City Arts & Lectures

Our guest is Rachel Kushner. Her writing includes novels like The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers, and essays on everything from prison abolition to art theory and motorcycle racing. Her fourth novel, Creation Lake, is Kushner’s take on noir. It follows a young woman infiltrating a French anarchist collective. On December 12th, 2024, Kushner came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Jonah Wiener, a culture journalist and contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. The conversation was wide-ranging, from her research process, to her travels in France, and her opinions on the Tesla Cybertruck. 

Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no (selfish) motivation to do so? Why do we hold onto possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed? Hear Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and his co-author, Alex Imas, discuss these questions, examined in their book The Winner’s Curse, with Michael Lewis. Richard H. Thaler received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is a distinguished service professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, coauthor of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Cass Sunstein) and the author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.  Alex O. Imas is a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Among his honors are the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award, and the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award. Previously, he was an assistant professor of behavioral economics at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael Lewis is known for his meticulous research on far-reaching subjects—from the top-secret world of high-frequency trading (Flash Boys), to baseball (Moneyball), to behavioral economics and the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (The Undoing Project), to an account of a band of medical visionaries trying to avert Trump’s calamitous response to the COVID-19 outbreak (The Premonition), to the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby (Going Infinite). Most recently, he authored Who Is Government?, with contributions from W. Kamau Bell, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, and others. On November 21, 2025, Thaler and Imas visited the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage by Michael Lewis.

This week, our guest is Padma Lakshmi. As host of shows like Taste the Nation and Top Chef, Lakshmi champions cooks and eaters from across cultures. She’s the author of several cookbooks –  including her newest, Padma's All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond – and the memoir Love Loss and What We Ate. Lakshmi’s passion for social justice causes, as well as her deep appreciation for food, are both reflected in her active social media presence.  On November 17, 2025, Lakshmi came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk – and laugh – with comedian and broadcaster W. Kamau Bell.

This week, our guest is Salman Rushdie. Over the course of six decades, Rushdie has made a profound impact on literature and free speech. He is the author of fifteen novels, including Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, two short story collections, and six works of nonfiction, most recently, his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. On November 16, 2025, Rushdie came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Poulomi Saha about some of the impacts of the attack he suffered in 2022, and how the themes in his newest story collection, The Eleventh Hour, connect to his past work.

This week, our guest is Richard Misrach — one of the most influential voices in contemporary photography. His work appears in major museum collections around the world, and his innovative approach to large-scale color photography has influenced generations of artists.  Since the 1970s, his work has merged aesthetics and activism, often depicting human impact on the environment. In series like Desert Cantos, Petrochemical America, and most recently, Cargo, rich colors and tranquil landscapes belie the ecological disasters that exist below the surface.   On November 11, 2025, Misrach came to the KQED studios to talk to Steven Winn about his newest project – photographs of cargo ships into and from the Port of Oakland taken from 2021-2025, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work is collected in a new book, Cargo, featuring an introduction by his longtime friend and frequent collaborator Rebecca Solnit.