City Arts & Lectures

This is a rebroadcast of a program that originally aired in August of 2023.  We've selected the encore to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the turning point in the Vietnamese diaspora of which Ocean Vuong is a part.   

Ocean Vuong‘s exquisitely crafted poetry and prose ask perennial and pressing questions about race, masculinity, addiction, trauma, and courage. His beloved novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, for which he recently finished writing the screenplay, tells the story of a queer Vietnamese refugee coming of age against the backdrop of violence, poverty, and addiction. Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and his newest, Time is a Mother, “full of concentrated, kaleidoscopic riffs on the feelings and sounds, the delirious highs and darkest lows, that make up contemporary life” (The New Yorker).

On June 9, 2023, Ocean Vuong came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Mike Mills, a filmmaker, graphic designer, and artist best known for the films Beginners, 20th Century Women, and most recently C’mon C’mon.  

 Our guest today is Gianna Toboni, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker whose new book “The Volunteer” is the unusual story of a Death Row inmate. In 2007, Scott Dozier was convicted of a pair of grisly murders, and sent to Nevada’s Death Row.  Rather than fighting that sentence, Dozier sought to expedite his execution.  But despite his willingness to submit to the sentence, Dozier’s death date was delayed and stayed over and over.  Toboni examines why the state didn’t follow through on its own decision, and how America’s system of capital punishment is rife with black market dealings, disputed drugs, and botched executions – all at a cost of billions of dollars.  Toboni argues that the system is failing those it intends to serve, including death penalty supporters and opponents.  On March 26, 2025, Gianna Toboni came to the KQED studios in San Francisco to talk with Lara Bazelon, an author and professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. 

Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times and the author of Why We’re Polarized. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, host of the podcast Plain English and a news analyst with NPR.   Klein and Thompson’s new book Abundance is a call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic scarcity: from climate change to housing, education to healthcare. The history of the twenty-first century in America is one of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.

On March 26, 2025, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Manny Yekutiel, a Bay Area restaurant owner and political organizer. 

Today, we’ll listen to a conversation with four writers: journalist Michael Lewis, TV host and comedian W. Kamau Bell, novelist Dave Eggers and historian Sarah Vowell – all paying tribute to civil servants, government workers often un-recognized but essential to a functioning democracy. They were profiled in a series of articles in the Washington Post, all of which have been collected in a new book “Who is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service".  On March 19, 2025, the four contributors came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about the government workers they profiled, what motivates public servants, and what the future might hold as the Trump administration slashes the federal workforce.