Emma Straub plays many roles as a leader in the literary world: independent bookstore owner, award-winning novelist, and children’s book author, to name a few. Straub is a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Times best-seller, and the owner of Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic, where she helps celebrate our vibrant literary world through countless readings and events. Straub’s new novel, American Fantasy, has been named one of the most anticipated books by Time, The New York Times, People, and Harper’s Bazaar. Set on a nineties-boy-band-themed cruise, Straub’s characters explore the intersections of aging, nostalgia, memory, and possibility, creating a hilarious, intimate portrait of the surprises and reawakenings that life can provide. On April 11, 2026, Emma Straub came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk on stage with Ayelet Waldman. Waldman is the author of A Really Good Day, My Marriage, and the essay collection Bad Mother. Her new novel A Perfect Hand will be published in May. She was one of the creators of the Netflix show Unbelievable, and was an executive producer for the show Star Trek: Picard.

Over the past forty years, Gina Gershon has remained a beloved actress while constantly pushing herself as an artist, adding to her astonishing and diverse resumé. Since her small, breakout performance in Pretty in Pink, Gershon has been best known for her roles in movies (including Bound, Showgirls, Face/Off, The Insider) and television (including Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Riverdale, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Assassin), but her career, and community, began as a musician and dancer. She performed at Carnegie Hall, recorded albums, and toured the United States, playing her jaw harp with Sting, Laurie Anderson, Joan Baez, Paul Simon, and Herbie Hancock. While she has not yet performed with her close friend Bob Dylan, they were sparring partners when Gershon took up boxing. On the stage, Gershon has worked with David Mamet, and performed in Sam Mendes’s Cabaret and the Tony Award-winning Boeing-Boeing. In 2007, Gershon took on a new artistic practice, publishing the children’s book Camp Creepy Time with her brother Dann. She later released her first work of nonfiction, In Search of Cleo: How I Found My Pussy and Lost My Mind, the true story of Gershon’s search for her runaway cat. Gershon’s newest book AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs, looks back at how she learned to survive and thrive in Hollywood, tracing her brilliant and unique career to find cautionary tales, turning points, and everything in between. On April 3, 2026, Gina Gershon came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater for an onstage conversation with Gina Pell, Content Chief of The What.

This program originally aired in 2022.  Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of four novels and two collections of short stories.   Her 2022 novel, Matrix, imagines the life of Marie du France, a medieval writer who became France’s first woman poet. On April 12, 2022, Lauren Groff came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about Matrix with Isabel Duffy.  The two also discussed the utterly unique way in which Groff writes her novels.  After copious research, she writes a complete first draft, tosses that away without reviewing it, writes a new draft, and repeats the process again.

This program was originally aired in June 2023.  Abraham Verghese is a best-selling novelist, and a physician whose focus on healing and empathy stands out in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. His novel Cutting for Stone is the story of twin brothers in Ethiopia coming of age on the brink of the country’s revolution. That book remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for over two years. His newest novel, The Covenant of Water, tells much of the story of twentieth-century India through a single family. Verghese’s nonfiction books are My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story and The Tennis Partner. Abraham Verghese is Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. On May 11, 2023, Abraham Verghese came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage by Michael Krasny, host of the Grey Matters podcast and former host of the award-winning KQED program Forum. Krasny is the author of Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, Let There Be Laughter, and Spiritual Envy.

This week, our guest is Michael Pollan, author of ten books including "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "How to Change Your Mind". Since the 1980s, Pollan has captivated readers on an array of topics, from the consequences of what we eat, to the history and contemporary use of psychedelics. Now, he’s turned his eye towards what might be his biggest subject yet: consciousness. In his new book, "A World Appears", Pollan examines the nature – and very definition – of consciousness. From cutting-edge neuroscience, to conversations with spiritual practitioners, the book offers multiple perspectives on something as fundamental to our humanity as it is mysterious. On March 4, 2026, Pollan came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab.

This is an encore of a program originally broadcast in July 2024.   Since their foundational philosophical critique of gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has been a singularly important contributor to our contemporary understanding of those categories, including what it can mean to be queer.  Butler’s revolutionary cultural influence and constant drive towards better understandings of our world guarantee that they will remain a widely read canonical writer for decades to come. In recent years, Butler’s theoretical and activist work on gender performance and nonviolence has placed them in conversations around transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, and the Occupy Movement. Their forthcoming book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, examines why recent authoritarian governments and transexclusionary feminists have focused so much of their energy and ire on gender. On June 13, 2024, Judith Butler came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to be interviewed on stage by Poulomi Saha,  the co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

This is an encore of a program originally distributed in 2024. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author, and one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals working today. In books like Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari examines topics like the future of humanity, and the connections between biology, myth, and power.  His latest book is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, from the Stone Age to AI. On October 1, 2024, Yuval Harari appeared at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to technology journalist, author, and podcaster Kara Swisher.

Sally Mann is one of the most significant American photographers of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Mann has explored childhood, family, memory, mortality, and the passage of time, often through experimental and historic photographic processes. From At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), a nuanced study of girls on the cusp of adolescence, to her landmark series, Immediate Family (1985–1994), occasionally staged photographs of her three children, taken with an 8×10 view camera. In more recent years, Mann turned her lens toward the land itself, using the American South as a site of both personal and collective memory. Mann is the subject of the documentary films Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (1994). Her memoirs include Hold Still, and now Art Work: On the Creative Life. On February 11, 2026, Sally Mann came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with teacher, writer, and photographer Ted Orland.

This is an encore presentation of a program originally aired in November of 2024.  In this program, two novelists who've created visions of a future after significant climate change...talk about whether their fiction can help shape reality.  Across his life, Richard Powers has been driven by an insatiable curiosity for humans and the world around us. This has led him from budding scientist to award-winning author, from Bangkok to the Netherlands, and has helped him win a Pulitzer Prize and a Macarthur Genius Grant. Powers is best known for his novels, including The Gold Bug Variations, named a Time Book of the Year, The Echo Maker, which received a National Book Award, and The Overstory, which received a Pulitzer Prize. Powers’ fourteenth novel, Playground delves into the lives of artists, scientists, and teachers who choose to start seastedding - living on floating cities. On October 30, 2024, Richard Powers came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with fellow novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future.

Legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson was one of the most remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history – central to the Stonewall Riots and the gay liberation movement at large. Her remarkable life story is captured in a new biography by artists and filmmaker Tourmaline. Tourmaline is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work is dedicated to Black trans joy and freedom. She is a TIME 100 Most Influential Person in the World awardee and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has frequently appeared on ABC News, as well as in the New York Times and Vogue. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Getty Museum. She created the critically acclaimed film Happy Birthday, Marsha!, and she has directed Pride campaigns for Dove, Marc Jacobs, and Reebok. She previously worked with Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She lives in Miami, Florida. Kate Schatz is the New York Times-bestselling author of the “Rad Women” book series and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. Her novel Where the Girls Were is forthcoming in 2026 from Dial Press.   On December 10, 2025, Tourmaline came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to talk to Kate Schatz about her bool "Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson".