City Arts & Lectures

Our guest is renowned neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky.  He’s spent his career investigating behavior across the animal kingdom, including humans.  In books like The Trouble With Testosterone and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky translates decades of research into fascinating stories and lessons ac

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black l

This week, an encore of one of last year’s most popular programs - a conversation between two unconventional artists, director, visual artist and author, John Waters and Aubrey Plaza, actor, comedian and producer. For nearly 50 years, John Waters has been making subversive films that playfully push all sorts of boundar

This week, our guest is David Brooks. As an Op-Ed contributor to The New York Times, Brooks writes about subjects ranging from politics and foreign affairs, to cultural trends and spirituality. Brooks started as a humorist, penning satires for his college paper, before becoming a film critic and then a reporter at The

NOTE: This program was not broadcast, because as you’ll hear, it contains a lot of explicit language and content - so much that we felt it would be hard to listen to with all the bleeps and edits that would be necessary for the radio. The language in this podcast has NOT been edited or bleeped, so please listen to it w

Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, earned him the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Now he’s written A Man of Two Faces. It’s a memoir about his family, as well as larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Viet Nam and America. On November 9, 2023, Nguyen came to The Sydney Goldstein Th