The Commonwealth April/May 2014

ECONOMIC FORECAST page 10

JAMES CARVILLE & MARY MATALIN page 13

JAMES FRANCO

GLORIA DUFFY page 54

Commonwealth page 42

The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

APRIL/MAY 2014

MUSIC LEGENDS 8 GRAHAM NASH 49 LINDA RONSTADT $5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

Machu Picchu to the Galapagos Incan Treasures & Dar win’s Islands September 30 – October 14, 2014

Experience two of the world’s most treasured destinations — the enigmatic ruins at Machu Picchu and the fascinating Galapagos Islands.

•

In Lima, Peru, visit the Larco Herrera Museum and enjoy a briefing by U.S. Foreign Service staff.

• Explore the Sacred Valley, filled with important Inca sites and indigenous villages.

• Experience the awesome ruins at Machu

Picchu, the stunning “Lost City of the Incas.”

Stay overnight at the on-site Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge.

• Discover Cuzco, the archaeological hub of the Americas and spend time in the home of a local family.

• Fly to the Galapagos Islands, where you board

a privately chartered yacht. Explore the islands’ astonishing wildlife during guided nature walks and while swimming and snorkeling.

•

Take an optional 5-day/4-night pre-tour extension to the Amazon Rainforest.

Our group is limited to 20 travelers, so reserve soon.

Cost: from $8,493 total price from San Francisco ($7,795 air, land & cruise inclusive plus $698 airline taxes and departure fees)

Commonwealth Club Travel CST: 2096889-40

Detailed brochure available at: commonwealthclub.org/travel Contact: (415) 597-6720 • travel@commonwealthclub.org Photos: Charlesjsharp/wikicommons

INSIDE The Commonwealth VO LU M E 1 0 8 , N O . 0 3 | A P R I L / M AY 2014

8 Photo by Ed Ritger

FEATURES 8 GRAHAM NASH

16 WEEK 2 WEEK

A ROCK & ROLL LIFE

10 Photo by Rikki Ward

The longtime member of Crosby Stills & Nash still has a lot to say

10 THE 2014

WALTER E. HOADLEY ECONOMIC FORECAST

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Keith Hennessey and Christina Romer, both former top economic advisors to U.S. presidents, look at the biggest factors affecting the economy in 2014

Photo by Ed Ritger

DEPARTMENTS 4 EDITOR’S DESK Continuing the work of our former president, Shirley Temple Black

6 THE COMMONS Kaiser Permanente makes big gift to the Club; plus letters on MDMA research, fracking, and playing for the prince

54 INSIGHT

CALIFORNIA CAMPAIGN 2014

A bevy of political analysts weighs in on what to look forward to (or dread) in our state campaigns this year

42 JAMES FRANCO

BEING JAMES FRANCO

The young actor and writer discusses how books and films intersect

49 LINDA RONSTADT

13 JAMES CARVILLE &

SIMPLE DREAMER

MARY MATALIN FAMILY FIRST: MAKING A LIFE TOGETHER IN POLITICS

Two political veterans pulled up stakes from the nation’s capital and headed to New Orleans. Why?

The superstar singer recalls her life and career, getting started with Jackson Browne, the Eagles and what she likes to sing over the phone with Emmylou Harris

Photo by Ed Ritger

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Dr. Gloria C. Duffy, President and CEO On Ukraine

EVENTS 17 PROGRAM INFORMATION 18 TWO MONTH CALENDAR 20 PROGRAM LISTINGS Events from April 1 to June 5

31 LANGUAGE CLASSES About Our Cover: Two music legends, Graham Nash and Linda Ronstadt, tell the tales of their music and their lives. Photos by NASA Earth Observatory/wikicommons (background); Tyler R. Swofford (guitar).

“I realized I have an intimate and insider knowledge of this world of Hollywood and acting and performance, and it’s an interesting world. People who don’t have the almost two decades of experience that I do write about it, so why am I not writing about it?” – James Franco J U N E/J U LY 2013

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EDITOR’S DESK

J O H N Z I P PE R E R V P, M E D I A & E D I TO R I A L

Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Shirley Temple Black: Lifetime Ambassador

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ommonwealth Club stages have been the setting for programs with many Hollywood people. Just in the past few years, we’ve had Rob Reiner, Richard Chamberlain, Rita Moreno, Patty Duke, Louis Gossett Jr., George Hamilton, and many others. Our stages have also hosted international diplomats from the U.S., Syria, Mexico, Germany, Canada, Iraq, and elsewhere. To my knowledge, though, only one person brought together at the Club the worlds of film and diplomacy, and that was Shirley Temple Black.

In the photo above, little Shirley Temple is photographed on her way back from a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

According to the Library of Congress, the two discussed Shirley’s recently lost tooth. No one really thought FDR was asking her how to get the country out of the Depression, though the president was certainly smart enough to know that she helped keep millions out of depression as the friendly, happy child star of many hit films

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of the 1930s.

I’m writing this editor’s note shortly after the Academy Awards ceremony, in which the annual tribute to departed cinematic luminaries included Shirley Temple Black. People like my mother remember her as a young star – and my mother was thrilled as a child to be told that her curly red hair made her look like Shirley Temple. But later generations got to know her as Shirley Temple Black, the former child star who became a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. She even ran for the U.S. Congress as a conservative Republican in the late 1960s, losing to Pete McCloskey. In 1976, she was appointed the first female chief of protocol of the United States, where, among other duties, she handled the arrangements for President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ceremonies.

But in everything she did, she was an ambassador. That includes helping to get discussion going about issues that still affect millions of

American families. When she was diagnosed cable company to ask them to start doing so. with breast cancer in 1972, she became one I am sometimes engaged in discussions of the first prominent women to talk openly with people who are amazed at the Club’s about this widespread illness. media reach. In fact, when I watched those Here at The Commonwealth Club, we Academy Awards in February, a guest told me have even more to be thankful for when it he listened to the Club’s weekly radio procomes to Shirley Temple Black. She joined gram, but he didn’t know we also did video. the Club in 1971, one of the first women to Not only do we do video – on the Calido so, and she also became one of the first fornia Channel, YouTube, Fora.tv, KRCB women to serve as president of The ComTV, C-SPAN and elsewhere – but we have monwealth Club, a role she performed in upgraded our cameras and infrastructure to 1984. She was also instrumental in reaching allow us to do occasional live streaming from across ideological lines and personally conour auditorium. Probably our biggest success vincing Cesar Chavez to address the Club, with live streaming was our recent program something he did in a landmark 1984 speech. with venture capitalist Tom Perkins. Our InOne of the things she championed durforum folks organized that program in a very ing her presidency of the Club was finding short timeframe, yet it sold out completely. a permanent home for the organization, and Our live video stream was also carried by as a legacy of her dedication to that goal she Fortune magazine’s website (thanks to the designated The Commonwealth Club as one event’s moderator, Fortune Senior Editor of just two organizations to receive gifts in at Large Adam Lashinsky), and it received hirley Temple Black was a tremendous amount of media coverage her memory. If you would like to show your appreciation for the life and work of Shirley literally around the world. instrumental in reaching across Temple Black, you can do so online here: The Perkins program was very controrazoo.com/story/I-Heart-Shirley-Temple-Black. ideological lines and personally versial. He had already been the subject of We certainly do our best to continue her criticism for making a poorly worded defense legacy, by reaching out to people of differ- convincing Cesar Chavez to of the one percent, and he seemed pleased to ing views and backgrounds, by welcoming have the opportunity to respond to his critics. everyone to the Club, by finally bringing to give a landmark 1984 speech.

Though he backed off on his most incendiary fruition her dream of a permanent home for comments (comparing his critics to Nazis, the Club, and by continuing to have lively basically), he ended with a quip that the rich discussion of events and ideas and policies that affect us all. should have as many votes as they have dollars. If anyone actually reads these little editorials I write each issue, you’ll remember that the new frontier: In February, The Commonwealth Club launched last issue I cited others who believed much the same thing. its newest endeavor with a weekly television program on the Controversial? Yes. And it lit up the Twittersphere with zillions of California Channel. This statewide channel is devoted to covering comments, mostly critical of Perkins, a few supportive of him, and California governance and issues of interest to the Golden State, a few critical of the Club for even having him as a guest. But The so they were a perfect fit for the Club.

Commonwealth Club is not an ideological organization pushing its Please watch our new program: It’s on at 9 p.m. Thursdays. Cali- own policies; we are and always have been a place where we invite fornia Channel is on most cable systems in the Bay Area; to find out people with lots of different views to hear each other, talk to each if your cable company carries it and on what channel it airs, visit other, see each other as humans, and, best of all, maybe come together calchannel.com/local-listing – and if your cable company doesn’t carry for solutions to our common problems. the California Channel, it might be worth a call or an email to your That is in the best tradition of Shirley Temple Black.

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BUSINESS OFFICES The Commonwealth, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105 | feedback@commonwealthclub.org VP, MEDIA & EDITORIAL John Zipperer | SENIOR EDITOR Sonya Abrams | DESIGNER Tyler R. Swofford STAFF EDITORS Amelia Cass, Ellen Cohan | EDITORIAL INTERN Zoë Byrne | PHOTOGRAPHERS Ed Ritger, Rikki Ward ADVERTISING INFORMATION: Tara Crain, Development Manager, Corporate and Foundation Partnerships, (415) 869-5919, tcrain@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-2805. | PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. | POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-2805. | Printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink. Copyright © 2014 The Commonwealth Club of California. Tel: (415) 597-6700 Fax: (415) 597-6729 E-mail: feedback@commonwealthclub.org | EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY: The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question and answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub.org/media, podcasts on Apple iTunes, or contact Club offices to buy a compact disc.

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Commons THE

Talk of the Club

Coming Soon to a Rooftop Near You

THE TICKER

Kaiser Permanente shows strong support for Club’s new home

Updates and check-ins

L Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing

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he Club welcomed another high-profile supporter to its campaign for a new home.

On March 3, 2014, Kaiser Permanente presented a $1 million donation to support our new building at 110

Photo by William F. Adams

The Embarcadero in San Francisco, in particular to help build a unique rooftop deck with breathtaking bay views for Club functions. In the photo above, Kaiser Permanente Chairman Bernard J. Tyson (left)

Our New Neighbors, Part VIII

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n 2008, Perry’s restaurant opened its second San Francisco location, selecting a spot on the Embarcadero just a few buildings down from where The Commonwealth Club’s new offices will be located. It might have been prescient planning on the part of Perry’s executives, but they weren’t thinking about us; they were much more likely thinking about the preand post-game crowds from the nearby AT&T stadium.

Located at 155 Steuart Street (in the Griffin Hotel) and, like the Club’s new building, also accessible from the Embarcadero, this is now one of four Perry’s locations in San Francisco. The others are at the Design Center, San Francisco International Airport and the original location on Union Street. Perry Butler opened that first Union Street restaurant in 1969; ever since, Perry’s has been known for favorite American dishes such as steaks, hamburgers, traditional Cobb salads, and corned beef hash.

One Yelp poster wrote, “[H]alf-price bottles of wine can’t be beat! When do you get the chance to order Cakebread, Honig, and Duckhorn for less than $30 each

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presents the check to (left to right) Commonwealth Club Board of Governors Vice Chair John R. Farmer, Board member Rose Guilbault, and Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Perry’s Restaurant

at a restaurant? It’s also right on the water, so you have a great view if you sit in the back of the dining room. “ The Embarcadero location features murals reminding visitors of the Union Street location, as well as exposed brick walls and a breathtaking view of the bay – which Club members and their guests will soon get to know very well from our own building (see story above).

Photo by Tyler R. Swofford

iving live: Our March 27 program featuring Huffington Post President Arianna Huffington in conversation with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg didn’t just sell out – it sold out in record time, with little public notice, and filled up giant Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

People who weren’t able to get a ticket had a good second option, however: Huffington Post Live, HuffPost’s video channel, streamed it live, as did commonwealthclub. org/tv. iClub: By the time you read this, the Club will have released its new and very much improved mobile app for iPhones. Working closely with developers at CityGovApp for the past two years, a Club committee headed by Board of Governors member Frank Meerkamp of Accenture planned and im p lemented features, including extensive audio archives going back to the 1940s, improved ticket purchasing, and much more. For more information on the new app and information about adding it to your iPhone, please see commonwealth club.org/publications/ mobile-apps.

The Mailbox Ecstasy Credibility?

I heard part of the broadcast on Friday 17 January of the Commonwealth Club of California on KQED. The subject was the use of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD, and the speaker claimed important results (80% cure rate?).

There seem to be significant problems about the credibility of this speech.

I looked up the use of MDMA for PTSD on the ClinicalTrials.gov database. It showed 8 trials: 5 recruiting, 2 completed, and 1 terminated. The speaker mentioned trials in Israel and Switzerland, giving the impression that these were significant. According to the database the only completed trial listed in Israel was terminated without results due to staff turnover. The only trial listed in Switzerland was completed in 2011, but with no results reported. The other study completed (in 2010) also did not report any results.

Another item of concern is that all of these studies were sponsored by the same organization, the “Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.”

Why were no questions asked about the conflict between the speaker’s claims and the clinical trials results? Both the speaker, host, and the Commonwealth Club have lost credibility.

John Hosack California Response from Richard Rockefeller, Ed.M, MD, and Rick Doblin, PhD: All the statements made by Dr. Rockefeller in his Commonwealth Club talk concerning outcomes of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy research were derived from articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, cited below. * Contrary to Dr. Hosack’s assertion, clinicaltrials.gov does indeed reference the published MDMA/PTSD pilot study from which Dr. Rockefeller derived his claim that over 80 percent of subjects attained a durable remission from their PTSD. Dr. Hosack would not have found the actual results of the study at this website since authors are required to post their study titles there, but not the text of their published articles. He would have found the articles themselves, however, had he searched PubMed - at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.

Fracking Water Dr. Hosack is correct that MAPS is the only organization currently sponsoring research to evaluate MDMA’s therapeutic potential.

A non-profit organization which conducts research for the benefit of the public, MAPS places all its data in the public domain and permits anyone else to cross-reference its FDA-approved IND for MDMA, and/or to use its data in support of alternative research applications. MAPS would welcome other organizations conducting research of their own on the therapeutic potentials of MDMA, but so far none – neither non-profit nor forprofit – has come forward to do so. *Cited journals • Chabrol H, & Oehen P. MDMA assisted psychotherapy found to have a large effect for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. J Psychopharmacol. 2013 Sep;27(9):865-866.

Doi: 10.1177/0269881113495119.

• Mithoefer MC, Wagner, MT, Mithoefer AT, Jerome L, Doblin R. The safety and efficacy of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder: the first randomized controlled pilot study. J Psychopharmacol. 2011 Apr; 25(4):439-452.

Doi: 10.1177/0269881110378371. Epub 2010 Jul 19.

• Mithoefer MC, Wagner MT, Mithoefer AT, Jerome L, Martin SF, Yazar-Klosinski B, Michel Y, Brewerton TD, Doblin R. Durability of improvement in posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and absence of harmful effects or drug dependency after 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted psychotherapy: a prospective long-term follow-up study.

J Psychopharmacol. 2013 Jan;27(1):28-39.

Doi: 10.1177/0269881112456611. Epub 2012 Nov 20.

• Oehen P, Traber R, Wildmer V, Schnyder U. A randomized, controlled pilot study of MDMA (±3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine)assisted psychotherapy for treatment of resistant, chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). J Pyschopharmacol. 2013 Jan;27(1):40-52. Doi: 10.1177/0269881112464827. Epub 2012 Oct 31.

I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is surrounded by fracking. This morning, on your radio program, Jim Woolsey said the waste liquid from fracking is the problem.

“ T he

wo r l d wat e r c r i s i s

g r o w s l a r g e r e v e r y d a y.

Please feature exper ts on threats to our water supply.”

Yes, toxic, carcinogenic & radioactive waste is part of the problem, but a bigger problem is the use of millions of gallons of fresh, clean, potable water to frack each well.

Only 30 percent comes back out of the wells.

The remainder, now irrevocably poisoned & radioactive, is lost to us. The world water crisis grows larger every day. Please feature experts on threats to our water supply.

Thank you.

Gloria Forouzan Pittsburgh, PA

The Prince’s Band As a member I hope to attend next Monday [Prince Albert II, Feb. 24, 2014], especially because of this memory: From 1955 to 1958 I was the pianist in the 6th Fleet Band. Our home port was Villefranche-Sur-Mer. The commander of the Sixth Fleet was Admiral Charles Brown. In addition to his military achievements he was perhaps our nation’s best diplomat.

Everyone liked him, including Prince Ranier.

Although our band hoped to play at the wedding, Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez canal and the 6th Fleet was ordered to the area. We missed the wedding. I seem to recall that the professional big band in Monaco was in the name of Aime Barelli. I regret not having been able to meet such good musicians. When Prince Albert was born Admiral Brown ordered a 21 gun salute. Word from Villefranche was that only 11 were heard. Brown ordered:,“Turn the ship around and do it again.”

Gary Rinehart California

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a rock & ro

Grah Na 8

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The rock giant discusses his past and present interests. Excerpted from Climate One and Inforum’s “Graham Nash Gets Wild with The Commonwealth Club,” November 15, 2013.

ll life

ham ash

going somewhere.

Anyway, the next day, I went to school and I got called to the headmaster’s office. It’s never a good thing to be called to the headmaster’s office, and I had to admit to the fact that I was not sick as I told them I was, that I was in fact buying tickets to the Bill Haley concert. But it absolutely changed my life.

Not only did the music thrill me to death, but also I learned something about school and I learned something about passion and I GRAHAM NASH learned something about not being dissuaded Singer, Songwriter, Author, from your passion. I learned a lot in that day.

Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life That was a very important day in my life.

DALTON: Was part of that lesson the punIn conversation with ishment you received for skipping school?

GREG DALTON NASH: Well, yes, because they have to make Founder and Host, Climate One an example of you, of every kid taking time GREG DALTON: As a member of the off school buying concert tickets for a rock 1960s pop group the Hollies, Graham and roll show. So I was slippered [spanked].

Nash was part of the British invasion that It wasn’t pleasant. It was upsetting. I didn’t transformed American music. As a young think that I’ve done much wrong just takmusician in England, he played and partied ing a morning off school to buy tickets for a with the Beatles, Rolling Stones and many concert. I didn’t kill anybody. It wasn’t that other rising stars. In 1968, he left the Hollies bad to me, but I guess it was to them. Ever to join David Crosby and Stephen Stills in since that day, I decided that school was Crosby, Stills and Nash. actually not for me – that I can learn much I’d like to begin with a story about you more in life than I could in school. and school. One day, you skipped school to DALTON: Yet you still wrote a wonderful go buy tickets for Bill Haley. Tell us that story. song called “Teach Your Children Well,” GRAHAM NASH: It was just before my which pays tribute to teachers. So you fifteenth birthday. Obviously, Bill Haley’s weren’t a fan of school, but you have a love “Rock Around the Clock” was part of the for teachers. soundtrack of a movie called Blackboard NASH: I’m not a great fan of school, but I Jungle that had just been shown in Man- love facts and I love education. Yes, I wrote chester and was driving all the kids crazy. “Teach Your Children” and we have a lot to Then one day, we learn from our kids. heard from the loWe have a lot to cal newspaper that teach them, but we decided that school was not do have a lot to learn Bill Haley and the Comets were actufor me, that I can learn much from our children. ally coming to ManDALTON: Shortly chester. more in life than I could in school. after that Bill Haley And as Greg says, concert, you left me and my friend I’m not a great fan of school, but I s c h o o l a n d yo u Allan Clarke were started your muyoung kids just get- love facts and I love education. sic career with Alting into music, lan Clarke, whom just feeling our way you’ve been friends through the universe and we knew that we with from six years old. Tell us about that would have to go see the show. I was the musical relationship in those days. one that was chosen to stay off school and NASH: I’m not sure why Allan Clarke and I get tickets. So I was standing in queue wait- can sing so well together. It wasn’t anything ing to get tickets and I noticed that one of that we were taught. It was completely my teachers, Mr. Lewis – whose name I will natural to us.

Continued on page 45 never forget – passed by the queue in his car

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Photo by Ed Ritger

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THE 2014 WALTER E. HOADLEY ECONOMIC FORECAST presented by

BANK OF AMERICA MERRILL LYNCH

Two top economists look at what’s driving our economy this year and what policies can make things better – or worse. Excerpted from “Christina Romer and Keith Hennessey: Bank of America/ Merrill Lynch Walter E. Hoadley Annual Economic Forecast,” January 31, 2014.

KEITH HENNESSEY Faculty Member, Stanford Graduate School of Business; Director, National Economic Council Under President George W. Bush; Member, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

CHRISTINA ROMER Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Immediate Past Chair, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers

JONATHAN WEBER West Coast Bureau Chief, Reuters News — Moderator 10

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Original photo by Rikki Ward

JONATHAN WEBER: Larry Summers’ concern is that technology has always been a job producer, in that technological change improves productivity, which leads to greater job growth. That’s always been the case historically, but that doesn’t mean it will always be the case in the future. If you look anecdotally at the technology business, which I’ve covered on and off for many years, in the old days, the big tech companies had employment bases in the many hundreds of thousands. IBM had 400,000 or 500,000 employees, HP 300,000 or 400,000. If you look at the equivalent companies in the hierarchy today, they have far fewer employees: in the tens of thousands at places like Google and Facebook. That kind of suggests that there is something going on where the job creation engine of technological productivity is not what it used to be, and that possibly portends a lot of bad things. How do you respond to that kind of analysis?

CHRISTINA ROMER: I think there are a couple of things. What’s been true historically is that technological progress certainly displaces some workers, but certainly over the vast stretch – going back to the industrial revolution, even – most of that technological progress has in fact made the economy stronger. People didn’t have jobs in one industry but they moved into another, and so traditionally that’s what you would expect to happen.

I haven’t yet seen any real evidence that the nature of technological change has changed. You describe the tech industry.

It is true that Google and Facebook aren’t giant employers the way some places – IBM – might have been in the past, but I think you want to think more broadly. There are technological changes in the tech industry, but there are technological changes throughout the economy. We had a large discussion at lunch about the energy sector; new technologies – hydraulic fracturing – setting off a revolution of not only production of energy, but employment in our energy sector.

I think the real question is, “Are we going to see that kind of technological progress, or is high tech going to feed into retail trade, high tech manufacturing?” I think that’s going to be the real issue. But I certainly wouldn’t want to jump on the bandwagon of, “We’re just doomed.” There’s still a lot of hope out there.

KEITH HENNESSEY: Let’s distinguish between the first order of facts and the much bigger second order of facts. I don’t care that much about how many people are working at Apple making iPads. The effect of the iPad on productivity and economy as a whole is much greater because of everybody who has iPads scattered around the country and around the world. What matters is not actually the technology itself but how does that allow someone to change the nature of the way they do business – hopefully in a more productive fashion?

The other is [that] it’s a big technological change. It can disrupt certain industries and can mean that those industries shrink in terms of employment, or it can mean that certain people no longer have the skills to do the jobs that they do. But if it increases productivity in the long run, it is raising our productivity growth, and that’s a good thing.

“I t

does not make sense

to me to do a policy that is going to reduce labor supply in any way, shape or form. ” –Keith Hennessey

WEBER: Income inequality is an issue of the moment. Do you think that is a problem from a macroeconomic standpoint? Second, the main realistic policy proposal that seems to be out there at the moment to address it is raising the minimum wage. Do you think that’s a good idea?

ROMER: Income inequality is a problem for our society, for our sense of community – all of that. The macroeconomic side is probably not the biggest part of it. There’s a lot of talk that it can affect aggregate demand or growth. I think that’s not the biggest effect of inequality.

The things I worry about more are the standard of living of the people at the very bottom of the income distribution. That matters tremendously for their welfare and happiness and all that. The other thing that really matters for our economic growth is mobility. Does anyone, wherever they’re

born, have a chance to rise to their potential?

I think that matters a lot for growth in the economy. On the minimum wage, if you told me that’s the only policy we could have to address the low standards of living for people at the bottom of the income distribution, I’d be all for it. It’s not the best policy.

Something like the earned income tax credit is better simply because it targets the people at the bottom of the income distribution, so it’s very much tied to income. I think it has good incentive effects. It makes them want to work more, and it doesn’t have any negative effects on employers.

The evidence is: The minimum wage doesn’t have a lot of negative effects on employers. It doesn’t seem to hurt job creation very much at all. It’s just not as well targeted as maybe some other programs might be.

HENNESSEY: First, just value choice, I would place a much higher priority on increasing the size of the pie for everyone.

Short-term and long-term macroeconomic growth – that’s going to be my first concern, just as a personal matter. As a policy matter I would also be much more concerned about our fiscal position. I think debt-to-GDP in the 70s was a real problem. The future projected path of debt-to-GDP is an even bigger problem. Both of those things, both short-term and medium-long-term growth and our fiscal posture and fiscal future, are much higher concerns of mine than distributional questions.

If you want to look within the world of what gets broadly labeled “income inequality,” I would focus on opportunity at the bottom. I’d be making sure that we have a flexible economy. I’d be trying to slow health-cost growth. Low-wage workers could get higher wage increases instead of having their compensation increases just be going to higher health insurance premiums.

I’d focus especially on elementary and secondary education.

Minimum wage – it does not make sense to me to do a policy that is going to reduce labor supply in any way, shape or form. The beneficiaries of a minimum wage increase, more often than not, tend to be teenagers in middle to upper income families. The people who lose their jobs, or work fewer hours, tend to be lower-skilled workers who I don’t think we want to be doing anything to destroy any level of job.

ROMER: Let me just disagree. Yes, there are

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some middle-class and upper-class teenagers that get the minimum wage. I think the main people it helps are the people we think of as poor people, working hard and at minimum wage jobs. It’s not perfectly targeted, like something like an earned income tax credit, but it’s not terrible. I do want to say, there have been really good studies, careful studies, looking at New Jersey, which raises its minimum wage, and Pennsylvania, which doesn’t. What happens with employment at McDonalds in those two states right next to each other? It doesn’t seem to matter all that much for employment. We could fight on the numbers, but I actually think there’s a pretty strong professional consensus. If it has employment effects, they’re pretty small.

HENNESSEY: My point is simply that there are costs and benefits. If you are a low-skilled worker and you still have your job after a minimum wage increase, you’re better off because your wage went up. If you’re a low-skilled worker and you no longer have a job or you’re working fewer hours after a minimum wage increase, then you’re worse off.

WEBER: Over the last week or so, there has been a lot of volatility – sort of a mini crisis in the emerging markets – driving the market down here. The stock market has had a very strong run based mainly upon the quantitative easing it seems. Maybe something else is happening now. When you look at that emerging market volatility, does that portend a larger set of issues in the financial markets?

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ROMER: What’s going on in emerging markets is [that] they’re certainly screaming a lot about U.S. monetary policy. There was just an article today in The Financial Times of the head of the Bank of India saying the Fed needs to be thinking more about emerging markets. It’s tempting for them to be blaming [us]; we’re starting to taper our quantitative easing, and that’s where their problems are coming from. If you look where this is happening, it’s Turkey. They’re having some very big political disruptions in Turkey. That’s part of why investors are getting very nervous there.

The other thing that’s happened: the news recently has been on China. China, which had been growing 8, 9, 10 percent a year in GDP, came in at around 7 percent.

Their manufacturing is showing some weakness. They are the prime market for some of these emerging market economies. If you were to ask me where that unease is coming from, why investors are getting nervous about emerging markets, I suspect China is a much bigger part of the story.

HENNESSEY: I agree with Christina.

When you say emerging markets, my immediate focus is on China not meeting the expectations that China and others seemed to set. Which raises the question: Why did people believe those expectations in the first place? Clearly Fed policy is buoying things up, not just in the United States, but around the world as well.

WEBER: Do you think the current approach, which is the sort of gradual easing

A P R I L/MAY 2014

back of the stimulus, is the right approach?

HENNESSEY: You’re arguing about whether to turn the dial half a notch this or half a notch [that] way at the rate at which we’re doing it. The adjustments that the Fed is making are so small. The debate is much larger than the size of the effect of the policy scope they’re talking about. It almost becomes theological in terms of the camps on monetary policy. I don’t really stress that much on whether the Fed is tapering off at $65 billion a month or $75 billion a month.

WEBER: Do you think [monetary policy] should be tighter?

HENNESSEY: Not necessarily, because I don’t see inflation risk. That suggests that no, it doesn’t make sense to tighten.

At the same time, you do have to worry about blowing new bubbles. Those point in opposite directions. I’m not particularly freaked out about anything in the range that’s being debated.

ROMER: I love the big picture on monetary policy. The Fed is supposed to care about the real side of the economy: what’s the unemployment rate relative to a sustainable level, and what’s the inflation rate relative to what they think is a reasonable number, which is 2 percent inflation. The big picture is that unemployment is well above what anyone thinks is the sustainable level, and inflation is well below.

I think the real issue when you think about monetary policy is: Suppose the Fed is worried about bubbles with quantitative Continued on page 41

Mary Matalin

&

James Car ville

Family First: Making a Life Together in Politics

Photo by Ed Ritger

How and why did one of D.C.’s most powerful couples decide to head to the Big Easy? Excerpted from “James Carville and Mary Matalin,” January 16, 2014.

MARY MATALIN and JAMES CARVILLE Co-authors, Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home In conversation with

TERRY CHRISTENSEN Professor Emeritus, San Jose State University TERRY CHRISTENSEN: Your move from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans is a major topic throughout the book. What made two political junkies move away from the political capital?

JAMES CARVILLE: After the [Hurricane Katrina] events of August of 2005, we knew we weren’t going to stay [in Washington] forever; I just didn’t want to grow old among strangers. The tug and the depression set in about how fragile everything was. And the culture – she always loved it. We got married in New Orleans. That was at her insistence; it was the only way she would marry me – if we got married in New Orleans. I grew up 60 miles up the river.

We look back on it and it was really an almost insane thing to do to take two young children and [settle] in a city that was [buried]. It was very fragile. It turned out to be superb, but we didn’t know it at the time; it was a gamble. It was time to go home, and I give Mary all the credit in the world. She did a terrific job in getting the children to adjust.

It’s a very different culture down there, and you just don’t walk into it. That’s one of the appealing things about New Orleans, but it’s also one of the difficult things if you’re a newcomer. The culture’s different, the social structure’s different and everything is different. So it was a real risk, and our children had a period of adjustment.

MARY MATALIN: For me, it was a confluence of events. We did not get married to

have children. But then I had one at 42 and one at 45, and they’re such blessings.

One day, I was at school with the little one in the bookstore – first day of school. If you have children, you know that, particularly [for] girls, there is no greater calling in life than anonymity. They want to be like, “Don’t separate me out. Don’t be looking at me.” So I’m standing there with an armful of her stuff and this little perky tennis-wearing ponytailed babe behind me says, “You were such a bitch on ‘Meet the Press’ yesterday.”

So my six- or seven- – whatever age she was – year-old reaches for my hand and is squeezing it so hard. I know she’s thinking, “My mom’s gonna blow; she’s gonna blow bad.”

I came home that night and said, “This is a hard place to raise children.” Confluent with that was his saying after Katrina, “Sugar, we’re going to become a sliver on a river.” I’m from Chicago. Anything that follows “Sugar,” I will follow it. So I loved New Orleans long before I knew James Carville. I thought it was important for the kids to grow up by family.

I thought we might be able to contribute something. It was not an anti-Washington thing; we still have a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, we have a home in Washington.

I think there are very few bastions of

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13

“There are very few bastions of authentic eccentricity left in the country. New Orleans is definitely one of them. ” –Matalin

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Photo by Ed THE RitgerCOMMO N WE AL TH

A P R I L/MAY 2014

authentic eccentricity left in the country.

New Orleans is definitely one of them as are plenty of places in California. So I think we have a bond there.

CHRISTENSEN: Mary, you write a lot about your admiration, affection and deep respect for Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush. Could you tell us a little bit about what you saw in them that some other people might have missed?

MATALIN: I’m 60, so I got into politics when it wasn’t right, left. I grew up with Democrats. I didn’t know any Republicans.

The college I went to, there were 11 out of 17,000 kids that were Republicans. I was a Democrat. I worked in steel mills and I was [in] a union. I became a conservative when I started thinking and paying taxes, so I know why I am what I am. But in politics as in life, I divided people between good guys and jerks. So there’s a lot of jerky Republicans and there’s a lot of jerky Democrats.

But I’ve had the great blessing to work for some men and women of great integrity of both parties. The way in which you see politics conveyed does not portray what happens behind the cameras. You might be surprised to learn that when Dick Cheney was president of the Senate, one of his go-to people in the Senate was Hillary Clinton, because that woman never promised anything she wasn’t going to deliver and she always under-promised and over-delivered, and you can’t say that about every senator.

Dianne Feinstein was [also] good. There were a lot of good people on both sides of the aisle, and we both respect them for their integrity, their honesty, their loyalty without getting into the policies. In terms of being smart and having integrity, I have really been blessed and I am happy to like some of James’s people. [Laughter.]

CHRISTENSEN: James, are there political leaders you’ve worked with that you revere in the same way?

CARVILLE: Yeah. I’ve been very fortunate.

I obviously love President Clinton to death.

I mean, to actually have a chance to work for somebody like that is remarkable.

First of all, I love politics. I have nothing but joy when I think about how I’ve earned my living. I’m not in any way feeling bad about it or anything else, and I’ve worked in probably seven, eight different states. I’ve worked in 22 different countries. I’ve really been privileged to meet a lot of remarkable

people and to have been part of a lot of remarkable things. But the thing that I take most from my time in politics is the relationships that we’ve made.

I’ve been very fortunate. When we thought about writing this book, after 20 years, we were ground zero for some of the big stories, from the brouhaha over the Clinton impeachment to 9/11, the recount, the Katrina reconstruction; and politics has been very good to James Carville and has allowed me to see and participate in things that a kid from a one stop-sign town in south Louisiana could only dream of.

MATALIN: People are people. I love “Poppy” Bush. He took me under his wing after my mother died; that was my family. And we weren’t just losing [the 1992 presidential election]; we were getting our behinds kicked by [Carville]. The weekend before the election, we’re on separate Sunday shows and then I went right from the Sunday show to Andrews [Air Force Base], I get on the plane and the military aide says, “President Bush wants to see you right now in his cabin to talk to you about James.” I hadn’t seen what James had said on the show and I’m like, “Oh no, what did he say?” So I go in there and “Poppy” Bush goes, “They asked James Carville if there was one nice thing he could say about George Herbert Walker Bush, and he said anybody that Mary Matalin loves as much as she loves ‘Poppy’ Bush has got to be a great guy.” And he gets all choked up and so that’s – people are people.

And on the Clinton side of things, President and First Lady Clinton had an engagement party for us right after the campaign.

President Clinton was still angry enough to not look at me, but while we were on stage together, he told everybody how much he appreciated how loyal I was to my guy.

We’re now really good friends; he comes to the house and we sneak around and look at all of the furniture that James keeps complaining about my buying; it turns out that President Clinton is a secret antiques aficionado, the guy knows something about everything: “That’s a fourteenth century Italian Corona.” I’m like, “Get out of here, you know that?” And James goes, “What the hell is it?” So I mean everything is not politics with politicians.

CARVILLE: We’ve done a number of events at [George H.W. Bush’s presidential Continued on page 39

“I

obviously love President Clinton to

death. To actually have a chance to work for somebody like that is remarkable.”

–Carville AP R I L/MAY 2014

THE COMMO N WE Photo AL TH

by Ed Ritger 15

WEEK

CALIFORNIA C A M PA IG N ★ 2014 ★ Our Week to Week political roundtables preview the state’s 2014 races. Excerpted from “Week to Week” January 13 & 27, 2014.

JOHN ZIPPERER: Let’s talk about some of the interesting campaigns locally.

JOSH RICHMAN, state and national politics reporter, Bay Area News Group: The big news in the East Bay: George Miller is retiring from Congress. So now we have an open seat for which one person has already declared candidacy, if you can believe that.

Miller’s press conference was at 10:00 this morning. Mark DeSaulnier’s press release went out about four hours later. [Laughter.]

It’s a lot of Democrats running. It’s a very safe Democrat seat.

ZIPPERER: What about Mike Honda’s race?

JOE GAROFOLI, political reporter, San Francisco Chronicle: Ro Khanna is a former Obama administration official who lives in Fremont and had raised a record-breaking amount of money in the last quarter of 2011 when people thought that he was going to run to succeed Congressman Pete Stark. Pete Stark decided not to retire; Khanna decided not to challenge him. You know how it ended up for Pete Stark.

First, [Khanna] moved from one side of Fremont to the other and then decided that he would run against Mike Honda instead, much to the chagrin of some of the people who had given him money to run against Pete Stark. But with a massive bankroll, he is a serious candidate with a campaign team that was cobbled together from Obama 2012.

RICHMAN: Got some of Obama’s top

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campaign aides.

ZIPPERER: What doesn’t he have? Obama’s endorsement. Melissa, can you talk about some of the referenda we’ll see this year?

MELISSA GRIFFIN CAEN, political analyst, CBS SF: I don’t know if any of you have been accosted with clipboard-carrying persons outside your grocery stores, but it is signature-gathering time and you have to collect at least 500,000 for an initiative, about 800,000 for a constitutional amendment, and there are some real doozies swirling around. We have Tim Draper, who would like California to be split into six states. Actually, what he would really like is a state called Silicon Valley – but he figured another five just to be fair. There’s a real estate developer in San Diego who would like to expand the state legislature to 12,000 representatives and senators instead of the 120.

ZIPPERER: And still the Democrats would control – GRIFFIN CAEN: Right. We would have 9,700. What’s interesting about both of these proposals is that they get to the heart of people not feeling like they’re being represented.

So we have, for example, a housing crisis here in San Francisco, and if we want to do some things, we need to change state law. But it’s really hard to get people who are not in the Bay Area to care about our housing crisis.

ZIPPERER: Governor Jerry Brown is running for re-election. Is this going to be a cakewalk?

A P R I L/MAY 2014

GAROFOLI, RICHMAN, GRIFFIN CAEN (in unison): Yes. ZIPPERER: Carla, you’ve done some work on this story [GOP gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari]. Tell us what makes him such an interesting candidate.

CARLA MARINUCCI, senior political writer, San Francisco Chronicle: He’s 40 years old, an Indian-American and a very sharp guy who is really a Wall Street whiz kid in management of this TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program]. But of course one of the things we always do when we have a gubernatorial candidate is look at their voting record, and we found that in more than half the elections in which he was eligible, he did not vote, including some big ones like the last Republican primary [and] the Schwarzenegger ballot where he had many initiatives.

He’s trying to present a profile of a different kind of Republican, and that could be interesting. One who is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage. I think he’s banking on those 20 percent of Californians who are independent voters and on a lot of young voters and millennial voters, and hoping to make that contrast with Jerry Brown with age – age and experience versus youth and energy. And he certainly has that.

DEBRA J. SAUNDERS, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle: I [was there] watching Kashkari making his announcement last week and I was sort of underwhelmed.

There’s been a group of people who have been pushing him, saying he’s sort of like the new hope for the Republican Party. He’s Indian-American; he’s libertarian on social issues; he can draw people to the party and really change things. All I can think is: he’s going to lose to Jerry Brown. And so how’s that really going to make a difference?

LARRY GERSTON, professor, San Jose State University, political analyst, NBC Bay Area: He doesn’t have to win. All he has to do—he’ll come in second—all he has to do is get somewhere.

SAUNDERS: All he has to do is lose.

GERSTON: With dignity. This is where a guy like Kashkari can make long-term differences. Republicans have got to wake up. We can’t all be over 80 and white. Until that day happens, this party in this state particularly is just going to die on the vine. [It has] got to open this thing up and I think a guy like Kashkari, down the road, has that possibility.

Not just him but people like him.

Programs For up-to-date information on programs, and to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, go to commonwealthclub.org

OVERVIEW

TICKETS

The Commonwealth Club organizes more than 450 events every year – on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports.

Programs are held throughout the Bay Area.

Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all Club programs – including “Members Free” events – require tickets.

Programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Tickets are available at will call. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705. Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. If a program is sold out and your tickets are not claimed at our box office by the program start time, they will be released to our stand-by list. Select events include premium seating; premium refers to the first several rows of seating.

STANDARD PROGRAMS Typically one hour long, these speeches cover a variety of topics and are followed by a question and answer session. Most evening programs include a networking reception with wine.

PROGRAM SERIES CLIMATE ONE programs are a conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. To understand any of them, it helps to understand them all.

GOOD LIT features both established literary luminaries and upand-coming writers in conversation. Includes Food Lit. INFORUM is for and by people in their 20s to mid-30s, though events are open to people of all ages.

MEMBER–LED FORUMS (MLF) Volunteer-driven programs focus on particular fields. Most evening programs include a wine networking reception.

MEMBER-LED FORUMS CHAIR Dr. Carol Fleming carol.fleming@speechtraining.com ARTS Anne W. Smith asmith@ggu.edu Lynn Curtis lynnwcurtis@comcast.net ASIA–PACIFIC AFFAIRS Cynthia Miyashita cmiyashita@hotmail.com BAY GOURMET Cathy Curtis ccurtis873@gmail SF BOOK DISCUSSION Barbara Massey b4massey@yahoo.com BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Kevin O’Malley kevin@techtalkstudio.com ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Ann Clark cbofcb@sbcglobal.net GROWNUPS John Milford Johnwmilford@gmail.com

HEALTH & MEDICINE William B. Grant wbgrant@infionline.net Patty James patty@pattyjames.com HUMANITIES George C. Hammond george@pythpress.com INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Norma Walden norwalden@aol.com LGBT James Westly McGaughey jwes.mcgaughey@me.com MIDDLE EAST Celia Menczel celiamenczel@sbcglobal.net PERSONAL GROWTH: Stephanie Kriebel stephanie@sunspiritwellness.com PSYCHOLOGY Patrick O’Reilly oreillyphd@hotmail.com SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Chisako Ress chisakoress@gmail.com

Hear Club programs on about 200 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States. For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs on select Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

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KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

Watch Club programs on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast & DirecTV the last Sunday of each month at 11 a.m. Select Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley programs air on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at fora.tv and youtube.com/commonwealthclub

Subscribe to our free podcasting service to automatically download a new program recording to your personal computer each week: commonwealthclub.org/podcast.

HARD OF HEARING? To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Andre Heard at aheard@commonwealthclub.org seven working days before the event.

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17

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

FORUM CHAIRS

RADIO, VIDEO AND PODCASTS

APRIL

Two Month Calendar MONDAY

TUESDAY

1

12:00 p.m. The Fracking Boom 6:00 p.m. From Critical Mess to Critical Mass 6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

7 5:15 p.m. Money For Life FM

1:45 p.m. Nob Hill Walking Tour

14

6:00 p.m. Dan Richard: High-Speed Rail and the Future of Transportation in California

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

21

9 12:00 p.m. Joe R. McBride: The History of Eucalyptus Plantations in the Bay Area 6:00 p.m. Jeremy Rifkin: Are We Moving from a Capitalist to a Collaborative Economy?

7:00 p.m. Dr. Jared Diamond

16 5:30 p.m. Humanities West Book Discussion: Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights FM 6:00 p.m. The Extreme Life of the Sea

22 6:00 p.m. Robots in the Classroom

5:15 p.m. Shakespeare in Prisons FM

23 6:00 p.m. Latino/a Culture, Heritage and Conservation for the Environment 6:00 p.m. Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz: The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After 50

6:00 p.m. A Man and His Mountain FM

28 5:30 p.m. Middle East Discussion Group FE

6:00 p.m. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

15

7:00 p.m. Understanding Pain

12:00 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

2

6:00 p.m. How Did Oracle Team Win The America’s Cup – Twice?

8

5:30 p.m. Book Discussion - The Sound of Things Falling: A Novel by Juan Gabriel FM

6:00 p.m. Paul Giroux: Building Panama Canal FM

WEDNESDAY

29 6:00 p.m. On the Green Beat in the Developing World – Internews

30 5:30 p.m. Humanities West Book Discussion: The Caliph’s Splendor FM 6:00 p.m. Endangered World Rivers and Deltas 6:00 p.m. Archduke Karl von Habsburg

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THURSDAY

3

6:00 p.m. The Immigrant and the University: Peder Sather and Gold Rush California 6:30 p.m. Nuclear Power: Meltdown or Revival?

10

FRIDAY

SAT/SUN

4

5/6

12:00 p.m. Be in the Know: Plans for the Commonwealth Club’s New Headquarters Building FM This event has been postponed

11

12/13

18

19/20

25

26/27

12:00 p.m. War on Whistleblowers: The Snowden Effect 5:30 p.m. Arts Forum Planning Meeting FE 7:00 p.m. Evgeny Morozov FE

17 12:00 p.m. Changing the Way We Die 6:00 p.m. Lincoln’s Words of Freedom FE

24 1:45 p.m. Chinatown Walking Tour 6:00 p.m. Diversity and Accomplishment: Celebrating Assyrian Contributions to Baghdad’s Golden Age

12:00 p.m. LGBT Rights in Israel: 25 Years of Progress and Challenges FM

Legend

San Francisco East Bay/North Bay Silicon Valley

MONDAY

TUESDAY

MAY FM

Free program for members

FE

Free program for everyone

MO

Members–only program

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SAT/SUN

2

3/4

1

6:00 p.m. Ecological Intelligence

12:00 p.m.

Befriending the Imagination FM 7:00 p.m. Nate Silver

5 12:00 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social 5:30 p.m. Book Discussion: A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov FM

12 6:00 p.m. War! What is it Good For? FM

19 12:00 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

6:00 p.m. Tim Draper: The Case for 6 Californias 6:00 p.m. Gestures Around the World 6:15 p.m. Science & Technology Planning Meeting FE

13 6:00 p.m. One Mama 7:00 p.m. Aneesh Chopra

20 7:00 p.m. Ruth Reichl

7 5:15 p.m. Tiptoeing Through the Twilight Zone: An Explorer’s Guide to Understanding Dementia

8

9

1:45 p.m. San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour

10/11

12:00 p.m.

Syria and the Arab Spring FM

6:00 p.m. Willie Brown MO

7:00 p.m. Sandra Tsing Loh

14 12:00 p.m. Vitamin C, Calcium and Chronic Degenerative Disease

15

16

12:00 p.m. Truly Heal Your Body, Your Life and the World from Cancer

17/18

12:00 p.m. Jose Cuisia, Jr., Philippine Ambassador FM

6:00 p.m. John A. Amster: Patents in the Boardroom

21 6:00 p.m. Inside College Football: Ask the Commissioners

22

23

24/25

30

31

www.commonwealthclub.org/events www.commonwealthclub.org/events

6:00 p.m. Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich: Rebalancing America’s Relationship to Asia with Australia

by Our Side FM

6

1:45 p.m. North Beach Walking Tour 6:00 p.m. Quantum Mechanics: The Theoritcal Minimum

5:30 p.m. Middle East Discussion Group FE 6:00 p.m. No Child Left Inside FM

26

27 6:00 p.m. Getting to 50/50

28

29 6:00 p.m. Rebecca Solnit: The Faraway Nearby

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April 1 – 2

T U E 01 | San Francisco

T U E 01 | San Francisco

The Fracking Boom

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

Russell Gold, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal; Author, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World Trevor Houser, Partner, Rhodium Group; Co-author, Fueling Up: The Economic Implications of America’s Oil and Gas Boom

Fracking for oil and natural gas is transforming the way the United States powers its economy. A flood of low-priced natural gas has undercut new nuclear plants and nudged utilities to pull the plug on old ones. Cheap gas has also stolen market share from coal and has also hit renewable sources of power, such as wind and solar. Now the fracking bonanza is spreading to China and beyond. With the U.S. poised to become the world’s largest petroleum producer in a few years, the world’s new energy equation could undermine OPEC and profoundly alter the geopolitical balance of power.

Russell Gold’s new book The Boom illustrates Texas oilmen and Oklahoma wildcatters who developed and perfected hydraulic fracturing technology that ushered in a new era of American industry. Trevor Houser’s new book Fueling Up examines the economics of fracking. Join us for a conversation about the most powerful force in today’s energy economy.

Tammy Frisby, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Stanford University Melissa Griffin Caen, Contributor, KPIXTV and San Francisco Magazine; Attorney Josh Richman, State and National Politics Reporter, Bay Area News Group

California’s electing new leaders this year, and issues like income inequality and affordability are dominating the headlines. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news. Come early to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks at our social.

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. networking reception Cost: $20 non-member, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

T U E 01 | San Francisco

W E D 02 | San Francisco

From Critical Mess to Critical Mass: How Can We Get There from Here?

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Bina Venkataraman, Sr. Advisor on Climate Change Innovation, Exec. Office of the President of the United States; Lecturer, MIT; Director of Global Policy Initiatives, Broad Institute Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute; Author, The End of Growth, The Party’s Over and Snake Oil Daniella Dimitrova Russo, Executive Director and Co-founder, Plastic Pollution Coalition Beth Greer, Expert on Sustainable and Toxin-free Living Betsy Rosenberg, Host and Producer, “On the Green Front” Radio Show; Blogger, HuffPo Green; Climate Commentator, Fox News – Moderator

Extreme natural disasters, acidified oceans, shrinking coral reefs, unstoppable arboreal infections, a vanishing bee population – environmentalists say the writing is on the wall. A panel of experts will share ideas on how to get the critical message to the masses in time to protect the environments in which we live and breathe.

MLF: ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES/BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Ann Clark

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A P R I L/MAY 2014

Ben Tarnoff, Author, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Tarnoff’s latest book focuses on Mark Twain’s early years as a struggling writer in Civil War-era San Francisco and on the countercultural community he discovered there. It was a haven for weirdos, gamblers, crooks and draft dodgers, but later became a literary laboratory for new kinds of writing.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond

T H U 03 | San Francisco

How Did Oracle Team USA Win the America’s Cup – Twice?

Jimmy Spithill, Oracle Team USA Skipper Norbert Bajurin, Commodore, Golden Gate Yacht Club Julian Guthrie, Reporter, The San Francisco Chronicle; Author, The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing’s Greatest Race, The America’s Cup, Twice Michael Krasny, Host, KQED’s “Forum” — Moderator

In last summer’s 34th America’s Cup, San Francisco’s home team, Oracle USA, was down eight-to-one when it pulled off a comeback for the ages, with eight straight wins against Emirates Team New Zealand. The victorious skipper, Spithill, was at the helm supported by his team and the unlikely partnership of Golden Gate Yacht Club’s Commodore Norbert Bajurin and Larry Ellison, co-founder and billionaire CEO of Oracle Corporation. They’ll talk about the danger and drama of sailing these ultra-fast, aerodynamically designed 72-foot catamarans. Guthrie is the author of The Billionaire and the Mechanic, which tells the incredible story of how a car mechanic and one of the world’s richest men teamed up to win the world’s greatest race – twice!

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m.check-in and premium reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 for students (with valid ID); Premium: $40 nonmembers, $30 members

The Immigrant and the University: Peder Sather and Gold Rush California Karin Sveen, Author, The Immigrant and the University

Norwegian poet Karin Sveen has unveiled the story of Peder Sather — Norwegian immigrant, important financier of mid-19th century America, founder of California’s greatest public university and the man who Sather Gate at UC Berkeley memorializes.

His story serves as a monumental tribute to everything good and great about both Norway and the United States.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: Part of the Good Lit Series, underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation

F R I 04 | San Francisco

M O N 07 | San Francisco

Nuclear Power: Meltdown or Revival?

Be in the Know: Plans for the Commonwealth Club’s New Headquarters Building

Money for Life

Three years after Fukushima we ask: Is nuclear power dead in the water? Or is it poised for revival due to the world’s desperate need for carbon-free energy? Two U.S. nuclear plants are being shut down but dozens of others have been revitalized by regulators who approved letting them run another decade or two.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. networking reception Cost: $20 non-member, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Also know: The speakers and audience will be videotaped for ftr. broadcast on the Climate One TV show on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast and DirecTV

Steve Vernon, F.S.A., Author; President, Rest-of-Life Communications

This event is postponed.

Come hear a special presentation about the exciting architecture and sustainable design plans for The Commonwealth Club’s new Club offices on the San Francisco Embarcadero.

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP/ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, sdts free Program Organizer: Ann Clark

How can retirement savings generate a reliable, lifetime income? Steve Vernon has spent his professional life tackling this very question and he has a plan.

Join us in a discussion that is relevant to working people, retirees, policymakers and service providers alike.

MLF: GROWNUPS Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking reception, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John Milford Also know: In association with Western Pension and Benefits Council

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T H U 03 | San Francisco

Dave Lochbaum, Director, Nuclear Safety Project, Union of Concerned Scientists Additional Speakers TBA

April 2 – 7

W E D 02 | San Francisco

April 7 – 9

M O N 07 | San Francisco

M O N 07 | San Francisco

T U E 08 | San Francisco

Book Discussion: The Sound of Things Falling: A Novel, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Biz Stone: Confessions of a Creative Mind

Nob Hill Walking Tour

The Sound of Things Falling gives us a vision of the drug culture unraveling a generation of Colombians, one life at a time. Soon after he gets to know Ricardo Laverde, disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realizes that his new friend has a secret, or rather, several secrets. Shortly after their meeting, Ricardo is shot and killed on a street corner in Bogotá and Yammara is caught in the crossfire. Yammara’s subsequent investigation harkens back to the early 1960s, a time of marijuana smuggling, years before the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living nightmare of fear and random death.

Co-founder, Twitter; Author, Things a Little Bird Told Me

MLF: SF BOOK DISCUSSION Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m.

Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizer: Barbara Massey

In 2002, Isaac “Biz” Stone was in debt and attached to several struggling net projects. Today, we know him as a co-founder of Twitter, a successful blogger and author and an all-around innovator and creative mind.

What explains his huge success – his rapid rise, his stint with Google, how he so quickly became the face of Twitter? Biz’s latest book, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind, promises to explore just that. It is a collection of pivotal personal stories and lessons about the infinite value of creativity and non-linear thinking. Join us for a conversation with Biz as we discuss his new book and delve into the mind of “Biz Stone, Genius.”

Explore one of San Francisco’s 44 hills, and one of its original “Seven Hills.” Because of great views and its central position, Nob Hill became an exclusive enclave of the rich and famous on the West Coast who built large mansions in the neighborhood.

This included prominent tycoons, such as Leland Stanford and other members of the Big Four. Highlights include the history of four landmark hotels: The Fairmont, Mark Hopkins, Stanford Court and Huntington Hotel. A true San Francisco experience of elegance, urbanity, scandals and fabulous views.

Location: Meet in front of the Fairmont Hotel’s Caffe Centro, 801 Powell St. (at CA St.) Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Also know: Limited to 20. Must pre-register.

Tour operates rain or shine.

See website for timing, pricing and location.

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

W E D 09 | San Francisco

W E D 09 | San Francisco

W E D 0 9 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

Joe R. McBride: The History, Ecology and Future of Eucalyptus Plantations in the Bay Area

Jeremy Rifkin: Are We Moving from a Capitalist to a Collaborative Economy?

Dr. Jared Diamond

Economist; Author, The Zero Marginal Cost Society

Joe R. McBride, Ph.D., Prof. of Landscape Arch. and Envmtl. Planning, UC Berkeley

McBride will explain the ecology of the eucalyptus forest in the Bay Area. He will discuss its structure, the variety of plants and animals that live within it, its health and the ecological functions it performs.

There will be a description of the dynamics within these forest stands and about their invasive potential.

MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizers: Dee Seligman, Chisako Ress Also know: Part of The Science of Conservation and Biodiversity in the 21st Century series

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Economist and New York Times best-selling author Jeremy Rifkin will be here to discuss his new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, in which he describes how the emerging “Internet of Things” is transforming us into an era of nearly free goods and services and no longer subject to market forces. Rifkin, known for observing the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, society and environment, theorizes that while capitalism will always be an intrinsic part of our economy, it will lose its position as the dominant economic paradigm later in the century.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

A P R I L/MAY 2014

Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography, UCLA; Author, Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Third Chimpanzee for Young People

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diamond examines the evolutionary history of humans and the unique traits and behaviors that distinguish us from other animals. Diamond also explains why our innate tendencies toward invention and violence have led us to a crucial tipping point. Hear what Diamond has to say about the future of our species.

Location: Eagle Theatre, Los Altos High School, 201 Almond Ave., Los Altos Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $15 members, $8 students (with valid ID); Premium (includes priority seating and copy of book): $45 nonmembers, $45 members

T H U 10 | San Francisco

T H U 1 0 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

War on Whistleblowers: The Snowden Effect

Arts Forum Planning Meeting

Evgeny Morozov

Interested in the arts? Exhibitions, theater, symphony, opera, ballet? Our committee is made up of members like you, who share such an interest in the arts. Please help us in designing and producing future programming for the Club’s calendar. We welcome your ideas and enthusiasm.

Contributing Editor, The New Republic

Jesselyn Radack, National Security & Human Rights Director, Government Accountability Project

Radack works primarily with whistleblowers – from the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, NSA and CIA – with special focus on torture, secret surveillance and political discrimination.

She represented former NSA official and whistleblower Thomas Drake and CIA torture conduct whistleblower John Kiriakou, who is the sole CIA agent sent to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite not having tortured anyone.

MLF: THE ARTS Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Lynn Curtis

April 10

T H U 10 | San Francisco

New Republic Contribuing Editor Morozov has been described as one of the “most prominent, most multi-platformed critic[s] of the utopian promises coming from Silicon Valley.” He will discuss changes in privacy, democracy and the future of information and technology policy.

Location: Arts & Sciences Building, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara Time: 7 p.m. program Cost: FREE Also know: In association with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John O. Sutter, Ph.D.

T H U 10 | San Francisco

Mag ad?

Matt Taibbi: A Scathing Portrait of American Injustice Former Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone; Author, The Divide

Taibbi is perhaps best known for memorably christening Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” He has written extensively urging us to think critically about the key institutions and events that shape our country’s collective brain. From Griftopia’s intense debunking of vested interests and ”vampire squid” investment banks to The Great Derangement’s thorough examination of the post-9/11 era, Taibbi writes with passion and urgency. In his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, he continues to passionately decry systemic corruption. This time, however, he turns his focus to examining what he calls “the divide” – the line where troubling trends of mass incarceration and mass inequality meet. He examines the side-by-side existence of criminalized poverty and what he calls the unpunished crimes of the rich. Join us for a challenging, important exchange of ideas.

Subscribe to our podcasts! Receive a new program recording each week.

IT’S FREE! For more information, visit commonwealthclub.org/media

Location: SF Club Office Time: 6 p.m. check-in and premium reception, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID); Premium (includes priority seating): $45 non-members, $35 members

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Podcasting

April 14 – 16

M O N 14 | San Francisco

T U E 1 5 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

Paul Giroux: Building Panama Canal

Understanding Pain

Paul Giroux, M.ASCE, Senior Engineer, Kiewit Corporation

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal, Raymond “Paul” Giroux, accomplished engineer, builder and award-winning civil engineering historian, will highlight how the right people, the right machines and the right methods all came together in 1904 to build a project of unprecedented scope and challenges.

The Panama Canal’s successful construction was the result of the convergence of extraordinary people, machines and methods. In the decades preceding Panama Canal’s construction, tremendous advancements were realized in every discipline of engineering. In the realm of heavy civil construction, these collective engineering advancements provided the construction technology that made the Panama Canal possible.

MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Chisako Ress

Allan Basbaum, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Anatomy, UCSF School of Medicine.

Pain speaks as forcefully and as personally as any human experience. While the ability to experience pain is essential for survival, chronic pain is the scourge of sentient existence. As a topic of research, pain presents a formidable challenge for scientists. How does individual perception of pain vary? Why are some chronic pains so difficult to control? How effective are alternative and complementary methods, such as acupuncture and hypnosis, and how do they exert their pain-relieving effects?

Location: The Hoover Theatre, 1635 Park Avenue, San Jose Time: 6:30 p.m. check in, 7 p.m. program Cost: $15 non-members, $10 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Also know: In association with Wonderfest

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T U E 15 | San Francisco

W E D 16 | San Francisco

Dan Richard: High-Speed Rail and the Future of Transportation in California

Humanities West Book Discussion: The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights

Board Chair, California High-Speed Rail Authority

The cost of statewide high-speed rail is estimated at $68 billion. The Northern California pieces are in the $12 to $15 billion range. Currently $3.3 billion is slated to come in from federal funding and $9.95 billion is available in state bond money. Will the economics of high-speed rail come together? What will be the actual timeline? Will the majority of Californians benefit from this plan? Bring your questions to ask the Chair of the California High-Speed Rail Project.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Join us to discuss the Richard F. Burton translation of the classic tales from Baghdad’s Golden Age. These are the tales about Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba that saved the life of Shahrazad, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage.

Beginning an enchanting story each evening, Shahrazad always withheld the ending, and a thousand and one nights later, her life was spared forever. Lynn Harris will lead the discussion.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: In assn. with Humanities West

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A P R I L/MAY 2014

The Extreme Life of the Sea Stephen Palumbi, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Director of the Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford; Co-author, The Extreme Life of the Sea Anthony Palumbi, Writer; Co-Author, The Extreme Life of the Sea

Stephen Palumbi and his son, Anthony, take us on an adventure to the absolute limits of the aquatic world – the fastest and deepest, diving into the icy Arctic and boiling hydrothermal vents, while exposing the eternal darkness of the deepest undersea trenches to demonstrate how marine life thrives against the odds.

T H U 17 | San Francisco

Changing the Way We Die Fran Smith, Author, Changing the Way We Die; Blogger, Psychology Today Sheila Himmel, Author, Changing the Way We Die; Blogger, Psychology Today

Is there really such a thing as a good death? How can people facing death live fully in the time they have left? Smith and Himmel are prize-winning journalists and former colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News whose fathers’ deaths propelled them to explore these questions and the nation’s $17 billion hospice industry. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care – 44 percent of all deaths – yet most patients come in too late to get the full benefits. As 76 million baby boomers turn 65, commercialization by for-profit hospices threatens to undermine the hospice philosophy of compassionate, comprehensive, patient-driven care. Smith and Himmel examine the shifting attitudes and practices around death and dying, through the stories of patients, families, doctors and the corporate giants that increasingly own this “market.” What choices can each of us make now to get the best care possible when the time comes? How can we prepare to help those we love to die on their own terms? Join an eye-opening conversation about what you need to know before you need to know it.

MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Bill Grant

T H U 17 | San Francisco

M O N 21 | San Francisco

M O N 21 | San Francisco

Lincoln’s Words of Freedom

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

Shakespeare in Prisons

Fred Martin, Author, Abraham Lincoln’s Path to Reelection in 1864: Our Greatest Victory; Former Senior Vice President and Director, Governmental Relations, Bank of America

Lincoln was a political genius whose words powered victory. Self-taught with only rudimentary education, Lincoln’s words and his logic sprang from his moral and ethical convictions. Just as he had educated himself, he led the populace step by step, with his writing and his speeches, through the challenges facing the nation. Learn anew how Lincoln forged a pathway to victory, and gain a new perspective on American history for today’s world.

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

Martin G. Reynolds, Senior Editor, Community Engagement and Training, Bay Area News Group/Digital First Media; Cofounder, Voices Larry Gerston, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, SJSU; Political Analyst, NBC Bay Area; Author, Not So Golden After All: The Rise and Fall of California Additional Panelists TBA

California’s electing new leaders this year, and issues like income inequality and affordability are dominating the headlines. Join our panelists for engaging commentary on political news, discussion of the week’s events and our news quiz!

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. wine-and-snacks social Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Lesley Schisgall Currier, Founder and Managing Director, Marin Shakespeare Company

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space... were it not that I have bad dreams.” Hamlet eloquently distinguishes between a physical prison and the prison of the mind. The U.S. has the largest percentage of population incarcerated of any first-world nation.

Where is the line between punishment and rehabilitation? Do prisoners deserve arts programs? How does Shakespeare serve as a tool for personal transformation?

Societal transformation? Shakespeare in Prisons explores art, society and morality.

MLF: PSYCHOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Patrick O’Reilly, Ph.D.

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MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Chisako Ress

April 16 – 21

W E D 16 | San Francisco

April 21 – 23

M O N 21 | San Francisco

APRIL 21-JUNE 13

A Man and His Mountain

Art Exhibition: “Befriending the Imagination”

Edward Humes, Author, A Man and His Mountain: The Everyman who Created Kendall-Jackson and Became America’s Greatest Wine Entrepreneur In conversation with Barbara R. Banke, Chairwoman, Jackson Family Wines; Widow of Jess Jackson

Jess Stonestreet Jackson was a self-made billionaire who built the Kendall-Jackson empire into a best-selling brand of super premium wines in the U.S., all after the age of 50. Jackson Family Wines is one of the last remaining family-owned winery groups and owns and operates more than 35 individual wineries in California and around the world. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes and Jess’s widow and KendallJackson Chairwoman Barbara Banke will tell the story of this amazing man and his influence on the California wine industry. A wine tasting will follow the conversation.

MLF: BAY GOURMET Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Cathy Curtis

J. Ruth Gendler, Artist; Author, The Book of Qualities and Notes on the Need for Beauty

In celebration of National Poetry Month artist and author J. Ruth Gendler has gathered a soulful, insightful selection of poems and picture poems from children focusing on identity and feeling, the hand and imagination. This exhibit will also include Gendler’s bright, metaphorical monotypes and paintings. Gendler will be speaking at the Club on Friday, May 2, at noon in the Gold Room.

MLF: THE ARTS Location: SF Club Office Time: Regular Club business hours Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Lynn Curtis

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T U E 22 | San Francisco

W E D 23 | San Francisco

Robots in the Classroom

Latino/a Culture, Heritage and Conservation for the Environment

Elad Inbar, CEO, RobotsLAB Vikas Gupta, CEO, Play-i Sheena Vaidyanathan, Computer Science Teacher, Los Altos School District Tina Barseghian, Senior Editor, MindShift, KQED – Moderator

Robots are making inroads in a wide variety of industries, with particularly interesting applications in the field of education.

Today’s students are interacting with robots in ways that prior generations couldn’t even imagine. In this panel, experts will discuss the implications, benefits and risks associated with robots in the classroom MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students Program Organizers: Chisako Ress and Tim Smith Also Know: Part of the 21st Century Robotic series

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Adrianna Quintero, Senior Attorney; Director, Latino Outreach, Natural Resources Defense Council Gary Segura, Professor of American Politics and Chair of Chicano/a Studies, Stanford University Anita Martinez, Retired College Educator; Environmentalist; Community Health and Safety Activist

Most people don’t automatically label Latinos and Latinas as environmentalists. A deeper look at family, home and community values reveals a long-standing generational commitment to conservation and the wise use of everyday resources in daily life. California’s changing demographics all point to a tremendous potential for local, national and worldwide political environmental progress as we listen and learn about the conservation practices of our Latino and Latina families and communities.

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP/ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Ann Clark

A P R I L/MAY 2014

Perspectives of Iran October 9 – 23, 2014

Commonwealth Club Travel

U.S. to TEHRAN Thursday, October 9 Depart the U.S. TEHRAN Friday, October 10 Arrive very late at night. Upon arrival, transfer to the former Intercontinental Hotel, now the Laleh Hotel.

Study Leader, Azadeh Moaveni Azadeh Moaveni is an IranianAmerican journalist and writer who specializes in covering Iran, having spent over a decade reporting throughout the region from bases in Cairo, Beirut, and Tehran. She is a former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, and currently writes widely on Iran for Time, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and other publications.

As one of the few American correspondents permitted to work continuously in Iran throughout the 2000s, Azadeh has reported extensively on Iranian youth culture, women’s rights, social media and political change, and Iranian security issues.

Azadeh began her career in 1999 as a reporter in Cairo and joined Time magazine in 2000 as a Tehran and then New Yorkbased reporter, covering society and political stories across the Middle East. In 2003, she became a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq. She has worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan and also writes book reviews for The New York Times Book Review and the Financial Times.

Azadeh has written two books – the bestselling Lipstick Jihad (2005) and Honeymoon in Tehran (2009) – which focus on the country’s youth culture, tangled ties with the West, and the rise of President Ahmadinejad. She is co-author of the Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi’s memoir, Iran Awakening (2007).

TEHRAN Saturday, October 11 Enjoy a full day of sightseeing in Tehran concentrating on its excellent museums. Visit the Archaeological Museum with its fine collection including a stone capital of a winged lion from Susa. Explore the Glass and Ceramics Museum of Iran and the Contemporary Art Museum. (B,L,D) TEHRAN Sunday, October 12 Visit to the Reza Abbasi Museum, which is home to a superior collection of Persian miniatures. View the Iranian crown jewels. This spectacular collection of jewels, stored in the basement vault of the Bank Milli Iran, contains the world’s largest uncut diamond as well as the Peacock Throne. (B,L,D) TEHRAN Monday, October 13 Head to northern Tehran to visit Khomeini’s home where one is allowed a glimpse of the dwelling. Enjoy lunch in a lively neighborhood. Stop at the Zahir ol Dowleh Cemetery, the resting spot for many of Iran’s writers and artists. Close by is the garden home of Dr. Hesabi, a prominent Persian scientist.

Enjoy tea here before returning to the hotel. (B,L,D) TABRIZ Tuesday, October 14 Fly to Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan. Until recently Tabriz was the second largest city in Iran. Visit the Blue Mosque, considered a masterpiece of Iranian decorative tile work due to the quality of the work, the finesse of the designs, and the harmony of the overall composition. Continue on to the gardens of the Shah Goli (the Royal Lake), a popular site for picnicking and musical performances, and learn about qanats, a rather extraordinary system of irrigation, which can extend for miles. End the day at the bazaar of Tabriz, known for its silverwork and jewelry. Overnight at the Pars Hotel. (B,L,D)

TABRIZ Wednesday, October 15 Today begins with an excursion to the Saint Stepanos Monastery. Dating back to the 7th century, this is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Situated on the south-eastern fringe of the main zone of the Armenian cultural space, the monastery once constituted a major center for the dissemination of Armenian culture in the region. This church along with St. Thaddeus is the last regional remains of this culture that are still in a state of integrity and authenticity. Return to Tabriz mid-afternoon. Dinner and overnight at the hotel. (B,L,D) SHIRAZ Thursday, October 16 In the morning, enjoy a short excursion to the intriguing troglodyte village of Kandovan. The Kandovan people have carved their houses in the rocks and still live in them as in ancient times. Return to Tabriz and connect with an afternoon flight to Shiraz. Upon arrival enjoy an orientation tour of this city known for its nightingales, poetry, and, at one time, wine.

Transfer to the Homa Hotel for dinner and overnight. (B,L,D) SHIRAZ Friday, October 17 Today we enjoy a full day excursion to Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire and one of the world’s most beautiful and spectacular archaeological sites.

This palace city was built by craftsmen from around Darius’ vast empire.

Superb bas reliefs depict the flow of ritual processions. After a lunch sitting in the shade of grape vines, visit Naghsh-E Rostam, which contains the carved tombs of four Achaemenian kings. (B,L,D) YAZD Saturday, October 18 This morning explore the city of Shiraz, stopping at the tomb of the celebrated poet Hafez. The marble tombstone is engraved with a long verse from the poet’s works. Continue on to the Fars Museum. This octagonal pavilion houses a collection relating to the life of Karim Khan. After lunch drive to Yazd, passing through many acres of pistachios. Dinner and overnight at the Moshir Garden Hotel.

(B,L,D)

Online: commonwealthclub.org/travel Phone: 415.597.6720 Email: travel@commonwealthclub.org

YAZD Sunday, October 19 In Yazd stop at the home of the former governor of the city to see and learn more about traditional Persian architecture and the badgers, wind-towers ingeniously designed to catch a passing breeze. Enjoy a walking tour through the covered streets of the old quarter. Spend an afternoon concentrating on the Zoroastrian religion. Explore a small village called Taft where a large number of Zoroastrians still live. We also stop at one of the two Zoroastrian abandoned Towers of Silence where, until 40 years ago, the dead were left at the tops of the towers. (B,L,D) ISFAHAN Monday, October 20 Drive this morning to Na’in, an important trade center. It is well-known for its carpet making and also for its mosque from the early Islamic period. Continue on to a private house that has some superb 17th-century stucco carvings.

After a wonderful lunch, drive to Isfahan and to the delightful Abbasi Hotel, a converted caravanserai. (B,L,D) ISFAHAN Tuesday, October 21 Isfahan is perhaps the most beautiful of all Iranian cities. The central focus of this fascinating city, which never failed to inspire and awe European merchants and ambassadors to the Safavid court, is the immense Maydan-e Shah, or Royal Square. After lunch, spend the afternoon exploring the bazaar of Isfahan and learning more about traditional crafts in Iran. (B,L,D)

What to Expect Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group. In order to participate one should be able to walk 1-2 miles comfortably, use stairs without handrails, and be able to walk and stand for periods of two hours at time.

Fall is a lovely time to travel in Iran when temperatures range from 60-85 degrees Fahrenheit.

The infrastructure in Iran is quite good with modern roads and buses. Hotels are comfortable with private bathrooms and air-conditioning. Food is freshly prepared and we eat at delightful local restaurants. During the program participants should be dressed modestly and women will be required to have their head covered while in public areas. More details will be provided upon registering for the trip.

Trip Details Dates:

October 9–23, 2014

Group Size:

Minimum 10, maximum 25 (not including staff)

Cost:

$5,995 per person, double occupancy; $1,100 single room supplement

Included:

Accommodation as per itinerary, meals as listed in the program, bottled water on the bus, all sightseeing in a deluxe, airconditioned coach, internal flights, all entrance fees and special events listed, full lecture program and study leader, pre-departure materials and reading list, the services of a local Iranian guide, the services of a professional tour manager who will accompany the group throughout the trip, gratuities.

Not included:

International airfare into and out of Tehran (approximately $1,500), visa fees for Iran ($128 at time of printing), excess luggage charges, medical expenses, trip Insurance, items of a purely personal nature.

ISFAHAN Wednesday, October 22 Admire some of the five bridges crossing the Zayendehrud River and wander through the city’s fascinating Armenian quarter. In the afternoon view the Friday Mosque and the Palace of Forty Columns, a charming pavilion used to receive dignitaries and ambassdors. (B,L,D) ISFAHAN to U.S. Thursday, October 23 Depart Tehran in the early morning, arriving back in the United States today.

*Itinerary is subject to change

Online: commonwealthclub.org/travel Phone: 415.597.6720 Email: travel@commonwealthclub.org

Highlights •

Join our Study Leader, Iranian-American journalist Azadeh Moaveni, and Club travelers on a journey through Iran, where vast monuments serve as testament to the extraordinary history of this country.

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Explore Tehran, the country’s capital, including a visit to the basement vault of the Bank Milli Iran to view the spectacular Crown Jewels, and learn about the thriving Iranian contemporary art scene.

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Discover the gardens of Shah Goli, the amazing tile work of the Blue Mosque, and the town’s colorful bazaar in Tabriz.

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Experience the country’s center of Zoroastrianism in Yazd where the most traditional Persian architecture is found.

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Visit the Fars Museum in Shiraz and take an excursion to the magnificent ruins of Persepolis – one of the most remarkable archaeological sites found in the Near East.

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Take in the beauty of Isfahan where brilliant bluetiled buildings and majestic bridges are often recognized as the perfection of Islamic architecture.

Please note the State Department has had a Travel Warning for Iran since 1979. You can read this Travel Warning at http://travel.state.gov/travel/ cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_920.html. Our tour operator has operated many trips to Iran, including several fall departures in 2013. The Commonwealth Club and our tour operator are closely monitoring the situation in Iran and will not operate the trip if the situation within the country becomes hostile or unsafe.

Perspectives of Iran

Commonwealth Club Travel

RESERVATION FORM October 9–23, 2014

Phone: 415.597.6720 Fax: 415.597.6729

NAME 1 NAME 2 ADDRESS

CITY/STATE/ZIP

HOME PHONE

CELL

E-MAIL ADDRESS

I would like to reserve _______ space(s) Enclosed is a deposit of $500 per person, in the total amount of $ _________________.

Please make checks payable to “Distant Horizons.” Your deposit is fully refundable up until 14 days after receipt of your reservation form. A confirmation letter, full terms and conditions, reading list and a travel insurance application will be mailed to you upon receipt of your deposit.

Room Arrangements Air Travel Arrangements □ Single Supplement □ I/we wish to be booked on the group flight from SFO.

Double Occupancy I will be sharing a room with:________________________

□

□ I/we wish to be booked on a flight departing

□ I would prefer a roommate, but will pay the single

□ I/we will make my own arrangements to arrive

in supplement if one is not available.

from:_________________________________________

in Tehran.

PLEASE RETURN THIS FORM ALONG WITH YOUR DEPOSIT TO: Commonwealth Club Travel 595 Market St., 2nd floor San Francisco, CA 94105 You may also fax the form to 415.597.6729 CST: 2096889-40

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz: The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After 50 President, Charles Schwab Foundation; Author, The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After Fifty

Join us as Schwab-Pomerantz shares answers to the array of financial questions plaguing those who are age 50 and older. The financial world is more complex than ever, and like most people moving into the phase of life where protecting assets is paramount, people 50-plus are faced with a number of financial puzzles. Whatever the specific issue, people need deeply researched advice from professionals with impeccable credentials.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: General admission: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students; Premium (includes priority seating and a copy of book): $50 non-members, $40 members

T H U 24 | San Francisco

FOREIGN LANGUAGE GROUPS

Chinatown Walking Tour Enjoy a Commonwealth Club Neighborhood Adventure. Join Rick Evans for a memorable midday walk and discover the history and mysteries of Chinatown. Explore colorful alleys and side streets. Visit a Taoist temple, an herbal store, the site of the first public school in the state and the famous Fortune Cookie Factory.

Free for members Location: SF Club Office FRENCH, Intermediate Class Thursdays, noon Pierrette Spetz, Graziella Danieli, danieli@sfsu.edu FRENCH, Advanced Conversation Tuesdays, noon Gary Lawrence, (925) 932-2458

Location: Meet at corner of Grant and Bush, in front of Starbucks, near Chinatown Gate Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–5 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Also know: Temple visit requires walking up three flights of stairs. Limited to 12 people.

Participants must pre-register. Tour operates rain or shine. Photo by H Sanchez/Flickr.

GERMAN, Int./Adv. Conversation Wednesdays, noon Sara Shahin, (415) 314-6482 ITALIAN, Intermediate Class Mondays, noon Ebe Fiori Sapone, (415) 564-6789 SPANISH, Advanced Conversation (fluent only) Fridays, noon Luis Salvago-Toledo, lsalvago@comcast.net

F R I 25 | San Francisco

M O N 28 | San Francisco

Diversity and Accomplishment: Celebrating Assyrian Contributions to Baghdad’s Golden Age

LGBT Rights in Israel: 25 Years of Progress and Challenges

Middle East Discussion Group

For centuries, Baghdad was the center of the Islamic, Christian and Jewish worlds.

Though Arab Muslims ruled, they were not originally in the majority. At Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, Greek, Persian and Indian medicine and philosophy were translated directly into Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic and the language of ethnic Assyrians. Assyrian religious leaders, scientists and philosophers made invaluable contributions, which influenced Baghdad’s intellectual institutions and shaped Islamic civilization itself.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: In assn. with Humanities West

Arthur Slepian, Executive Director and Founder, A Wider Bridge Donny Inbar, Ph.D., Associate Director of Arts and Culture, Jewish Community Federation Israel Center - Moderator

Having enacted LGBT anti-discrimination protections in 1992 and home to an open and vocal LGBT-rights movement, Israel’s stance on equality is radically different from many of its neighbors. How has Israel become a place where LGBT people have a level of equality and visibility unlike anywhere else in the Middle East?

MLF: MIDDLE EAST/LGBT Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

Make your voice heard in an enriching, provocative and fun discussion with fellow Club members as you weigh in on events shaping the face of the Middle East. Each month, the Middle East Member-Led Forum hosts an informal roundtable discussion on a topic frequently suggested by recent headlines. After a brief introduction, the floor will be open for discussion.

All interested members are encouraged to attend. There will also be a brief planning session.

MLF: MIDDLE EAST Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

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www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T H U 24 | San Francisco

Nicholas Al-Jeloo, Ph.D. in Syriac Studies

April 23 – 28

W E D 23 | San Francisco

April 29 – May 1

T U E 29 | San Francisco

W E D 30 | San Francisco

W E D 30 | San Francisco

On The Green Beat in the Developing World – Internews

Humanities West Book Discussion - The Caliph’s Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad

by Benson Bobrick

Endangered World Rivers and Deltas: Where the Rivers Flow into the Cycle to Revitalize the Oceans

Liu Lican, Journalist, China Gustavo Faleiros, Journalist, Brazil Imelda Abano, Journalist, Philippines Michael Simire, Journalist, Nigeria James Fahn, Exec. Director, Internews’ “Earth Journalism Network” – Moderator

Home to 80 percent of the world’s population, the fastest growing economies and most of our remaining biodiversity, the developing countries of the world are key to our planet’s environmental future. Come hear the views of these highly respected and experienced leading environmental journalists.

Join us to discuss the achievements of Harun al-Rashid, the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, whose actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. When Harun came to power, the Islamic empire stretched from the Atlantic to India, and in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new ideas were developed in astronomy, geometry, algebra, medicine and chemistry. Lynn Harris will lead the discussion.

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP/ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Ann Clark

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: In assn. with Humanities West

W E D 30 | San Francisco

T H U 01 | San Francisco

Archduke Karl von Habsburg: A Modern Monuments Man

Ecological Intelligence

Imperial Prince and Archduke of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia

Archduke Karl von Habsburg, LLM, is truly a modern “Monuments Man.” As president of the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and a former member of the European Parliament for Austria, he has specialized in international humanitarian law and intangible cultural heritage protection. Archduke von Habsburg has most recently worked to save cultural artifacts in many modern crisis-ravaged parts of Africa and the Middle East. Here’s a rare chance to meet a descendant of European Royalty, who is currently working to preserve the world’s most precious treasures.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: General admission $25 non-members, $15 members, $10 students; Premium (seating in first rows): $40 non-members, $30 members

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Steven Goldbeck, Chief Deputy Director, San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission Kimery Wiltshire, CEO & Director, Carpe Diem West

Deltas are the critical point where the rivers flow in nature’s cycle to revitalize the oceans and earth. Join two experts for a discussion of the destruction to deltas worldwide.

Learn what the international Delta Alliance is doing to restore major rivers and deltas.

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP/ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking rec eption, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Ann Clark

Daniel Goleman, Author, Ecological Intelligence Joshua Freedman, COO, Six Seconds; Author, Inside Change Additional speakers TBA

Though ecological awareness is on the rise, environmental depredation continues at alarming rates. While many people cognitively understand that behavior has to change to save the planet, that knowledge isn’t often enough to trigger change. People hear about “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” but they still buy bottled water and throw away plastic bags. The disconnect is rooted in understanding the human brain – and the way our brains actually process danger.

On the one hand, the long-term threats that are destroying the planet don’t activate the human threat-response system. On the other, ringing alarm bells push people into short-term, survival-oriented, self-protective reactions. Could the neuroscience of change and the role of emotion be the missing links to reducing carbon pollution?

Can feelings bring people into action?

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. networking reception Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Also know: The speakers and audience will be videotaped for future broadcast on the Climate One TV show on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast and DirecTV

A P R I L/MAY 2014

Befriending the Imagination J. Ruth Gendler, Artist; Author The Book of Qualities, Notes on the Need for Beauty

The human imagination is an essential natural resource and needs our attention to flourish. In this talk, author and artist Gendler celebrates the immensity and beauty of the imagination. As a poet-inthe-schools for over 25 years, Gendler has gathered an extraordinary collection of children’s art and writing. This afternoon we will see and hear selections that celebrate the directness and profundity of their imaginations and talk about ways to nourish the imagination in all of us.

MLF: THE ARTS Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Lynn Curtis

F R I 02 | San Francisco

M O N 05 | San Francisco

Nate Silver

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

Editor-in-Chief, FiveThirtyEight; Author, The Signal and the Noise In Conversation with Jordan Ellenberg, Mathematician; Author, How Not to Be Wrong

Presented in association with Cal Performances and The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Nate Silver started off predicting baseball, and now his awardwinning blog FiveThirtyEight features data-driven analysis of a diverse array of topics, from dating to education.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 6 p.m. check-in and premium reception, 7 p.m. program Cost: $40 non-members, $25 members, $10 students; Premium (includes seating in first rows and VIP reception): $80 non-members, $60 members Also know: Special Thanks to Bay Area Science Festival for helping to co-promote the event!

Panelists TBA

California’s electing new leaders this year, and issues like income inequality and affordability are dominating the headlines. Week to Week will take a look at the issues and the people in local, state and national politics. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, audience discussion of the week’s events and our news quiz! And stay after the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our member social.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. wine-and-snacks social Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

T U E 06 | San Francisco

T U E 06 | San Francisco

Book Discussion : A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Gestures Around the World: Do You Know What Your NonVerbal Communications May Be Saying?

Science & Technology Planning Meeting

MLF: SF BOOK DISCUSSION Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizer: Barbara Massey

Syndi Seid, Founder, Advanced Etiquette

What you think is a perfectly fine gesture in the U.S. may be very offensive in another culture. Learn from top to bottom what head, facial, hand, leg and toe gestures really mean on various continents.

Join international etiquette expert Seid as she leads a lively discussion and leave with a sharpened awareness of which gestures never to make again.

MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Norma Walden

Join fellow Club members with similar interests and brainstorm upcoming Science & Technology programs. All Commonwealth Club members are welcome.

We explore visions for the future through science and technology. Discuss current issues and share your insights with fellow Club members to shape and plan programs for the months ahead.

MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 6:15 p.m. meeting Cost: FREE Program organizer: Chisako Ress

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www.commonwealthclub.org/events

M O N 05 | San Francisco

This great Russian classic is set in the Caucasus during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. Its Byronic anti-hero, Grigory Pechorin, is the prototype of the “superfluous man,” often met in other Russian novels. A person of great ability, intelligence and charm, Pechorin can find no real outlet for his talents and becomes bitter, cynical and bored. He takes pleasure in manipulating others and inflicting pain. Not a political novel in any direct sense, A Hero of Our Time serves as an oblique criticism of the stifling world created

by Russia’s autocratic system.

May 2 – 6

F R I 02 | San Francisco

May 7 – 12

W E D 07 | San Francisco

W E D 0 7 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

T H U 08 | San Francisco

Tiptoeing Through the Twilight Zone: An Explorer’s Guide to Understanding Dementia

Sandra Tsing Loh

San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour

Mary Hulme, LCSW, President/Founder, Moonstone Geriatrics

Curious to learn and understand more about dementia? Hulme will teach reallife strategies for coping with dementia.

She will describe her “Three Laws for Living with Dementia” and will highlight the importance of humor, creativity and experimentation in staying connected to anyone suffering from this illogical and vexing disease.

MLF: GROWNUPS Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students Program Organizer: John Milford Also know: In association with San Francisco Village

Contributing Editor, The Atlantic; Host, “The Loh Down on Science;” Author, The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

In her hilarious new memoir, Loh chronicles her life as a daughter, mother, wife, artist, and most of all a woman going through menopause. She offers a candid and honest look at her mid-life crisis and the physical, mental and emotional changes she faced.

Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Also know: In association with the Contemporary Asian Theater Scene, Good Lit event – Underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

See website for pricing and location.

Explore San Francisco’s Financial District with historian Rick Evans and learn the history and stories behind some of our city’s remarkable structures, streets and public squares.

Hear about the famous architects that influenced the building of San Francisco after the 1906 Earthquake. Discover hard-to-find rooftop gardens, Art Deco lobbies, unique open spaces, and historic landmarks. This is a tour for locals, with hidden gems you can only find on foot!

Location: Lobby of Galleria Park Hotel, 191 Sutter St. Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Also know: Tour operates rain or shine.

Limited to 20 people. Participants must preregister. The tour covers less than one mile of walking in the Financial District. Note: This tour involves walking up and down stairs.

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T H U 08 | San Francisco

F R I 09 | San Francisco

M O N 12 | San Francisco

Willie Brown: Annual Lecture on Political Trends

Syria and the Arab Spring

War! What is it Good For?

Bonnie Joy Kaslan, Honorary Consul General, Republic of Turkey, SF Bay Area Dina Ibrahim, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Broadcasting and Communication Arts, SFSU; Media Analyst Evgeny Avdoshin, Consul and Press Attache, Russian Consulate, San Francisco Robert Rosenthal, Executive Director, Center for Investigative Reporting – Moderator

Ian Morris, Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Stanford University; Author, War! What Is It Good For?

Former Mayor, San Francisco; Former Speaker, California State Assembly

Former San Francisco Mayor Brown will give his annual lecture on national and regional political trends.

A two-term mayor of San Francisco, powerful speaker of the California State Assembly and widely regarded as one of the most influential African-American politicians of the late 20th century, Brown has been at the center of California politics, government and civic life for an astonishing four decades.

MEMBERS ONLY +1 paying guest Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $25 non-members, $15 members; Premium: $45 non-members, $30 members

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The distinguished panel will discuss the Syrian tragedy, which has caused hundreds of thousands of casualties and created over two million refugees. The panelists will be also focus on how the conflict has impacted neighboring countries.

MLF: MIDDLE EAST Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

A P R I L/MAY 2014

Monday Night Philosophy ponders a paradox. If you had lived 20,000 years ago, you would probably have faced a 1-in-10 of dying violently. But by the 20th century AD, that risk had fallen to 1-in-100 and it keeps going down. The explanation is uncomfortable: despite all its horrors, war itself has made the world a safer and richer place by creating larger societies that then pacify themselves internally. Morris looks at the implications of this argument.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond

T U E 1 3 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

T U E 13 | San Francisco

Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich: Rebalancing America’s Relationship to Asia with Australia

by Our Side

Aneesh Chopra

One Mama

Former US CTO; Author Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government

Siobhan “ShaBoom” Neilland, Founder, OneMama ShaBoom Products

Former Ambassador, Australia Joe Epstein, Past President, Board of Governors, Commonwealth Club Moderator

In the next 20 years, the middle class in Asia is projected to swell from 600 million to 3.2 billion. This wouldn’t merely be the largest reduction in poverty in human history; it would have global economic benefits. Bleich will discuss the planning of America’s economic, diplomatic and security rebalance to Asia.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Also know: In assn. with Asia-Pacific Affairs MLF

Technology has completely revolutionized our society and economy: the way we work, shop and play. Chopra will discuss how innovative public and private partnerships can reshape and improve some of our most challenging issues, from economic development to affordable healthcare. Chopra served as the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer appointed by President Obama. Come hear his take on what open government innovation really means.

Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing

See website for pricing and location.

May 12 – 15

M O N 12 | San Francisco

How do you overcome the death of your child? Neilland found a unique way to fill this major void by traveling to Uganda and opening herself to the love of many children, which led her to found OneMama. org in her efforts to help others live. Come hear Neilland discuss how all you need is an idea, a strategy and a whole lot of tenacity to transfer your own personal technique to the professional concept of business and philanthropy.

MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS/HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students Program Organizer: Jill Gregerson Assisting Organizations: The NorCal Peace Corps Association

W E D 14 | San Francisco

T H U 15 | San Francisco

Vitamin C, Calcium and Chronic Degenerative Disease

John A. Amster: Patents in the Boardroom – The Truth Behind the Headlines

Truly Heal Your Body, Your Life and the World from Cancer

Thomas E Levy, MD, JD, Author, Curing the Incurable: Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins

As chronic degenerative diseases become more prevalent, Dr. Levy posits that deficiency of vitamin C in the tissues ultimately dictates whether you are ill and how severely ill you are. The presentation will include a general overview of vitamin C, why nearly everyone has too much calcium in their body and Levy’s suggestions for the best ways to address these factors therapeutically to optimize health.

MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizers: Bill Grant & Phil Jacklin

CEO and Co-founder, RPX Corporation

Marcus Freudenmann, Founder, Truly Heal; Director and Producer, Truly Heal Your Body, Your Life and the World from Cancer; Producer, Cancer Is Curable Now.

Patents have been big news in recent years. The most significant development affecting patents has been the rise of nonpracticing entities (NPEs), also known as “patent trolls.” NPEs acquire patents and litigate them to extract license payments or legal settlements from an allegedly infringing company. The discussion will focus on a new perspective: how patents can and should be transacted using market mechanisms instead.

Marcus Freudenmann is an expert in the world of alternative treatments for cancer.

He will address the complexity of these treatments, as well as how to evaluate a patient effectively with a systematic approach.

Through such an evaluation, a practitioner and patient can create an individualized treatment plan. Freudenmann says such treatment plans can eliminate root causes of cancer, heal underlying trauma and help patients find life purpose and joy.

MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Chisako Ress

MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Adrea Brier and Bill Grant

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www.commonwealthclub.org/events

W E D 14 | San Francisco

May 16 – 19

T H U 16 | San Francisco

Tim Draper : The Case For Six Californias Venture Capitalist; Founding Partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Founder, Draper University of Heroes

F R I 16 | San Francisco

M O N 19 | San Francisco

Jose Cuisia, Jr., Philippine Ambassador to the U.S.

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

Draper has submitted an initiative to the state’s attorney general in the form of a ballot proposition proposal called Six Californias, which he hopes to get on the November ballot. The proposal calls for the creation of new states, such as Silicon Valley and West California, which would be anchored by the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Draper believes that the Golden State has been rendered nearly ungovernable by social and economic changes. The initiative has to qualify by July 18, 2014, to make it on the next ballot.

As his country recovers from Typhoon Haiyan, a massive natural disaster with a heavy human toll and far-reaching economic effects, Ambassador Cuisia will discuss the growth and challenges facing the Philippine economy as well as his country’s crucial relationship with the United States. Cuisia was nominated by President Benigno S. Aquino III to the position of ambassador on November 30, 2010. Previously he served as central bank governor and chairman of the Monetary Board and chairman of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation Board.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID)

Larry Gerston, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, San Jose State University; Political Analyst, NBC Bay Area; Author, Not So Golden After All: The Rise and Fall of California Additional Panelists TBA

California’s electing new leaders this year, and issues like income inequality and affordability are dominating the headlines. Join our panelists for engaging commentary on political and other major news, audience discussion of the week’s events and our news quiz! Stay after the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks at our member social.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. wine-and-snacks social Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

M O N 19 | San Francisco

M O N 19 | San Francisco

No Child Left Inside

Middle East Discussion Group

Nicole Ardoin, Assistant Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education Zenobia Barlow, Executive Director and Co-Founder, The Center for Ecoliteracy; Regional Environmental Justice Coordinator, EPA; Founder, Three Circles Center Erik Hoffner, Outreach Coordinator and Writer, Orion Magazine Mitchell Thomashow, President Emeritus, Unitylege; Director, Presidential Fellows Program, Second Nature Laurette Rogers, Co-Founder, Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed (STRAW)

Make your voice heard in an enriching, provocative and fun discussion with fellow Club members as you weigh in on events shaping the face of the Middle East. Each month, the Middle East Member-Led Forum hosts an informal roundtable discussion on a topic frequently suggested by recent headlines.

After a brief introduction, the floor will be open for discussion. All interested members are encouraged to attend. There will also be a brief planning session.

Spring heralds the beginning of the outdoors season, but despite the demonstrated positive effects that nature has on kids, many children remain glued to screens or stuck inside prepping for yet another standardized exam. Will it always be “heads in tech”? Or will it also be “feet on the ground”? If children are not given opportunities to connect with the natural world, who will be the stewards of the future? Join a roundtable discussion of experts and educators hosted by Orion Magazine, publisher of the new anthology, Leave No Child Inside, to examine the merits and opportunities inherent in experiential outdoor play and learning for all children and their abilities.

MLF: ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Ann Clark

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MLF: MIDDLE EAST Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

T U E 20 | San Francisco

We d 2 1 | S a n Fra n c i s co

Ruth Reichl

Think Like a Freakonomist

Inside College Football: Ask The Commissioners

Food Critic; Former Editor, Gourmet; Author, Delicious!

Angie Coiro, Journalist and Host, “In Deep” - Moderator

In her fictional debut, Reichl celebrates her love of food with a story about family ties and the special bond between sisters.

Reichl is an award-winning chef and well-known food critic for The New York Times. Hear more from one of the pioneers of the Berkeley culinary revolution.

Location: Schultz Cultural Hall, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto Time: 6:30 p.m. check in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $15 members; Premium (priority seating and copy of book): $45 non-members, $45 members.

Also know: Part of the Good Lit series. Underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

Steven Levitt, Author, Think Like a Freak, Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics Stephen Dubner, Author, Think Like a Freak, Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics

Now, it’s time for you to think like a “freak.” Levitt and Dubner’s newest masterpiece helps us get whacky to analyze the decisions we make, the plans we create and even the morals we choose. Get freaky – and these statistic gurus will teach you how to make smarter, harder and better decisions. With practical insights from “The Upside of Quitting” to “How to Succeed – With No Talent,” Levitt and Dubner have again turned our brains inside out and made statistics sexy. There’s a hidden side to everything.

Larry Scott, Commissioner, Pac 12; Fmr Chair and CEO, Women’s Tennis Assn.; Fmr Pres. and COO, ATP Properties James Delany, Commissioner, Big 10 Ted Robinson, Emmy Award-winning Broadcaster; Announcer, Pac 12 Network, and San Francisco 49ers – Moderator

As the 2014 season begins to take shape, hear the heads of the two college conferences with the largest television and media footprint discuss the opportunities and challenges facing college football, including compensation for student-athletes, safety issues and the advent of playoffs as the sport continues its unparalleled growth.

T H U 22 | San Francisco

T H U 22 | San Francisco

T U E 27 | San Francisco

North Beach Walking Tour

Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

Getting to 50/50

Location: Meeting Spot is Washington Square Park at Saints Peter and Paul Church (Filbert & Powell). Our guide will be on the steps of the church. The official address is 666 Filbert, between Columbus and Stockton.

Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2-4 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Also know: Limited to 20 people. Must preregister. Tours operate rain or shine. Photo by Flickr user Clemson.

Leonard Susskind, Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stanford University; Co-author, Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum Art Friedman, Data Eng.; Co-author, Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

Sharon Meers, Head of Magento Enterprise Strategy, eBay; Former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs; Co-author, Getting to 50/50 Joanna Strober, Founder and CEO, KurboHealth; Co-author, Getting to 50/50

The theory and associated mathematics of quantum mechanics is famously difficult to comprehend. Susskind and Friedman offer crystal-clear explanations of the principles of quantum states, uncertainty and time dependence among other topics. They provide a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.

A game-changing read that some think will do for the cultural dialogue around working families what Lean In did for working women, in Getting to 50/50, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober share personal stories, compelling social science and a practical roadmap to help women – and men – stay engaged with their kids without sacrificing their careers.

MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students Program Organizer: Chisako Ress

MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Patty James

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www.commonwealthclub.org/events

See website for timing and location

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check in and members social with tailgate food, 6 p.m. program Cost: $25 non-members, $15 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Join another Commonwealth Club Neighborhood Adventure!

Explore vibrant North Beach with Rick Evans during a two-hour walk through this neighborhood with a colorful past, where food, culture, history and unexpected views all intersect in an Italian “urban village.” In addition to learning about Beat generation hangouts, you’ll discover authentic Italian cathedrals and coffee shops.

May 20 – 27

T U E 2 0 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

May 29 – June 4

T H U 29 | San Francisco

M O N 02 | San Francisco

TUE 03 | East Bay

The Faraway Nearby

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

Will Durst: Midterm Madness!

Rebecca Solnit, Author, The Faraway Nearby

American Political Satirist

Award-winning San Francisco author Solnit reaches beyond her own life to the stories she heard and read that helped her navigate the difficult journey through her mother’s illness, disintegrating memory and eventual death. Exploring the essential elements of empathy for dealing with irreparable loss, Solnit has created a marvelous Russian doll of a book with a narrative as rich as the fairy tales she recreates.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: Photo by Jim Herrington

Josh Richman, State and National Politics Reporter, Bay Area News Group, San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times Additional panelists TBA

Let’s have a mid-year political check-in. Week to Week takes a look at the issues and the people in local, state and national politics. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, audience discussion of the week’s events and our news quiz!

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Durst is a five-time Emmy nominee, seventime Stand Up of the Year nominee, author of a national syndicated humor column and frequent commentator on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and numerous other channels. His 2012 show “Elect to Laugh” ran for 41 weeks in San Francisco. With the midterm election season in full swing, join Durst for an evening of political satire as he pokes fun at the circus that is the American political process.

Location: Lafayette Library, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette Time: 5:45 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, Cost: $22 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

W E D 04 | San Francisco

JUST ADDED! | May 01

L AT E B R E A K I N G E V E N T S !

Fixing Global Poverty: What Works and What Doesn’t

The 17th Annual Travers Conference on Ethics and Accountability in Government

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

Thomas A. Nazario, Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco, School of Law; Author Living on a Dollar A Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor; Founder & President, The Forgotten International

People often spend too much time discounting one proposal aimed at tackling a problem in order to shore up or push another. As with many of the world’s great problems, however, there is no silver bullet that will resolve them all, but advocates insist that solutions do exist. Nazario’s expertise lies in the area of children’s rights and global poverty.

MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Linda Calhoun

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THU APRIL 17

Danah Boyd, Author

Theme: Accountability in higher education Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley in cooperation with The Commonwealth Club of California

With tuition rising fast and state budgets perpetually crunched, universities are facing intense public scrutiny about the value they deliver to their students and to the public. How should we conceptualize the mission and obligations of universities? Continental breakfast, lunch, and light refreshments will be provided.

Location: UC Berkeley Time: 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Cost: FREE See website for more details

A P R I L/MAY 2014

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program

WED APRIL 23

LGBT Planning Meeting Location: SF Club Office Time: 6 p.m. program

W E D M AY 7

Brian Lamb

Founder and Retired CEO, C-SPAN Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program

MON JUNE 5

The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money and Today’s Push for Performance Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing

Photo by Ed Ritger

library]. However classy a guy you think he is, you really have no idea; he’s as classy as you think. He is a real first-class charming man. Very decent.

I was mortified of his wife – MATALIN: Scared. He was very scared CARVILLE: – who would not mention my name.

MATALIN: Mrs. Bush called him for 10 years, “He who shall not be named.”

CARVILLE: And then I probably said an uncomplimentary thing or two about her child, too. Then we have this dinner after we make this presentation, and she makes me sit by her. I don’t get intimidated by much, but I was really scared to death. Then she stood up and said some nice things about me and I was like “Whew, man!” Cuz, I tell you, I could see she’s a tough cookie. [Laughter.]

CHRISTENSEN: I want to talk a little bit about September 11, 2001. It’s a very moving part of the book because you had very different experiences during that time. Mary spent days in the bunker, as it were, with the vice president, and you two weren’t even able to speak for several days. Could you both talk a little bit about your experience?

CARVILLE: We had a thing called the Sperling Breakfast, which is this legendary Washington institution where you go talk and maybe there’s 40 reporters. We walk out and Bob Shrum said, “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.” I remember looking up and it was a blue sky. In general, if it’s a blue sky in Washington, it’s a blue sky in New York and I remember thinking, “Well, planes don’t fly into buildings anymore, you

know.” Shortly thereafter, it became apparent what happened.

We were on 16th Street; we lived in Alexandria and my children were in school; one must have been in first or second grade and the other was in preschool I think. I knew that I had to get to the kids. I had no idea what was going on. To say that there was traffic would be an understatement. So I didn’t know anything about what Mary was doing.

I didn’t know anything, and the Pentagon was smoking. I got to the kids, then we got home, and I was panicked. I didn’t know; there were rumors about a plane that was on the mall, and there was a chemical attack and should you go get duct tape and tape up your windows. No one knew anything until about five o’clock in the afternoon. You might pick up the phone and say, “Hello,” and this voice comes on and says, “Mr. Carville?” I say, “Yes,” and he goes, “This is Major Dickerson.

I’m authorized to tell you that your wife is fine and I can say nothing else. Goodbye.”

That was it. I was like “Whew.” So about every four, five days, the good major would call to say, “I’m authorized to tell you that your wife is fine.” I had to tell a first-grader and a preschool kid what was happening.

“Your mother’s fine. We don’t know where she is. Nobody can tell us.”

MATALIN: Our neighbors subsequently told me that after he got the call from the major, he was seen running through the whole neighborhood with a beer in each hand, “Mary’s alive! Mary’s alive! Mary’s alive!” Thank you, honey, for that.

[At that time]I had a two-year-old, a five

year-old. You leave [for work in the morning] way before the sun comes up, and you get home way after the sun comes down. It might be a great job, but you’ll never look worse in your life. My entire makeup regime was Chap Stick, and to dry my hair, I would hang out the window in the car in the morning. But this particular day, on 9/11 – men, please ignore this, I think the women will like this – I had on a royal purple Louis Ferro pencil skirt and tailored jacket and black and red six-inch patent leather [shoes], because I was meeting with the energy people – the Democrats and teamsters who supported our energy policy – so I had makeup on; I had my hair done; I was all dressed up. I sit down in my office and go, “Whoa, this is a first” – and a plane hits. What the heck?

I went down to the vice president’s office.

We knew immediately that something was wrong. The second plane hit and we moved right into action, calling the mayor, trying to contact the president, who was on the road.

Before we could get very deep into it, two guys who were very handsomely dressed but built like movers came in and picked up Dick Cheney like he was a feather pillow and just said, “We’re evacuating. We’re going now, sir.

We’re evacuating. We’re going now, sir.” I’m not very proud of this but the first thought in my mind was, “What am I? Chopped liver?

Like what’s gonna…?”

They answered no questions. Somebody came down the hall and said, “Everybody who is in the West Wing report to the mess for further instructions.” We all got down there. Everybody was clueless. It’s not a very

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big place. We didn’t stay clueless for long, because we got our instructions, which were and I quote, “Run for your life. A plane is going to hit the White House.” Now again – I’m not proud of this but – I’m thinking, “Everybody knows I’m not going to run for my life in these six-inch [shoes] and everybody knows if you nick patent leather, you can never fix it.” I’m not trying to be funny, but it’s so surreal. I’m thinking to myself, “Run for your life. A plane’s going to hit the White House. What is this, like a movie script or something?”

So I judiciously walked for my life in my high heels, which is a good thing, because I didn’t get very far when two guys with big guns found me and said, “The vice president wants you in the bunker.” With the clearance level that I had, you can’t tell your family where you are, where you’re going, how long you’re going to be there, when you’re coming home. That’s what James is referencing. But I did know and I will say this about the depth of love for my husband at the cellular level: I knew the kids were blocks away from the Pentagon; I knew the Pentagon had been hit, we could not find Rumsfeld, who is a dear friend of ours, because he was pulling dead bodies out of where it’d been hit; and one of my friends who was replacing me on “Crossfire” was on the plane that hit the Pentagon. We got a call from Ted Olson, “My wife was on the plane.”

It was scary. I knew [James] was in Washington, on the wrong side of the river, I knew at a cellular, primal level that if he had to swim the Potomac, he would get those kids and he would get them to safety. I just knew it. I couldn’t have melted down. There was no luxury to melt down, but I would have, had I not had such faith in him to be able to take care of his family, which is how we were able to move to New Orleans. I trust in my heart that he’ll never let anything happen to any of us.

CHRISTENSEN: As a teacher of local government and politics, I was really happy to read in your book an advocacy of engaging in local politics, local government. And you’ve done a lot in New Orleans. Could you talk about that a little bit?

CARVILLE: Yeah, let me, first of all, try to explain New Orleans to you.

CHRISTENSEN: We only have half an hour.

CARVILLE: If you live here, you’re very

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proud, as you should be, of your quality of life. You’ve got universities, the greatest high-tech companies in the world; the climate here is unbelievable – you’re close to the ocean, the mountains, almost with a better quality of life than you have here in the Valley in Palo Alto. The thing to remember about New Orleans is no one ever speaks of a quality of life. It is only a way of life: you know what our food tastes like, you know what it is, you know what it looks like, you know what our music sounds like, you know what a carnival crew looks like, you know

“It

was clear after two

years there [in New Orleans] that

without

proper

leadership, we were going to be a sliver on a river. ” –Matalin what our architecture is like, you know what our funerals are. It’s an entire culture.

Some people say, “Man, down there, there’s humidity, there’s hurricanes, there’s poverty…” Whatever. That’s all secondary. But it’s like any other culture: it is very fragile.

It is very fragile with its outside influences.

It has environmental threats. It has political threats. It has any number of things.

My grandmother was from New Orleans, I grew up north of it. It was great.

I lived there a couple of times, but I had abused that culture in every way that you could. I would drink, I’d eat, I’d party; I would do all of the things, enjoyed it. After [Katrina in] 2005, I realized that we lost a thousand trumpets. The music may have stopped and you can’t go to a conservatory and learn this stuff. It’s just passed down. I just felt like I really wanted this culture to not just survive but to thrive. That’s really what the fight was about to me, and now my kids. One time, I was at the house and my daughters came in and said, “Daddy, will you give us a ride to Pinkberry?” I said, “Pinkberry? What the hell is that?” They said, “It’s a yogurt place.” I said, “Let me tell you something, we don’t eat yogurt in this house. We eat snowballs, goddamnit.

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We’re not having any yogurt around here cuz snowballs are part of our culture.” I became just sort of a, you know, cultural Ayatollah. I was like “You can’t do this….”

But that’s really the nature of what we are.

It became economical in not a very significant way—we’re only 370,000 or 375,000 people. But culturally, we are the most identifiable place in the country, probably as deep in nuance a culture as any city in the world, when you think about it.

MATALIN: Look, we did not go down there, we didn’t get involved in local politics because we’re junkies. I like to garden.

I like to cook. I like architecture. I like painting. I like music. I like everything that it offers. But it was clear after two years and having brought our children there that without proper leadership, we were going to be a sliver on a river. So, we talked to [the mayor] this morning.

His election was at the end of the month – the mayor who said he didn’t even want to run. We said, “You’ve got to run.” We were like, we don’t do this anymore. We became his voluntary [advisors], he calls us the apostles, and we won that race with 67 percent of the black vote, 67 percent of the white vote, uptown, downtown, 74 percent approval. I mean, you’ve never even seen this.

The point is that his whole solution is – and this is why the book is positive about politics – Americans want to save something. We pulled together and we saved it. And as he said it, after the Super Bowl, despite that little blackout – but who hasn’t blacked out in New Orleans?

You know, seven years ago, we were 15 feet underwater, and now we’re rivals, we’re Silicon South; we have the third film industry. Anyway, it takes leadership.

He’s a Democrat, okay? There’s a handful of Republicans but not as many as there are in this room here. The point was that everybody came together. The objective, or the guiding principle, was outcome-based.

He said, “If you come to this office and you want to talk about old fights or you want to create new fights, get the hell out of here.

You’ve got to try, want a new solution. Let’s try it.” From teaching entrepreneurship to innovation to medical to every sector of the economy to crime. That’s why you have to have an engaged and active and informed citizenry. That’s why we did it.

Photos by Rikki Ward

“I t’s

really easy to forget

that mor tgage rates have a c t u a l l y g o n e u p. We’r e already seeing a bit more normalization in that market.”

–Christina Romer Forecast, continued from page 12 easing or thinking maybe that tool isn’t being as effective as it might have been before.

What they ought to be doing is thinking about [whether] they have some other tools.

Rather than just saying we should wiggle this dial one way or another to have bigger picture thinking.

Maybe this broad policy of low interest rates is not the way we should go. We should think about who isn’t getting credit in the economy who’s creditworthy, who could be doing something useful with that money.

Are there small businesses that are somehow being frozen out? I vote for a little more creativity rather than just staying where we are.

Certainly I would not be in favor of,“let’s tighten things,” because we are certainly still a troubled economy.

HENNESSEY: By the way, bubbles are really easy to spot when they’re in the rearview mirror. Once they burst you can figure out that it was a bubble. It’s really hard to figure out whether you’re in one right now.

WEBER: I’m interested in your views on the housing market and real estate in general.

[Economist Robert] Shiller and others have said there’s a new housing bubble already in some areas. I’m interested in your views on the housing market and its trajectory, and whether the easy money has created new risks already in the housing market.

ROMER: I certainly don’t think [there’s] anywhere near a bubble yet in the housing market. A little reality check: We have seen house prices bottom out and start to go up. At most, we’ve recovered about a third of what we lost in terms of house prices, so it’s not like we’re in any sense back to what it was like. It’s very regional.

Bob Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize recently in economics, actually is one of the

people who does surveys about why people are investing in housing. One of the things I thought I’d learned from his surveys is that by-and-large you don’t see the kind of crazy behavior [from] people expecting really rapid appreciation of house prices. Even his own research so far, at least at a nationwide level, is not saying there’s anything close to a bubble happening.

On the easy money side, it’s really easy to forget that mortgage rates have actually gone up. Once the Fed started talking about tapering their purchases of assets, we saw back in June, mortgage rates went up about a percentage point and have stayed up. They’ve inched down a little bit recently.

We’re already seeing a little bit more of a normalization in that market.

HENNESSEY: I don’t know if we’re in a housing bubble. I think I do know that what happened leading up to 2008 included both a housing bubble and, probably more important, a credit bubble expressed as a housing finance bubble. I still have not seen the really good economic analysis that explained whether the housing finance bubble was driving the housing bubble or vice versa or whether it was mutually reinforcing.

We also know that the housing bubble was much more pronounced in what they call the four “sand states”: Arizona, Nevada, Florida and then parts of California. So I’m concerned not so much about a housing bubble, but I’m concerned that the explanation I rely on for the credit bubble, which has to do with global capital flows.

Mervyn King has expressed this best in talking about how the large developing economies like China and India suddenly turned into net savers rather than net borrowers, and you had huge flows of capital coming from large developing economies into the U.S. and Western Europe, making everything really cheap here. I look on what happened in the time leading up to 2008 as a credit bubble being expressed through flawed housing markets and flawed housing policies.

I am less worried about us repeating the housing bubble problem. I am more concerned that the underlying forces driving the last credit bubble still exist, and if we ever get back to the point where the whole world is growing fast, that we will again see that credit surge and we may have some other part of our system that’s not prepared for it.

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The actor and Bay Area native discusses his approach to writing, what he draws from his experience in Hollywood, and whether he writes a better screenplay of William Fau l k n e r ’s b o o k s t h a n Faulkner could. Excerpt from Inforum’s “James of All Trades: An Evening with James Franco,” October 27, 2013.

JAMES FRANCO Actor; Author, Actors Anonymous and Palo Alto In conversation with

JORDAN BASS

Executive Editor, McSweeney’s

JORDAN BASS: You have all of these books you’re working with. One of the things you talked about at the screening last week was this interest you have in trying to figure how to take literary technique, narrative technique, how to represent that...

JAMES FRANCO: I went back to school, I went to UCLA – [applause] – yeah, I heard there were a lot of UCLA grads in San Francisco. Anyway I went back to school and got my degree in English literature and then I went on to graduate school.That’s where I met my editor, Ed Park, at Columbia. But I already was an actor; I’d been an actor for over a decade at that point, probably 15 years. What I found is that once I started directing my own movies, it was my time to just make the movies that I wanted to make.

I had spent a lot of time as a young actor waiting around for people to make movies that I’d be excited about and then cast me in them. I remember people asking me, “If you could play any role, what would it be?” I said many times, “I’d love to play Hart Crane, the poet.” Well, nobody came around and said, “I’m doing a movie about Hart Crane,

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and I want you to be in it.” Then once I started making my own movies, it was like, “Why aren’t you making the movies that you want to make? This is the time.” So I just started going back to all the books that I loved and seeing if I could make those or get the rights to those.

I didn’t plan it this way, but I felt like that was one of my things when I was directing; that I could take classics or even newer books and bring the world of literature and the world of film together – try to be loyal to the spirit of the sources but also find contemporary film techniques that could help capture what was in the book.

So for example, with As I Lay Dying, it’s still kind of a very modernist text; it’s still pretty avant-garde and experimental. Each chapter is told from the first person [point of view] of a different character. There are interior monologues that are so complex.

There’s no way that these characters would ever express themselves that way, so it’s as if Faulkner is giving voice to their inner selves, or their souls, or their feelings or something.

I thought if I just adapted the story – their

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mother dies, they have to take her to the city and bury her – that would only be half the book; I needed to capture the style. So I used split screen to give a feeling of multiple perspectives. Split screen, being a technique that probably wouldn’t have been used if the movie was made back when [the book] was written 80 years ago.

And this idea of – to get those weird interior monologues, using this reality TV confessional thing, where they’re talking directly to the camera, in a way that’s how those interior monologues feel to me.

“What is this? We’re not getting a character really thinking to himself. This is like Faulkner, or someone, speaking.” So you have to make it as strange in the movie as it is in the book. We have the characters talk right to the camera even though it is a period piece, and in some ways it doesn’t feel right, and in other ways it does feel right, when you’re doing a book.

BASS: Did you go back and look at any of Faulkner’s actual screenplays when you were working on that? He was in LA for a while, right?

O

FRANCO: I don’t think he ever adapted As I Lay Dying.

BASS: Well, no. Anyway, he wrote all these other things.

FRANCO: Yeah, he did. He worked with Howard Hawks a lot, for 10 years I think. I guess the most famous story about him and Hollywood is he went on a hunting trip – if you can believe people were hunting around Los Angeles – with Howard Hawks and Clark Gable. Clark Gable said, “So what do you do, Mr. Faulkner?” And Faulkner, I guess, was offended, because The Sound and The Fury was out and everything. He said, “Well, I’m a writer. What do you do, Mr. Gable?” Anyway, he hated Hollywood and I think his scripts were not that great. The books are great, but his scripts – BASS: Yeah, Faulkner’s books are pretty good, I find. So when did this start? When did the work on Actors Anonymous start to pick up for you?

FRANCO: I think the earliest stuff started when I was at school in New York, at Columbia. I was at Brooklyn College, too, with Amy Hempel, a great short story writer,

and Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours. I had a book before this that’s called Palo Alto. I started working on that material before, at UCLA, and I was worried about being taken seriously as a writer, because people knew me as an actor and I was a writer. Even though I was going to school and taking it as seriously as I could, I knew people would be skeptical. So I thought, “All right, I won’t write about acting or Hollywood or any of that stuff. This will be something different so maybe people will read me as a writer.”

[Palo Alto] came out and I was happy with it. But I realized that I have an intimate and kind of insider knowledge of this world of Hollywood and acting and performance and it’s an interesting world. People who don’t have the almost two decades of experience that I do write about it, so why am I not writing about it? The saying is, “Write what you know.” [Charles] Bukowski worked at the post office and I think his first novel was Post Office because he worked there. So why am I not writing about this subject that I have a lot of knowledge about? So I started

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Ed Ritger

Photo by Ed Ritger

writing these pieces, and I found that maybe this is one of my other things: I really like to frame one medium or discipline or art form by another, and so I liked this idea that I would be creating something about performance, about acting, that would be in book form, that wouldn’t be a movie. It wouldn’t be a monologue, a one-man show or a play.

It would be a novel, but maybe almost a performance in book form.

BASS: You have a narrator at the very beginning of the book who says, “Anyone driven to play dress-up for a living is trying to hide something either from himself or from others.” But then there are other parts of the book that actually feel very confessional in a way and very drawn from your life. So it seems like you’re kind of going for exposure and concealment at the same time.

FRANCO: Right. One of the other big influences on the book was a writer named David Shields, who was a teacher of mine and he has a book called Reality Hunger.

In that book, he does two main things: he appropriates text from other people’s work and just puts it in with his own text, but he also makes a very strong argument for putting autobiography and nonfiction into creative structures.

I think he overstates his case because we are so used to novels being a certain way, so he has to come at it really strong and he calls it a manifesto. I think it upset some people and then some people it really turns on. It really turned me on – this idea of putting

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oneself into doing kind of an autobiographical thing, but in more kind of creative or experimental forms than just a tell-all memoir or confessional or something.

One of the essential things that any MFA program, any creative program, will try and get you to do – whether it’s filmmaking, writing, art – is find your voice; find what your subjects are, what you can do that is special and how you express it that is also coming from you. So I found that if I used this idea of putting myself into a book, you know, not hiding a side of myself like I did with the first book, what would that be? What would be special about inserting myself into it?

I realized I’m in a profession that uses masks, and so there would be, exactly like you said, this kind of unveiling in the sense that I’m not going to hide. I’m going to put my experiences, or some of my experiences, in here. But those experiences involve masks, so there’s an unveiling and a veiling at the same time.

And I thought, “OK, maybe that’s my thing.” You know.

BASS: I think one of the things that I was interested in in the book was the type of stories you’re choosing to tell because you are drawing a lot from your life, your background, your experiences. But there’s actually not a lot about actually making a movie or being part of a big Hollywood production or any of those awards shows – things like that.

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FRANCO: Yeah.

BASS: You’re writing about the fringes of the business a little more but…

FRANCO: I think that comes, again, from the idea of a recovery book approach. One of the other things I like about that is if you look at the granddaddy of all recovery books, Alcoholics Anonymous, there are two main sections in that book. There’s the opening section that lays out the program – practical information about how the program works.

Then in the back, there’s a bunch of stories, just testimonies about people [who] were addicted and then what happened and then how they recovered.

I thought, “Oh, I like that. I like that I could have just that structure.” You know what I mean? Nothing about the addiction stuff, but just that structure of being able to talk in a non-narrative kind of way, just directly to the reader, and then have stories also.

Also what those stories are doing is they’re sharing experience and it’s basically getting people to read those, so that I can identify. So if I only wrote stories about A-list actors, it would kind of lose that [aspect] in a little bit, but you could also say that the voice in the A-list chapters is more a voice of experience. People will think that that’s my voice; I like to think that there’s a veil, that it’s not me.

That it’s a little ironic, but maybe I’m just fooling myself.

Graham Nash, continued from page 9 We started to sing in the assembly before classes. We would sing the Lord’s Prayer and then we ended up singing in this beautiful harmony. But I knew from a very early age in my life what I wanted to do. I wanted always to make music, and I wanted to create music that made me feel like those early rock and roll records – like the Bill Haley record, like the Everly Brothers. I’m a great lover of harmony, and I’ve been doing this all my life.

I guess if I had been a plumber for 50 years, I’d be a great plumber too.

DALTON: You and Allan Clarke had a chance to meet the Everly Brothers. You staked outside of hotel. What was it like to meet them, your heroes?

NASH: It changed my life. The Everly Brothers on April 22, 1960 came to play in Manchester. And me and Clarke would sing their songs. In 1960, I was 18. We were two kids that just played around with acoustic guitars and loved the Everly Brothers’ stuff.

When they came to Manchester Rock, obviously, we were going to go and see the show.

But more than that, Allan and I decided that we would meet them, and that entailed a couple of things. Where they were playing in Manchester was only about 100 yards from the best hotel in Manchester, so we kind of figured that that’s where they were staying and that was kind of driven home to us by the fact that there was no tour bus. So it wasn’t like they were doing the show in Manchester then getting on the bus and driving to the next city. So we knew that they were in town.

So we waited, me and Allan, on the steps of the Midland Hotel until about 1:30 in the morning and they came around the corner. I think they were a little drunk. They’d been to

a nightclub after their show. Allan Clarke and I obviously missed the last bus home. We had a long way to walk home in the cold, north of England weather at 2:00 in the morning.

But it changed my life.

In many ways, I think that we’re all trying to touch the flame. Anybody that we admire, any music that we like, any sculpture that we like, any painter, any musician, all that stuff, we want to touch; we want to get as close to the flame as possible. The feeling that I’m trying to explain, when we met the Everly Brothers, was there was only me and Allan Clarke, and Don and Phil Everly on the steps of the Midland Hotel at 2:00 in the morning, right? And instead of like just patting us on the head and signing an auto-

“I

think we’re all trying to

touch the flame. Anybody that we admire, any music we like, ... we want to get as close to the flame as possible.”

graph, they stood and talked to me and Allan Clarke for what seemed to be about a couple of weeks. It may have only been 10 minutes, but they taught me something very interesting in there. I think when you meet your heroes, if you can look them in the eye and know that you have even a microsecond of contact, that’s enough. We do want to touch the flame, but we don’t want to get burned.

So the Everly Brothers were incredibly important in my life. If we want to continue with these crazy Everly Brothers stories, we told them that night that we wanted to be in the business, that we did acoustic songs like they did, and one day we would like to make records and stuff – la-la-la-la, same old stuff. But six years later, the Hollies would play a show at the London Palladium and it was a big deal. It was kind of like The Ed Sullivan Show here in America. After sound check, the phone rang backstage and our road manager, Rod Shields, picked up the phone and looked at me and he said, “Yes, he’s right here,” and hands me the phone. I, of course, want to know who it is before I say hello. He said, “It’s Phil Everly.” I said, “That’s not nice. Come on. Why do that to me?” He said, “It’s Phil Everly.”

So he hands me the phone and I say, “Hello.” It’s Phil Everly on the phone, and he’s in town with his brother Don, and they want to make a record in England, and did the Hollies have any songs that they haven’t recorded? We had a lot of songs we hadn’t recorded. So we went over to their hotel and they chose six to seven of them. We started recording with them the very next day. We had a couple of session men in there, John Paul Jones on bass of course and Elton John – who was [at the time known as] Reggie Dwight – on piano and Jimmy Page on guitar. There were a lot of interesting musicians....

Now you got to understand, I really wanted to pay them back for what they have given me, what their music had done for me in my life. I have a cassette of me singing “So Sad” three-part with the Everly Brothers. Just two weeks ago, when I spoke to Phil, he gave me permission to use it on the electronic ver-

Fun Facts about Graham Nash – as learned from Wild Tales • Graham Nash’s ownership of his first record, Be-Bop-A-Lula, occurred when he swapped his lunch for it with a school friend.

• His first meeting with Mama Cass of The Mamas & The Papas ended with her crying when he told her truthfully that her idol, John Lennon, would most likely be a very harsh critic of her music at first.

• Mama Cass introduced him to David Crosby.

• His first impression of Crosby:

“He looked harmless and agreeable – probably the last time I could ever say that!”

• The name, Crosby, Stills & Nash wasn’t created without a hitch: “Trouble is, that didn’t go down well with Stephen.

Stephen wanted his name first.

[He] insisted we call ourselves Stills-Crosby-Nash, with hyphens, but the way I heard it, it just didn’t sound right. At the time, we decided that this was a democratic group, and if two

of us decided on one name, the other guy would just have to deal with it.”

• Adding Neil Young to the group turned out to be “like lobbing a live grenade into a vacuum.”

• While Nash was busy putting in a new floor for her kitchen, Joni Mitchell broke up with him through a long-distance telegram from Crete.

• After Mitchell, he started seeing the singer Rita Coolidge, AP R I L/MAY 2014

who happened to be dating Stephen Stills at the time.

“If someone steals your girl, you’re bound to hold a monster grudge,” Nash admits.

• Since Nash’s son knew the group from school and they had opened for Crosby, Stills & Nash a couple of times, Maroon 5 got their start on the charts because he “thought they were talented [and] lent them money to make more demos.”

—By Zoë Byrne THE COMMO N WE AL TH

45

sion of the autobiography. So you’ll be able to get to hear me singing three-part with the Everly Brothers, which was a dream to me – that’s for sure.

DALTON: When you left the Hollies, you came to America. You open your book,Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, talking about a cab ride up to a bungalow in Laurel Hills, where you’re about to see your girlfriend, and you have a musical experience.

NASH: I had met Joni Mitchell several months before in Ottawa when the Hollies were playing in Ottawa. Needless to say, I fell completely in love with this woman; not only was she incredibly beautiful, and still is of course, but she’s a genius. Joni Mitchell is one of our greatest musicians. No doubt about it. [Applause.]

So we had a good time in Ottawa, and she invited me to come and see her when I had some time off. So I flew from London to Los Angeles to be with Joni for a while.

There were a couple of people at dinner at her house, and it was Stephen [Stills] and David [Crosby]. Then, after smoking a big one and having a nice dinner, David said to Stephen, “Hey, play Willy that song that we’ve been working on.” You see – DALTON: Willy is your nickname that they call you.

NASH: Yes, I hope so. Yes. The Byrds had broken up and David had been thrown out of the Byrds. And the Buffalo Springfield had broken up, so David and Stephen were trying to figure out something to do because

they had this incredible musical energy. So David says, “Play Willy that song we were just working on.” They sang the song of Stephen’s called “You Don’t Have to Cry,” which is on the first CSN record. It was a beautiful song and I told Stephen that it was a wonderful song and would they sing it again. They sang

“ I ’m

good at singing

h a r m o n y. A s a h a r m o n y singer, you have to become who you’re singing harmony with, if you want it right. ” it again, and they came to the end of it and I said, “Okay. Do me a favor. Bear with me here. Just bear with me. Just do it one more time.”

Now remember before we were talking about if I would have been a plumber how good I would be? I’m good at singing harmony, because I’ve been doing that a long time in my life. I had, in the first two performances of that song, studied not only the lyrics and not only the melody, but their body language, how they were standing, how they were breathing. As a harmony singer, you have to become who you’re singing harmony with, if you want it right. That’s the

The San Francisco Community Music Center Children’s Chorus performs “Teach Your Children Well” for Graham Nash

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A P R I L/MAY 2014

way I think about it.

So whatever sound Crosby, Stills and Nash has vocally was born in less than a minute. We didn’t have to work for months, we didn’t have to rehearse for a year, it happened immediately. So much so that about a minute into the song we had to stop and start laughing. I mean it was silly. I mean the Byrds and the Springfield and the Hollies were good harmony bands, but this was completely different. We had never heard anything like the sound of our three voices together. Nobody has any claim on any of the notes, of course, but you can’t sing like me and David and Stephen when we are on our game. It was incredibly great.

DALTON: I’d like you to tell us the story of what prompted you to write “Our House.”

NASH: [In] 1969, I was having breakfast with Joni at a delicatessen in the Valley in Los Angeles, Art’s Deli. We finished breakfast. We were walking back to her car and we passed an antique store, and we were looking in the window obviously and we were most curious. Joni saw this vase that she wanted and she bought it. We went back to her house in Laurel Canyon where we lived. We went through the front door. It was kind of a miserable morning as some Los Angeles mornings can be – a little drizzly, a little rainy, a little chilly. I opened the front door and I said, “I’ll tell you what, why don’t I light a fire and why don’t you put some flowers in that vase that you just bought today?” [Laughter.] I’m a musician, what do you think I’m going to

do with that? So Joni went to the garden to pick some flowers and I sat at the piano. I’m a musician and I don’t like nothing happening. So because she was not at the piano, I sat down at the piano and “Our House” was written probably in about an hour. Just an ordinary moment, but I think we’ve all been there. I’ll do something while you get the dinner going. We’ve all been at these ordinary moments, and I personally love ordinary moments. I actually cherish them more than some other more insane moments of my life.

Ordinary moments, that’s where the secret is.

DALTON: Talk to us about the entry of Neil Young into the band.

NASH: On that first Crosby, Stills and Nash record, Stephen played most of the instruments. Obviously, David and I played rhythm guitar on “Long Time Gone,” “Lady of the Island” and those other songs, but Stephen played most of the instruments. He played lead guitar obviously. He played bass.

He played piano.

When we finished the record and we realized that we’re going to have to go out on the road and play live, how exactly do we do that, right, when Stephen played most of these, right? So I think, at some point, Stephen and Dallas Taylor, who was our drummer, went to England and asked people like Stevie Winwood and Jimi Hendrix, to join our band. But we needed somebody else. Ahmet Ertegun, who was the CEO and owner of Atlantic Records and a true, true music man, had dinner one night with

Stephen and David suggested that they get Neil. Stephen was kind of upset of that, because he had just been through 20 months of insanity with Neil, of Neil not turning up, of not doing TV shows, being difficult. And me, I had never met Neil Young, right? I knew who he was. I knew he was a great writer.

“ T hat ’s

not fair to keep

somebody in such incredible conditions. We need people like Manning to tell us what’s g o i n g o n i n o u r n a m e. ” I’d heard “Expecting To Fly” and I thought it was a brilliant piece of record making and songwriting, but I’d never met Neil.

So I said, “Look, with all due respect, before we make this momentous decision to bring somebody else into what we consider to be a beautiful object of three-part harmony in this first record, I’ve got to meet this kid, right?” I went to breakfast in New York City with Neil. And after that breakfast, he was in the band. He was self-assured. He was very funny. He knew exactly what he wanted.

DALTON: Another British rocker, John Lennon, had troubles with his immigration status. Did being British ever cause you to

think about being careful, being politically active in America when John Lennon had famously had troubles?

NASH: No, I don’t care. A lot of people say, “Talk to the FBI and get the freedom of information [files]. Find out if they got files on you.” Why the [heck] do I want to know whether they got files on me? What the hell can I do about it? We all know what’s been going on in the last 10 years with the NSA. We know it’s going to get worse in the future.

So the way I feel about it, I’m not doing anybody any harm. Anyone can know anything they want about me.

DALTON: Why did you write that song about Bradley Manning [now known as Chelsea Manning]?

NASH: Because it was unfair. Constitutionally here in America, we’re entitled to a speedy trial. A speedy trial in normal legal lingo is about 100 to 120 days, while all the lawyers get their stuff together for the trial, right?

That’s what you’re entitled to. Manning, a U.S. soldier, a whistleblower, gave all the military and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, right? Kept in a 12-foot by 8-foot white cell with bright lights 24 hours a day, often has to stand naked, being woken up every five minutes at night to see if he’s okay for a thousand days before the trial.

It wasn’t fair to me. I don’t particularly care whether he’s innocent or guilty; [you shouldn’t put] somebody in such incredible conditions that the United Nations likened it to torture. This is America. We need people Photo by Ed Ritger

AP R I L/MAY 2014

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47

like Manning to tell us what’s going on in our name.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering if you had any great stories or memories about Live Aid? NASH: Any time that we can get hundreds of millions of people to all be on the same page at the same time, it’s a good thing. When Live Aid went down, there were obviously concerts in London and in Philadelphia.

There was a great camaraderie about it all. We knew that what Bob Geldof wanted to do, in terms of feeding the children in Ethiopia, was a good thing.

Now I know it’s possible to critique it, because you can say all that money you gave, it never really got to the people because the warlords took it. I know all that stuff could have gone on. But the point is that his point was these kids are starving – we have to take care of them. So there was a great feeling of camaraderie. We did the show in Philadelphia. There was a great feeling of camaraderie, especially with the four of us because we hadn’t really sung and played together for maybe years before that. But yes, Live Aid was a really good event to be a part of, because we thought we were making a difference in the world – and possibly we did.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Songs for Beginners is one of my favorite albums. I wanted to know your inspiration behind the song.

NASH: I’m a loud mouth. [Laughter.] I need to speak my mind. It’s one of the reasons why I am so proud to be an American citizen for over 35 years. I want to be a part of this country. I have a different view of this country than you do. I’m not from here. I see it differently than you do. This is an incredibly great country. This was based on principles that should go on for the next 100,000 years.

It’s being f---ed up right now, and we all know why it’s being f---ed up. But don’t you ever, ever forget how great these people are and how great this country really is.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Speaking of your background in the protest movement in the 60s and with all the trouble we have today with the environment and the government shutting down and the things you just mentioned, I wonder what your perspective is on where is the anger, where are the people or the public of America? Why aren’t we rising up as some of the folks did in the ’60s and ’70s?

NASH: Remember Kim Kardashian and

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Graham nash with Wavy Gravy

Justin Bieber? That’s where the majority of people are.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: They don’t care?

NASH: It’s not that they don’t care; they’ve been trained not to care. They have been trained to lie there. They have been trained by the media. You can count the people that own the world’s media on two hands. Do you think that they really want protest songs on their airwaves? Do you really think they want people speaking out about real things on the TV? Not at all. They don’t want any of that.

But let me tell you something. When CSNY did the last Living with War Tour with Neil, we knew what we had to say,

A P R I L/MAY 2014

Photo by Ed Ritger

particularly about George Bush, right? I had never been on a tour in my life where there were bomb-sniffing dogs. I was never on a tour where there were FBI agents all the time. I had never been on a CSNY tour where people walked out. About 10 percent of the people, every single night, walked out, especially in the South when we got to a song called “Let’s Impeach the President.” [Laughter.] They stood for three hours before that song came on the show, right? But they have a right to leave. They paid for that ticket. But if you go and buy a ticket to a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert, what do you expect?

Linda Ronstadt simple dreamer

Original photos by Carl Lender/wikicommons (Linda Ronstadt); Green Gabbro (background)

The stories behind the legendary singer. Excerpted f ro m “ L i n d a R o n s t a d t ,” January 24, 2014.

LINDA RONSTADT Grammy Award-winning Musician; Author, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir In conversation with

BARBARA MARSHMAN,

Editorial Pages Editor, San Jose Mercury News Photo by Dave Fischer/wikicommons

BARBARA MARSHMAN: You had some difficult times; your mother was ill for a long time. [But in many ways your childhood] just sounds idyllic, growing up in a musical family.

LINDA RONSTADT: I always say, “Tucson: Where spring is not a promise, it’s a threat.” Everything stings you and there’s thorns and everything bites you. But if you’re desert-born, there’s something that happens to your soul. You get very into that terrible discomfort [laughter] and I still go back.

MARSHMAN: Since you mention the desert, one of my favorite characters in the book, and one of the best drawn, is Murphy the pony. The astonishing thing was that you would go out with a girlfriend in the desert

all day, and sometimes Murphy would throw you, and so on. You were five years old.

RONSTADT: Oh, Murphy was so cute! It would sound like child abuse, but in those days that was the way it was; you got up in the morning, you got your clothes on, you went out, you found the gang – if there was a gang, because we lived pretty far from other people.

I was really just so grateful to have a friend at the age of five. She was seven and she could do everything that I could do, but way better.

So I thought that I couldn’t do anything at all well. I just followed her around. She had a really nice pony. Her pony didn’t buck, but mine did. I spent a lot of time on the ground.

[Laughter.] Our parents cared about us. They fed us and everything like that, but they just

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49

didn’t hover over us. I’m a very opposite kind of parent. I’m one of those [that say] “Oh be careful, you’re going to get hurt!”

MARSHMAN: So you didn’t let your kids ride their ponies across the desert by themselves at five?

RONSTADT: We had a pony for about five minutes. I moved back to Tucson, and nobody had a pony anymore because everything had been developed. All the places where ponies were going to live had grown houses.

But we had a weird little pony that I brought to my house and kept in the back yard. But there were military planes flying over and it scared him. He wasn’t very friendly; he would rear up and try to hit us with its front hooves, so I sent him back to “Ponyville.”

MARSHMAN: I wondered if the freedom of being able to do something like that as a child was part of nurturing your creativity almost as much as your musical family [was].

RONSTADT: Maybe it’s part of [why I] couldn’t stay anyplace for five minutes. I couldn’t stay with any kind of music. I would just move to the next place. I was very restless.

I put together a compilation of duets recently that they’re going to release in some form or other. I put that together, and it was from this time to that time, and there was nothing that was like the one before. They were so wildly different. I thought, “This is the craziest career anybody could possibly have.

Who is this person?” It was me. [Laughter.] It was rampant eclecticism. It was like a different voice. It was like watching a chameleon change colors. No wonder my audience got confused; I confused myself. I was only doing one thing at a time, so it seemed like I was doing it for a really long time, but then I would listen back to earlier things and say, “Oh, I really had to move on from that. I didn’t want to stay there.”

MARSHMAN: You sang a great deal as a child with your family. Your father had a tremendous voice, didn’t he?

RONSTADT: He had a beautiful voice, probably the best voice in the family. And everybody loved it when he sang. He wouldn’t stand up and say, “Listen to me sing!” It would just happen. We’d be driving in the car, and he’d start singing something and I’d sing in harmony and somebody else would start singing a third part. We’d be at the dinner table, and my father would just start singing. We weren’t allowed to read at the dinner table, but we were allowed to sing.

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Couldn’t bring a magazine, but you could sing all you wanted. My father would call me up on the phone, and he’d start singing something and I’d sing with him. Somebody might just hear me singing this harmony to nothing. The other person that I do that with a lot is Emmylou Harris. She and I sing stuff together – McGarrigle Sisters songs, which we love wildly. She’ll say, “I heard the new McGarrigle record is out and it goes like this.”

And I’d start singing the harmony because I already had the record. It’s so nice to have a friend like that who understands that you need to sing over the phone together. That’s a good friend.

MARSHMAN: After one semester of college you packed up and –

“J a c k s o n

Browne was a

16-year-old kid I met when I was 17. I thought he wrote really good songs, better than the people in Tucson. ”

RONSTADT: That’s all they could stand of me. I would get up in the morning after working at some club the night before. I’d stay out till all godly hours, then I’d go to sleep for about five minutes. I had this 7:40 anthropology class that was taught by this teaching assistant. There were 1,500 people in there; it was in the dark and he would be droning on and on. It was just awful. It was like abuse. I’d have to get up at 5:50 in the morning, and I was always too tired. I’d get up at the last minute and put my coat on over my flannel nightgown, because it’s cold in the desert, and I’d get there and I’d fall asleep in the 7:40 class because the guy was up there droning on and on. Then I would go out and I would forget where I’d parked the car because I was so sleepy. By that time, the sun was up in the desert, so it would go from 38 degrees to 78 degrees. So I’d be in my hot, sweaty nightgown afraid to take my coat off because there I’d be in my nightgown, and I couldn’t find the car anywhere. So I just figured I wasn’t cut out for college. [Laughter.]

I like reading, so I just read a lot of books,

A P R I L/MAY 2014

but I didn’t go to the class.

MARSHMAN: So [one day] you announced to your parents that you were moving to LA and left.

RONSTADT: They were sad. My mother cried and my father said, “You’re making a big mistake.” And I said, “Well, I just have to go. There aren’t enough good clubs in Tucson to play in.” Tucson had a great music history in the early days before there was a radio. There was a good musical community there. My grandfather was the conductor of the oompah band that played all the military affairs and played serenades. Whatever you wanted music for, you had to call my grandfather. He was a rancher, but he conducted the band – taught everyone how to play their instruments. And my aunt Luisa was a big star in the ’20s. She was a very well known singer. She went to Spain and collected a lot of traditional Spanish folk songs and dances, and she also went to northern Mexico and collected a lot of stuff from the Altar Valley.

She became a scholar of that musical history.

She sent this letter home to my grandfather saying – this was in the ’20s – she had met this guitar player and he was such a good guitar player that he could hold the audience when she went off to change her costume.

She really wanted to bring him to the United States because she was sure he’d be a hit. And it was Andres Segovia. He was her Eagles.

[Laughter.] It’s a Ronstadt tradition. You hire someone to be your backup person who’s going to become a way bigger star than you’ll ever dream of being.

MARSHMAN: That early time in Los Angeles and all of the folks who came together there, that must have been an astonishing community.

RONSTADT: We didn’t know that. We were just looking around, just trying to get that song, trying to write that song, or learn that song, or get somebody else who wrote that song to let you record it before they did.

That’s what I mainly was doing. We were just together all the time, hanging out, playing; we didn’t think of it in terms of, “Oh there’s Jackson Browne, he’s a star!” Jackson Browne was a 16-year-old kid I met when I was 17.

I thought he wrote really good songs, for instance, better than the people that I heard writing songs in Tucson. [I just thought,] “Oh, they write some pretty good songs over here in California.” The next person I met was Ry Cooder, and I said, “They’ve

got some pretty good guitar players here.”

Ry was 18 and he was playing like a demon, like fire would come out of his fingers. He and Taj Mahal had a band called The Rising Sons. I went and heard them and thought, “Oh, they’ve got some good players here.” So I stayed. I could learn.

MARSHMAN: What is there to learning the music of a song?

RONSTADT: What usually attracts me about a song will be something in the chords.

The way the chords are voiced can just reach in and grab your heart and rip on one of the ventricles, so that it causes really severe pain and you have to go to the emergency room.

It’s like that: “Ow, that really hurt. Play it again.” [Laughter.] And it really disturbs me.

It gives me a stomach ache. Jimmy Webb’s songs infallibly give me a stomach ache. They upset my stomach. I have to listen to them some more, so that I get really sick and throw up because I like them so much. It seems perverse, but it just is. There’s something in the chord, and then there’s something in the words, a phrase, and I think, “I’ve felt like that. That’s exactly the way I felt, but I

couldn’t quite say it,” or, “I didn’t realize I felt like that. I didn’t realize I was quite so sad about that situation.” So you sing it for a while and you learn it. And three or four years later you’re singing it on stage and that situation is gone. Then you [think instead], “It was too bad that I went to the market today looking for bread and butter pickles and they didn’t have any, and I really feel bad because I wanted to make a pickle and cheese sandwich and there were no bread and butter pickles.” That’s what it becomes about while you’re on stage. It just changes. [You might think I’m] standing on stage remembering that guy that broke my heart in 1968, but I forgot about him forever ago. I can’t even remember his name or care.

MARSHMAN: How many songs did you actually write?

RONSTADT: Not very many. I only recorded two. I wrote a song called “Try Me Again,” which I gave Andrew Gold half credit for, but he didn’t write it. And I wrote half of “Winter Light” with Eric Kaz. MARSHMAN: At the time, you were a little unusual in that most of the people who were

prominent were writing and singing their own material.

RONSTADT: I just used the ones they didn’t use up. There were plenty left over and I was happy to have them.

MARSHMAN: Of course you also had a voice. [For example] Bob Dylan did not have a voice.

RONSTADT: Oh, no. Bob Dylan, please.

Forget it! He’s a great singer. He has plenty of voice. He has a very wonderful, resonant voice with lots of rich story and lots of tones.

He’s a really fine musician. He’s an excellent singer. He’s very in tune. He’s just a completely original-sounding singer. That’s hard to do. [Applause.] I’ve had this argument with myself about Bob Dylan. He didn’t sing “as good” as Otis Redding. Well, guess what, he was Bob Dylan. Why should he sing like Otis Redding?

The ‘70s was a phenomenon of the singer-songwriter. But what would happen was you’d get somebody who would spend his whole life having experiences and writing 12 songs that he could then record. Then that was it. Then he’d have to wait another

Linda Ronstadt performing at University of Texas, Arlington in 1977

Photo by Craig Howell/flickr

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lifetime to get another collection of songs.

But Ella Fitzgerald never worried if she wrote a song. Billie Holiday could have cared less.

She wrote a good song. She wrote “Strange Fruit.” I had to think about just exactly how to ask J.D. [Souther] or Jackson or one of those guys, “Can I please record that song?”

I found a tape of me and Jackson Browne having this conversation where I was trying to get one of his songs, and he gave me one of Warren Zevon’s songs instead. It was “Poor Pitiful Me,” so that worked out pretty well.

That same night, I was trying to talk J.D. into giving me this song called “Last In Love” and he said, “Why don’t you sing this song, ‘Blue Bayou’?” I’ve got all this on tape. I’ll have to put it on somebody’s website.

MARSHMAN: The industry is so different today from when you started. You had to deal with record companies and things like that.

But you also got a lot of things done for you.

RONSTADT: It’s unrecognizable. They were gatekeepers. It’s just like the news. What do we do if we don’t have The New York Times to be fact checkers? We used to have the local papers that had their own fact checkers. All the news shouldn’t come out of New York.

American pop music is a little saggy these days, because there aren’t these gatekeepers.

It’s kind of great that anybody can make a record. [If ] you’ve got a laptop and you know how to work Pro Tools, you can kind of figure it out. But everybody can make a record. There’s such a huge amount of stuff out there. I think you do the same thing you always do. You find a way to get in front of an audience and you start singing about stuff and it either resonates with people or it doesn’t. But it’s harder. Art is not about competition. It’s about cooperation. Art is a conspiracy. The word conspirus is a Latin word meaning “to breathe together.” So when you’re singing together in a choir, or singing a duet, you’re forming a conspiracy to commit beauty, to commit understanding and commit revelation, commit magic. That’s what you do with music.

MARSHMAN: What has been your most challenging project and why?

RONSTADT: There were the ones I failed at utterly. You didn’t get to hear a lot of those.

I didn’t do so well singing real true opera. I didn’t have the training for it. I went and sang “La Bohème.” I sang Mimi in “La Bohème,” and it was great for me because I got to learn it in a way that you don’t learn it unless you

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“ W hen

yo u a re s i n g i n g

together, you’re forming a conspiracy to commit beauty, to commit understanding and revelation, commit magic. ” sing it. It’s a very intimate relationship that you have with music that you’ve learned. But I just didn’t do it well enough. So I sang it for a while, and then I came home. Now I hear somebody else sing it and I know this girl Mimi really well and the other people who come on the stage are like old friends. It was a great experience for me, but I don’t know that it was so good for the audience. [Laughter.]

MARSHMAN: So tell us about [a project] that was an extremely challenging success.

RONSTADT: The standards were really hard. The thing about the standards is they’ve got to sound easy. And they’re so hard. There’s no room for forgiveness. You can’t be an inch out of tune. Your voice is completely exposed. You’ve got to be able to hold that note. There’s no vibrato. You’ve just got to have precision singing. I used to think of myself on an elevator going right up to that note. I’d get out at that floor. It was really hard, but it was worth it when I got to when I was singing and I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just swimming. I used to say it felt like I was swimming in cream. The first time I ever started singing with Nelson Riddle and the Orchestra, I just thought, “This is heaven.

This is as good as it gets.”

And the Mexican stuff was very difficult to learn, to be at a professional level. I’d sung it with my family and I’d remember the first [line]; I couldn’t remember the rest of the verse, but somebody else would. A cousin would put it in. But you can’t do that when you’re up on the stage professionally. You have to know all the words. For the first show I did, it was so hard to learn all that stuff in Spanish that I was really nervous.

When you’re nervous, your mind just goes blank. We didn’t have those monitors yet with the lyrics. There were a couple songs I didn’t know and I had a really nice costume with a fan. I put the words on the fan, but I can’t see without my glasses. [Laughter.] It was hopeless.

A P R I L/MAY 2014

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D R . G LO R I A C . D U F F Y P R E S I D E N T & C E O

A Promise Kept

I

t was painful to observe the “guarantees.” But the resulting Budapest Agreement of 1994 was political turmoil in Ukraine no less definitive. It committed the signatories to respect Ukraine’s over the past few months, and borders and to abstain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine. then the Russian show of military On this basis, Ukraine then agreed to dispose of its nuclear weapons. force in Crimea. Ukrainian indeThe Russian introduction of troops into Crimea in early March pendence, achieved without blood- was in direct violation of this Budapest Agreement, causing President shed and with rejoicing in Ukraine Obama and the British government to take a hard line with Ruswhen the Soviet Union collapsed sia over their intervention. On this basis, we threatened sanctions in 1991, seemed to flicker like a against Russia. flame that could easily be snuffed Ukrainian leaders were very nervous in 1994 about giving up out. And while it has diminished, the nuclear weapons that they saw as the ultimate insurance for the danger of Russian intervention their independence and security. They would only do so with the in Ukraine is not yet over. security assurances from the United States, Russia and the UK. That Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy The Russian concern about the United States and the UK stood by the Budapest Agreement instability and changing government leadership in Ukraine is in the recent episode was a very important demonstration that we understandable. Oil and gas represent 65 percent of Russia’s ex- meant it in 1994 when we said we would protect the security of ports, and one of the paths to exporting its oil and gas is through Ukraine. Keeping a promise like this is not only the right thing to Ukraine. The Russians don’t want to see a do, but it is crucial to our credibility with government in Ukraine that might frustrate other countries with which we may negotior increase the price of transporting their ate about their weapons and their security. krainian leaders were very energy by this route.

Ukraine’s independence two decades ago There is also a sizeable ethnic Russian nervous in 1994 about giving up was promising, but the results have been of population in Ukraine, in regions with minimal benefit to the 45 million Ukrainians, non-Russian groups, creating fear of repri- the nuclear weapons they saw as due to political infighting, corruption, poor sals against the Russians. And Russia’s only economic policies and perhaps outside medwarm water ports are in the Black Sea, one the ultimate insurance for their dling. The recent conflict with Russia ramped of which is on the Crimean Peninsula on up when the predecessor Yanukovych governUkrainian territory. In the winter, the Black independence and security.” ment in Ukraine expressed its interest in an Sea is one of the few ways for Russian ships “association” agreement with the European to reach the outside world.

Union, turning to the West instead of joinAnd yet, as Secretary of State John Kerry said, invading or trying to ing a Russian-led customs union as Russia requested. Russia applied dominate one’s neighbors is not a 21st-century way of handling these pressure by keeping the price of natural gas to Ukraine high last fall, fears and concerns. Ukraine is an independent country. Russia should then lowering it at the end of 2013 when Ukraine moved away from respect their independence and negotiate the best possible deals with its approach to the EU and toward the Russian customs union. this sovereign state to protect Russia’s economic and security interests.

The new prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is a The Russian intervention in Crimea is a clear violation of an 39-year-old, pro-EU economist and attorney who is forward-looking, existing international agreement and thus of international law. We technology-oriented and interested in the modernization of Ukraine. negotiated with the Ukrainians in 1993 and 1994, asking them to Becoming associated with the EU would benefit economic developagree to the removal of the 1,900 nuclear weapons on their terri- ment in Ukraine, and it appears that that is where Yatsenyuk would tory and for them to become a non-nuclear state under the Non- take Ukraine, if his government is allowed to proceed unmolested.

Proliferation Treaty. Before they would agree to this, the Ukrainian Let’s hope that sanctions will be effective and monitors in Crimea government insisted on security guarantees, much like the United and eastern Ukraine and other measures will reassure Russia that States provides to its NATO partners. Under this kind of treaty, its people and trade routes will be secure and that they will allow an attack on one of our NATO partners is considered an attack on Ukraine to take the path to modernization and greater prosperity the United States, and we are bound to defend them. as a participant in the European community. Maybe Russia itself The United States, Russia and the UK agreed to give Ukraine a will go in that direction, one of these days, which would also be slightly lower level of commitment, security “assurances” rather than beneficial for Russia.

“U

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A P R I L/MAY 2014

The Balkans Unveiled

Albania

• Macedonia •

Kosovo

•

Serbia

•

Bosnia & Herzegovina

October 8 – 21, 2014

•

Croatia

An in-depth look at this richly complex region presented by two leading foreign affairs educational organizations.

• Attend discussions with Study Leader Admiral

• Visit UNESCO-listed Ohrid, Macedonia one of the

• Enjoy meetings with embassies and specially

• Stroll through Skadarlija, the bohemian quarter of

Gary Roughead, the 29th Chief of Naval Operations, about the conditions that led to the Balkan conflict and progress made since that time.

invited distinguished local guests.

• Visit the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum with a survivor

who used the tunnel to get in and out of Sarajevo during the siege.

• Explore Tirana, capital of Albania, the country

listed as #1 in Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011.

Commonwealth Club Travel CST: 2096889-40

oldest human settlements in the world and take a walking tour of Pristina, the capital of one of the youngest countries in the world, Kosovo.

Belgrade, sometimes compared with Paris’ Montmartre district.

• Visit beautifully reconstructed Mostar and walk

the medieval walls of UNESCO-listed Dubrovnik.

Cost: $7,995 per person, double occupancy $1,295 single room supplement

Detailed brochure available at: commonwealthclub.org/travel Contact: (415) 597-6720 • travel@commonwealthclub.org Photos: provided by MIR Corporation

The Commonwealth Club of California 595 Market Street, 2nd Floor San Francisco, CA 94105

Purchase event tickets at commonwealthclub.org or call (415) 597-6705

PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

or (800) 847-7730 To subscribe to our free weekly events email newsletter, go to commonwealthclub.org and click on “MY CLUB ACCOUNT” in the menu at the bottom of the page.

PROGRAMS YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS Wednesday, April 30

Thursday, May 8

Archduke Karl von Habsburg Imperial Prince and Archduke of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia Archduke Karl von Habsburg, LLM, is truly a modern “Monuments Man.” As president of the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and a former member of the European Parliament for Austria, he has specialized in international humanitarian law and intangible cultural heritage protection.

He has worked to save cultural artifacts and historical sites in such modern crisis-ravaged areas as Mali, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. for event details, see page 32

Willie Brown Former Mayor, San Francisco; Former Speaker, California State Assembly Former San Francisco Mayor Brown will give his annual lecture on national and regional political trends. Regarded as one of the most influential AfricanAmerican politicians of the late 20th century, Brown has been at the center of California politics, government and civic life for an astonishing four decades. Most recently, a myriad of celebrities gathered to celebrate the naming of the western portion of the Bay Bridge in his honor.

for event details, see page 34

Tuesday, May 20

Tuesday, May 20

Think Like A Freakonomist Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner Authors, Think Like a Freak, Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics Now, it’s time for you to think like a “freak.”

Levitt and Dubner help us get whacky to analyze the decisions we make, the plans we create and even the morals we chose.

These statistic gurus will teach you how to make smarter, harder, and better decisions.

With practical insights from The Upside of Quitting to How to Succeed – With No Talent, Levitt and Dubner have again turned our brains inside out and made statistics sexy. for event details, see page 37

Ruth Reichl Food Critic; Former Editor, Gourmet; Author, Delicious!

In her fictional debut, Reichl celebrates her love of food with a story about family ties and the special bond between sisters.

Reichl is an award-winning chef and wellknown food critic for The New York Times.

Hear more from one of the pioneers of the Berkeley culinary revolution.

for event details, see page 37