The Commonwealth February/March 2015 by The Commonwealth Club of California

KATHLEEN TURNER page 10

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA page 13

ATUL GAWANDE page 44

BLOODY THURSDAY page 47

GLORIA DUFFY page 58

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

$5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015

WILLIAM K. BOWES, JR. LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT HONOREE SIR MICHAEL MORITZ

Venture Capitalist & Philanthropist Chairman of Sequoia Capital

DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN HONOREES LEVI STRAUSS & CO. CEO Chip Bergh accepting on behalf of the company

JENNIFER SIEBEL NEWSOM The Representation Project Filmmaker, and advocate for women, girls, and their families

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INSIDE The Commonwealth VO LU M E 109, N O . 02 | F E B RUA RY / M A RC H 2015

10 Photo by J. Astra Brinkmann

FEATURES 8 JOHN CLEESE

The legendary writer and performer finds the humor in wasted time, tragedy, depression and death

17 WATER IN THE WEST

Highlights from the ongoing discussion about the causes of the California drought – and strategies to outlast it

Photo by Sonya Abrams

10 KATHLEEN TURNER

On the pride she takes in acting a great part well and the lifelong rage that keeps her politically active

44 Photo by Ellen Cohen

DEPARTMENTS 5 EDITOR’S DESK

13 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

POLITICAL ORDER & DECAY

An explanation of government corruption around the world and why the United States is not immune

The Club is moving house

6 THE COMMONS A waterfront walking tour in the rain, Kathleen Turner takes a question from the audience, and John Cleese is a video star all over again

58 INSIGHT

44 ATUL GAWANDE

How can doctors and their patients work together to make healthy decisions?

47 FROM BLOODY

THURSDAY TO NOW 80 YEARS OF LABOR HISTORY IN SAN FRANCISCO Union leadership and historians look back on the seminal events on the waterfront and how that legacy has played out

Photo by Ed Ritger

Dr. Gloria C. Duﬀy, President and CEO

EVENTS 20 PROGRAM INFORMATION 21 TWO MONTH CALENDAR 23 PROGRAM LISTINGS Events from February 1 to April 1

23 LANGUAGE CLASSES

About Our Cover: We hope this practical joke lover will approve of, and maybe even smile at, our extremely respectful tribute to his comic genius. Photo by Ed Ritger; design by Tyler Swoﬀord.

“I just discovered one day, by chance, that if I was given sheets of blank paper, I could write something down and if somebody – perhaps myself, not necessarily – performed it right, people J U N E/J U LY 2013 THE COMMO N WE AL TH 3 would laugh.” – John Cleese

Kenya Safari Maasai Mara, rift valley & the Great Migration

August 5–15, 2015 Join study leader team Jessica Jackley and Reza Aslan on a safari in Kenya where tradition and modernity mix and contrast against a backdrop of astonishing beauty and biological diversity.

•

Explore Sweetwaters, one of the only places where one might see the endangered northern white rhino.

•

Discover the Great Rift Valley and Lake Nakuru, with rhino, leopard, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and 350 species of birds.

•

Visit a 200-acre Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Daphne Sheldrick’s Elephant Orphanage.

•

Meet with Mary Wykstra from Action for Cheetahs in Kenya, and see the Karen Blixen Museum, the former home of the Danish Baronness, author of the book Out of Africa.

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Experience the “Jewel of Africa,” the Maasai Mara, a site with one of the largest and the most spectacular animal migrations in the world.

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Take an optional balloon ride over the savannah at sunrise, or join an optional pre-tour extension to Amboseli National Park (3 days, 2 nights).

Cost: $6,995 per person, double occupancy

Commonwealth Club Travel CST: 2096889-40

Study Leader Team Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan’s first book is the International Bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into seventeen languages, and named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade. His degrees include a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard, a Ph.D. in the Sociology of Religions from UC Santa Barbara, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He is the founder of Aslan Media, a social media network for news and entertainment about the Middle East and the world, and co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, the premier entertainment brand for creative content from and about the Greater Middle East. During our trip he will lecture on Kenya as part of the origin of religions, myths and rituals.

Jessica Jackley is an entrepreneur and investor focused on financial inclusion, the sharing economy, and social justice. She currently serves as an investor and advisor with the Collaborative Fund, investing in entrepreneurs who champion the sharing economy. Jessica was a co-founder and CEO of ProFounder, a pioneering crowdfunding platform, which later joined forces with GOOD. She was a co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Kiva, the world’s first peer-to-peer microlending website, one of the fastest-growing social benefit websites in history. Jessica has taught Entrepreneurial Design for Social Change at Drew University and Global Entrepreneurship at USC. She was named one of Fast Company’s 60 in the 2012 League of Extraordinary Women, and has received numerous awards for her work. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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

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 by John Zipperer

Next Stop: 555 Post Street

y the time you receive this issue of the magazine, The Commonwealth Club of California’s headquarters will have just finished a move to its first new location in 28.5 years. Yes, after nearly three decades at our site at Market and Second streets, the Club’s oﬃces and two main auditoriums will now be at 555 Post Street, just oﬀ Union Square in downtown San Francisco. With the expiration of our lease on Market Street, we wanted to find a spot that was easy to access, had enough space for our public and private functions and was economically sound. While we continue to build out and complete our new permanent home at 110 The Embarcadero – the first building the Club will own in its 112-year history – we needed a good place to continue holding the programs that attract more than 50,000 people a year (as well as millions more who catch them on the radio and TV, on podcast and streaming video). Over the past year, I have observed our CFO Nick Leon, FOLLOW US ONLINE

facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub

our president and CEO Dr. Gloria Duﬀy, and our real estate agent Tom Christian of Cassidy Turley scour the downtown San Francisco marketplace for potential spaces. Sometimes it was like Goldilocks searching for the right home: This one was too small, that one was too expensive, and that one was too far from public transportation. Then we found 555 Post Street. Located just two blocks oﬀ Union Square, we’re surrounded by restaurants where you can take in a nice dinner after an evening event at the Club; a parking garage is located right next door, and there are other parking garages nearby; we’re right on a couple bus lines and a short walk from Muni and BART stations. So as of this writing, we’re packing boxes, putting up some fresh paint and arranging the furniture. Starting in February, come join us at 555 Post Street to help us celebrate our new interim space – and our uninterrupted work of 112 years presenting thoughtful, provocative, fun, community-based programs for the Bay Area.

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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 | DESIGNER Tyler R. Swofford | STAFF EDITORS Amelia Cass, Ellen Cohan INTERNS Zoë Byrne, Laura Nguyen, Christopher Wendt | PHOTOGRAPHERS Sonya Abrams, J. Astra Brinkmann, 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, 555 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94102. | 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 © 2015 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.

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

COMMONS THE

Talk of the Club

Four Blocks of History

THE TICKER

Rick Evans brings San Francisco‘s past alive with new waterfront walk

he architecture buﬀs, walking enthusiasts and neighborhood residents on the Club’s November 19th waterfront walk were so engaged by guide Rick Evans’ insights on topics ranging from the gold rush to futuristic skyscraper designs, that they didn’t appear to mind a little rain blowing under their umbrellas. The sold-out tour spanned four square blocks beside the Bay, between Mission and Folsom Streets. The damp and intrepid walkers were particularly interested in the many public art pieces scattered throughout the neighborhood dealing with San Francisco’s maritime history. A big piece of that history is the 1934 general strike and associated violence known as Bloody Thursday. The Club takes a special interest in that episode, because its future headquarters once housed the International Longshoremen’s Association. Just around the corner from that building, Evans ushered the eager crowd in for a closer look at six steel panels covered in bright airplane-paint pictures telling the story of the longshoremen’s 1934 hard-won fight for better pay, shorter hours and union-controlled hiring practices. After two demonstrating waterfront workers were shot and killed by the police, other San Francisco labor groups – as well as dock workers all along the West Coast – joined their strike in sympathy. (See page 47.)

Comedy Knows Comedy

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and check-ins

Photo by Amelia Cass

As the tour group gathered in front of the ornate Audiﬀred Building (1889), everyone’s attention was drawn to a drab, vacant fixer-upper next door by a cheerful blue and white banner emblazoned with a familiar sunburst logo and the words “A Home for Ideas.” Having already housed the big, controversial ideas of the longshoremen, the building now stands empty. Soon the Club will fill it again, using the space to bring diverse thinkers together to examine today’s controversial big ideas. You can join Evans for future waterfront walks. See this issue’s event listings.

Questions from the floor

ctress Kathleen Turner attracted a full crowd of fans, acting students, and even at least one professional comedian when she appeared in conversation with Doug Sovern at The Commonwealth Club in December. After she and Sovern discussed her career, including her current role as political columnist Molly Ivins at the Berkeley Rep, they took questions from the audience. One of the questioners was none other than political humorist Will Durst. Durst, who has spoken at the Club on numerous occasions, got right to the point with his question. DURST: You did a great movie with Dennis Quaid – TURNER: Undercover Blues. DURST: It was a wonderful movie, so politically incorrect. You were shooting guns off while carrying a baby around. Were you worried about the political correctness ... when you do comedy? TURNER: No, no, no. We made sure the baby was safe. [Laughter.] I was just tickled pink by the idea of

Updates

being able to do both at the same time – watching the kid take its first steps and teaching it how to hide. DURST: I love your comedy. You have just great timing. TURNER: I do! [Laughter.] For more from Turner and Sovern, see page 10.

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

Photo by J. Astra Brinkmann

oom: Millions of people have viewed Club videos on YouTube (youtube. com/commonwealth club), but a recent one gained viewers faster than others. When John Cleese spoke to the Club in Silicon Valley about his Monty Python career and other topics, he was engaged in a lively, funny and at times very smart conversation by “Mythbusters” host Adam Savage. Many of our videos rack up several thousands of views apiece, but only this one zoomed to nearly 30,000 in a few weeks. The viewer comments help explain its popularity. Clinton Hammond wrote, “If you fancy yourself an actor, a writer, a director or a human you ought to watch this interview. Two great minds, having an excellent chat.“ Abhishek Paul wrote, “This is the first video I’ve seen with 15000+ views and 0 unlikes. John Cleese still creating history.“ And Hero Crafters wrote, “An hour passed by like a minute. After the vid was over I was hungry for more! Listening to both of them talk is mesmerizing. “ Read the words of Cleese and Savage starting on page 8.

LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair John R. Farmer Vice Chair Richard A. Rubin Secretary Frank Meerkamp Treasurer Lee J. Dutra President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duﬀy BOARD OF GOVERNORS William F. Adams † Carlo Almendral Courtland Alves Dan Ashley Massey J. Bambara Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman** John L. Boland Michael R. Bracco Thomas H. Burkhart

Maryles Casto** Mary B. Cranston** Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dr. Jaleh Daie Dorian Daley Alecia DeCoudreaux Evelyn S. Dilsaver Joseph I. Epstein* Jeﬀrey A. Farber Hon Katherine A. Feinstein Fr. Paul J .Fitzgerald, S.J. Carol A. Fleming, Ph.D. Leslie Saul Garvin Dr. Charles Geschke Paul M. Ginsburg Edie G. Heilman Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Anna W. M. Mok**

Kevin P. O’Brien Donald J. Pierce Frederick W. Reid Skip Rhodes* George M. Scalise Lata Krishnan Shah Dr. Ruth Shapiro Charlotte Mailliard Shultz George D. Smith, Jr. James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Ellen O’Kane Tauscher Charles Travers Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Russell M. Yarrow Jed York ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Rolando Esteverena Steven Falk

Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman ** Hon. Shirley Temple Black*† J. Dennis Bonney* John Busterud* Maryles Casto** Hon. Ming Chin* Mary B. Cranston** Joseph I. Epstein * Dr. Joseph R. Fink * William German *

Rose Guilbault** Claude B. Hutchison Jr. * Dr. Julius Krevans* Anna W.M. Mok** Richard Otter* Joseph Perrelli* Toni Rembe* Victor J. Revenko* Skip Rhodes* Renée Rubin * Robert Saldich** Connie Shapiro * Nelson Weller * Judith Wilbur * Dennis Wu* * Past President ** Past Chair † Deceased

THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR 2014 CORPORATE & FOUNDATION SUPPORTERS FOR BRINGING CIVIC DIALOGUE TO THE BAY AREA Accenture LLP

The Koret Foundation

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Asset Management Company

Levi Strauss & Co

Ayrshire Foundation

Marin Community Foundation

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Mineta Transportation Institute

Bank of the West

ORACLE

Bernard Osher Foundation

Pacific Gas & Electric Company

BlackRock

Paul Hastings

Blue Shield of California

Pisces Foundation

The California Wellness Foundation

Relevant Wealth Advisors

Charles Schwab

San Francisco 49ers

Chevron Corporation

The San Francisco Foundation

ClimateWorks

San Francisco Business Times

Columbia University Teachers College

S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation

CSAA Insurance

Sierra Steel Trading

Dean & Margaret Lesher Foundation

Silicon Valley Bank

Deloitte & Touche LLP

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Skoll Foundation

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General Motors

Virgin America Airlines

Lisa & Douglas Goldman Foundation

Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation

Infoedge

Wells Fargo

The Commonwealth Club

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015 leaders THE COMMO N WE AL TH putting you face-to-face with today’s thought

J CL A life in comedy, from lemurs to last words. Excerpted from “John Cleese: Monty Python Actor and Comedian”, November 17, 2014. JOHN CLEESE Actor; Writer; Producer; Author, So, Anyway… In conversation with

ADAM SAVAGE

Host, “Mythbusters” 8

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ADAM SAVAGE: How is this book tour treating you? JOHN CLEESE: Brutally brutal! We came to New York – two days in New York – Washington, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle and here. SAVAGE: I can’t believe you can remember all of those. CLEESE: I think I did those in just under two weeks. So you just get pretty tired. You really do. Mainly because on those planes now, the seats are so small. I mean, they’re all right. You’re a decent size. You’re not huge, but you’re not tiny, right?

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

SAVAGE: It’s true. They fit me very well. CLEESE: So you’re OK. They fit you. I’m miserable. I always think of those bamboo cages that the North Koreans use. SAVAGE: With the water up to here? CLEESE: Yeah that’s right. So you couldn’t get comfortable, right? SAVAGE: Yes. CLEESE: They used to keep their pilots [in them after they were captured]. SAVAGE: Kafka called it something. Kafka talked about it in In the Penal Colony. It was this box that you couldn’t get comfortable in. CLEESE: Yeah. It’s just like that. I have to

JO H LEE N SE Photo by Ed Ritger

sit there for two hours being uncomfortable and then get in a car, and they always get me a small car, so that I can’t sit up straight. So by the time I get to the hotel, I’m kind of like “Bleh, bleh, bleh.” And I’m 75, for God’s sake. SAVAGE: You look damn good for 75. CLEESE: Thank you. SAVAGE: I don’t want to make you feel old with this comment because you are old, but – CLEESE: No, no, I’m very old. I’m very old. Seventy-five is nearly dead. SAVAGE: For most of human history, it has been.

CLEESE: It’s way past dead. SAVAGE: Methuselah. CLEESE: Absolutely. But then it’s not such a bad thing, because most of the best people are dead, right? Most of the people you and I would like to meet most, like Plato. Who is dead that you’d really like to meet? SAVAGE: Richard Feynman, Da Vinci. CLEESE: Feynman? SAVAGE: Yeah. CLEESE: Yes, wonderful man. SAVAGE: Did you ever meet him? CLEESE: No, but I just think he had this incredibly positive attitude when things

went wrong. Whereas most of us think, “Oh f--k, what are we doing?” Feynman would say, “Now that’s interesting.” SAVAGE: Yeah. CLEESE: And I think that’s most wonderful. My favorite last words [were uttered by] an 18th-century woman; she was vaguely upper class and I don’t know her name because she wasn’t famous. Just before she died, she announced to the people in the room who were waiting for her to die, “It’s all been most interesting.” Isn’t that wonderful? SAVAGE: What a great thing to be able to say. Continued on page 51

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KATHLEEN TURNER

Original photo by J. Astra Brinkmann

The actress on acting, politics, Molly Ivins and what’s up with Nicolas Cage. Excerpted from “Kathleen Turner in Conversation with Doug Sovern”, December 8, 2014. KATHLEEN TURNER Actress In conversation with

DOUG SOVERN

Reporter, KCBS Radio DOUG SOVERN: I didn’t know that you actually had met [Molly Ivins] a few times. KATHLEEN TURNER: I was pretty familiar with Molly. We crossed paths because of our activism. She came to the People For the American Way events to speak; I went to

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

the ACLU to speak. Our spheres of interest and anger crossed. Can I tell the story about meeting her? You guys know that Molly and Ann Richards were tremendous friends. That was a very important relationship for both of their lives. I lived in New York and I had an apartment on 66th and Broadway, a little building there. Ann Richards took an apartment there when she was undergoing the medical treatments for her final cancer. I came into the lobby one day and Ann and Molly were standing waiting for the elevator. They said, “Well, you’re coming with us.” I said, “Yes I am.” So we went up to Ann’s apartment. I guess I was sort of fresh meat. They were having a good time with this audience, because this is what they did. They told stories about each other all the time. Molly kind of won because she told this story about Annie: She said that when Annie was just starting out in politics, all the real business was done at the backyard barbecues; no one did any work at the leg-

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

islature. Anyway, so Annie went to one of these events with a young woman who was her assistant and a young black man that she had hired recently for her oﬃce. The good old boys would come up and say, “Annie, you are looking so lovely,” and “Who’s this sweet young thang you have with you?” They just wouldn’t see this young man at all. So Molly said that Annie commenced to be perturbed by this. So when the next “brother” came up, she said, “Judge, I’m so glad to see you. I’d like you to meet my new husband.” Swear to God. These women – this is all real. SOVERN: I’m a political reporter; I met Molly Ivins a few times in passing. I’ve seen your show in Berkeley. You really do channel her in an extraordinary way. How diﬃcult is it to portray an actual living or previously living person? TURNER: It is a fine line and it did give me pause – the thought of actually trying to imitate Molly. First of all, that’s kind of offensive to me, [both] the thought of imitating someone else and the thought that she could Photo by J Astra Brinkmann

be imitated; that’s not my intention at all. I’m an actor. I’m a good actor. To act as a character based on Molly, that I can do. To try and be Molly, that I cannot do. It doesn’t make sense to my brain. What I do know: This is a fun play. There are some big, wonderful laughs in it and there is a commonality and rhythm to good comedy and good laughs. Molly had it. Molly delivered her own lines probably better than anybody, and I have the ability to do that also. So the similarities are that, and the passion and the anger, which I think probably the women here very much understand. Molly said, “Thank God for lifelong rage.” Yeah. Thank God for lifelong rage. It can accomplish lots. SOVERN: You are doing a show that is quite political in nature, portraying one of the great political journalists. One of the causes that you mentioned is People for the American Way. What are the causes that you are most passionate about? TURNER: Most of the passion in my work right now is for Planned Parenthood. I supposedly had September and October oﬀ. Yeah, right! I went down to Texas three times for Wendy Davis and for Planned Parenthood, because to me Texas is, at the moment, probably the most vivid example of backlash against women in this country. It is lifethreatening, the closure of women’s health clinics – not necessarily abortion providers at all, simply women’s health clinics. This doctor in Houston came to me and said that her clinic had been closed because of the TRAP [Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers] laws. She had diagnosed five cases of breast cancer the year before in her patients. Now that the clinic was closed, where would these women be diagnosed? When? At what cost to their lives and their finances? We can’t say. But almost certainly, it will be a great deal later and at a much higher cost. This is not political. This is inhumane. I do not understand the attacks that are coming back on women. I do not understand why. I’m old enough to have actually marched. We thought we had done it. We thought, “Well, thank goodness that’s settled. We’ll go on with our individual lives.” But no, no. It seems as though we have to have this whole battle again. Anyone who can take away your choices – your medical choices, your reproductive choices – controls your life. This is untenable. If we have to fight it again, we fight it again. But I don’t understand why. If

anybody’s got a really good idea about why men are turning on us, I wouldn’t mind hearing it. Other than sheer fear. SOVERN: [Body Heat was] your first movie. You went through this whole ordeal. It’s a success. You’re a star. But did you think, What have I gotten myself into? This is what it takes to make a movie? TURNER: I don’t think I had any idea of what the impact would be on my life. I’d already done Broadway. I’d done a soap opera for a while. I was making a good living as an actor, as a working actor. One of my highest ambitions at that point was to become a real stage star, to become Zoe Caldwell. That was my ideal. So Body Heat kind of happened to me. I rather fell in love with filmmaking,

“M olly [Ivins] had it. Molly delivered her lines probably better than anybody. Molly said, ‘Thank God for lifelong rage.’” because it can be so incredibly precise. It can be just gorgeous. Things that you can’t do on stage – I mean they can’t see my eyes after eight rows or something like this. But in War of the Roses, with a 150mm lens that goes from here to here, when I blink, I oﬀer him the pâté and he gives me the wine; when you blink, it’s a whole sentence. This kind of precision and choices were just gorgeous, I thought. Film kept me entertained for some time. I never went more than two years without being on stage, because I never wanted to lose my love or my skill. I met a lot of film actors who have gotten frightened of the stage, because they stayed away too long. In fact, when I went back to Broadway with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael [Douglas], Jack [Nicholson] called me up and said, “Don’t do it. They’re going to kill you. When you’re a stage actress, you’ve got this target on your back.” I said, “No, you don’t understand. I’m better on stage.” SOVERN: Which do you actually like better? TURNER: Stage. I like being with people. You have to do film, because it does pay so much better. Theater just doesn’t. I mean, theater is really for the love of it.

SOVERN: And you keep getting extraordinary roles in theater. TURNER: I was always aware that as I got older, there would be less and less work for me in film, certainly in terms of Hollywood studio films, and better and better roles in theater. Film doesn’t have time to write deep characters. You have to be identified right away. You’re the sexual object or you’re the bitter, angry older woman or you’re the grandmother. You have to be labeled right away for the camera to work. But they don’t write in-depth characters. I mean, if you see a really interesting character in film, it’s probably the actor. It is not the script. But in theater, it is the script and the possibilities. Doing Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was one of the highlights of my entire life. It was everything I hoped it could be. You don’t get to say that very often in life. SOVERN: Prizzi’s Honor was an amazing film for which you earned great acclaim. Any stories you’d like to tell? TURNER: Well, Prizzi’s Honor was John Huston’s last really full film and he had very, very bad emphysema. He could not move anywhere without an oxygen tank. So it was an extraordinary opportunity. John would say to Jack and me, “Work something out and then I’ll come look at it and then we’ll bring in the cinematographers.” So for the first time in a film, I got to do more of my blocking and everything and [make] my own choices than probably ever before. But then I was oﬀ in Morocco, shooting Jewel of the Nile, I guess, and John sent me a rough cut of Prizzi’s Honor. It didn’t have music and it wasn’t sound- or color-corrected or anything. He wanted me to take a look at it. I was watching this and getting really, really worried. It was so slow and it was so ponderous and it was so heavy-handed. I thought, Dear God, this is going to sink like a stone. Then when I got back to the States, he’d put music to it. They had color corrected it and suddenly this dark, heavy-handed piece of filmmaking was transformed. That was the greatest lesson I learned about the entire machinery of filmmaking – what adding music could do, what color-correcting a film could do. It was just staggering from what I had seen as a rough cut. It was funny. I thought there were laughs in it when I did it, but not when I saw it the first time. It was a great honor to work with John. SOVERN: One of my favorite films you did

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was Peggy Sue Got Married [by] Francis Ford Coppola. His nephew Nicolas Cage [costarred]. You shot in the Bay Area, didn’t you? TURNER: We shot up in Santa Rosa and all out here. SOVERN: So that was a local film with a local filmmaker, an icon in the Bay Area. How was it working with Francis Ford Coppola and [what about] the fact that, for his nephew, the film was a big star turn? TURNER: Well, it was Nic’s first big role, and he was a bit of an a--hole. I think a lot of it was that Nic was very concerned about it being thought that it was nepotism; that he wasn’t cast for his talent or his ability, but that he was cast because he was the nephew. So he kind of went out of his way – well, he kind of dissed Francis a lot, which was unnecessary, sort of trying to prove that he was separate and that he got this on his own. I don’t know. I mean, Francis is a lovely, lovely man. There’s no reason to give him any disrespect. It was very, very intense, that shooting. Once Francis came to me and he had this silver bullet kind of trailer and he had screens up – keep in mind he was shooting with one camera, so he may have multiple screens up but there’s only one thing showing – and he said, “Would you mind if I direct from my trailer?” He’s done this before. He’d have a walkie-talkie and the first A.D. [assistant direcor] would hold the walkie-talkie out while Francis gave directions while he was sitting there. I said, “No, I don’t mind at all. I will act in mine.” He said, “Oh, so you want me on set every time you’re there.” I said, “Yes, I

do.” So then he said, “OK. You have to be on set every time I’m there.” I said, “All right, fine, fair trade,” not really thinking that there were two scenes I wasn’t in and I could’ve slept. AUDIENCE MEMBER: You made a reference to the fact that you work with nonprofits. George Carlin said the same thing. He never did go on camera for any

“I

watched a rough cut

of Prizzi’s Honor ... and I thought, Dear God, this is going to sink like a stone. ” of those. He stated that he always worked in the background. Where do you work? TURNER: I show up at the events. Anything that has my name on it, I am there. My name is not allowed to be used unless I am physically there. I travel the country to Planned Parenthood aﬃliates in between jobs to fundraise and liaise with the community. I show up at marches. I showed up at a freezing event [about] gun control in Washington D.C. last year when I had pneumonia. I didn’t know I had pneumonia until after I got home. For Meals on Wheels, I deliver meals. I try to take on only four or five organizations, because I can’t do more and hold to my standards to be there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do you find the most rewarding as a practitioner of the craft of acting? TURNER: I find stage most rewarding. In a theater, unlike almost any other place to us, you sit closer to a stranger than you do in your own home. There’s a little divider between you and this complete stranger whose faith you don’t know, whose attitudes or political beliefs you don’t know. You sit there in trust, because you make an agreement when you come into a theater and sit down. You’re already extending a kind of trust. Then, if the play is good, you start to breathe together; you hold your breath together; you laugh at the same time and you become part of something more than an individual. I think all human beings need that. That’s why theater has been so eﬀective for so many centuries. AUDIENCE MEMBER: You know, you’re such a complex person because you do drama, you do romance, you do adventure and you’ve got all of your political passions. Is there one role in particular, or two in particular, that feel like a synthesis of all that you are. TURNER: I’d tell you, this Molly Ivins comes close in “Red Hot Patriot.” Someone said to me, “You’re such a great actress. Could you do Sarah Palin?” I said, “No. I really couldn’t. That would be just pretending, which is not the same as acting.” Molly’s words are so well chosen. She was an extraordinary writer and tremendously knowledgeable about how politics worked. They just taste good, you know? It’s really fun. Photo by J. Astra Brinkmann

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On why the divide between democracies and authoritarian regimes is less important than whether they are modern or patrimonial systems. Excerpted from “Political Order and Decay,” October 21, 2014. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Author, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

STEPHEN KRASNER

Ph.D., Professor of International Studies; Freeman Spogli Institute Senior Fellow; Hoover Institution Fellow, Stanford University – Moderator Original photo by Architect of the Capitol (Congress)

etween us, this has really been a bad year in terms of global instability. But I think the nature of global instability in different parts of the world illustrates some of the themes in this story of political development, because the different parts of the world are actually very different from one another. So if you start with the continent of Eurasia, at either end you’ve got big consolidated, powerful, authoritarian states, Russia and China, that have territorial ambitions – they’re on the move. This is a big problem for their neighbors and for American foreign policy. But in a certain sense, that’s a very well-understood problem. This was the nature of diplomacy in the 19th and particularly in the 20th century; you would make claims about the people that speak your language living outside of your country. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve, but it’s a very familiar kind of problem. But there’s another part of the world that Zbigniew Brzezinski used to refer to as the “arc of crisis,” which starts in North Africa, goes through Sub-Saharan Africa into the Arab Middle East, through Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the way to the Indian border. There the political problem is almost the op-

posite. There the problem is not that you’ve got big, powerful, consolidated threatening states, but that you’ve got a complete political vacuum. What’s remarkable about this year is that you have Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen – all of these Arab countries that simultaneously are virtually failed states, where there’s no central authority, where they cannot control the activity of jihadists on their own territory. In recognition of this fact, American foreign policy in this part of the world, ever since September 11, has been focused on one thing and one thing above all, which is state building in those countries that are aﬄicted by this kind of terrorism, because in the long run, that is the only way to control this kind of activity. We invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and we also discovered that the only way you’re ever going to get out of this involvement is by leaving behind a government capable of acting like a state should, which is maintaining a monopoly over its own territory. It turns out we’re not very good at it, unfortunately. This is the problem I call “getting to Denmark,” where Denmark is not actually a real country, but it’s kind of a symbol for a country that’s prosperous, democratic, [displays] low levels

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of corruption, well governed and so forth. We’re constantly trying to take a country like Afghanistan or Iraq and turn it into some version of Denmark, and it doesn’t work very well. Political order is really a central issue. The question is, how did any state ever come to fill that vacuum and to develop strong modern institutions? We need to begin by understanding what political order is, and in my view, there are actually three critical baskets of institutions that you have to have. The first institution is the state. The state is about power; the state is about having a legitimate monopoly of force over territory that can keep the peace, defend the community from foreign aggression, provide for infrastructure and oﬀer basic public goods and services, health care and so forth. If you don’t have a state, you end up like Sierra Leone and Liberia right now in this terrible Ebola epidemic, because you don’t have public health authorities that can actually quarantine people, provide medicines and do all of the things that public health oﬃcials are supposed to do. The second important set of institutions is the rule of law. The rule of law, to really be the rule of law, must apply to the most powerful actors in the society: the people with the guns or the coercive power. If the president, the prime minster or the king can make up the rules as they go along, then that’s not the rule of law. The rule of law, in its most fundamental sense, is a constraint on power. Then finally you’ve got democratic accountability, which is a set of procedures –

free and fair elections – by which you can try to ensure that the elites running the country are acting in the interest of the whole community and not just in their own narrow selfinterest. There’s the balancing act that has to go on in any modern political order between, on the one hand, the state, which is the power institution that uses and accumulates power, and, on the other hand, the rule of law and democracy that are institutions that limit power and constrain power. You really want to have all three of these institutions, but they really need to be in some kind of a balance. Now, there’s one other really critical definition that I think is key to understanding what’s going on in the world, and that is [the diﬀerence] between a modern state and what has been called a patrimonial state. In the Middle Ages, when you had kingdoms, you had a patrimonial system in which there was no distinction between public and private. Basically, the king owned his domain, so if he wanted to give a province away as a wedding present to his daughter, he could go ahead and do that. Under this system, there was no such thing as corruption because the king owned everything and therefore there was no way you could violate public trust because there was no public. Today there are no countries in the world in which the ruler gets up and says, “I own this country.” What you have is a pretense of running a modern state – you have a parliament and a president and a court system, but the reality is what political scientists call neo-patrimonialism. It’s the pretense of hav-

ing a modern state [when] in reality the state is just a collection of kleptocratic people who are in it to extract resources from the society. You don’t have to have democracy to have a modern state. A modern state is impersonal; it seeks to treat people equally on the basis of the fact that they’re citizens. The single important dividing line in the world now is between these patrimonial or neopatrimonial states and modern states, much less between democracies and authoritarian regimes. We Americans love democracy, and we categorize the countries of the world by whether they’re democratic or authoritarian, but whether they’re modern or patrimonial is actually a much more important dividing line these days. Take what went on in Ukraine earlier this year. As you remember, the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from power last February by these young demonstrators who wanted Ukraine to align with the European Union and not with Russia. So what was the issue involved in that struggle? I would argue that it was not democracy, because everybody including those protestors admitted that Yanukovych had been elected in a reasonably free and fair election. What they did not want was the degree of kleptocratic corruption that his regime represented. He was funneling billions of dollars of state resources to his family, getting it outside of Ukraine, and the entire system was essentially a little family-based cabal to suck resources out of the Ukrainian public sector. These young people said, “We don’t want to live in a country like this. We want to live in EuPhoto by Sonya Abrams

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rope.” What Europe represents to them is a place in which there is a distinction between public interest and private interest, and where the government is supposed to serve public interest and not simply [operate] as a vehicle of enrichment. Even in countries that are democratic, this failure to achieve a democratic state is very critical. Take India. India is a very successful democracy and has been ever since independence in the late 1940s. There’s a study that was done by Jean Drèze, who’s an economist and an activist, of primary school education in several poor states in northern India; and he discovered that 50 percent of schoolteachers were not showing up for work, despite the fact that they were being paid. There’s nobody in the world that thinks this is the right thing to do. There was a big outcry – there’s a free media in India, there’s a lot of political opposition – and there were eﬀorts at reform. Ten years later, they do another survey and they discover the percentage of schoolteachers not showing up for work was exactly the same: 50 percent. Despite the fact that it’s a democracy, there’s a free press, there’s a political opposition, they could not achieve this very basic goal of getting teachers they’re paying to actually teach children. That is a big problem for India, because there is a huge education gap that really holds back the competitiveness of that society as a whole. Even if you get closer to Europe, why is it that Greece got into trouble during the recent Euro crisis? There are many reasons, including bad design of the European Union and of the monetary system as a whole, but one of the factors was that the Greeks could not control their public budget deficit. Part of the reason for that was a [result of ] democracy: the two competing political parties. After every election they would trade positions and what they spent their time doing was packing the public sector with their own oﬃcials, such that by the time we get to the late 2000s, the Greek public sector had something on the order of seven times the per capita number of civil servants that Britain did. That was one of the reasons they couldn’t control their wages, and that’s been really corrupting state politics. So again, we Americans really love democracy and we focus very much on democracy, but I would say that creating a democracy is actually much, much easier than creating a modern state. We’ve had several examples of this in the last decade. Iraq and Afghanistan

are both democracies; they both had elections, or in Afghanistan’s case, an election-like event – there’s a lot of corruption, but for a poor country, they pulled oﬀ something like an election. What they do not have is a modern state. They do not have a state with the authority to keep the peace, to build infrastructure. And both of these countries are so corrupt that they lack legitimacy. That’s one of the reasons they’re facing these big insurgencies. So getting to Denmark, if by Denmark you mean a modern state, is a much, much harder task than simply getting to modern democracy. One thing that is important for Ameri-

“G etting

to Denmark is a

much harder task than simply getting to modern democracy.” cans and Europeans to understand is that when you look at corruption or what we interpret as corruption in developing countries, we [shouldn’t] get too proud of ourselves, because in fact we have diﬀerent forms of corruption. [Besides,] in a certain sense we went through much of the same thing that I was describing in India, which is this widespread patronage. In fact, if you have democracy too early, before you’ve actually modernized your state, that is actually one of the sources of patronage and corruption in government. The single best example of this is in the United States itself. In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States. This was a really pivotal election. He was running against John Quincy Adams – a Boston Brahmin. [Adams] was the son of John Adams, the second president of the United States; he went to Harvard; he traveled in Europe as a young man; he could speak several European languages. Jackson, by contrast, grew up in a cabin in frontier Tennessee. He never had much formal education; he was a drinker, a brawler, an Indian fighter and, as it turned out, the victor of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, which propelled him onto the national stage. This was a classic fight in American politics where Jackson represented a populist streak. Most states opened up the franchise to all white males sometime in the 1820s. Now that ordinary Americans could

vote, whom did they vote for? Did they vote for the Boston Brahmin or Andrew Jackson? They voted for Andrew Jackson, because he was one of them, and he actually made the argument [that] we shouldn’t be ruled by people from Harvard and Yale. Jackson came to power, and he said two things: “I should get to decide who gets appointed to work as an official in the U.S. government” and “I don’t think that it takes a genius to run the American government – any ordinary American can do it.” This began a 100-year period in American history that’s alternately known as the spoils system or the patronage system, in which from top to bottom every office was filled as a result of a political payoff by a politician to some political supporter. If you read Abraham Lincoln’s letters from early on in both of his two terms, he was just inundated and driven crazy by the fact that he had to spend the first six months in office distributing patronage to people that supported him, and in fact the Union Army lost several important early battles because it was led by a bunch of political generals. This is the sense in which when we look at a place like Brazil, India or the Philippines that is subject to this kind of vote-buying, we think, “What’s wrong with them? Don’t these people understand what good government really is?” We don’t understand that in fact at a certain stage in our history, when we were much poorer and less educated, this was the system that we not only had, but we in a certain sense invented. The rewarding [of ] friends and family that is the natural form of human sociability is very powerful, and in political systems that want to be modern, over time there’s just a big effort to revert back to this form of relationship. In a certain sense this has happened. The United States pretty much banished the old forms of bribery and corruption that existed in the 19th century in the Progressive Era. So today outright bribery, if you define that narrowly as an exchange of an explicit quid pro quo, is not a big problem in the U.S. Congress. What is a big problem is a different form, which is essentially legalized gift exchange, where you give a nice donation to a congressman, and then six months later, somehow the congressman decides to vote in favor of a piece of legislation that you want. This has led to the decay of American political institutions. I’m not simply talking about the issue that a lot of other people are

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thinking about, which is polarization; that’s the United States has always been a model a factor. It’s when polarization meets the par- for successful, prosperous democracy, and ticular characteristics of the American con- I think if we don’t get our act together, the stitutional system that the problem becomes Xi Jinpings and Vladimir Putins are going particularly severe. The American founding to have more grist for their particular mills. fathers were worried about one thing above all: maximizing individual freedom and Question and answer session with protecting individuals from tyranny. They de- Dr. Stephen Krasner, senior fellow, signed an extremely complex constitutional Freeman Spogli Institute system that separated and balanced political power because they did not want power to be STEPHEN KRASNER: How do you give concentrated in a powerful executive as it had government enough power to be effective, been in the British monarchy. That system but not enough to be corrupted? worked reasonably well through much of FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: I would put the the 20th century. The reason it worked well problem in the following terms: We are was that the two political parties overlapped trapped in a low-trust equilibrium where substantially. we have a political culture that doesn’t trust Now that’s completely shot. There’s the government. This is not just true of the no overlap between the two parties; the Tea Party people; a lot of people on the left most liberal Republican is now consider- don’t trust the government. They think it’s in ably more conservathe thrall of corporative than the most tions, or it’s too selfur system makes it very interested or money conservative Democrat. When that makes too much of combines with our easy for a well- organized a difference. So we check-and-balance do two things: We system, that be- minority to stop things. are reluctant to pay comes very deadly, taxes to fund the because we have what I describe as a “ve- government adequately, and we don’t want tocracy.” That vetocracy just means rule by to give it enough authority, because we veto; it’s a more pejorative way of describing say we are too worried about these people checks and balances. Our system makes tyrannizing over us. The government then it very easy for a very well-organized and operates without adequate resources and well-resourced minority to stop things that without adequate authority, and lo and a majority wants to do. It does not promote behold, they don’t do a good job. We turn consensus in making big decisions about around and say, “See, the government can’t complicated issues. do anything.” So I think you’ve got to break This has now become a global problem. out of that cycle. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and [Hun- KRASNER: Is the United States moving gary’s] Viktor Orban and a number of other to neo-patrimonialism in light of the huge would-be authoritarian leaders would actu- amount of money needed to run for office? ally like my speech in a certain way. They FUKUYAMA: The simple answer is yes. would get up and say, “You know, democ- The Supreme Court in its wisdom has racy in Europe and America is not working said that money is basically a form of free well since the financial crisis. Look at us speech, which is a kind of incomprehensible authoritarians: We’re on the move; we’ve decision, but it was spoken and therefore got decisive government; we can get things it’s legislatively extremely hard to control it. done where those countries can’t.” Now, I It concentrates the power and the advocacy do not believe this for a minute, because of interest groups, which collectively are I think that all of these systems – these not representative of the whole American alternative authoritarian systems – have people. They’re representative of the most much graver weaknesses of legitimacy and well-resourced and the best-organized parts. long-term effectiveness. But the kind of im- That’s an example of patrimonialism; it’s a age that America projects around the world way of organizing yourself and your family [is important]; its soft power is important. and your friends because you yourself are well This country is very important, because organized and other people are not.

“O

”

Photo by Sonya Abrams THE

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California is in an extended drought. What are the future prospects for a wet state? Excerpted from “Water Underfoot” on August 13, 2014, and “Chasing Water” on October 28, 2014. BROOKE BARTON

BRIAN RICHTER

Director, Water Program, Ceres

Chief Water Scientist, The Nature Conservancy; Author, Chasing Water: A Guide for Moving from Scarcity to Sustainability

DEBBIE DAVIS Community & Rural Aﬀairs Advisor, Oﬃce of Planning and Research, State of California

PETER GLEICK President & Co-founder, The Pacific Institute; Author, Bottled and Sold

FELICIA MARCUS Chair, State Water Resources Control Board

BARTON THOMPSON Director, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University In conversation with

GREG DALTON

Director, Climate One at The Commonwealth Club

GREG DALTON: Peter Gleick, I heard about a billboard in the Midwest that shows the Great Lakes; there’s a straw in each lake and on one straw it says Arizona, another straw says California and the other straw says New Mexico, which is basically saying, Beware: These southwestern states are after our water. Is that possible? With the algae bloom, would we even want that water? PETER GLEICK: It’s possible, technically. Engineers love to think about these things, but it’s not ever going to happen. We talk about this all the time. There’s a lot of water over here; there’s not much water over here; if we can just move it from one place to the other, isn’t that the solution? BROOKE BARTON: And that’s what you guys have done here. GLEICK: In the 20th century, that’s what we’ve done to some degree. We built an enormous infrastructure in California and in the West to move water from one place to another and to store it in the wet season so we can use it in the dry season. That Photo by Ed Ritger (Water Underfoot)

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infrastructure has permitted all of us to live the lives that we lead, but it’s really expensive to move water from one place to another. Gravity is not your friend when it comes to moving water, and the Rocky Mountains are in the way. [Laughter.] So that’s not going to happen; sort of like [desalination], it’s really expensive. In the end this is partly economics. Frankly, desal is cheaper than moving water from the Missouri or the Mississippi or the Great Lakes to the West. So we’re not going to do that. We could do it, but we’re not going to do it, and it’s not just an economic question. Frankly, it’s now an ecological question. The Great Lakes go up or down a foot [and] they’re not happy; a long-term withdrawal from the Great Lakes wouldn’t make them happy either. DALTON: Some people say the industry is moving toward waterless hydraulic fracturing, perhaps using recycled water, salinated water [and] that they’re aware of that water risk. Brooke Barton, did you want to comment on fracking and water? BARTON: We’ve looked at this question from the national level. We’ve looked at 40,000 shale wells that have been fracked in the past year and a half, and indeed there is a very shocking correlation between the predominance of shale energy development and drought conditions. About 55 percent of the wells that were drilled were in regions of extreme drought in the past year and a half – so Texas, New Mexico, California, a few other regions. Forty-seven percent of all the wells that were fracked in the country

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were in areas of extremely high water stress, meaning water’s already over allocated in those places. So the oil and gas companies are facing some challenges increasingly to access the water. Something along the lines of 40 percent were in areas of groundwater depletion, and groundwater was being used for this activity. So, it’s not just in California.

“T here are counties where something like 85 percent of all water is going to fracking.” –Brooke Barton The scale of hydraulic fracturing is actually quite small in California at this point. It’s not likely to expand at the scale we’ve seen in other places. The common refrain of course from oil and gas producers is [that] in Texas and many of these states, we’re using less than 1 percent of total water use, but if you look at it on a localized scale, there are counties in Colorado, in Texas, New Mexico, where something like 85 percent of all water is going to fracking. The communities there are under intense pressure to sell their water, to receive the pollution and really bear the burden. AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do we know about how soon that buﬀer of water will be a concern for us? What are your thoughts on preparing for unreliable water

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for a large part of the world’s population? BRIAN RICHTER: So in much of the West, the timing of the peak of snowmelt runoff off the Rockies and off some of the mountains in the Pacific Northwest has shifted, notably shifted by a week, in some places two weeks, three weeks in others. That may not seem catastrophic, but when you gain an understanding of the fine level of design that we’ve [used to] create our water management systems, our reservoirs, our delivery systems to cities and farms – the designs are fairly sensitive to that amount of shift in water availability. If you’re getting a lot more water coming off sooner in the year, do you have the reservoir capacity to capture that water or is a lot of it going to spill? And then after that, that rush of water is going to come off earlier and you end up with a lot less water as you get into the drier summer months in July and August. Is there going to be enough water available to be able to manage for your needs at that time? So subtle shifts combined with the sensitivity of how we’ve designed our water management systems is going to be a very, very big challenge in the coming decade. GLEICK: There’s a great way to describe this, which is [that] we live in the 21st century, with a 21st-century climate, a 20thcentury infrastructure and 19th-century laws and policies. DALTON: Let’s talk about the incentives for conservation. If we’re all drawing from a particular aquifer or well, it’s either use it or lose it. I’ve talked to people [who say,] “I

Photo by Ed Ritger (Chasing Water)

got a lawn. If I don’t use it, someone else will use it.” So there’s very little incentive, Felicia Marcus, for conservation when there are no rules, no penalty for extreme use. FELICIA MARCUS: I don’t know that I would buy into that construct having lived through earlier droughts in Los Angeles, for example – L.A. really stepped up. You have a whole host of places in Southern California that have grown by millions of people without increasing their water use because of a conservation ethic, but also because of rules at the local level on toilet retrofits and incredible eﬀorts on the part of water districts and multiple agencies to help retrofit inside the house. You have communities like one of the water districts in western Riverside County, where they’ve done landscape ordinances in every single one of their communities to say, “We have to have a climate-appropriate landscape and you’ve got to have that in order to get our water.” You also have communities that have figured out the reasonable amount of water for a community, a family of a certain size, a yard of a certain size and a certain climate. It really varies, and so there’s an incredible array of activities that people have. I do think the notion that, “If I don’t use it, somebody else will,” just frankly doesn’t hold true. While you can’t necessarily draw the droplets, every drop of water saved is water saved for the future. We know the droughts are going to be more frequent, [but] we don’t know when. What we do know is that we don’t know when this drought is going to end. We do know [about]

the Australian experience where they kept thinking they were in the three-year drought cycle for at least six years, as the story goes, and then it ended up being a 10 to 12-year millennial drought. The lesson they learned – as our own forbearers [did] in the ’70s at the state government – was that they wished they had conserved more, sooner. That is true for every local community. So it’s in [people’s] self-interest. It’s also true at a local level that if you increase your security, it allows communities to be more gracious in helping other communities through this time of drought. DALTON: So flood irrigation is not always evil. MARCUS: No. It’s not always evil. It’s a much more complex world; that farm’s runoﬀ is what re-[enters] the stream and becomes another person’s water, or becomes a refuge’s water. So it’s a much more complex picture than [talking about] just ag[ricultural]-versus-urban [water use]. In fact, I really think we need to work at erasing that ag-versus-urban distinction, because we do need each other. Food security is going to become one of the issues of our time in the coming decades, in part because of climate change, in part because of population growth. But we have one of the five Mediterranean climates in the entire world that can grow healthy fruits and vegetables year-round, and that is a precious resource as well. So the complexity of it sometimes makes it diﬃcult, but we have to get to that complex place of figuring out how to honor all of us and figure out how everyone can do

the best they can. DALTON: Buzz Thompson, some farmers say that they’d be happy to have more control in regulation on groundwater if there was less water left in the system for fish. So should some of California’s environmental regulations be relaxed because of the drought? Serve people instead of fish? BARTON THOMPSON: I certainly understand the agricultural concern that if they’re being asked to actually reduce the amount of groundwater that they’re pumping, then the state needs to find them some type of replacement water for that. It’s going to be very diﬃcult in many cases to find replacement water, and certainly that should not come out of the environment. If you take all of the various sectors in which we use water today – agriculture, urban and the environment – in a period of drought, the sector that gets cut the most is the environment. It’s always the environment that we pull the water away from first, and that has significant implications for the fish that rely upon our river and stream flows. So, my answer is no, we can’t find it there. We need to continue to find ways in which to stretch our available water supply – storage. Personally, I think it should be through groundwater storage more than through surface water storage, but we should be storing more water, and to the degree possible we should be conserving water and reclaiming water in order to make that water available to hopefully make up for the reduced groundwater that can be extracted. Continued on page 42

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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.

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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.

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MEMBERLED FORUMS CHAIR Dr. Carol Fleming carol.fleming@speechtraining.com FORUM CHAIRS 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

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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 Gerald Harris Gerald@ artofquantumplanning.com Beau Fernald bfernald@gmail.com

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

RADIO, VIDEO AND PODCASTS 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 (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m. KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs on select Tuesdays at 7 p.m. KOIT (96.5 FM and 1260 AM) Sundays at 6 a.m. KLIV (1590 AM) Thursdays at 7 p.m. KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m. KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m. KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

Watch Club programs on the California Channel Thursdays at 9 p.m. and 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 Valerie Castro at vcastro@commonwealthclub.org seven working days before the event.

FEBRUARY

Eight Weeks Calendar MONDAY

TUESDAY

3 5:15 p.m. Healthy Aging: Lowering the Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease 6:00 p.m. William Ury: Getting to Yes with Yourself

12:00 p.m. Transforming California’s State Parks FM 6:00 p.m. Half the Sky: China’s Women Prisoners 6:30 p.m. Particle Fever: A Special Film Screening

17 6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

4 4:30 p.m. SF Giants’ Bruce Bochy and Larry Baer 5:30 p.m. Humanities West Book Discussion FM 6:00 p.m. Dodging Extinction 7:30 p.m. SV Reads 2015: Homeland & Home FE

11 6:00 p.m. Scoble on Startups 2015: Context, Cloud and Bleeding Edge Tech 6:00 p.m. Living Planet Report 2014: Global Footprint Network

18 6:00 p.m. Socrates Café FM 6:00 p.m. Get Fit, Lean and Keep Your Day Job

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SAT/SUN

7/8

14/15

1:45 p.m. Waterfront Walk 6:00 p.m. Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death 6:30 p.m. Janet Napolitano and Mark Yudof: A Conversation on the Future of Higher Education

12 12:00 p.m. The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands 1:45 p.m. Chinatown Walking Tour

12:00 p.m. Bay Area: Ground Zero for the Reinvention of America FM

19 1:45 p.m. San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour 6:30 p.m. Parliament Members from Around the World: Democracy and the Digital Age

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

5:15 p.m. Sexual Intelligence FM 5:30 p.m. Book Discussion: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov FM 6:00 p.m. A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions FM

WEDNESDAY

21/22

12:00 p.m. The Invisible People: Syrian Refugees FM

7:00 p.m. Lessons in Leadership and Success

23 5:30 p.m. Middle East Discussion Group FE 6:30 p.m. San Francisco’s PanamaPacific Exposition of 1915 FM

7:00 p.m. Gary Wenk: Your Brain on Food

25 6:00 p.m. Lessons from the Rim Fire: What It Means 6:30 p.m. A Republic, If You Can Keep It: The Threat to American Democracy

26 6:00 p.m. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered

12:00 p.m. Restructuring Health Care: The Massive, Disruptive Integration of Care Delivery and Financing FM

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Legend

MARCH

San Francisco

Free program for members

East Bay/North Bay

Free program for everyone

Silicon Valley

Members–only program

MONDAY

TUESDAY

2 5:30 p.m. SF Book Discussion: The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade FM 6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social

1:45 p.m. Nob Hill Walking Tour

6:00 p.m. A Senseational Wine Experience

9 6:00 p.m. Minimizing Fear FM 6:00 p.m. Brewster Kahle: Open Source Housing for Good FM

10 6:00 p.m. International Careers: Explore the World As You Work 6:00 p.m. The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

6:00 p.m. The Amazons FM

17 6:00 p.m. The Allure of Irish Dancing 6:30 p.m. Andrew Keen

24 6:00 p.m. Equality and Justice

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

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

5:30 p.m. Humanities West Book Discussion: The Song of Roland FM 6:00 p.m. Who is Putin?

12:00 p.m. Elder Financial Abuse and Blessing Scams 5:30 p.m. Explore the World from The Commonwealth Club Planning Meeting FE 6:00 p.m. In Manchuria TBA: Chef Michael Mina

11 6:30 p.m. Getting to Good Policy in the Era of Political Polarization

18 12:00 p.m. Jeﬀrey Lieberman 5:15 p.m. Estate Planning in Film 6:00 p.m. Socrates Café FM

19 1:45 p.m. Waterfront Walk 6:00 p.m. The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 6:00 p.m. Why Cuba Matters

Time TBA. Tavi Gevinson: INFORUM’s 21st Century Visionary Award

1:45 p.m. Russian Hill Walking Tour 6:00 p.m. Deep Decarbonization of the United States 7:00 p.m. Gretchen Rubin: Happiness and Habits

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

SAT/SUN

7/8

14/15

6:00 p.m. 2015: Critical Year for Planet Earth

9:00 a.m. Regional Transit Governance Seminar FE

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

FRIDAY

21/22

12:00 p.m. Future of Afghanistan FM

28/29

T U E 03 | San Francisco

Healthy Aging: Lowering the Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease

William Ury: Getting to Yes with Yourself

Patricia Renaut Spilman, M.S., Senior Scientist, Buck Institute

As a growing portion of the American population ages into its golden years, there will inevitably be a greater number of those suﬀering from Alzheimer’s. At the forefront of the eﬀort to find a breakthrough cure is the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Spilman, a senior scientist at the Buck Institute, will share with us proactive “healthstyle” choices that encourage a healthy mind and body far into one’s later years. MLF: GROWNUPS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 4:45 p.m. reception, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John Milford

William Ury, Co-founder, Harvard Program on Negotiation

LANGUAGE GROUPS

FOREIGN LANGUAGE GROUPS

Free for members Location: SF Club Oﬃce

William Ury asks, How can we expect to get to yes with others if we haven’t first gotten to yes with ourselves? Ury has taught tens of thousands of people from all walks of life how to become better negotiators. He has discovered that the greatest obstacle to successful agreements and satisfying relationships is actually our own selves and the natural tendency to react in ways that do not serve our true interests. Join this discussion about learning to understand and influence our own selves first. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 sutdents (with valid ID)

FRENCH, Intermediate Class Thursdays, noon Pierrette Spetz, Graziella Danieli, Beatrice Hallier danieli@sfsu.edu, hallierb@usfca.edu FRENCH, Advanced Conversation Tuesdays, noon Gary Lawrence garylawrence508@gmail.com GERMAN, Int./Adv. Conversation Wednesdays, noon Sara Shahin sarah_biomexx@yahoo.com ITALIAN, Intermediate Class Mondays, noon Daria Siciliano (415) 839-5077 SPANISH, Advanced Conversation (fluent only) Fridays, noon Luis Salvago-Toledo, lsalvago@comcast.net

W E D 04 | San Francisco

San Francisco Giants’ Bruce Bochy and Larry Baer

Humanities West Book Discussion: Two Lives of Charlemagne by Einhard and the Monk of St. Gall

Larry Baer has stated that hiring three-time World Series champion and two-time National League manager of the year Bruce Bochy was “probably the best move [Giants management] ever made.” Here’s a chance to celebrate and relive the Giants’ amazing 2014 World Series victory. Go behind the scenes and into the dugout with Manager Bochy and Team President Baer to find out who’s in, who’s out and what strategies will keep the Giants at the peak of their game. Location: Wyndham Parc 55 Hotel, Cyril Magnin Ballroom, 55 Cyril Magnin St., San Francisco Time: 3:30 p.m. check-in, 4:30 p.m. program Cost: $30 non-members, $15 members; Premium (seating in first few rows): $55 non-members, $40 members Note: In partnership with Virgin America

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

Join us to discuss the life of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman emperor and “father of Europe.” One biography we’ll look at is by Einhard, who joined the royal court in 791 to serve as an epic poet, mathematician and architect. His work is believed to be the finest biography of its time. This edition also contains the highly anecdotal “life” of Charlemagne, penned by the Monk of Saint Gall. Lynn Harris will lead the discussion. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond Note: In association with Humanities West

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

W E D 04 | San Francisco

Bruce Bochy, Manager, San Francisco Giants Larry Baer, President and CEO, San Francisco Giants; Key Strategist, Giants’ Baseball and Business Transactions In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt, Former President, Oakland Athletics

February 3 – 4

T U E 03 | San Francisco

February 4 – 5

W E D 04 | San Francisco

W E D 0 4 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money and the Future of Life on Earth

SV Reads 2015: Homeland & Home – The Immigrant Experience

Anthony D. Barnosky, Professor, UC Berkeley; Cox Visiting Professor, Stanford University

Paleobiologist Barnosky weaves together evidence from the deep past and the present to oﬀer a practical, hopeful plan for avoiding yet another mass extinction. Optimistic that we can change this ominous forecast, Barnosky provides clear-cut strategies to guide the planet away from global catastrophe using existing technology and know-how.

NoViolet Bulawayo, Author, We Need New Names Cristina Henriquez, Author, The Book of Unknown Americans Bich Minh Nguyen, Author, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir Sal Pizarro, Columnist, The San Jose Mercury News – Moderator

Santa Clara County is made up of a multitude of diﬀerent ethnicities with more than one-third of residents born outside of the United States. Hear this year’s selected authors as they share their stories of immigrating and the balance of maintaining connections to the culture and heritage of their homelands. Location: Campbell Heritage Theatre, 1 W. Campbell Ave., Campbell Time: 7 p.m. doors open, 7:30 p.m. program, 8:30 p.m. book signing Cost: FREE Notes: In association with the Santa Clara County Oﬃce of Education, Santa Clara County Library District and San Jose Public Library Foundation.

MLF: HUMANITIES/SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: George Hammond

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T H U 05 | San Francisco

THU 05 | East Bay

Waterfront Walk

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death

A Conversation on the Future of Higher Education

Katy Butler, Author, Knocking on Heaven’s Door

Janet Napolitano, President, University of California; Former Secretary of Homeland Security Mark Yudof, President Emeritus, University of California; Former Chancellor of the University of Texas System

Join Rick Evans for his new walking tour exploring the historic sites of the waterfront neighborhood that surrounds the location of the future Commonwealth Club headquarters. Hear the dynamic stories of the entrepreneurs, controversial artists and labor organizers who shaped this recently revitalized neighborhood. This two-hour tour will give you a lively overview of the historic significance of this neighborhood and a close look at its ongoing development. Location: Meet in front of Boulevard Restaurant, 1 Mission (corner of Mission at Steuart Street) Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Note: Limited to 20. Must pre-register. Tour operates rain or shine.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

When does death cease to be a curse and start to become a blessing? Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When is the right time to say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go”? Science writer and essayist Katy Butler explores these questions through a blend of investigative reporting and memoir. This story is the fruit of her own family’s journey. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco 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

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

San Francisco

Higher education faces a growing number of issues as 2015 begins. The University of California, with 10 campuses across the state, is no exception. The system is currently grappling with proposed tuition hikes, student protests and a statewide drop in funding. Join Napolitano and Yudof as they discuss the challenges currently facing America’s higher education system. Location: Lafayette Library, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu.

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

M O N 09 | San Francisco

Sexual Intelligence: A New View of Sexual Function and Satisfaction

Book Discussion: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions

Marty Klein, Ph.D., Marriage & Family Therapist; Sex Therapist; Author, Sexual Intelligence

What do most people want from sex? A combination of pleasure and closeness; however, during the act, that’s not always the focus. Instead, we worry about how we look, smell, sound and perform. Join sex therapist Dr. Klein as he discusses ways in which we can improve our sex lives and connect with our partners.

The Master and Margarita is woven around a visit by the devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. In part, it is angled against a suﬀocatingly bureaucratic social order. The novel deals with the interplay of good and evil, innocence and guilt, courage and cowardice, love and sensuality, exploring such issues as the responsibility toward truth when authority would deny it, and the freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, was translated from its original Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

February 9 – 10

M O N 09 | San Francisco

Elias Castillo, Author

Monday Night Philosophy refutes the myth that the California missions were idyllic sites where Franciscan padres and Native Americans lovingly commingled. In reality, the missions were death camps in which the Catholic missionaries, guided by mission founder Junípero Serra’s direction, practiced unremitting violence against their charges. Castillo details the dark past of the mission system.

MLF: SF BOOK DISCUSSION Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizer: Barbara Massey

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 stu. Program Organizer: George Hammond

T U E 10 | San Francisco

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

Transforming California’s State Parks: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Future

Half the Sky: China’s Women Prisoners

Particle Fever: A Special Film Screening

Christine Kehoe, Co-Chair, California Parks Forward Commission

California’s magnificent 280-unit park system faces significant challenges. Declining budgets have led to diminishing services and a long list of maintenance needs, while outdated administrative systems and technology impede park staﬀ’s ability to manage and protect the parks’ natural resources eﬀectively. Come hear about a recent report by the Parks Forward Commission recommending vast changes to tackle these issues and ensure the sustainability of our state parks. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID)

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

John Kamm, Founder and Executive Director, Dui Hua Foundation

David Kaplan, Physicist; Co-Star and Producer

Since 1997, the number of women in China’s prisons has risen at a rate far outstripping the increase in its general population. This has necessitated a critical look at the issue, from why it is happening to how to better care for the incarcerated. The Chinese government has begun addressing the problem and is considering adopting UN-mandated protocols for women prisoners. Come discuss this human rights issue with an expert. MLF: ASIA PACIFIC AFFAIRS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: Cynthia Miyashita

Silicon Valley

Particle Fever follows six brilliant scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, marking the start-up of the most expensive experiment in the history of the planet. As they seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe, 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries joined forces in pursuit of a single goal: to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and find the Higgs boson, potentially completing our understanding of ordinary matter. Location: Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. film screening, 8:30 film discussion Cost: $20 non-member, $12 member, $7 stu. Note: In Association with Wonderfest

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

MLF: PERSONAL GROWTH Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco 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: Rosemary Wright

February 11 – 17

W E D 11 | San Francisco

T H U 12 | San Francisco

Living Planet Report 2014: Global Footprint Network

Context, Cloud and Bleeding Edge Tech

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands

Mathis Wackernagel, Ph.D., President, Global Footprint Network

Dr. Wackernagel will discuss the Living Planet Report, 2014 and the Global Footprint Network’s ecological footprint. He has worked on sustainability on six continents. Join us as he speaks about current science and the health of our planet and the serious challenges ahead to ensure healthy, safe environments worldwide at the global, national and local levels.

Robert Scoble, Chief Startup Liaison, Rackspace; Author, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy In conversation with Kevin O’Malley, President, TechTalk / Studio

Eric Topol, MD, Scripps Health Chief Academic Oﬃcer, Scripps Clinic; Author

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

Top tech evangelist Scoble travels the world looking for bleeding edge technology. He’s interviewed thousands of executives and innovators, and reports what he learns through books and social media, where he’s followed by millions of people. Join Scoble to learn about the freshest startups, trends and devices he’s uncovering for 2015.

Much as the printing press liberated knowledge from the control of an elite class, new technology – from the smartphone to machine learning – is poised to democratize medicine. In this new era, patients will control their data and be emancipated from a paternalistic medical regime. The path forward is complex, with resistance from the medical establishment and digitized medicine raising serious privacy issues.

MLFS: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP/ENVIRON MENT & NATURAL RESOURCES/HEALTH & MEDICINE/INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Ann Clark

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, stu. free Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: Bill Grant

T H U 12 | San Francisco

F R I 13 | San Francisco

T U E 17 | San Francisco

Chinatown Walking Tour

Bay Area: Ground Zero for the Reinvention of America

Week to Week

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, and visit a Taoist temple, an herbal store, the site of the first public school in the state, and the famous Fortune Cookie Factory. 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 Note: 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.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Panelists TBA

There is no place on the planet better positioned than the Bay Area to drive the creation of a digital, global and sustainable civilization for the 21st century. Leyden, former managing editor of Wired magazine, presents a dazzling multimedia presentation covering the many tech, economic, social and political transformations that will unfold right here in the coming decades.

At Week to Week, we explore the biggest, most controversial, and sometimes the oddest political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil, and have a good sense of humor. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, an audience discussion of the week’s events and our news quiz! Come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our member social (open to all attendees).

MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 stu. Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, students free (with valid ID)

Peter Leyden, Former Editor, Wired; Founder and CEO, Reinventors; Coauthor, The Long Boom

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

W E D 18 | San Francisco

T H U 19 | San Francisco

Get Fit, Lean and Keep Your Day Job

Socrates Café

San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour

J.D. Griﬃn, M.B.A., Certified Nutrition Coach; Men’s Physique Competitor

What if you could lose fat, get fit, feel healthy and still keep your day job? You can! Griffin wants to teach you how to get yourself into the best shape of your life. By breaking health and fitness down to their essentials, Griffin has developed a functional approach with three sections: nutrition, cardiovascular exercise and resistance training. He offers you a timeefficient, practical guide that anyone can follow to start seeing results. MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Patty James

The Humanities Forum brings Socrates Café to The Commonwealth Club. It will be held every third Wednesday evening for the discussion of philosophical issues. At each monthly meeting the group’s facilitator, Bob Enteen, will invite participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic will briefly explain why she or he considers the subject interesting and important. An open discussion will follow, ending with a summary. Everyone is welcome to attend. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free Program Organizer: George Hammond

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, unique open spaces and historic landmarks. This is a tour for locals with hidden gems you can find only 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 Note: Tour operates rain or shine. Limited to 20 people. Participants must pre-register. The tour covers less than one mile of walking in the Financial District. This tour involves walking up and down stairs.

T H U 1 9 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

F R I 20 | San Francisco

Parliament Members from Around the World: Democracy and the Digital Age

Lessons in Leadership and Success

The Invisible People: Syrian Refugees

Heidi Roizen, Operating Partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Alison van Diggelen, Host, “Fresh Dialogues”; Contributor, BBC – Moderator

Giles Duley, Photojournalist; Humanitarian

Youth and women who are members of parliaments from around the world will discuss how they are harnessing opportunities presented by new mobile technologies and social media to strengthen engagement between citizens and their elected representatives. The panel discussion is part of an exchange program supported by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for Development on Leadership in the Digital Economy. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 stu. Note: In association with the National Democratic Institute and the Institute for Representative Government

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Female engineers, computer scientists and executives remain minorities in U.S. companies. Nowhere is the disparity at the top as stark as in Silicon Valley. Roizen, a well-known Silicon Valley executive, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, will share her experiences in the industry and oﬀer insights into how to overcome challenges of bias and flourish in the tech world. Location: Microsoft Campus, 1065 La Avenida, Mountain View Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $8 stu. Note: Underwritten by Latham & Watkins LLP, with special thanks to Microsoft

Silicon Valley

While on foot patrol in Afghanistan, Duley, an award-winning photographer, stepped on a land mine and became a triple amputee, losing his arm and both legs. He is noted for both his portraits of the rich and famous, and his work which focuses on humanitarian issues and the stark consequences of conflicts on civilians. Duley, who has been honored by Amnesty International, will show excerpts from his latest documentary, which encompasses Syrian refugees. MLF: MIDDLE EAST Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T H U 19 | San Francisco

Panelists TBA

February 18 – 20

W E D 18 | San Francisco

February 23 – 25

M O N 23 | San Francisco

Middle East Discussion Group

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition: Its 100 Year Impact

Make your voice heard in an enriching, provocative and fun discussion with Club members as you weigh in on events shaping the face of the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan. 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: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

Kevin Starr, Ph.D., California State Librarian Emeritus Laura Ackley, Author, San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 Lori Fogarty, Executive Director, Oakland Museum of California Dr. James Ganz, Curator, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Anthea Hartig, Ph.D., Executive Director, California Historical Society – Moderator

This year marks the centennial of the International Panama-Pacific Exposition, a world’s fair that symbolized San Francisco’s transformation from a city devastated by earthquake and fire to an economic powerhouse poised to lead a social and cultural revolution. Among the exhibits at the exposition was the C. P. Huntington, the first steam locomotive purchased by Southern Pacific Railroad. A telephone line was established to New York, so people across the continent could hear the Pacific Ocean. The centerpiece was the Tower of Jewels, which rose to 435 feet and was covered with over 100,000 cut glass Novagems. Buildings that remain include The Palace of Fine Arts and the Japanese Tea House, which was barged down the Peninsula to Belmont. Come hear the story of this defining moment in San Francisco’s history and how it impacts our lives today. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Note: In association with the CA Historical Society

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

M O N 2 3 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

W E D 25 | San Francisco

Gary Wenk: Your Brain on Food

Lessons from the Rim Fire: What It Means

Gary Wenk, Ph.D., Author; Professor of Psych., Neuroscience, Molecular Virology, Immunology & Medical Genetics, Ohio State U Lisa Krieger, Science/Medicine Reporter, San Jose Mercury News – Moderator

What is it about fat, sugar and salt that makes them so irresistible? What happens in our brains when we take a sip of coffee or a drag on a cigarette? We’ve all heard the phrase, “You are what you eat.” Now we find out how true it really is. Wenk investigates the effects of specific foods on our bodies and brains, illuminating why everything we consume affects the way we think, feel and act. Location: Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 stu.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Jeanne Wade Evans, Deputy Regional Forester, Pacific Southwest Region, U.S. Forest Service Joe Amodio, Member, Tuolumne River Trust Advisory Committee Michael Carlin, Deputy General Manager, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Larry Cope, Director of Economic Development, Tuolumne Economic Development Authority Joe Litehiser, Ph.D.; Senior Scientist, Bechtel Corp; President, Friends of Camp Mather

With California’s drought conditions building, 2013 and 2014 saw some of the worst fires in Yosemite and Sierra history. The Rim Fire and subsequent fires aﬀected incredible amounts of acreage and economies in both the U.S. national forests and California’s forests and parks. The recovery eﬀorts and lessons learned involve stories of enormous destruction, damage, protection and renewal. Learn what has happened to people’s lives, homes, businesses, and recreational opportunities and about the ecological and habitat impact. Learn how people, rivers, communities, organizations and businesses coped, and explore the work our panelists are doing to protect and restore Yosemite and the Sierras. MLFS: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP/ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco 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

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

S W I T Z E R L A N D WA L K Nature & Culture of Appenzell & Engelberg August 25 – September 6, 2015

HIGHLIGHTS Journey to Switzerland, the world’s oldest living democracy and a matchless paradise for walking. Luxuriate in the magnificent views of the Swiss and the Austrian Alps. Discover the village of Appenzell, with its charming houses adorned by murals. Visit St. Gallen and the Abbey Library with manuscripts dating from the 8th century. Enjoy a curator-led tour of Engelberg’s Benedictine Monastery, housing the oldest church organ in Switzerland.

Experience an optional e-bike tour and take a boat ride on Lake Lucerne. Hike to a castle in Werdenberg, the only wooden medieval settlement, which retains its character. Sample regional specialties during beer and cheese tastings. Explore Rutli-Meadows — the “Cradle of Switzerland.” Take the Mt.Titlis Rotair cableway — the highest glacier excursion in Switzerland.

Commonwealth Club Travel

What to Expect

Itinerary

Participants must be in very good health and able to keep up with an active group. Walks are easy to moderate, 2–4 miles and approximately 2–4 hours per day. Expect a 500–800 feet elevation change over 2 miles. Most activities each day will take place at an average altitude of 3,000–6,500 feet, although on one day you will reach 10,600 feet.

Tuesday, August 25 Depart the U.S. on independent flights to Zurich, Switzerland.

in town, followed by a free afternoon. Return to Appenzell at leisure. (Trains depart every 30 minutes.) Hotel Adler (B,L,D)

Wednesday, August 26 Zurich to Appenzell Arrive at Zurich Airport and transfer to our hotel (1 ½ hours) in Appenzell, which sits at 2,676 feet. Enjoy a historical orientation walk through the village and visit a handicraft workshop that produces the hackbrett, a stringed instrument found in every Appenzeller folkore group, and similar to a zither. Enjoy a lecture before dinner at our hotel. Hotel Adler (D)

Saturday, August 29 Ebenalp & Mt. Schaefler We journey by train to Wasserauen, and take a cable car to Ebenalp (5,000 ft). We then descend on foot to see the prehistoric Wildkirchli caves, inhabited around 40,000 years ago. Walk down to the hermit dwellings and the well-known Berggasthaus Aescher. Continue on to Mt. Schaefler with magnificent views of the Appenzeller Mountains. Return by cable car and train. Back at the hotel, learn about traditional Appenzeller singing before dinner at a local restaurant. Hotel Adler (B,D)

In order to participate, one should be able to walk on gravel and dirt hiking trails, and through meadows. One should be able to use stairs without handrails and walk and stand unassisted for periods of two hours at a time. You will need to board buses, trains and gondolas unassisted. Hotels are clean, comfortable and charming, but not luxury accommodations. You do not have to participate in every activity, and several options for longer and shorter walks are available depending on the day. The tour director will brief people each day on the next day’s options and activities.

Thursday, August 27 Hoher Kasten Today’s walk takes us along the Sitter River to Weissbad (2,700 ft), or alternatively take a moderate uphill trail to Bruelisau (3,000 ft), then ride the cable car up to Mount Hoher Kasten (6,000 ft). Luxuriate in the magnificent views of the Alpstein, Rhine Valley and the Austrian Alps. After lunch at the top, we return to Appenzell. Hotel Adler (B,L) Friday, August 28 St. Gallen Take a train ride to St. Gallen, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visit the Old Town, including several old houses and enjoy a lecture in the Cathedral. Explore the Abbey Library’s beautiful rococo and stucco work. See manuscripts dating back to the 8th century and a ceiling painting by Josef Wannenmacher. Enjoy a traditional Swiss lunch at the oldest restaurant

Online: commonwealthclub.org/travel

Phone: 415.597.6720

Sunday, August 30 Appenzell Leisure morning or an optional (and very fun) guided E-Bike tour to enjoy the Alpine panorama. In the afternoon learn about beer making and sample local specialty breads and beer at a beer tasting. Dinner at the hotel. Hotel Adler (B,D) Monday, August 31 Werdenberg & Engelberg Depart by coach for Engelberg, with a stop to independently explore the medieval castle of Werdenberg, founded in 1230. Continue along Walensee Lake, with a stop in Einsiedeln, known for its splendid church, considered one of the finest examples of Baroque architecture in Switzerland. Arrive at the hotel in Engelberg (3,444 ft). Hotel Schweizerhof (B,D)

Email: Travel@commonwealthclub.org

Trip Details Tuesday, September 1 Engelberg Enjoy a curator-led visit to the magnificent Benedictine Monastery, founded in 1120. Then walk to the impressive valley waterfall (3,555 ft) where we take a cable car to Fürenalp (5,544 ft). Have a light lunch at the “Hütte”, and then return to the valley by cable car. Walk back to Engelberg. Hotel Schweizerhof (B,L,D) Wednesday, September 2 Gerschnialp Take a gondola up to Gerschnialp and then a walk to Sälmi Töngi. Every summer since 1975, Sälmi Töngi cheese dairy has been turning 300,000 kg of cow’s milk and two tons of goat’s milk into rounds of cheese, which are stored in cellars until they are ripe enough to take to market. Enjoy a cheese tasting followed by an optional trotti bike ride from Gerschnialp down to Engelberg. Or return the way you came. Afternoon to explore Engelberg on your own. Hotel Schweizerhof (B,D) Thursday, September 3 Engelberg & Mt. Titlis Walk from the hotel to the Mt. Titlis (10,627 ft) cable car and travel in the world’s first revolving cable car, “Rotair.” At the top of the highest mountain in central Switzerland you will witness breathtaking scenery and walk through the Glacier Grotto. The Titlis Cliff Walk holds the record for being the highest suspension bridge in Europe. Enjoy a lecture about glaciology and the different snow conditions. From Mt. Titlis, walk over beautiful snowfields before tak-

ing the funicular to Trubsee (5,890 ft) where we enjoy a walk around the mountain lake. Continue by cable car down to Engelberg. Hotel Schweizerhof (B,L,D)

Dates:

Friday, September 4 Lucerne & Mt. Stanserhorn Travel to Lucerne this morning. For those interested, an optional excursion to the famous Stanserhorn is offered. (A fantastic 360° panorama on the “CabriO” cable car is exciting, but not for everyone.) It is the world’s first cable car with a roofless upper deck. In the late afternoon take a guided city tour through the old town of Lucerne. Hotel Ambassador (B)

Minimum 13, Maximum 22 participants (not including staff)

Saturday, September 5 Lucerne & Rutli-Meadows Take a train ride followed by a unique postal-bus to Seelisberg (2,627 ft). Walk down through the forest to Rutli-Meadows (1,670 ft) — the “Cradle of Switzerland” above Lake Lucerne, Uri. Enjoy a lecture and a typical Swiss lunch in the place where the Confederates convened to confirm the Everlasting League of 1291. Then we take a boat across Lake Lucerne to Lucerne. Enjoy a farewell dinner. Hotel Ambassador (B,L,D) Saturday, September 6 After breakfast, transfer to Zurich airport. (B)

*itinerary is subject to change

Online: commonwealthclub.org/travel

Phone: 415.597.6720

August 25 to September 6, 2015 (13 days)

Group Size: Cost:

$4,695 per person $500 single room supplement

Included:

Tour leader, local guides and guest speakers; activities as specified in the itinerary; transportation throughout; airport transfers on designated group dates and times; accommodations as specified (or similar); meals (B=breakfast, L=lunch, D=dinner); wine and beer with welcome and farewell events; bottled water at meals; Commonwealth Club representative with 13 or more participants; gratuities to local guides, drivers, and for all included group activities; pre-departure materials.

Not included:

International airfare to Switzerland; gratuity to local tour leader; visa and passport fees; meals not specified as included; optional outings and gratuities for those independant outings; alcoholic beverages beyond welcome and farewell events; travel insurance (recommended, information will be sent upon registration); items of a purely personal nature.

Email: Travel@commonwealthclub.org

S W I T Z E R L A N D WA L K RESERVATION FORM August 25 – September 6, 2015

Commonwealth Club Travel

Phone: 415.597.6720 Fax: 415.597.6729

NAME 1 NAME 2 ADDRESS

CITY/STATE/ZIP

HOME PHONE

CELL

E-MAIL ADDRESS

SINGLE TRAVELERS ONLY If this is a reservation for one person, please indicate: ___ I plan to share accommodations with _________________________________ OR ___ I wish to have single accommodations. OR ___ I’d like to know about possible roommates. I am a smoker / nonsmoker. (circle one) PAYMENT* Here is my deposit of $______ ($500 per person) for ___ place(s). ___ Enclosed is my check (make payable to Commonwealth Club). OR ___ Charge my deposit to my ___ Visa ___ MasterCard ___ American Express CARD#

EXPIRES

SECURITY CODE

AUTHORIZED CARDHOLDER SIGNATURE

DATE

*Please note that final payment must be made by check. ___ I/We have read the Terms and Conditions for this program and agree to them. SIGNATURE

PLEASE RETURN THIS FORM ALONG WITH YOUR DEPOSIT TO: The Commonwealth Club; Attn: Travel Department P.O. Box 194210 San Francisco, CA 94119 You may also fax the form to 415.597.6729

Terms and Conditions: The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted European Walking Tours to organize this tour. Reservations: A $500 per person deposit, along with a completed and signed Reservation Form, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check. Cancellation and Refund Policy: Notification of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply: • 91 or more days or more prior to departure: $350 per person • 90-1 days to departure: 100% fare Tour pricing is based on the number of participants. Tour can also be cancelled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor European Walking Tours accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour. Trip Cancellation and Interruption Insurance: We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation. Medical Information: Participation in this program requires that CST: 2096889-40

you be in good health and able to walk several miles each day. The “What to Expect” outlines what is required. If you have any concerns see your doctor on the advisability of you joining this program. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure. Itinerary Changes & Trip Delay: Itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant. If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road conditions, transportation delays, airline schedules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or European Walking Tours or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes is not included. Limitations of Liability: In order to join the program, participants must complete a Participant Waiver provided by the CWC and agree to these terms: CWC and European Walking Tours its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any transportation carrier, hotel, ground operator, or other suppliers of services connected with this program (“other providers”), and the other providers are solely responsible and liable for providing their respective ser-

vices. CWC and European Walking Tours shall not be held liable for (A) any damage to, or loss of, property or injury to, or death of, persons occasioned directly or indirectly by an act or omission of any other provider, including but not limited to any defect in any aircraft, or vehicle operated or provided by such other provider, and (B) any loss or damage due to delay, cancellation, or disruption in any manner caused by the laws, regulations, acts or failures to act, demands, orders, or interpositions of any government or any subdivision or agent thereof, or by acts of God, strikes, fire, flood, war, rebellion, terrorism, insurrection, sickness, quarantine, epidemics, theft, or any other cause(s) beyond their control. The participant waives any claim against CWC/ European Walking Tours for any such loss, damage, injury, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any mental, physical, or other condition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/ European Walking Tours shall not be liable for any air carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket to or from the departure city. Baggage and personal effects are at all times the sole responsibility of the traveler. Reasonable changes in the itinerary may be made where deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers.

T H U 26 | San Francisco

A Republic, If You Can Keep It: The Threat to American Democracy

Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered

Larry Kramer, President, The Hewlett Foundation

About the only thing conservatives and liberals agree upon is that the American political system is dysfunctional. But what are the causes, and what might be the cure? Larry Kramer, currently president of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and a constitutional law scholar, will discuss the origins of the problem and eﬀorts being undertaken by the foundation to address the issue. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

BART to The Club Hop on any city-bound

Dianne Hales, Author, Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered

at the Montgomery or Powell Street station.

Why does Mona Lisa’s smile still enchant us? Little is known about the world’s most recognized face, most revered artist and most praised and parodied painting. Join Hales as she reveals Da Vinci’s muse, Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, and explores Giocondo’s colorful family history and the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife and a mother.

The Club is now located at 555 Post Street.

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond

M O N 02 | San Francisco

Restructuring Health Care: The Massive, Disruptive Integration of Care Delivery and Financing

Book Discussion: The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade

Mark Zitter, CEO, Zitter Health Insights Terry Stone, Managing Partner, Health & Life Sciences Practice, Oliver Wyman Paul Markovich, President and CEO, Blue Shield of California.

Wade investigates humanity’s transforming propensity for religion, showing how our innate piety has adapted to changing needs and conditions. Beginning as hunter-gatherers, humans were able to experience independent and personal access to the divine. But with the rise of organized agriculture and the growth of cities, religion became hierarchical. Wade, seeking the answer to religion’s ubiquity, posits that faith, acting as a catalyst of social cohesion, became effectively written into our genetic code – along with a periodic urge to rebel against the institutionalization of worship.

We all want more health care and to pay less for it. The Aﬀordable Care Act increased coverage but did little to stem rising costs. What else can be done? There is a growing movement to integrate the accountability for treatment and financing care. Hospital systems and large medical groups are assuming increasing financial risk for the populations they serve, while health insurers are partnering with or even purchasing provider organizations to deliver care to their members. This interactive panel will explore what’s working, what barriers remain and what we can expect from these major changes in the U.S. health care system. MLF: HEALTH & MEDICINE Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Bill Grant

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

MLF: SF BOOK DISCUSSION Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizer: Barbara Massey

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

F R I 27 | San Francisco

San Francisco

February 25 – March 2

W E D 25 | San Francisco

March 2 – 5

M O N 02 | San Francisco

T U E 03 | San Francisco

Week to Week

Nob Hill Walking Tour

A Sense-ational Wine Experience

Explore one of San Francisco’s 44 hills, and one of its original “Seven Hills.” Because of its great views and central location, Nob Hill became an exclusive enclave of the rich and famous on the West Coast, who built large mansions in the neighborhood. Visit the city’s largest house of worship, Grace Cathedral, and discover architectural tidbits and anecdotes about the railroad barons and silver kings. A true San Francisco experience of elegance, urbanity, scandals and fabulous views.

Annette McDonnell, Culinary Specialist; Tasting Room Manager, Paradise Ridge Winery

Panelists TBA

At Week to Week, we explore the biggest, most controversial, and sometimes the oddest political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil, and have a good sense of humor. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, an audience discussion of the week’s events, and our news quiz! Come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our member social (open to all attendees).

Indulge yourself in a sense-ational wine experience! Paradise Ridge Winery will be presenting their unique Wine & Herb tasting, a passionate collaboration between Paradise Ridge’s culinary expert Annette McDonnell and Swede’s Feeds Nursery in Kenwood. Using your senses, discover the remarkable flavors you find in wine using herbs you can grow in a garden or kitchen window.

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

MLF: BAY GOURMET Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $22 non-members, $10 members Program Organizer: Cathy Curtis

W E D 04 | San Francisco

T H U 05 | San Francisco

Humanities West Book Discussion: The Song of Roland

Who is Putin?

Elder Financial Abuse and Blessing Scams

Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, students free (with valid ID)

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

Join us to discuss The Song of Roland, the anonymous classical epic that glorifies the heroism of Charlemagne in the 778 battle between the Franks and the Moors. Lynn Harris will lead the discussion. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: In association with Humanities West

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Ilya Ponomarev, Fmr Opposition Member, Russian State Duma; Fmr Chair, Innovations Subcommittee of Duma

George Gascón, SF D.A.

Who is Vladimir Putin: powerful tyrant or cornered ex-KGB oﬃcer who became Russian President? What is his end game? How should the White House handle the crisis between Russia and the West? Join our discussion with a leader of the Russian opposition. Hon. Ilya Ponomarev was the only State Duma member to vote against the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation. In August the Kremlin banned him from returning to Russia.

In 2012 there were 47 reported cases of blessing scams, a type of fraud that preys on elderly Chinese women and takes advantage of their love and commitment to their families. The San Francisco D.A.’s oﬃce is the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to successfully prosecute blessing scam cases and secure the highest sentence. Come hear D.A. Gascón discuss his oﬃce’s blessing scam public education campaign and how you can protect your friends, family and community from falling victim to elder financial abuse and scams.

MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: Norma Walden

MLF: GROWNUPS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: John Milford

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

THU 05 | TBA

Explore the World from The Commonwealth Club Planning Meeting

Chef Michael Mina: The Makings of a Food Empire

All interested Club members are welcome to attend our bimonthly, one-hour planning meetings of the International Relations Member-Led Forum. We focus on Europe, Latin America, Africa and worldwide topics. Join us to discuss current international issues and plan programs for 2015. MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Norma Walden

Michael Mina, Founder, Mina Group; Executive Chef, Restaurant Michael Mina; James Beard Award Winner “My philosophy on cooking is my philosophy on life: create balance and harmony. In the end, it is all about creating lasting relationships.” – Chef Michael Mina

March 5 – 9

T H U 05 | San Francisco

Starting in the kitchen of a small hometown restaurant at the age of just 15, 46-year-old Mina’s relationship with cooking has been lasting, to say the least. For most chefs in a food mecca like ours, maintaining a successful restaurant for just a few years is a coup – but not for Mina. Since coming to the city in 1991 to open up Aqua, Mina has opened more than 20 restaurants across the country, including the eponymous Restaurant Michael Mina, Bourbon Steak, RN74, Pabu and The Ramen Bar, making his empire bigger than those of other greats like Emeril Lagasse and Tyler Florence. Mina is a master builder with a talent for the details, which has helped him create a giant yet sustainable enterprise that churns out not only great dishes but also a network of talent that pushes food forward. Join us to celebrate Michael Mina’s legacy of influence on American cuisine and learn just what makes a titan tick. See website for time, price and location details.

In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China

M O N 09 | San Francisco

Podcasting Subscribe to our podcasts! Receive a new program recording each week. It’s free!

Minimizing Fear George Hammond, Author, Rational Idealism and Conversations With Socrates

Meyer draws on his three-year residence in Wasteland, Manchuria, to bring to life a sweeping view of a rapidly changing China. The rice-farming village was transformed in a common process: A private company moved in, introduced organic farming and provided workers apartments in new highrise buildings in exchange for their land rights. Meyer uses Wasteland to help make sense of variegated contemporary China.

Monday Night Philosophy understands that we have explained life to ourselves in ways that have scared us silly for so long that it has become an engrained habit. Ironically, it’s a habit we rather enjoy because fear often keeps us more alert than we’d otherwise be. Tonight we’ll sort through those fears with the goal of understanding how unlikely it is that these fears are justified, eliminating those that are highly irrational and minimizing those that are merely ridiculous.

MLF: ASIA PACIFIC AFFAIRS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: Lillian Nakagawa

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond

Michael Meyer, Author

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

For more information, visit commonwealthclub.org/podcast

Silicon Valley

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T H U 05 | San Francisco

March 9 – 10

M O N 09 | San Francisco

T U E 10 | San Francisco

Brewster Kahle: Open Source Housing for Good

International Careers: Explore the World As You Work

Digital Librarian and Founder, Internet Archive; Co-founder, Alexa Internet

Aﬀordable housing is increasingly becoming an unattainable dream for many Americans living in cities. Could a tool from the digital open source software movement be a solution? Public licenses for apartments would eliminate debt and allow people working for the common good to live in high-rent cities. Kahle explores the potential of an open source housing model that could ease the housing squeeze. MLF: BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, stu. free Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

Terry Vogt, Managing Director, Terra Global Capital Lisa Reinsberg, Executive Director, International Justice Resource Center Vaido Vald, Superintendent, Skanska – Global Project Development and Construction Group Nikki Sayres, Sr. Director of Field Representation and Operations, The Asia Foundation

Have you ever thought of taking your sharply honed professional skill set overseas? Perhaps to use your management expertise to help shape the next green building complex in Denmark? Or your legal and human rights knowledge to push for the fair treatment of migrant workers in China? Our panel of international specialists from private industry and the nonprofit sphere will discuss opportunities for international work in various disciplines. Learn about the rewards and possible pitfalls of working abroad. Following the program you will have the opportunity to talk directly with the speakers. MLF: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Norma Walden Note: in association with NorCal Peace Corps Association

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

T U E 10 | San Francisco

Speeches on CDs

The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Oﬃcer, Co3 Systems; Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School; Author, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Join us for a shocking look at the ways corporations and governments track and control people, and the ways we can fight back. Data is everywhere. We create it every time we go online, turn our phone on (or oﬀ!) or pay with a credit card. This data is stored, studied and bought and sold by corporations and governments for surveillance, profit and control. “Foremost security expert” (Wired) and best-selling author Bruce Schneier shows how this data has led to a double-edged Internet: a web that gives power to the people but is abused by the institutions on which those people depend.

Did you miss a speech you really wanted to hear? Visit commonwealthclub.org/purchase or call (415) 597-6700 to order an audio CD for only $15!

Schneier reveals the full extent of surveillance, censorship and propaganda in society today, examining the risks of cybercrime, cyberterrorism and cyberwar. He shares technological, legal and social solutions that can help shape a more equal, private and secure world. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco 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)

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

T H U 12 | San Francisco

Getting to Good Policy in the Era of Political Polarization

2015: Critical Year for Planet Earth

March 11 – 17

W E D 11 | San Francisco

Michael Rich, President and CEO, RAND Corporation

Michael D. Rich is president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation, a non-profit, nonpartisan research organization that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. Since assuming his roles in 2011, Rich has focused on extending the impact of RAND’s work and challenging the organization to extend its legacy of innovation and helping decision makers stay ahead of the curve on the issues that matter most. In his nearly 40-year career at the RAND Corporation, Rich has consulted with heads of state, business executives and philanthropists about addressing the world’s most pressing problems. As the political climate has become increasingly polarized, is there a role for institutions like RAND that are committed to objective analyses and datadriven conclusions and recommendations? Rich explains how rigorous research and analysis should influence the policy debate even in today’s heated political environment. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

James Fahn, Executive Director, Internews’ Earth Journalism Network David Akana, Journalist, Cameroon Gustavo Faleiros, Journalist, Brazil Neha Sethi, Journalist, India Mark Schapiro, Journalist, U.S.

This year is going to be crucial for the earth’s climate and for the future of our planet as diplomats and other stakeholders look for an international protocol that will coordinate action against global warming. Join us to hear from these seasoned journalists who cover climate change, the impacts of global warming and the future of our planet. MLF: ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, stu. Program Organizer: Ann Clark

T U E 17 | San Francisco

The Amazons

The Allure of Irish Dancing

Andrew Keen

Adrienne Mayor, Research Scholar, Stanford

Amazons – fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world – were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Heracles and Achilles dueled Amazon queens, and Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great and Pompey each tangled with them. But were Amazons real? Mayor argues that a timeless search for a balance between the sexes explains the allure of the Amazons and reminds us that there were as many Amazon love stories as there were war stories. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco 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

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Entrepreneur; Author, The Internet Is not the Answer

Michael Dillon, ADCRG, Dillon Magh Adhair Academy of Irish Dance

Come celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a demonstration of Irish dancing by championship-level dancers from a renowned Bay Area dance school. Dillon, an Ard Diploma Coimisiuin le Rinci Gaelacha (a teacher certified by the worldwide governing body of Irish dance), will also explain the history that permeates this detailed and disciplined dance culture. This will be the perfect pre-pub experience, as you are sure to leave with your feet tapping out a jig – or maybe even a reel. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: George Hammond

Silicon Valley

The advent of the Internet ushered in one of the greatest shifts in society since the industrial revolution. There are many positive ways in which the Internet has contributed to a more open and dynamic world. We are, however, less aware of the Internet’s deeply negative eﬀects on our psychology, economy and culture. Keen, a 20-year industry insider, shows us the tech world with all its imperfections and explores how we can mitigate the unpleasant and unforeseen aftershocks that result from the reshaping of our society. MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6:30 p.m. prog., 7:30 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: Beau Fernald

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

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M O N 16 | San Francisco

March 18 – 19

W E D 18 | San Francisco

T H U 19 | San Francisco

Estate Planning in Film

Socrates Café

Waterfront Walk

MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free Program Organizer: George Hammond

Location: Meet in front of Boulevard Restaurant, 1 Mission (corner of Mission at Steuart) Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Note: Limited to 20. Must pre-register. Tour operates rain or shine.

John E. O’Grady, Esq., Chair of the Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Section, Bar Association of San Francisco

Attorney and mediator O’Grady discusses the latest approaches to the ageold estate planning questions raised in the popular movie A Thousand Acres, a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” He’ll show relevant clips to explore creative ways to protect your property rights and plan for your care and financial security without giving up control of your aﬀairs. There is no need to see the movie in advance. MLF: GROWNUPS Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 stu. Program Organizer: John Milford

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T H U 19 | San Francisco

The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972

Why Cuba Matters Tom Hayden, Activist; Director, Peace and Justice Resource Center; Author, Listen, Yankee: Why Cuba Matters

Christopher Agee, Assistant Professor, History Department, University of Colorado, Denver

During the Sixties, the nation turned its eyes to San Francisco as the city’s police force clashed with the free speech, civil rights and sexual liberation movements. More than just one-time flare-ups, these street-level conflicts forced Americans (and San Franciscans) to reconsider the role of the police oﬃcer in democratic society. Historian Christopher Agee explores the influential ways in which San Francisco liberals provided a solution that championed both broad diversity and strong policing by turning to the police as partners and granting them a powerful tool: the use of discretion. MLF: HUMANITIES Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco 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

In the wake of President Obama’s momentous move to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, one of America’s best-known voices of political activism oﬀers fresh insight into one of history’s most enigmatic international relationships. He draws upon his own past as a revolutionary student leader whose eﬀorts to mobilize political change in the U.S. mirrored a simultaneous radical transformation in Cuba. He explores the great opportunity both countries now have to finally find common ground. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 stu.

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San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

T U E 24 | San Francisco

Future of Afghanistan

Equality and Justice

Rohila Jalali, B.A., Business Administration Nangyalai Attal, B.A., English Language and Literature, 2014 UN Youth Courage Awardee Akmal Siddiqu, B.A., Finance and Management Ihsanullah Shagiwal, B.A., Business Administration Atta Arghandiwal, Author, Lost Decency: The Untold Afghan Story – Moderator

Shelby Steele, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution; Author, Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

A panel of young, dedicated Fulbright scholars hailing from Afghanistan and studying critical business and management fields at San Francisco’s Golden Gate University consider their nation’s future and their own personal goals for when they return to their beloved homeland. The three men and one woman are compelling figures: Rohila, who grew up in a Pakistani refugee camp, worked for USAID in Afghanistan; Nangyalai, a recent United Nations Youth Courage Awardee, pushed his government for labor reform; Akmal is a leader in the developing Afghan telecommunications industry; and Ihsanullah has taken on roles for the Afghan government and numerous international aid organizations. Regardless of their varied backgrounds, all are guided by a commitment to gender equality and open entrepreneurship in shaping Afghanistan’s development.

March 20 – 26

F R I 20 | San Francisco

The United States today is hopelessly polarized. Steele writes that the roots of this can be traced back to the ‘60s. While dismantling systemic racism and militarism, liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the American character. Steele believes that the resulting half-century of well-intentioned but ineﬀective social programs have failed to achieve their stated aim: true equality. Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 stu.

WED 25 | TBA

T H U 26 | San Francisco

Tavi Gevinson: INFORUM’s 21st Century Visionary Award

Russian Hill Walking Tour

Editor-in-Chief, Rookie Magazine; Editor, Rookie Yearbook Three; Broadway Actress, “This Is Our Youth”

It’s quite possible that Tavi Gevinson is the most influential 18-year-old in America. Despite the fact that she just graduated from high school, her resumé includes blogging phenom, magazine editor, writer, movie actress and Broadway star. At age 11, she started Style Rookie, a blog that garnered the attention of fashionistas the world over and has since spawned a corresponding online culture magazine, Rookie, three annual yearbooks and a nationwide tour. Frequently dubbed a wunderkind, Tavi is both a hero to teen girls everywhere and a leading creative voice in the digital era, covering topics – from astrophysics and Carl Sagan to how to wear a leotard “without giving a damn” – through a smart, modern, feminist lens. Join us as we honor Tavi Gevinson and her singular voice with INFORUM’s 21st Century Visionary Award. See website for time, price and location details.

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

Join a more active Commonwealth Club Neighborhood Adventure! Russian Hill is a magical area with secret gardens and amazing views. Join Rick Evans for a two-hour hike up hills and staircases and learn about the history of this neighborhood. See where great artists and architects lived and worked, and walk down residential streets where some of the most historically significant houses in the Bay Area are located. Location: In front of Swensen’s Ice Cream Store,1999 Hyde Street at Union. The tour ends about six blocks from the Swensen’s Ice Cream Shop, at the corner of Vallejo and Jones. Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Notes: Steep hills and staircases, recommended for good walkers. Parking diﬃcult. Limited to 20. Must pre-register. Tour operates rain or shine.

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

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www.commonwealthclub.org/events

MLF: MIDDLE EAST Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

March 26 – 31

T H U 26 | San Francisco

T H U 2 6 | S i l i co n Va l l e y

Deep Decarbonization of the United States

Happiness and Habits

Jim Williams, Chief Scientist, Energy and Environmental Economics

Is it possible for the United States to greatly reduce its carbon emissions and still maintain a vigorous economy? Concern about climate change impacts on the environment and economy is leading to innovation as scientists seek new ways to reduce carbon emissions. Dr. Williams and his team at E3, along with researchers at Berkeley Lab and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have completed an assessment of the technical and economic feasibility of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Their work is based on a detailed sector-by-sector, region-by-region, year-by-year analysis of the infrastructure changes, technology requirements and costs of a low-carbon transition. The work was sponsored by the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP), an international collaboration with research teams from the 15 largest GHG emitting nations, who are developing long-term scenarios for decarbonization in their own countries. The DDPP aims to advance the climate dialogue by providing decision makers with a more concrete understanding of what limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius would mean for their countries, states and businesses.

Gretchen Rubin, Author, The Happiness Project and Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

Humans are creatures of pattern – we repeat our standard behaviors over and over again every day. Rubin believes that when we change our habits, we change our lives. But how do we effect this change? Through research and experimentation, Rubin oﬀers a framework of diﬀerent strategies to fit our individual personalities. Come experience how every individual can lead a happier and more productive life. Location: Mayer Theatre, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $8 stu.; Premium: $50 non-members, $40 members

MLF: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Gerald Harris

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

M O N 30 | San Francisco

T U E 31 | San Francisco

Middle East Discussion Group

Regional Transit Governance Seminar

Join us for a half-day seminar with transportation experts and public oﬃcials discussing regional transit governance challenges and best practices that shape development and growth in several vibrant urban landscapes. This event will be held in conjunction with the release of the Eno Center for Transportation’s most recent paper.

MLF: MIDDLE EAST Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

Transit Systems: Promoting Integration

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Getting to the Route of It: The Role of Governance in Regional Transit Joshua Schank, President and CEO, Eno Center for Transportation

Overcoming Transit Fragmentation Ratna Amin, Transportation Policy Director, SPUR

Transit Villages: The Missing Key to Transit Success Rod Diridon, Emeritus Executive Director, Mineta Transportation Institute

Nuria Fernandez, CEO, Valley Transportation Authority (invited) Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco Time: 8:30 a.m. continental breakfast, 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. program Cost: FREE Note: In association The Eno Center for Transportation, Mineta Transportation Institute, and SPUR

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

W E D 01 | San Francisco

Barney Frank

Week to Week

Former Member of Congress (D-MA); Author, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage

Panelists TBA

How did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay Jew with a thick New Jersey–Massachusetts accent become one of the most eﬀective politicians of his time? Barney Frank relates his journey from the outskirts of New York City to Boston’s city hall to the U.S. Congress, where he played a vital role in the struggle for personal freedom and economic fairness for more than four decades. With his trademark directness and insight, Frank explores the emotional toll of living in the closet and how he became the first member of Congress to voluntarily disclose his homosexuality. He chronicles his lifelong struggle against inequality, which culminated in co-writing the most significant Wall Street regulations since the Great Depression. Join the discussion with this quirky and robust political figure. Location: TBA Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: Cost: $25 non-members, $15 members, $7 students (with valid ID); Premium: $60 nonmembers, $50 members (includes priority seating and a copy of the book) Note: A Good Lit event underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

April 1

WED 01 | TBA

Join The Club

WED March 18 | San Francisco Jeﬀrey Lieberman, M.D.; Lawrence C. Kolb Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; Author, Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychology

Membership is open to all. Support for The Club’s work is derived principally from membership dues.

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of cruelly chaining “lunatics” in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. However, the path to legitimacy for “the black sheep of medicine” has been anything but smooth. Through a period that saw hydrotherapy, lobotomies and primal screaming regularly used as treatments, psychiatry has endured serious growing pains on its way to becoming an accepted evidence-based profession. Dr. Lieberman traces the history of the field, from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science to its maturity, all the while arguing that we dispel the stigma linked to mental illnesses and treat them as diseases rather than as unfortunate states of mind.

For more information, visit commonwealthclub.org/join

Location: SF Club Oﬃce Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, 12 p.m. program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

F E B R UA RY/MA R C H 2015

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Late Breaking

WATER continued from page 19 DALTON: Buzz Thompson, something people talk about: mega-droughts – that we may be going back to more historically normal drier times: Climate change or not? THOMPSON: We don’t know for sure exactly what’s going to happen in the face of climate change, but we do know three things. The first thing is that if you look back over California’s history and the history of the western United States over the past thousand years, the last 150 years actually look pretty good. Over the last 150 years, we’ve had droughts probably about every 10 to 15 years, and we’re used to those droughts being relatively short. In some cases they’re just a couple of years. At their longest, they’re somewhere between five and seven years. If you go back and look at the records from a period from about 1000 to 1300 A.D., you find that there were some droughts that were much longer than anything that we have seen today. Some of those droughts lasted, for example, up to 13 years. Of much greater concern is that there were periods of time that sometimes lasted to 80 to 140 years in which, though not every year was a dry year, we never recovered from the droughts that we had. So we would have a 13-year drought, then maybe we would have rain for a year or two, but that wasn’t enough rain to make up for the 13-year drought before we went into the next 10-year drought. Over those periods of time, we know that a number of our lakes and rivers actually shrank in size because of how little precipitation we were seeing during that period of

time. So even without climate change, if you look back, we need to be prepared for much worse droughts than we’ve seen over the last 150 years. Then, second of all, if you look at climate change, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to precipitation levels in the state of California. Precipitation could go up; it could go down; it could vary region to region; but what we do know is it’s going to be warmer, and as a result of it being warmer we’ll probably have smaller snowpacks and those snowpacks will melt earlier in the year. That’s of concern because those snowpacks are a natural reservoir for us; to the degree they are smaller and they melt earlier in the year it’s going to be harder for us to harvest those for the water that we need. The third thing that’s important to recognize is that climate change is not just about a change in the mean. It’s not just about whether or not over time we’re going to have more rain, less rain, more snowpack, less snowpack. Climate change is going to bring extremes. California is a state of extremes. We have extreme droughts. We have floods. What we pretty well know is, under climate change, those extremes are going to become more extreme. We will have more drought periods. We will have more flood periods. The droughts will probably be worse. The floods are going to be worse. All of that means that people like Felicia and Debbie who are managing our state water resources for us are going to have to worry about how you manage for situations that we have never encountered in our own experiences.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m Miriam Gordon, I’m the California Director of Clean Water Action. I want to follow up on the groundwater issue. Today in the legislature, both groundwater and the water bond are being addressed, and two bills that would require sustainable groundwater management plans to be developed throughout the state are being heavily opposed by a long list of agricultural representatives throughout our state. They don’t want to be forced to create plans and they don’t want to be forced to measure their withdrawals or do any kind of reporting. MARCUS: When I first came back into government a couple of years ago, I was stunned at how this dialogue had changed since I left about 10 years before. It used to be you couldn’t mention groundwater or people would go crazy and just say, Don’t you dare touch this; we can’t even have a conversation. I was struck by how many people were having conversations about it around the state, in coﬀee shops and bars, if not at microphones. I even had people from the agricultural community frequently come up to me and say, You have got to do something about it. Just don’t say I told you so. Now those people are speaking at microphones, too, and I think a piece of it is this neighbor-versus-neighbor issue. There’s something about being neighborly, I think, that is important to people generally, but I also think there’s a lot of fear. It’s complex. Do people trust the state government or government in general? Many people do not, so it’s understandable as we’re Photos by Ed Ritger (Water Underfoot)

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F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

trying to do anything new – I mean it’s been 100 years; part of the deal for getting the state surface water rights system passed in 1914 was they dropped groundwater out in the legislature. After 100 years, the time has come to revisit that. But you are correct: There’s a tremendous amount of opposition and it’s not going to be over until it’s over. AUDIENCE MEMBER: As I understand it, the urban use of all the water, considering environment and agriculture and so on, runs roughly about 10 percent of the total amount used. Now if we all cut at 20 percent, we’re talking 2 percent of the whole – of the water use. It seems like we’re also fining folks. I live out in Orinda. Our yearly bill runs in the vicinity of $600. We just passed a law that says that communities can charge $500 a day for what they construe as overuse. What I’m saying is that we seem to be spending an awful lot of time going for the people who use the least water, and it seems totally unfair. DEBBIE DAVIS: I want to make one really important comment, and that is that ag is not a monolith. There are lots of different kinds of agriculture in this state and lots of different kinds of farmers in the state and there are many who work very hard to be as conservative in their water use as they can, but the fact is it takes water to grow things. If you have a garden in your backyard, you know that. And our division between how much water we use for ag versus our urban areas is very consistent with the rest of the world, frankly. We’re not asking people to dramatically change their lifestyles. I can tell you the stories of people who are carrying jugs of water in; their domestic wells are dry and their whole entire lives are upside down because they can’t flush their toilets and they can’t take showers, et cetera. We’re just asking people to swap out your toilets, use a high efficiency toilet, install an aerator, install a low-flow shower head. Maybe have a shower timer so you’re conscious of how much time you’re taking in the shower. I don’t personally think we’re asking that much of our urban communities, and there are huge benefits because it’s not just that drop of water that we’re saving; it’s also the energy; it’s also the impacts on the environment; it does have huge benefits even though it’s a smaller percentage across the board.

Golden State Water Politics

Water bonds, water rights and water investment How are California’s leaders dealing with the drought and the state’s continuing heavy needs for water? What will be the legislative outcomes, for example on the now approved water bond Proposition 1? Panelists discussed those questions during an October 13, 2014, program called “Water Politics.” GREG DALTON, director of Climate One: The water system is all connected and flows all around. Let’s have Lauren Sommer [explain] for us the water bond. What will it do? Where will the money go? LAUREN SOMMER, science and environment reporter, KQED: It’s a little bit of everything. There’s definitely some money in there for water storage. That’s a big chunk of it, so this could be surface storage like reservoirs, raising dams or possibly groundwater storage. There’s environmental restoration. There’s groundwater cleanup for contaminated water, so people can use that water. There’s a little flavor of everything, which I think is why we’ve seen some pretty strong support within the legislature and from the public. But as a lot of people have pointed out, because it’s a little bit of everything, it’s not going to solve the problems we have here in California. It’s not going to really take a big bite of some of the big challenges that we have going forward. DALTON: [Are] water right reforms in Sacramento a possibility? JOHN COLEMAN, president of the association of California Water Agencies: There’s a lot of unintended consequences. I think all water agencies would fight changing the water rights structure. Forty percent of what the Port of Oakland exports is ag[ricultural products.] That’s 76,000 union jobs at the Port of Oakland. You start moving the water rights and start changing what can be grown and what can’t be grown, where it can be grown and whether you can grow it – those are jobs here in the Bay Area. Good-paying jobs that are going to be lost as well. DALTON: We move water around to diﬀerent parts of the state. Danny Merkley, water pricing – a lot of people think that agriculture gets it too cheap. DANNY MERKLEY, director of water resources at the California Farm Bureau Federation: Water costs are based on your proximity to the source, on the quality it needs to be [and] what it takes to [get it to you]. More senior water right holders’ irrigation districts’ systems are paid for; they don’t have the same cost that someone who’s built a brand new facility [and who’s] still making payments on it. One way to look at it really is water is free. It costs to capture it, to transport it and to treat it. We have members in some parts of the state that are paying over $2,000 an acre for water, and we have other members that are paying well under a $100 an acre for it. It depends on where they are, the quality of the water that they’re getting, how much it needs to be treated and how far away they’re transporting it. ANTHONY RENDON, California Assemblymember and chair of the State Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee: I think it’s important to remember that a lot of our water infrastructure system that brings water hundreds and hundreds of miles and delivers it throughout the state was built 50 to 100 years ago by an incredibly engaged federal government or helped by a federal government that was engaged and believed that there was a certain amount of value to those types of projects, regardless of what your politics are, whether you’re on the left or the right. I think it’s fairly safe to say that we have a federal government today that isn’t that engaged in terms of these large infrastructureal projects or any sort of public works projects. So to a large extent, we are sort of on our own [with] those sorts of local solutions, like water recycling, like groundwater remediation, like storm water capture. Those types of local solutions are the things that we have to invest in because: A, they’re cheaper and B, they’re local.

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From the Q&A session, Dr. Gawande discusses life and death, and the medical at tention we receive i n b e t w e e n . E xce r p te d from “Dr. Atul Gawande,” October 22, 2014. ATUL GAWANDE Author, The Checklist Manifesto and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; Staﬀ Writer, The New Yorker; Professor, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health

ALICE HUANMEI CHEN M.D., M.P.H., Chief Integration Oﬃcer, Director of the Center for Innovation in Access and Quality, and Director of the eReferral Program, San Francisco General Hospital; Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco – Moderator ALICE HUAN-MEI CHEN: It seems to me that one of the reasons that your book is so well received is that it speaks to the universal. At the risk of being flippant, the bumper sticker line that comes to mind is “Life is a sexually transmitted condition that’s invariably fatal.” [Laughter.] But in all honesty, people have said Americans somehow think that death is avoidable. How has it come to be that we as a society have such a hard time facing it head on? ATUL GAWANDE: A woman at Stanford named Laura Carstensen looked at how our desires and goals change depending on how close we are to the end of our lives. She did these interesting studies with people wearing beepers. They were ages 18 to 94; her team would page them, and whenever they were paged, they would have to write down what emotions they were experiencing, what kinds of desires they might have. In another set of studies, they would ask, “If you had an hour of time to spend with anybody you wanted, who might you want to spend that

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Atul Ga time with?” The kinds of answers they got back were a kind of young signature and an old signature. What [young] people wanted and desired was often getting stuﬀ, achieving stuﬀ, getting public recognition, being connected to a really wide group of people. Older people tended to want a smaller, tighter-knit group of people that they had deeper, more intimate connections with. The further layer that came out of this was [that] a lot of the puzzle was around as you got older, what took so long to figure this out? That’s wisdom that you’re accumulating along the way, and the thought was maybe it’s brain changes or maybe it’s a cultural phenomenon. Her work suggests that if you have 20 years or more in front of you, you might as well think you’re immortal. CHEN: Shared decision making is a little bit of a trendy concept in health policy circles now, and in my experiences [is] easier said than done. Actually, your description of Dr. Benzel, your father’s neurosurgeon, is one of the clearest examples that I’ve seen, and it

F EBR UA RY/MA R C H 2015

kind of dovetails into one of our audience questions: How do doctors take the time to learn about their patients’ priorities? Aren’t they incredibly busy already? How do they know what to ask? Doctor Benzel seemed to know what to ask. GAWANDE: How do you make the time to unlock the priorities that people have? How do we have the time to do anything right in medicine? There couldn’t be anything that’s more important, and so I came at it by thinking about it a couple ways. I think the concept of what the job of a doctor is has changed enormously over the last half century. Fifty years ago, the job of a doctor was “doctor knows best.” It was a paternalistic ideal. The doctor might or might not tell you how sick you are, wouldn’t tell you options, would just say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do to you.” By the time I was in medical school, training in the ’90s, [there was] an ideal that we regarded as “the informative doctor.” It’s almost a retail model: here is option A, Here is option B; here is the red pill and the blue

awande Photo by Ellen Cohan

pill, and the risks and the benefits. What do you want to do? I was taught that when people will then say to you – and they say it to you often – “What would you do, doctor?” you’re supposed to say “It’s not about me. It’s really about you. So it’s your choice. It’s your call.” People feel a little abandoned in those circumstances. In fact, what people want is a counselor – the term for it is shared decision making. I didn’t really understand what that was until I came to see people like Benzel, who was the neurosurgeon for my father. The other neurosurgeon was someone we consulted, someone who gave my dad the options. He sort of first tried the paternalistic mode of saying “You should have an operation. You should have it today.” My dad made him spell out all the options and he switched to the informative mode, “We can put oﬀ the surgery, and you’d be paralyzed. Or you could have the surgery now and we’d minimize the risk of paralysis, but yes, there’s a 25 percent chance of major complications,

like paralysis.” [Laughter.] What Benzel did was he first asked, “Tell me about your life?” He asked those kinds of questions, and it became clear that my father’s first priority was he wanted to stay a surgeon – my dad is a surgeon – as long as he could, and wanted an option that was not going to risk taking that away. They decided to take the risk that the tumor would advance, and make him catastrophically paralyzed, and wait for surgery. As it turned out, he waited two and a half years without it advancing. It was a risk that they’d agreed was a wise one to take. Then he had to end his practice because the paralysis had advanced, and that was when he went for the surgical option. That way of going about it, and his way of being uncomfortable with the uncertainty of the situation but identifying the priorities and goals that someone has, and then fighting for them, is the really cool, interesting thing and it became something I wanted to [use] more [in] the way I practice, too. CHEN: There are a number of questions here

about political controversy – you know, the whole Sarah Palin death panel issue. What’s interesting is approaching end of life in the way you’re advocating, which is really trying to understand what makes life meaningful. Avoiding the kind of lottery ticket mentality of the rare cure turns out to be one of the few areas in medicine where we can hit that triple aim: improving patient experience, outcomes and actually reducing cost. But as soon as the cost issue comes up, all this death panel rhetoric starts flowing. What would be your thoughts in terms of how do we actually engage? Or do we side step it? GAWANDE: One of the concerns I have is that if it’s just about saving costs, it can actually be sacrificing the priorities and values that people have. CHEN: When we talk about that last phase, inevitably on the issue of physician-assisted suicide, our right to die comes up. What are your thoughts on physician assisted suicide? GAWANDE: I’ve come to complicated views about it. I think that people with unbearable

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suffering should be given the option that they could have an assisted death. In Oregon or Washington, it’s done with a careful procedure that has led to just 1 percent of the population choosing to have that kind of a prescription. Only half end up using it. But the option is there on your shelf and the relief of knowing that there is a pathway if your suffering becomes unbearable. Where it gets complicated is that I think that the percentage of people who end up choosing assisted suicide should be regarded as a failure of the health system. Those are people [for] whom we have failed to relieve their burden of suffering. I’m alarmed by the idea that a goal is a good death. I don’t think our goal is a good death. I think our goal is a good life all the way to the very end. There are consequences if we think about it as a good death. In the Netherlands, the first country to have adopted this approach, the percentage of people at death who end up choosing this pathway is closing in at about 4 percent. The most common reason is that they say that they want to take this path because they don’t want to be a burden on others. That worries me. It worries me even more that the Netherlands was one of the late countries to develop a hospice and palliative care system to allow people more options for being able to have something other than suffering at the end of life. This debate is going on very intensively in India about assisted death. In India, cancer patients are not given narcotics at the end of life. I saw surgery patients there that were only given Tylenol for orthopedic surgery or for abdominal surgery. So if you had a terminal cancer – you’re in terrible pain and no one’s doing anything about it – wouldn’t you want assisted death? Something to put you out of your misery? But each one of those is a failure of the health system. So I am supportive of assisted death, but it’s with the understanding that assisted living is harder than assisted death, and each death chosen for that pathway is our failure to have developed capabilities that relieve people of suffering or to deploy the known capabilities to relieve people of that suffering. CHEN: Roughly 8,000 [people] turn 65 daily. At the same time, geriatrics may be the only specialty where you make less the more you train. The number of geriatricians has dropped by 25 percent in recent years.

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Clearly these trends are not in alignment. GAWANDE: I had the geriatrics clinic on the first floor right below my surgical clinic. I went in one day and I said, “I’m writing a book, can I follow you around?” They were like, “Yeah, sure.” The geriatrician is the one who is willing and able to deal with all of the range of problems that an elderly person has, many of which you cannot fix, but you can sometimes manage. An example that really struck me was a person in her 80s who [came into the oﬃce.] As I looked at her, I thought the biggest risk that she faced was that there was a chest X-ray that showed a possible lung nodule; that she’d had polyps in the past and should she have a colonoscopy or not might be a discussion that we needed to have; and her arthritis was really acting up and maybe

“I ’m alarmed that a goal is a good death. I don’t think our goal is a good death. I think our goal is a good life all the way to the very end.” there’s some medication for that. We should pick one of those and work on it. What [the geriatrician] zeroed in on was the fact that she was at tremendous risk of falling, that in talking to her, [he’d learned that] she had been having some falls and that was the most dangerous thing for her quality of life, for what she cared about in her life, which was living in her apartment independently for as long as she could. He knew the risk factors, which I didn’t know, things like being on four drugs or more or having weakness. He paid more attention to her feet than anywhere else and showed me how to examine the feet and then made a plan for her that addressed each of those issues: reduced her medications, worked on nutrition for her, got a podiatrist to work on the sores on her feet. A year later, I talked to her and she’d had no more falls since that visit and was still living independently in that apartment, and her risks had been very high for a falling in six months. Those are the kinds of capabilities we’re talking about. CHEN: What are some of the things that

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you actually see work in end-of-life planning? GAWANDE: At the first level, what comes has been powerful in Oregon, Wisconsin and other communities that have been able to make this work is being willing to talk to your own family member about “What are your fears and worries? What are your goals? What kind of life is worth living for you and what kind of life isn’t worth living?” Because more often than not, 70 percent of us will come to that moment and need someone else to speak for us, because we can’t. Those people are rarely equipped with the information. CHEN: The Institute of Medicine just released a report entitled Dying in America: Improving the Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences near the End of Life. Is there anything that is missing in that report or that you would want to highlight? GAWANDE: It’s a 507-page compendium of all of the evidence about the ways in which we’re failing at the end of life. What’s great is that it was a much more comprehensive overview of the science than I ever managed to get to, because the 500 pages distills tens of thousands of pages of information. We were fortunately aligned in all the same ways. What I hoped to do was tell the stories behind the data of what it’s like to try to use that kind of information and apply it in dayto-day life, whether as a doctor or as a family member, and also what it’s like when you don’t have that kind of information. The parts that are missing are a little bit of “How do I do that?” Conversations are powerful, but what kinds of conversation, and what are the words? A lot of what I was looking for was how do I get the words to talk to my father, to talk to my patient? Do I really have to break bad news for him? Some of those skills and lessons that people have are really powerful, like learning to not just give people the data about survival rates and so on but instead to be able to use words like “I’m worried. I’m worried about what this means.” It conveys that you care, that you’re not certain that they’re going to die in six months, but that you’re worried and that leaves open many possibilities, but also some direction for going forward. That report was phenomenally important and part of a wave of [a] variety of information that suggests we are way beyond death panels now and willing to engage at a national level with transforming our institutions to work better for us.

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80 YEARS OF LABOR HISTORY IN SAN FRANCISCO Eight y years ago, San Francisco’s waterfront was a domestic war scene. But from the bloody events of that conflict arose historic changes to the relationship between workers and owners. Excerpted from “From Bloody Thursday to Now: 80 Years of Labor History in San Francisco,” December 3, 2014. HARVEY SCHWARTZ Historian, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)

ROBERT CHERNY History Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University

JOHN CASTANHO Member, ILWU Local 10 and Coast Benefits Specialist

CARL NOLTE Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle

MELVIN MACKAY President of ILWU Local 10 (Program Chair)

TIM PAULSON Executive Director, San Francisco Labor Council – Moderator

Illustration by Ralph Chaplin/wikicommons

MELVIN MACKAY: This year marks the 80th anniversary of the 1934 Pacific Coast maritime strike to protest miserable hiring practices and poor working conditions. The strike [took place] up and down the West Coast, from Bellingham to San Diego. [This year also marks]the 80th anniversary of Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, when clashes between San Francisco police [and] picketers resulted in two strike supporters being killed and hundreds wounded. In the aftermath of Bloody Thursday, 127,000 workers representing 160 unions walked oﬀ their jobs in protest. During their landmark general strike, they shut down San Francisco for three days. These events helped bring about the national legislation in 1935 that established collective bargaining and set up the National Labor Relations Board. The Commonwealth Club will soon occupy the building that was a longshoreman’s union hall at the time of the 1934 strike. This fall, San Francisco spent up to $160 million on a new cruise ship terminal named after veteran labor leader James Herman, a one-time port commissioner and head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This portends a new era of economic activities and jobs on the waterfront throughout the city. What is the legacy of 1934 and what are the lasting contributions and legacies of union leaders such as Harry Bridges? Today, we’re pleased to take a special look at labor history. TIM PAULSON: Give an overview of what you think the legacy and the importance is of the 1934 strike and what it means for San Francisco. HARRY SCHWARTZ: First of all, let’s take a look at the pre-strike conditions: What were the problems on the waterfront? Well,

there had been a big strike in 1919 that had been lost, and control of the waterfront was really in the hands of the steamship owners, and also an organization which was a company-controlled group. It was called the Blue Book by nickname, because of the color of its book. It functioned as a way to control workers and to make sure that they didn’t have real collective bargaining or real worker-controlled unionism. On the waterfront by 1934 people “shaped up” right by the Ferry Building to get jobs. And there, you sometimes had to pay for your job. That is to say you had to pay a “kickback.” It could be booze, it could be money or various things. There were many, many things that were diﬃcult and wrong on the ‘front. The loads were excessively heavy, the equipment could be rotten; it could be unsafe; there was something called the “speedup,” which meant you made people work really really fast to increase productivity. They even had ethnic gangs that were forced by the bosses to compete with one another for speed. The result was a very high number of accidents on the waterfront. There were certain degrading issues. Sometimes a worker had to paint the house of a boss on the weekend. Sometimes you had to put money into a lottery for which there were no prizes. And this one I think is a bit of a zinger. There’s a longshoreman from Los Angeles and the port down there who told me in the 1980s, if you were looking for a job, if you had a nice-looking sister and liquor, and a wife that would put out, you had a job on the waterfront. [He said,] I’ve seen this here on these docks. And that’s a direct quote. So you see, the conditions were really terrible. One of the main demands of the strike was for a better hiring system. There were lots of

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famous aspects of the strike. The employers this long legacy of the ILWU has survived tried to force open the port – that’s literally ever since. force open the port – utilizing volunteers ROBERT CHERNY: I’m going to focus from companies who had tear gas to dem- especially on the immediate outcomes of the onstrate; they gassed the workers so they 1934 strike for those who were working on could show the police force that this stuff the waterfront at that time, and then look really worked. There were beatings; there at the somewhat bigger picture, the way in were shootings. All kinds of things went on. which that strike and other events in 1934 It looked like a warzone on the waterfront. It affected national policy. But I want to begin culminated in Bloody Thursday, July 5 when with the longshoremen, the men who were a couple of guys were killed [and] several on strike in 1934. Out of that strike, they sent to the hospital in a big confrontation. built a strong union, a strong organization From there, you had a big funeral parade along the coast from Bellingham to San on Market Street on July 9, [followed by] Diego with a very good system of commuthe general strike which was a protest strike nication among those local [chapters]. between the 16th and the 19th of July. The The strike was settled through arbitration. employers faced a strike again in 1936. They Initially there had been a lot of opposition did not try to use violence, because they’d to arbitration, but in the end, there was a learned the hard way that it didn’t work the vote of all of the striking longshoremen, first time. and they agreed to accept arbitration. There are additional famous things about Arbitration turned out to be a very good that situation in 1934. The rise of Harry thing. It gave them almost everything they Bridges as leader was one of them. He in- wanted. It gave them a coast-wide contract sisted on a coastso that there were the wide contract that same wages, hours would keep different hey even had ethnic gangs and working condiports from working tions in every port. on each other when that were forced to compete As a result, ports there were strikes. could not compete He insisted that with one another for speed. against each other black workers come by reducing working – Harvey Schwartz into the union. This conditions. They got was way before there wages of $0.95 an was a civil rights movement, 20 to 25 years hour, a 10-cents-an-hour increase, and they before that. He went into the black churches got a six-hour day – a two-hour decrease in San Francisco and said, This time, guys, from what they had had – and a 30-hour the black community is going to get a shot. week, which sounds unusual to many of us They had been discriminated against in a pri- today, but it’s something that stayed in that or union situation before 1919. The union contract ever since then. They got a union retained this kind of humane perspective; it dispatcher, which was an absolutely crucial also inspired other people to organize. They element in their success. fought for civil liberties over the years. They Harvey [Schwartz] described the “shape fought against various wars like Vietnam, up,” the way in which men went to the Afghanistan and Iraq. They joined the civil Ferry Building at 7 a.m. and tried to get rights movement, or supported it greatly, in a job for the day. That strike changed that the 1960s. They supported Cesar Chavez – process of hiring forever, because arbitrathe legacy is extremely long. tion gave them a dispatcher elected by It might be emphasized that in the ’30s, union members. One of the changes that ’40s and ’50s, the waterfront was a place resulted from this was the concept of “low where a lot of San Franciscans worked; man out.” Control of dispatching permitted many, many more people were involved in the union to implement a system that was the ‘front either on the waterfront [itself ] or designed to equalize pay among all union in spin-off jobs of one sort or another. With members. So union members, who became the mechanization, which really goes by the known as A-men, had first priority in being name of containerization, the workforce dispatched for jobs. Jobs were assigned on on the waterfront declined. But still, in all, the principle of low man out, which meant

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that the longshoremen on the A-list who was the reflection of the failure of a law that had worked the fewest hours were assigned had passed in 1933, the National Industrial first. This was a way of spreading the work Recovery Act, which was designed to recequally among the union so that no one ognize the right of workers to join unions would be favored with more work by a and to encourage unions and companies generous foreman or a foreman who felt to sit down together and agree on working that there had been some kind of a payoﬀ. conditions. But as it turned out, the compaControlling the dispatcher also meant that nies weren’t particularly interested in sitting there would be no discrimination in hiring. down with workers, and the result was a Because they controlled dispatching and strike wave all across the country in 1934, they applied the rule of low man out, there which led Senator Robert Wagner of New would be no discrimination on the basis of York to propose legislation in 1935 which race or politics. In the San Francisco local became the National Labor Relations Act. [chapter], they voted to prohibit segregated That law is still the basic law governing labor work gangs in the mid-1930s. relations today, though it’s been amended a Gang size was a safety issue: Were there number of times. enough men working in the hold? Were CARL NOLTE: I think the first thing you there enough men working on the pier to should consider is, how was the strike perhandle those loads? The dispatch system ceived by the public in 1934? It sounds like gave the union a great increase in control from what you said it was a famous victory over those key working conditions, because and all kinds of wonderful things happened. if a gang was dispatched to a job where they One would think that the public would be felt the working conditions were unsafe, eager to accept such a resolution. Of course they’d refuse to work we all, like myself, and they’d be sent believe that there are back to the hiring rbitration turned out to be two sides to every hall. The dispatcher story and that must would send another very good. It gave them almost be true today, right? gang and that gang Just tune into Rush would refuse to ever ything they wanted. Limbaugh or Rachel work under unsafe Maddow to see if – Robert Cherny conditions. Sooner that’s the case. But in or later the foremen 1934, social media and the companies got the message that they had not come into existence, television was weren’t going to get any work done under not invented, and radio news was just an unsafe conditions. And they communicated adjunct to entertainment. among all the local [union chapters] on the So that left the print newspapers. There coast as to what they were doing, so that were four in San Francisco – the Chronicle, they were all aiming at the same working the Examiner, the Call Bulletin, the San conditions. Eventually, the companies got Francisco News – and two in Oakland – the message and wrote these [conditions] the Tribune and the Post Inquirer. Two into the contract. of the newspapers, the Examiner and the The 1940 contract created a process for Call Bulletin, were owned by the Hearst the immediate arbitration of disputes over Corporation, which also owned the Post working conditions, so the contract recog- Inquirer in Oakland. The other Oakland nized the right of men to stop work that paper was owned by the Knowland famendangered their health or safety. But in ily, a stalwart of the Republican party. that circumstance, a port arbitrator was im- So these newspapers represented a point mediately sent to the sight, made a decision of view. Their point of view was – and on the spot, and the decision was binding they were not reluctant to share it with for both the workers and the employers. The everyone – that they were in favor of the arbitrators were chosen in equal numbers establishment. The establishment was from the companies and the unions. about 176 percent against the 1934 strike There were a lot of strikes in 1934. The in every way. Until, of course, Bloody strike here was not the only one; there were Thursday happened. When it became strikes all over the country. In some part, this clear that the situation had escalated out

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Photos by Rikki Ward

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of control and the police had killed two people and wounded several others. So even the opinions in the paper swung around toward the strikers, especially after the big funeral march up Market Street. But the strikers regarded the reporters who set out to cover the strike as agents of the cops and the scabs. One of the photographers for the San Francisco News was beaten so badly by the strikers he ended up in the hospital. He was Joe Rosenthal. You may remember him from the famous picture he took on Iwo Jima. He once said that what he saw in World War II did not compare to the violence he saw on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934. But later, when the opinion swung around, the Hearst papers still insisted that the leader of the strike, Harry Bridges, was a communist agent and tried to get him deported for... how long did this go on? CHERNY: ’Til at least 1955. NOLTE: So when you hear about what they say now, you see that that was perceived somewhat diﬀerently in 1934 and later and that that was the message that the people of San Francisco saw filtered through the media at the time. JOHN CASTANHO: As the least senior person up here, I guess you can tell I belong to a union. So, 80 years later, I am three generations removed from the ’34 strike. What does this all mean today? I think there are some things more readily visible today than others. [One thing that] was won in the ’34 strike, was recognition of the ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] as the sole bargaining unit for the longshoreman, which is not the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Before then, there were other unions that were trying to represent the longshore workers, and it was a race to the bottom. Everyone was trying to cut a better contract with lower wages so they could have their workforce represented. But I think that there are some things that are not very readily seen that are also very pervasive today. It was mentioned earlier that African-Americans were integrated into our workforce, and that’s very evident today. My local [chapter], Local 10, is over 65 percent African-American. I was 19 when I started on the Waterfront – and you guys remember when you were 19. We all thought we knew

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everything, [but] I got an education on the waterfront that I couldn’t get in any classroom. My father taught me the value of hard work, but I was taught things about politics that you could never learn in a classroom. You know, things that were going on in other countries. Apartheid was a really big deal when I was starting on the waterfront. I learned the importance of looking out for each other, moral lessons, the importance of sharing with one another. And when you talk about these things today, it just sounds so counter to corporate America. I’m proud to say that I belong to an organization that still tries to do that and [those values] were

“I’m living proof of someone who reaps the benefits of many of the battles in the 1934 strike.” – John Castanho instilled in me at a very young age. My grandfather started in 1945, and he was part of the march inland. He came here from Portugal, didn’t speak any English, and believe it or not, there were times and places in this country where if you were a non-English speaker, you were not welcomed to work in a lot of places. But the ILWU welcomed my grandfather. He worked at Albers Grain Mill in Oakland, which is now TraPac Terminal, for those of you who know the Port of Oakland. My father emigrated here in 1963 as a nonEnglish speaker. He was welcomed into ILWU Local 10, and for many years he worked in the break-bulk gang, he worked in gang 43, and this was before the advent of containerization. Now when containers came around, this changed the waterfront and a lot of the work moved to Oakland. But as far as the San Francisco landscape went, I’m pretty much living proof of someone who reaps the benefits of many of the battles that were fought for and won in the 1934 strike. PAULSON: It was acknowledged that The Commonwealth Club was going to be developing a building on the waterfront that has a history with the ILWU and the Longshore

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Workers Union. They immediately called the ILWU. John or Harvey, [do you have a] comment on the significance of that building and what The Commonwealth Club is going to be doing. SCWARTZ: Well, The Commonwealth Club is purchasing the old building which is located on the waterfront at Mission and Steuart, which was headquarters in 1934 of the organization. At that time its name was the International Longshoremen’s Association, the ILA. So the old ILA headquarters during the big strike has been purchased. It hasn’t been used for a long, long time; the inside of it is very diﬀerent. The Commonwealth Club has agreed to make the facade that faces Steuart Street, look like it did in the 1930s. They’ve also agreed to put up a plaque outside, and they’ve actually asked us to draft it. They’re also going to have some display material on the inside in the lobby area, so all kinds of people that visit Commonwealth Club happenings will pass by information on the material on the legacy of labor and the ILWU in San Francisco. There’s a side that faces in the other direction, that faces the Embarcadero, which is not the side that you see in the photos in 1934, and that side, the facade has to be changed because the Club needs room to hold its meetings. It’s going to have a couple of [auditoriums], one for 300 people, one for 150; it’s going to be quite something. So it seems to me that this is going to be the best possible resolution for the long-term life of this building. It will be recognition of its historical legacy there. CASTANHO: It wasn’t just an ILA oﬃce building. If we’re looking at July 5, 1934, and the events that happened that day, we also have to recall that there was a battle that took place between maritime workers and the police, and people were clubbed and hit with bricks, sticks and even shot. The wounded maritime workers were taken to this hall, this very same building that we’re talking about, and were treated there. There were two maritime workers that were killed, Howard Sperry and Nicholas Bordois. Both of these gentlemen had their bodies brought to this building, and they laid there and stayed until July 9, the day of the funeral. So there is a very important significance, historically, beyond the fact that it was just an ILA building.

Photo by Ed Ritger

CLEESE continued from page 9 CLEESE: What a great thing to be able to say. Exactly. SAVAGE: That’s awesome. I’m sure you’ve been peppered with all sorts of memories people have of the first time they saw you. The memory that I have is that watching Monty Python was the first time that I was laughing with my parents. CLEESE: Oh! That’s so touching. SAVAGE: It made me feel so grown-up, and I have been searching for that ever since. CLEESE: I find it very touching, because, particularly in America, a lot of men have said that it was the only thing that they really connected with their dads on, which is sad in a way, but at least they had that. SAVAGE: Yeah. CLEESE: Well, I love that. In fact, one of my failures, which was Fierce Creatures, was an attempt to make a movie specifically for children to watch with their parents. That is what I was trying to do, and everybody thought I was trying to make A Fish Called Wanda again. But I think that’s lovely when people laugh together. SAVAGE: Exactly, and you made me feel like I was having a connection with them. CLEESE: That’s right. SAVAGE: I remember being unhinged and we were trying not to laugh, so we could hear the next line. We were choking. CLEESE: That’s wonderful. The only real connection I had with my mum was that we laughed at the same things. Let me tell you a story that amuses me about profes-

sional comedians. W.C. Fields is one of the greatest comedians ever, and I don’t think young people know him as well as they should. He was absolutely wonderful. Somebody asked him about a professional comedian’s sense of humor. And W.C. Fields said, Well, for most people, if an actor dresses up as a very, very, very old woman and walks along the street like this and falls down a manhole, they’ll laugh. But to make a professional comedian laugh, it has to really be an old woman. SAVAGE: You have an anecdote in your book about making your mom laugh with a very dark joke. CLEESE: Yes, well she was a very anxious and neurotic woman. When I would telephone her – she lived until 101, so I saw quite a lot of her over the years – I would ring up; I would say, “Hello, Mum.” And she’d say, “Oh hello, John, how are you?” I would say, “I’m fine, Mother. How are you?” And she would always say with a hint of surprise, “Well, I’ve been just a little bit down this week.” I don’t know why she was surprised, because she was a little bit down this week for 50 years. You don’t like it when your mother is unhappy; you want her to be happy, and you know if you’re with a depressive, it’s very diﬃcult; it’s hard to cheer them up. One year, I just spontaneously had a moment of utter creative inspiration, because I said to her, “Mother, I have an idea.” And she said, “Oh, what is it?” I said, “Well, Mother, if you’re still feeling this way next week, I know a little man in Fulham, and if you

like, but only if you like, I could give him a call and he could come down there and kill you.” So from then on, any time she started to say that she wasn’t very happy, I would just wait a couple of minutes and then say, “So should I call the little man from Fulham?” And she’d laugh every time and say things like, “Oh no! I’ve got a sherry party on Friday.” SAVAGE: Something you said earlier reminded me that Richard Feynman said that “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” CLEESE: That’s wonderful! I would love to make a film about all the [screwups]. A cardiologist said to me in London just last year, a top heart guy, he said, “We got it wrong.” For 60 years, they’ve been saying that heart problems are caused by eating fats. He said, “It’s not fats, it’s sugar.” SAVAGE: Oh crap! If there’s one thing I like more than fat, it’s sugar. CLEESE: Me too! Me too! It’s bad news. The point is that for 60 years, they were out there telling everyone to avoid fats. Everything was based on this and now they’ve decided, “Oh no! We got that wrong. Sorry!” SAVAGE: But that’s like what we are. I was saying to one of my kids, “Think about yourself four years ago.” They’re 15. And I said, “Think about what an idiot you were compared to now. That’s going to keep happening for the rest of your life.” CLEESE: Yes! I think it was Mark Twain who said that he had never realized what an idiot was until he was 15 and he had a

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long conversation with his father. When he got to the age of 20, he was surprised at how much his father had learned in the previous five years. SAVAGE: That’s exactly right. Now about this book – wait, I was going to ask about lemurs. CLEESE: Oh! Ask about the lemurs. SAVAGE: What is it with the lemurs? CLEESE: I just think they’re the nicest little creatures. I wish I had married one. It would have simplified my life. They are the dearest, dearest little things and I see one of them is carrying an advertisement for a movie – oh no, it’s a raccoon, isn’t it? That’s right. No, I just love lemurs and I think they’re absolutely adorable, so I do a little bit to help because they are getting wiped out in Madagascar. It’s the only place [they live] – this huge island. We think it’s small because we look at the map next to Africa; it’s the size of France. They keep discovering more species. In fact, I have a species named after me. SAVAGE: No! CLEESE: Yes! SAVAGE: A Latin name? CLEESE: Yes. Avahi Cleesei, Cleese’s woolly lemur. Isn’t that wonderful? SAVAGE: That’s fantastic! CLEESE: Lovely. And I turned down a peerage. SAVAGE: I think you’ve got your priorities. CLEESE: I’ve got my priorities right. I’ve got a lemur named after me. So when I pay oﬀ the alimony, I must give them something. SAVAGE: The characters you guys [in Monty Python] took on are very specific. Thirty years after the last live performance, when you went to the ’02 [live performance], did [you and] Michael [Palin] go back into the exact same characters? Or did those characters get modified over the years? CLEESE: I don’t think they get modified much. I think my voice has dropped a little bit as I’ve gotten more relaxed, or rather because I’ve gotten older. I think there used to be a tightness in my voice, which a certain amount of therapy helped to clear. I can really just go straight back into it and it’s peculiar then. There are certain characters – if you played characters a great deal – it’s as though they continue to

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exist somewhere in you and you can just connect with that place and go. Even the gestures will be right. SAVAGE: I think one of the main things I got from the book that I didn’t know was that you are a writer first and foremost. CLEESE: I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I’d gotten to Cambridge on science and switched to law, because I wasn’t really interested in science. And I just discovered one day, by chance, that if I was given sheets of blank paper, I could write something down and if somebody – perhaps myself, not necessarily – performed it right, people would laugh. It was an astonishing discovery to me. But from the very beginning, I was always

“I’ve got my priorities right. I’ve got a lemur named after me. When I pay oﬀ the alimony, I must give them something.” performing what I had written. If you actually look back over the things people know me from, which are Python and Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda, all of those I wrote or co-wrote myself. SAVAGE: You said that the tension that existed among the Pythons while writing existed within the writing but not within the performing. CLEESE: That was the bizarre thing, because we did fight and argue a lot. The arguments were always about the script. Was the script good enough? We never argued about who was going to play what role, because it was quite obvious that Graham was going to play that or Michael would play that. It was obvious. We never argued about that. But when we got into arguing about the script, we used to get extremely worked up, much too much so. One of the problems was there were two really diﬃcult people in the group. The first was Terry Jones and the second was me. We used to butt heads, and it was sort of temperamental. I don’t usually say this in public, but it is sort of known. Terry

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is Welsh. I once explained to Terry that God had put the Welsh on the planet to carry out menial tasks for the English. He could never get his mind around it and insisted on behaving as if he was an equal. So there were a lot of fights with Terry. SAVAGE: Did you guys end up fighting over the same territory? CLEESE: No it was just whether something was funny. This is how ridiculous it got: Somebody had written a funny sketch in a dormitory, and somebody said it should be a really dusty, rundown sort of place. Somebody said, “Yes, but with one magnificent Louis XIV chandelier.” And somebody said, “Yeah, that’s funny, but not a chandelier, a dead stuﬀed farm animal with a light bulb in each one of its four feet.” And somebody said, “Obviously a sheep.” And somebody said, “What do you mean a sheep?” One guy said, “Well, obviously it’s funnier if it’s a sheep.” And another guy said, “No, it’s obviously funnier if it’s a goat.” “A woolly chandelier, that’s funnier.” “No, no, a goat with the horns.” This argument went on, and I remember quite seriously it went on for a quarter of an hour. Three were passionate that it should be a sheep. Three were passionate that it should be a goat. I remember I sat back and I thought, “This is insane! What are we arguing about? It’s obvious that it’s going to be a f--king goat.” [Laughter.] A lot of passion went into it. It was really ridiculous. SAVAGE: Did you guys write Meaning of Life in Hawaii? CLEESE: No, we wrote a bit of it in the West Indies. What happened was that after Life of Brian – which the Pythons all pretty much think is our best show, our best film. And I agree. I think the first half of Holy Grail is very, very good, but I don’t think the second half is. I thought, in Brian there was a real story there and it was about something important, too. When we got to Meaning of Life, we could never agree on a story. We kept meeting and writing for a month and we had masses of material and nothing could come together to unify it. So we all went oﬀ, after we finished The Life of Brian, to the West Indies for two weeks and I said on the first night, “I have a plan. Let’s not do any work at all. Let’s just have a wonderful holiday on the beach in the sun and

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by Ed Ritger THE COMMO N WE AL THPhotos 53

then go back to everyone and say, “We’re very disappointed; we just couldn’t put it together.’” I just about won the argument and then that little Welsh bastard came down the next day and said, “Well, I was thinking last night…” He really had put all the diﬀerent sketches together into stages of life. And I remember my sense of disappointment. I thought, “Oh God! We’re going to have to make this f--king film now.” He was entirely responsible. It was his determination. Otherwise, we would have had a wonderful holiday. SAVAGE: In an interview, you said writing this book was relatively easy and straightforward. But I’m gobsmacked by the detail. I mean, how did you compile all of the timelines? CLEESE: Well, there was a guy called James Curtis, who’s a really marvelous writer. He’s written a wonderful biography of Spencer Tracy and before that, W.C. Fields. He was helping me with the timelines, because he was such an expert on those kinds of research. He dug up reviews that Washington papers had done of shows I had done for a week in a nightclub in 1965. I mean, he found this stuﬀ everywhere. It was incredibly helpful because sometimes you’d think, “But that doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t have,” and then you realize, “Oh wait, I did that show in Chicago. Then I went back to New York before I went to Washington.” Just little things like that clarified these puzzles that you come across when you can’t figure out what happened in what direction.

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But you see, my experience with memory is that when I meet someone that I used to know very well, they will remember two stories about me in great, considerable detail, which I will have no recollection of and vice versa. I can tell them very specifically about what happened and they have no memory of it. That happened yesterday. Somebody told me in great detail something that had happened that involved me when I was about 18. No recollection of it at all. And in fact, when I was doing a rather fun show in New York with four fun women that would sit on a sofa… SAVAGE: “The View”? CLEESE: “The View.” [Laughter.] SAVAGE: Fun. They’re fun. CLEESE: They’re great fun. They showed me a clip of a sketch and I watched it, and I would’ve bet money that I’d never been in that sketch. I have no recollection of it at all. I sat there watching it and was just amazed I could’ve forgotten something. Look, someone else wrote it, which is probably one of the reasons I don’t remember it, and then I rehearsed it for five days and then recorded it. That was probably 1969. It seems to me that you remember what’s memorable and you forget the rest. You tend to remember stories when there’s a kind of moral at the end of them. SAVAGE: A moral for yourself? CLEESE: Yes, or a point or learning thing. Those are the kinds of stories I tend to remember more than outside jokes.

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SAVAGE: When Stanley Kubrick was writing Dr. Strangelove, he was originally writing it with material from the book Fail Safe, and he was writing a serious movie, but every time he took a scene to its natural conclusion, it was funny. So halfway through the process, he called up [co-scripter] Terry Southern and said, “We’ve got to make this a comedy.” CLEESE: That’s fascinating. It is strange. I remember somebody said to Arthur Miller, “Do you think life is a farce or tragedy?” He said, “I’m not sure, but on the whole I tend to think it’s a farce.” I think it’s a much healthier attitude to go through life just saying we have no idea what we’re doing; we’re all idiots, and we’re all getting it wrong. I came across this wonderful research – I’m a phony professor at Cornell, or at least I used to be before the alimony. I haven’t been back in some time because I can’t afford to take the time off. There’s a fellow there called David Dunning; he’s been interested all his life in self-assessment – how good people are at knowing how good they are at doing things. What he’s discovered is that in order to know how good you are at something requires almost exactly the same aptitudes as to be good at that thing in the first place. It follows as a corollary that if you’re absolutely no good at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know you’re no good at it. Once you realize that there are thousands of people out there who have no idea what they’re doing,

and they have no idea that they have no idea – this is not tragedy material. The only disappointing thing is that at the end we die. SAVAGE: I like the grammarian who, as they were dying, said, “I am going to, or I am about to, die; either is correct.” [Laughter.] CLEESE: My favorite one was an English practical joker in the ’20s who had a private income. He used to amuse himself with practical jokes. He lived in a very small but beautiful flat right off Piccadilly Circus. He lived above a very famous French fish restaurant called Prunier. He had a heart attack. The ambulance arrived and discovered that the steps up to his little flat atop Prunier’s were so steep that they couldn’t bring him down them on a stretcher; they had to use an emergency exit, which meant that he had to be carried out through the restaurant. As he was carried out through the restaurant, dying, he raised himself on one elbow and said, “Don’t eat the halibut.” [Laughter.] SAVAGE: There’s a local resident near here – Steve Wozniak, co-inventor of the Apple computer. He buys uncut sheets of bills from the U.S. Mint and then he has them laminated into a [sort of ] checkbook. So when he wants to pay you with a twenty, he tears it up by perforation. His whole goal is to convince you that he’s giving you money that he just printed. He’ll also have them put out rolls or just the sheets.

CLEESE: Now there’s a good way to use a lot of money. SAVAGE: Exactly. That’s exactly what billionaires should be doing. CLEESE: Oh! Absolutely! You know, we’ve rather lost practical jokes, haven’t we? SAVAGE: Well, one of the problems with practical jokes is that they get mean really quickly. And it takes real intelligence

“ T here

are thousands of

people out there who have no idea what they’re doing, and they have no idea that they have no idea. ” to do a practical joke that’s not mean, because mean is easy. CLEESE: But to do one [well] is just a really glorious, benevolent attempt to completely waste someone else’s time. The cleverest practical joke I ever heard was from a French poet in Paris in about 1817. He lived on his own in a block of flats and there was a nice old lady he was quite fond of. One day, he was out on a walk and he saw a pet shop and he just wandered in. He didn’t know what he was doing and he saw this dear little turtle and he thought, “I’m going to buy

it for her.” So he bought the little turtle and a bowl of water and took it back to her and she was so thrilled. She couldn’t stop talking about the thing. So after a time, he had a brilliant idea. He waited until she was out and he went and got the turtle and took it back to the pet shop and swapped it for a slightly bigger one. He took it back and she was so excited. The next day, she said, “Oh look! Look how well he’s doing.” He kept on doing this. Every week he’d go and swap it. It would get bigger and bigger. And the genius was, he [then] started making it smaller and smaller. SAVAGE: That’s beautiful. It puts a whole different slant on scientific inquiry, doesn’t it? CLEESE: Yes it does, for sure! SAVAGE: What would you be doing today if not for Monty Python? CLEESE: Oh. What an interesting question. If not for Monty Python, what I’d really like to be doing is I’d like to make documentaries about things that I really don’t understand, which would be humorous. They would be really humorous. I’d love to make a documentary about what religion would’ve been if the churches hadn’t [screwed] it up. I think that would be interesting. SAVAGE: Yeah. CLEESE: What is mystical experience? You know, what is it about? Why do people find it so extraordinarily emotional and powerful and yet why does it always fall into the hands of people who Photo by Ed Ritger

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then basically turn it on its head? Because I think it’s very hard to justify the Spanish Inquisition, you know? If you were there in Auto De Fé in Seville in what would it be, about 1560? There they are burning heretics and you can imagine Christ arriving and saying to one of the Inquisition people, “Could you explain what you are doing? Why are you burning these people alive because they’re in great pain?” And he would say, “Well, you see, we discovered that they have a different interpretation from us of your gospel of love.” And in America, in some extraordinary way, Christianity begins to overlap with capitalism. SAVAGE: Oh yeah. It’s all real estate. CLEESE: It’s all real estate and huge quantities of money being generated by preachers. I want to say, “I don’t think he said, ‘Blessed to the rich.’” So it’s fascinating. Somebody once said that an idea is not responsible for the people that hold it. I think that’s very, very accurate. So I’d like to do that, and I’d like to do a documentary about why very, very rich people need to be very, very rich – unless [it’s that]they want to play practical jokes. [Laughter.] SAVAGE: I agree. I find myself wondering about that too. CLEESE: Why do they need so much? I remember I said to someone in Santa Barbara once, “The funny thing about the very rich is how greedy they are, that they still want more.” And he said, “No, no, no, they’re rich because they’re so greedy.” In other words, they’re not really affected by the money coming in. That is the personality type. SAVAGE: Right. They’re continuing to attempt to satisfy the need. CLEESE: A psychiatrist said a beautiful thing to me about a year ago in London. He said, “If you want to understand what God thinks about money, look at the people he gives it to.”

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SAVAGE: Someone wants to know what the inspiration for Venezuelan beaver cheese is. [Laughter.]

“A nd

I suddenly thought,

Maybe entertainers are important after all. Because it was bringing people together. ”

Photo by Ed Ritger

CLEESE: Well, I was trying to come up with silly cheeses and I came up with some more when we did the ’02 [show]. There’s a DVD of it out. It should be worth looking at, because there were some wonderful moments where we broke up, which were just utterly, utterly special. SAVAGE: Where you cracked each other up? CLEESE: Cracked each other up. And it was just wonderful to have that freedom and to know [you have it]. You see, what happened was [comedian] Eddie Izzard

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came to seven of the shows. Can you believe that? He came to seven of the shows. And on the second night, a very weird thing happened. We started oﬀ with a very silly Spanish number with guitars, and then we went to white tuxedoes and talked about these Yorkshire businessmen who would get competitive about how tough their lives had been. We were halfway through the sketch and I was mainly listening to Michael on my right and Eric on my left. And I glanced over at Terry Jones and he had blood running down the side of his face. It was the side away from the audience. And I thought, “What the hell?” What had happened was, when he had taken his guitar oﬀ in a hurry because it was the second night and he was still rushing, he cut his eye and it bled profusely. The next time I looked at him, he thought there was something there and he had a red hand and I blew a couple of lines, I said the wrong thing. And I saw Eddie backstage about 10 minutes later; he was wandering around. I said, “Sorry about blowing the line. You know, I don’t know why I bothered.” He said, “No, no you don’t get it.” And I said, “What?” And he said the most important thing to me than anyone’s said in 10 years; he said, “You don’t realize. They’ve seen you do it right countless times. It’s much more special when something happens that’s never happened before.” And he was right. So it was the opposite of what a theatrical performance is supposed to be about. It became a completely other kind of animal. And the sheer goodwill and happiness in that arena was an extraordinary thing to experience. And I suddenly – I know this will surprise people – thought, Maybe entertainers are important after all. Because it was bringing people together. I was on a T.V. show four weeks ago in London with Neil Diamond and the same feeling happened when they were all singing “Sweet Caroline” and suddenly I just looked at this audience and everyone was having a good time. I thought, This is good. There’s no question. This is good.

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Can California Save Congress?

he partisan divide in Con- of our states and the nation, the dramatic nature of the challenges, the gress is widely noted and is disincentives for moderates to run for office, ideological divisions in measured in different ways. the electorate – all have been identified as causes. One way of gauging the trend Lee Hamilton, the veteran Indiana congressman, now retired, put toward extremism is tracking the his finger on the most direct cause when he said, “… computers have lack of ideological overlap between enabled state legislators – or members of Congress eager to dictate to Republican and Democratic mem- them – to draw congressional district lines that create safely Democratic bers of Congress. A few decades ago, or Republican districts. The result is that politicians running for the U.S. according to Brookings Institution House don’t have to appeal to the center to win, they need to appeal data, some Democrats in Congress to the core of their parties’ supporters.” Those elected to Congress win were more conservative than some by appealing to the extremes of their parties, and when they arrive in Republicans, and vice versa. Today, Washington, they are tethered to those ideological outposts. there is zero ideological overlap. As In 2008, California took a bold step to replace the system of gerPhoto courtesy of Gloria Duffy The Washington Post announced last rymandering that was polarizing its state political process. Through year, “the ideological middle is dead in Congress.” ballot Proposition 11, California removed the drawing of state legislaAs Congress fights over the budget, factions attempt to undo prior tive districts from the hands of the state legislature, which had been legislation, and other bickering continues, the danger is that congres- following the pattern Hamilton described, and placed it in the hands sional paralysis prevents the United States of the non-partisan Citizen’s Commission from coping effectively in a world of dramatic on Redistricting. Following a second ballot challenges. From adoption of new technology h e d a n g e r i s t h a t proposition in 2010, the Citizen’s Commission to confronting terrorism and climate change, also draws California’s Congressional districts. we face a competitive and demanding global c o n g r e s s i o n a l p a r a l y s i s Early studies of this system indicate that milieu. The U.S. needs to be at the top of its it has produced some of the most competigame in the effectiveness of our political pro- prevents the United States tive political races in the nation, including cess, to meet the challenges. from coping effectively in a intra-party races in some California districts, Obviously, consensus and cooperation and has led to the election of more moderate in our political structures are needed for our world of dramatic changes. state and federal representatives for California. nation to be effective, just as they are essential Twelve other states – Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, in business or any other institution. Without Montana, New Jersey, Washington, Alaska, the ability to compromise and make decisions, we face squabbling, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania – now have some backtracking and paralysis. And the dysfunction in Congress has begun form of non-partisan commissions, with varying but consistent results. to take a serious toll. The concern about ultra-partisanship in Congress is growing, and Over the past few decades, by many measures the United States one of the institutions that has decided to do something about it is the has declined from being the world’s leader. Currently we are 10th California-based Hewlett Foundation. The foundation has initiated worldwide in home ownership. The gap between rich and poor has a democracy initiative, the Madison Project, to “restore pragmatism widened, we are 13th in the quality of life index, and we are one of and the spirit of compromise in Congress; to reform campaigns and the last developed countries to put in place a modern health insurance elections so they set the stage for problem solving; and to promote an system. We are 17th among industrialized countries in educational informed and active citizenry.” testing results overall and 23rd in math, and ninth in per-capita GDP. Solving the national problem of partisan paralysis will take more The World Economic Forum has pegged the state of U.S. infrastructure than study, analysis and good will. It will take concrete changes as 25th in the world. Some if not all of these declines can be traced to to the political process, like changing the redistricting system in a national policy paralysis. majority of states. California can lead the way, through the example But how can this now deeply rooted problem of congressional of its own reforms and the leadership of its institutions like the super-partisanship be addressed? Determining the possible solutions Hewlett Foundation. The Commonwealth Club has always given depends on an analysis of the cause. Many sources of congressional voice to and encouraged those dedicated to improving our political polarization have been identified. The lack of an engaged voting citi- process, and we look forward to doing so as Californians tackle this zenry, the influence of lobbies and staff, the size and ungovernability fundamental problem.

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Provincial French Countryside May 25--June 11, 2015 Experience the beauty and allure of provincial France at an easy pace and in a unique style on this 15-day journey. •

Begin in Toulouse and discover medieval Carcassonne and the market town of Albi, with its Toulouse-Lautrec Museum.

•

Stay in charming Sarlat to explore the remote Dordogne, including a visit to the famous caves at Lascaux II and a leisurely cruise on the Dordogne River.

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Take a walking tour in the cliff side village of Rocamadour, and explore the Loire Valley’s impressive Chateau de Chenonceau.

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Travel to Crépon, visiting dramatic Mont-St.-Michel along the way.

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Visit the Tapestry Museum in Bayeux and Caen’s Memorial Museum devoted to “history for peace.”

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Tour Normandy’s D-Day landing beaches including Pointe du Hoc, Utah Beach, Ste-Mère-Église, and the American Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach.

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Walk amid the gardens of artist Claude Monet in Giverny, and see the familiar lily pond and Japanese footbridge of his paintings.

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Conclude in Paris and enjoy either the Louvre Museum or the Musée d’Orsay. Savor the City of Light at your own pace, on an optional 3-day/2-night post-tour extension.

Space on this exclusive Commonwealth Club tour is limited to just 24 travelers, and will fill quickly. Reserve your place today! Cost: $6,896, per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Commonwealth Club Travel CST: 2096889-40

Detailed brochure available at: commonwealthclub.org/travel Contact: (415) 597-6720 • travel@commonwealthclub.org Photos: provided by MIR Corporation Photos: Mussklprozz, Simon Frost/wikicommons; waywuwei/flickr

The Commonwealth Club of California 555 Post Street San Francisco, CA 94102

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

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PROGRAMS YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS Wednesday, February 4

Thursday, March 5

Bruce Bochy & Larry Baer Bruce Bochy, Manager, San Francisco Giants; Three-Time World Series Champion; Two-Time National League Manager of the Year Larry Baer, President and CEO, San Francisco Giants; Key Strategist, Giants’ Baseball and Business Transactions Administration Go behind the scenes and into the dugout with Manager Bochy and Team President Baer to find out who’s in, who’s out and what strategies will keep the Giants at the peak of their game.

for event details, see page 23

Michael Mina Founder, Mina Group; Executive Chef, Restaurant Michael Mina; James Beard Award Winner Since coming to the city in 1991 to open up Aqua, Mina has opened more than 20 restaurants across the country. Mina is a master builder with a talent for the details, which has helped him create a giant yet sustainable enterprise that churns out not only great dishes but also a network of talent that pushes food forward. Join us to celebrate Michael Mina’s legacy of influence on American cuisine and learn just what makes a titan tick.

for event details, see page 35

Tuesday, March 26

Wednesday, April 1

Gretchen Rubin

Barney Frank

Author, The Happiness Project and Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

Former Member of Congress (D-MA); Author, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage

Humans are creatures of pattern – we repeat our standard behaviors over and over again every day. Rubin believes that when we change our habits, whether good or bad, we change our lives. But how do we effect this change? Through research and experimentation, Rubin offers a framework of different strategies to fit our individual personalities. Whether you are an upholder, questioner, obliger or rebel, come experience how every individual can lead a happier and more productive life.

With his trademark directness and insight, Frank explores the emotional toll of living in the closet and how he became the first member of Congress to voluntarily disclose his homosexuality. He chronicles his lifelong struggle against inequality, which culminated in co-writing the most significant Wall Street regulations since the Great Depression. Join the discussion with this quirky and robust political figure.

for event details, see page 40

for event details, see page 41