The Commonwealth December 2021/January 2022 by The Commonwealth Club of California

MARY TRUMP ON HER UNCLE—AND YOU | PRIVATE COMPANIES AND COVID JOHN MCWHORTER RETHINKS RACIAL RECKONING | PROGRAM LISTINGS

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

PLANET OF THE ANIMALS

SUSAN ORLEAN & MARY ROACH on the Good, the Bad and the Amazing

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DECEMBER 2021/JANUARY 2022

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The

Commonwealth

CONTENTS

December 2021/January 2022 Volume 115, Number 6

FEATUR ES 18

Mary Trump

The former president’s niece discusses his lawsuit against her—and the program’s moderator—as well as the country’s need for emotional healing. 24

John McWhorter

The linguist and New York Times contributor explains what he thinks the left is getting wrong about racial reckoning. 36

The Role of Business in Ending the Pandemic

A special panel discussion of what private business is doing and can do to help end the COVID-19 era. 44

Susan Orlean

cover story: From a show dog named Biff to an orca named Willy—and Keiko—Orlean shares tales from the animal kingdom. 52

“Laundry detergents have these brightening agents that make ‘whiter whites.’ What they are really is in the ultraviolet

Mary Roach

cover story: The popular science writer talks about when animals and humans come into conflict, plus the hope that coexistence can work.

range. So if you as a hunter wash your camo gear in one of these detergents that makes whiter whites, you’re actually sort of glowing for the deer.” —MARY ROACH ON THE COVER: Your little pet cat’s much bigger wild cousin. (Photo by WenPhotos/Pixabay.) ON THIS PAGE: Above: Science writer Mary Roach. (Photo by Jen Siska.) Right: Professor John McWhorter. (Photo courtesy John McWhorter.)

“Someone like me standing on the outside asks, ‘Why? How is this better than what happened before?’” —JOHN MCWHORTER The Commonwealth Club of California, established 1903

DEPARTMENTS

4 Editor’s Desk Sins of the Feathers, by John Zipperer 5 The Commons talk of the club: A permanent memorial for Ellen Tauscher, the 2021 virtual gala, and more.

essay: Ana Alanis on losing her family home in a wildfire. letters: Reader mail for The

Commonwealth. 8 Program Listings See programs coming up in December 2021 and January 2022. 17 Programs Info About our programs and attending Club events. 58 The Big Picture Mayor London Breed.

The

Commonwealth

December 2021/January 2022 Volume 115, Number 6

EDITOR’S DESK

JOHN ZIPPERER

Vice President of Media & Editorial

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL PHOTO BY COULEUR/PIXABAY

John Zipperer

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Sarah Gonzalez, Ed Ritger. ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@ commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2021 The Commonwealth Club of California. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; 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/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub. Published digitally via Issuu.com.

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Sins of the Feathers

here is an axiom in the magazine world that a popular cover will feature an animal or a child. I once worked with a publisher who did that even better by featuring an animal and a child on the same cover. It worked. You would be forgiven for thinking that I put an animal on our cover this month just because people love animals. There is some truth to that, and I am one of those animal lovers. Right now, as I sit at my desk writing this editor’s note, my 18-year-old black-and-white cat At one time in history, anis rearranging a blanket on a chair three feet away, preparing for her afternoon nap. She has been a imals were actually tried in wonderful constant companion while I’ve worked the court of law when they from home during this pandemic. But there’s a more specific reason for the beautibroke a human rule. ful animal on our cover. This issue we are featuring two recent Club speakers who each brought us tales from the world of the animals: Susan Orlean and Mary Roach. In her program, Orlean shares stories with moderator Julia Flynn Siler of a famous dog and of the fate of an even more famous orca whale you might have seen at the movies. Mary Roach talked with Kara Platoni about her research into what happens when animals and humans come into conflict. The animals are of course innocents; just following their instincts. But at one time in history, animals were actually tried in the court of law when they broke a human rule. Roach shares storeis of some of these furred, feathered or scaled criminals. Both articles are, appropriately, illustrated with lots of colorful photos of animals. (No children, though.) And though it might seem random, each creature pictured is related to mentions in their respective books. In this holiday, year-end (and year-beginning) issue, our featured programs are a mix of politics, business, health, philosophy, and, of course, the amazing, wild world of animals. I hope this issue informs and entertains you this holiday season, and we all look forward to seeing you again in-person at The Commonwealth Club.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

TALK OF THE CLUB

N E WS O F T H E C L U B , S P E A K E R S , M E M B E R S A N D S U P P O RT E R S PHOTO BY SARAH GONZALEZ/SMG FOTO

GRATITUDE

Virtual Gala Success

or the second year in a row, the Club’s annual gala was held online instead of in-person, and for the second year in a row, it was a rousing success. More than 1,400 people tuned in to watch us honor scientific and medical heroes, including Nobel laureate and CRISPR technology co-inventor Dr. Jennifer Doudna, Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Dr. Alicia Fernandez, Dr. Monica Gandhi, Dr. Diane Havlir, Dr. Margot Kushel, Dr. Carina Marquez and Dr. Kim Rhoads. Emmy-winning journalist Diane Dwyer hosted the festivities, which included Dr. Anthony Fauci lauding the honorees’ work in the pandemic. Our annual gala and Distinguished Citizens Award event is the Club’s most important fundraiser, and this year we met and surpassed our goal of raising $1 million. Thanks to all of you who generously supported our gala. EAST BAY

Tauscher Memorial

he new fourth bore of the East Bay’s Caldecott Tunnel has a new name that honors the area’s former member of Congress, the late Ellen O’Kane Tauscher. The event in mid-November drew Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among other dignitaries. Speaking at the unveiling of the new name, Clinton cited German sociologist Max Weber’s comment that “politics is the slow, hard boring of hard boards.” Clinton added that “It takes passion and perspective, and when I think of our dear, dear friend Ellen, she herself was an instrument of boring hard boards against very difficult odds, time and time again.” Tauscher, who passed away in April 2019, represented California’s 10th district from 1997 to 2009, when she left to serve as President Obama’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. While still in Congress, she played a key role in getting funding for the Caldecott expansion that now bears her name. In her post-government career, she also served as a member of The Commonwealth Club’s Board of Governors.

Ellen Tauscher (right) interviewed Senator Dianne Feinstein at The Commonwealth Club in 2017.

IN THE NEWS

It Happened Here

an Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly said she’s “bullish” on the future of [San Francisco], noting that for decades people “Apparently, have predicted its demise. “People always given the trafcome back to the fic, not everythings that attract them,” Daly said during a press briefbody’s moved ing Tuesday in San Francisco’s Comto Texas.” monwealth Club, as she faced a view —MARY DALY of the Bay Bridge connecting the tech hub to Oakland. “And apparently, given the traffic, not everybody’s moved to Texas.” —Bloomberg The Federal Reserve should not be quick to raise short-term interest rates to cool inflation because there are costs to workers and the economy, said San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly on Tuesday. “Pre-emptive action isn’t free. Like all insurance, there are costs,” Daly said during a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Interest-rate hikes now would not ease supply-chain issues but would curb demand 12 to 18 months from now, slowing down the economy when millions of sidelined workers are ready and able to come back to work, she said. —Marketwatch

A delegation of young activists, leaders, and entrepreneurs from the Abraham Accords countries that flew to California earlier this month to speak about regional peace found audiences eager for hope, but low on knowledge, they said. Israel signed groundbreaking normalization agreements in 2020 with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco and is working to close such a deal with Sudan, but despite the deals being brokered by the US, many there were unfamiliar with the details, participants found. The group was organized by Sharaka, an NGO that emerged in the wake of the 2020 peace agreements to promote peace and cooperation in the region. They met with Jewish leaders, Democratic politicians and activists, university and high school students, and civil leaders in the Bay Area and Sacramento from November 7-14. One of their events was a panel discussion at the Commonwealth Club of California, the nation’s oldest public affairs forum. “One of our key messages to American audiences, speaking on the liberal West Coast, is that the Abraham Accords are real and transformative for the Middle East and hugely positive,” Dan Feferman, Global Affairs director for Sharaka, told The Times of Israel on Sunday. “Put aside the political polarization. Domestic American politics have nothing to do with the Middle East.” —The Times of Israel COMMUNICATIONS

Education Team Launches Newsletter

he newest email newsletter from The Commonwealth Club is now coming your way from our new education department. The monthly newsletter includes information about Club education-related programs, as well as other news of interest to educators, students, and others interested in education matters. The newsletter comes on the heels of the launch of a new website covering the work of our education department. Learn more about our education work— including how to subscribe to the free newsletter—at commonwealthclub.org/education.

commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

THE COMMONS ESSAY

My House Burned in a Wildfire. Here’s What I Need from You.

waiting for updates on our home. I cried when days later I finally got to hug Marco and our friends, holding their faces in my hands with gratitude and disbelief that they were finally safe and with me. A pile of ashes and warped metal is all that’s left of my home now. Our house was the last on Coffee Creek Road to burn. The fire had grown slowly over the course of a month, steadily creeping toward us, and then charged at Coffee Creek and my home in a flash, taking everyone by surprise. I had worried for years now about climate change and wildfires but didn’t really think my

has been an incredible and soothing blessing to have so many people support our family in the wake of this tragedy. Today with a grateful, wounded, and resilient heart, I raise this question: What do I need now? I need you to talk about climate change—what you want to fight to save, what you may have already lost, what gives you hope in the wake of the climate crisis, and what confuses or scares you most. Tell me about your favorite people and places in the world so we can focus on protecting them or mourn our losses together. Tell me about the nourishing meals you

e got the call from a neighbor around 7 p.m.—someone with a vacation home in the area was watching video surveillance footage of their property remotely and saw the flames consuming their structures. Then the video feed went dead. They told us the wall of fire was barrelling down Coffee Creek Road toward my home, and no one could get a hold of my stepfather. My mom and I were helpless, having evacuated weeks prior, now a “It’s too late to three-hour drive from home. My stepfather, Marco, save my home, would tell us later that he’d just gotten out of the shower and I’ll grieve when a firefighter banged on our front door, saying it was that loss for time to GTFO. Marco had stayed behind to help coordithe rest of nate fire crews who’d set up a base on our property and to my life. But stave off looters lurking about our mostly evacuated town. I initially imagined Marco’s maybe we can last few minutes in our home save yours.” were rushed and quiet, but he said that the fire’s approach A pile of ashes and warped metal is all that’s left of Alanis’ family home now. sounded like a roaring train. We quickly hung up with our neighbor, family would ever be victims of this kind of make with Mother Earth’s gifts so I can fuel who had also already evacuated, and reached tragedy. Despite the unmistakable threat of myself, too. Tell me you remember having other family friends in Coffee Creek who this outcome, I didn’t believe it happened cooler summers, cleaner air, and living withconfirmed Marco was with them and prepar- until I saw pictures of the ruins myself. Now out barrages of news stories about ecological ing to evacuate. They could see the flames, I’m haunted by my imagination, visualizing disasters. Do this so we can affirm together the fire crews were pulling out, and now each room of our house burning. Alone. that climate change and the reckless corpoeveryone was fleeing to safety. I was sitting Without us. This place I personify as another rate and government behavior that fuels this in the passenger seat of our parked van while member of our family and a vessel for all of crisis is not acceptable or normal. this unfolded and my Californian heart our memories. It’s too late to save my home, and I’ll skipped a beat when I saw raindrops start It has been about three months since my grieve that loss for the rest of my life. But to hit our windshield. I couldn’t remember family home and sanctuary of almost 20 maybe we can save yours. Or the countless the last time I’d seen rain. The irony was in- years burned in the River Complex Fire. other communities and ecosystems threatescapable—it was raining around me while Since then, we have been propped up by ened by climate change that deserve our my town burned 140 miles away. So I stuck an outpouring of support from our friends, attention and protection. My hope now is my head out the car window, face towards friends of friends, extended family, com- that by talking about how climate change the sky, and let the raindrops and reality of munity, strangers, and people we haven’t also personally affects you and your life will the situation wash over me. spoken to in years. We’ve received hundreds help bring us together, mend my heart, and The timeline gets hazy from here. It was a of messages of support, generous donations inspire us to sustain climate action. blur of stress, checking evacuation options to surpass our initial GoFundMe fundraising In solidarity, for Marco and our friends, and painstakingly goal, homecooked meals, and much more. It Ana.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

PHOTO BY ANA ALANIS.

BY ANA ALANIS Director of Development, Strategic Partnerships, for The Commonwealth Club of California

THE COMMONS LETTERS

Leadership of The Commonwealth Club CLUB OFFICERS

Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie

Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy

BOARD OF GOVERNORS

Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy in conversation with Kevin Adler about ways to handle homelessness.

Expectations of the Homeless [To the Editors:] . . . Thank you for your interesting and insightful presentation at The Commonwealth Club (“Kevin Adler and Dr. Gloria Duffy: Steps Everyone Can Take to End Homelessness,” August 30, 2021). I was hoping that you would get into more policy ideas. I have “When they been in touch with people who work with the homeless get on shore in Philadelphia and have suggested some we must have policy changes. One of the problems expectations is that the word “homeless” inclines us to think that be- of them, too.” ing without a home is the only thing needed. But as you . . . pointed out, contact with others is critical. They are also family-less, hope-less, resource-less . . . Policies should encourage homeless to at least make more connections with each other, then maybe later with former family and friends. One way to do this is to offer housing, but only if they join with three others to form a group of four. They will share responsibility in looking out after each other and if one of them “messes up,”

then they all lose their housing privileges up. Some homeless will be able to do this. Others will not. Along with this are maybe some “clear places” in the city that other San Franciscans want to be able to walk and not be harassed by homeless, maybe the downtown area after 6 p.m. and other places. There should be a minivan that offers a ride from those places back “home” for any homeless. Those unable or unwilling to join with others to gain a house will be taken to another facility that will be safer for them. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank used to require groups of five women to apply for micro loans and to support each other in the repayment plans. Then they got rid of that requirement and I think it was a loss to the ability and expectations of women who might enlarge their circle of support. We have to throw a lifeline to those who are struggling, but when they get on shore we must have expectations of them, too. I have further ideas on how to move this program forward if you are interested. John Suter, MD San Francisco The Commonwealth welcomes letters to the editor in response to content in this magazine or Club programming. Email jzipperer@ commonwealthclub.org or The Commonwealth Letters, Attn: Editorial, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Letters may be edited for content and brevity.

Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy

Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Bill Ring George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter

PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS

* Past Chair ** Past President

Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Rose Guilbault*

Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu**

ADVISORY BOARD

Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen

Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Nancy Thompson

commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

December 2021 & January 2022 UPCOMING PROGRAMS

YOUR GUIDE TO IN-PERSON & ONLINE EVENTS AT THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1 Climate + Justice: Young Activists Speak Out As the devastating effects of climate change take hold around the world, young people are demanding action from global leaders and, increasingly, taking action themselves. Ask a teenager or young adult which issues they think are most pressing in the world today, and climate will often top the list. One of the goals of our Creating Citizens initiative is to provide a forum for youth to meet and learn from peers and civic leaders about the complex and often controversial issues that are important to them. So it is with special pride that we present a panel of young climate activists discussing their own work and the power of youth to address the climate crisis and issues of racial and social injustice around the world. Join us for this special program! Samir Chowdhury, Founder and Executive Director, Youth Climate Action Team, Inc. Vanessa Nakate, Author, A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis Zaria Romero, Climate Generation Delegate, COP26; Junior, University of Wisconsin-Madison Darren Zook, Professor, Global Studies and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley A CREATING CITIZENS PROGRAM Location: Online Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program PST Notes: Vanessa Nakate photo by and copyright Esther-Ruth_Mbabazi. Educators and students who register for this program will receive one complimentary copy of Vanessa Nakate’s new

Climate + Kustice: Young Activists Speak Out, 12.1 book, A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis. To receive your free book, please select the “free registration” ticket and use the comment box to tell us if you are a student or an educator, and your school or organization name. Special thanks to the Ken & Jaclyn Broad Family Foundation. Additional copies may be purchased at the Club’s online bookstore.

(Re)Filling Those Seats: California Theatre Challenges Brad Erickson, departing long-time Theatre Bay Area executive director, introduces top new Bay Area artistic leaders. They will challenge each other and viewers about repertory, risks, delights and post-COVID theatre-making. What’s changed in the theatre producing community? What will (re)fill those seats?

Sean San Jose, Artistic Director, Magic Theatre Johanna Pfaelzer, Artistic Director, Berkeley Repertory Theater Khalia Davis, Artistic Director, Bay Area

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

Children’s Theatre Tim Bond, Artistic Director, Theatreworks Brad Erickson, Executive Director, Theatre Bay Area AN ARTS MEMBER-LED FORUM Program organizer: Anne W. Smith Location: Online Time: 3:30–4:30 p.m. program PST Notes: In Association with Theatre Bay Area. Tim Bond photo by Hillary Jeanne Photography.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2 Around the World in 80 Books Take an illuminating literary voyage around the globe, without any Covid restrictions to hamper your travels, using classic and modern works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them. David Damrosch explores how our idea of the world has been shaped by 80 exceptional books, following an itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize–winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole

David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, and Chair of Comparative Literature Department, Harvard University; Director, Harvard’s Institute for World Literature; Author, Around the World in 80 Books George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates A HUMANITIES MEMBER-LED FORUM Program organizer: George Hammond Location: Online Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program PST Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Damrosch photo by and copyright Derek Lyons.

Taste Makers—Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food Join us to learn more about America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers. Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? Award-winning author Mayukh Sen has produced a group biography about seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. His book Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of

PHOTOS COURTESY THE SPEAKERS.

Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk. To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives. In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we’re entering. Taken together, these 80 books offer us fresh perspectives on enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat, as well as the patriarchal structures against which many heroines have to struggle—from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to Margaret Atwood today.

Mayukh Sen, Alicia Kennedy and Reem Assil, 12.2

immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration and gender, Sen challenges the way people look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible. He’ll be joined on our virtual stage by Alicia Kennedy, author of the popular newsletter “From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy” and a forthcoming book on eating ethnically.

Reem Assil, Chef; Owner, Reem’s California and Reem’s California Mission Alicia Kennedy, Writer; Author, “From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy” Newsletter Mayukh Sen, Author, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” on KBCW/KPIX TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Co-Host John Zipperer, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Co-host A MICHELLE MEOW SHOW PROGRAM Location: Online Time: noon–1 p.m. program PST Notes: This program is part of our Food Lit series, underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation. Mayukh photo by Christopher Gregory-Rivera; Assil photo by Lara Aburamadan.

The New Peace Corps: An Interview with the Acting Director In March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peace Corps returned more than 7,000 volunteers to the United States from the countries around the world where they were based. There have been many discussions and conferences advocating for changes in the structure, mission, and goals of the Peace Corps as it celebrates the 60th year since its founding by President John F. Kennedy. The Peace Corps is passionate about working to strengthen the impact of its mission both at home and abroad as well as promoting diversity and inclusion to enhance the relativity and substance of its work. Please join us as we discuss what the future of the Peace Corps will look like. Carol Spahn, Acting Director, Peace Corps Glenn Blumhorst, President, National Peace Corps Association Frank Price, Vice Chair, Commonwealth Club International Relations Member-Led Forum—Moderator AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MEMBER-LED FORUM Program Organizer: Frank Price Location: Online Time: 3–4 p.m. program PST

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6 John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now Beyond his position as chairman of the

commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

UPCOMING PROGRAMS DECEMBER 2021–JANUARY 2022

John Doerr, Chair, Kleiner Perkins; Author, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now Ryan Panchadsaram, Advisor to the Chairman, Kleiner Perkins; Contributor, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now In Conversation with Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate One A CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM Location: Online Time: 6–7 p.m. program PST

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7 Reading Californians Book Discussion: How Much of These Hills Is Gold Join author C Pam Zhang to discuss her California Book Awards gold medal-winning novel for first fiction, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. The tale of two young Chinese siblings in the post-Gold Rush era, this stark. narrative has been subtitled by reviewers “this land is not your land” and compared to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Although Zhang will join us via Zoom, you can either join us virtually or in person. C Pam Zhang. Author, How Much of These Hills Is Gold A READING CALIFORNIANS BOOK DISCUSSION PROGRAM Program organizer: Kalena Gregory Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco, CA 94105 Time: 2:30–3 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–4:15 p.m. program (all times PDT)

PHOTOS COURTESY THE SPEAKERS.

venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr rose to global prominence in the business world with his development of OKRs (objectives and key results), which he popularized in his best-selling book Measure What Matters. Could the same set of management tools be applied to preventing the growing climate crisis? In Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, John Doerr and Kleiner Perkins advisor Ryan Panchadsaram argue that it can. Join The Commonwealth Club and Climate One as John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram discuss the most pressing issue in our lifetime—and how lessons learned at the highest levels of business might address it. John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram, 12.6

The Democratization of Clinical Trials Clinical trials represent the primary means to test new drugs before they become approved by the FDA for sale and marketing as a standard of care. The purpose of these trials is to test the safety and efficacy of new drugs and their combinations. Clinical trials must be performed with the highest ethical standards and must include geographically, genetically and socio-economically diverse populations. Trials provide completely free care for all participants, ensuring that any patient can participate. However, the vast majority of cutting-edge trials are performed in elite academic tertiary care centers, requiring patients not living in the immediate vicinity to undergo burdensome travel and long stays away from home. The Guardian Research Network was developed to address these issues by bringing novel trials to community health systems where most patients are treated, effectively democratizing clinical trial access. A new digital approach was developed to consenting patients, and collecting and reporting clinical data, and a network was formed using centralized approaches to save time and expense. Real-world data is used to submit comparator control arms to the FDA to support rapid drug approvals. Timothy J. Yeatman, M.D. is an adjunct professor of surgery at the University of Utah, where he has an active National Cancer Institute (NCI)-funded laboratory, and he is a member of the Cell Response and Regulation

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

Program of the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI). He has spent the past two and a half years directing the development of an integrated cancer program for Intermountain Healthcare and its 24 hospitals, and coordinating collaborations with the University of Utah and HCI. He recently joined Phenome Health as its chief clinical officer in charge of identifying and accruing 1million participants in the Beyond the Human Genome Project. Dr. Timothy J. Yeatman, M.D., Adjunct Professor of Surgery, University of Utah; Chief Clinical Officer, Phenome Health; Dr. Robert Lee Kilpatrick, Ph.D., Chair, Health & Medicine Member-Led Forum— Moderator A HEALTH & MEDICINE MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organizer: Robert Lee Kilpatrick Location: Online Time: 3–4 p.m. program PST Notes: Main image by mcmurryjulie.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8 Fee for All: How Judges Are Raiding the Assets of Older Adults and Lining the Pockets of Conservatorship Attorneys This forum will explain how the assets of seniors and people with disabilities are often drained in order to pay the fees of a variety of attorneys in probate conservatorship proceedings. With vague or nonexistent rules and a

Roz Alexander-Kasparik, Was only allowed to be conservator for her fiancé David Rector after the court depleted David’s assets with payments of fees to the conservator and attorney Sharon Holmes, Saw Theresa Jankowski

suffer “legalized extortion” when lawyers wanted hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees in exchange for a dismissal of her conservatorship case Dr. Gloria Duffy, CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California Evan Nelson, Attorney Debra Bookout, Lead attorney of the Guardianship advocacy program, Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada Thomas F. Coleman, Legal Director, Spectrum Institute—Moderator A GROWNUPS MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organizer: Denise Michaud Location: Online Time: noon–1 p.m. program PST Notes: Main image “Beware pickpockets/ Attention aux pickpockets” by Paris 16.

David Cay Johnston: The Big Cheat The Trump family is one of the most talked

Clinical Trials, 12.7

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson 12.8

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: The 2021 Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication Each year, Climate One grants the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication to a natural or social scientist who has made extraordinary scientific contributions and communicated that knowledge to a broad public in a clear and compelling fashion. We are thrilled to present this year’s award to marine biologist, policy expert and writer Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Dr. Johnson exemplifies the rare combination of superb

about families in the United States. Donald Trump’s presidency elevated that and helped put them on an international stage that brought the family to the forefront of the world. Over the last half decade, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston has provided the American people with fascinating insight into the financial world of one of America’s most influential families. Johnston talks about the financial life of the Trump Family in his new piece of work, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. This new book details the aspects of the Trump family’s finances during the four years

scientist and powerful communicator. Join us for this special event with the co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab and co-creator of the All We Can Save Project, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson ,Marine Biologist; Policy Expert; Writer Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate One A CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM Location: Online Time: 3–4 p.m. program PDT Notes: Speaker photo by and copyright Ryan Lash.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9

JOHNSON PHOTO BY AND COPYRIGHT RYAN LASH.

lack of accountability, judges are making ad hoc and often arbitrary orders requiring conservatees and proposed conservatees to pay unreasonable or excessive legal fees. Not only are they required to pay the fees of lawyers appointed to represent them, they are forced to pay the fees of lawyers representing other parties in the case: petitioner, temporary conservator, guardian ad litem, objector, public guardian, or permanent conservator. Judges in conservatorship cases are supposed to be conserving the assets of adults who find themselves entangled in these proceedings. Courts know how to conserve assets when they want to or are required to. For example, there are strict procurement rules to follow when courts plan to spend money from the judicial branch budget. Specific guidelines must be followed. Competitive bidding is often required. But the culture of conservation does not exist when judges are spending the money of elderly and often vulnerable adults. The attorneys who are supposed to defend these adults in conservatorship proceedings are often silent when their colleagues in the probate bar are seeking to have the conservatee pay for their fees. The panelists in this forum will explain how they witnessed or experienced this “fee for all” depleting the assets of a conservatee. The moderator will explain how the Funding and Fees Project of Spectrum Institute plans to tackle this problem with a thorough study of what has been happening in local courts throughout the state. The project will issue a report and recommendations on how to tame this asset-eating beast. The forum will encourage viewers to make a donation to Spectrum Institute to help fund the research and report. The report will document how the current “fee for all” is unconstitutional and will propose specific new protections to preserve the assets of conservatees just as judges protect judicial assets and budgets. What’s good for judges should be good for conservatees: real protection and asset preservation. The report will also urge attorneys for conservatees to raise more objections to fees and file appeals

commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

UPCOMING PROGRAMS DECEMBER 2021–JANUARY 2022 Donald Trump spent in office, leaving no details out, to give you the complete picture.

China’s Greater Bay Area and Ours: Can We Collaborate? China is rapidly connecting Hong Kong, Macao and nine cities in Guangdong Province into a regional finance, technology, manufacturing and tourism hub of 86 million people. Over the next decade, this Greater Bay Area (GBA) will mature into a global showcase for China’s economic model, “One Country-Two Systems” integration, and Belt and Road development strategy. GBA hopes to partner with comparable regions worldwide, including the San Francisco Bay Area, in areas such as clean energy, health care, mobility and fintech. A new report by the Bay Area Council and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council assesses the commercial opportunities and political obstacles amid U.S.-China tensions. Join the sponsors of the report for a deeper dive into the report’s findings. Louis Chan, Principal Economist (Global Research Team), Hong Kong Trade Development Council Sean Randolph, Senior Director, Bay Area Council Economic Institute Scott Rozelle, Helen Farnsworth Professor, Stanford University, and Senior Fellow and Professor, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies—Moderator AN ASIA-PACIFIC MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organzer: Lillian Nakagawa Time: 6–7 p.m. program PST Notes: Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge photo by Vickty T/Unsplash.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10 Bay Lights Mixer: Art, Music and More Ring in the holiday season at our Bay Lights Social kick off, Friday December 10 from 4:30–7:30 p.m. at The Commonwealth

JOHNSTON PHOTO BY BONK JOHNSTON; ALASKA PHOTO BY AND COPYRIGHT MAGNUS HASTINGS.

David Cay Johnston, Co-Founder, DCReport.org; Author, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family Location: Online Time: 3–4 p.m. program PDT Notes: David Cay Johnston photo by Bonk Johnston.

David Cay Johnston, 12.9

Alaska, 12.13

Club’s waterfront home. Come experience a relaxing and friendly social ambience where art and community comes together with four floors of array art happenings and live music and more. Our social event celebrates the official opening of All That Glitters works by Philip Hua and our current exhibit, Sculptors of the Pacific Rim. Entrance fee includes one complimentary drink and lite bites. Special complimentary treats by Hot Cookies.

Jail during the early days of the pandemic. The Young Women’s Freedom Center will also join the discussion about the trial delays that are keeping hundreds of people in jail past their deadlines, the ongoing conditions in the jails, and the impact that the prolonged pandemic is having on the accused, their families and justice in San Francisco. Join us for this special online presentation, and have your questions ready for our panelists.

Performers TBA AN ARTS MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94131 Time: 4 p.m. doors open & check-in, 4:30–7:30 p.m. mixer (all times PST) Notes: Thanks to our partners for this event—New Ballet, Hot Coookie, and Francis Somsel, Patron of the Arts at The Commonwealth Club, and leader of the Somsel Team at Compass Real Estate.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 13 The Adachi Project Shares Voices “From Inside” County Jail In the second Commonwealth Club showcase of The Adachi Project, members of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and its partners from Even/Odd Films and Compound will present their short film “From Inside” to amplify the voices and experiences of people who were inside San Francisco County

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

Panelists TBA Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” on KBCW/KPIX TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; Twitter @msmichellemeow—Co-Host A MICHELLE MEOW SHOW PROGRAM Location: Online Time: 2:30–3:30 p.m. program PST

Small Town to Drag Race Crown: An Evening with Alaska As one of the most prominent drag performers today, Alaska is no stranger to fame. But Alaska’s story is more than her success as both a runner-up and winner in two different seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” as well as her high-profile relationship and the equally public breakup that ended it. In her new book—My Name’s Yours, What’s Alaska?—Alaska goes beneath her glamorous surface to reveal a never-before told account of her unique life story. From humble beginnings as a small-town kid studying at theater

PHOTOS COURTESY THE SPEAKERS.

Social Justice: Surviving and Thriving Amid the Pandemic, 12.14

school to her larger-than-life vibrance as one of drag’s most influential stars, Alaska’s perseverance over her struggles regarding the expression and discovery of her queerness is an inspiring story for the LGBTQIA+ community and beyond. At INFORUM, Alaska will bring the journey detailed in her new visual memoir to life. In doing so, she will provide motivation and representation for those belonging to communities who are too often unheard and underrepresented in the media and in popular culture. Whether you’re a die-hard RuPaul fan or an ally of the LGBTQIA+ community looking to hear more of their important stories, Alaska’s discussion is sure to leave you with new understandings of what it means to embrace your identity and let it thrive.

Alaska, Season two winner, “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars”; Author, My Name’s Yours, What’s Alaska?: A Memoir In Conversation with Honey Mahogany, Chair, San Francisco Democratic Party; Co-Founder, Compton’s Transgender Cultural District; Season Five Contestant, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” AN INFORUM PROGRAM Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 Time: 5:15 p.m. doors open & check-in, 6–7 p.m. program (all times PST) Notes: Alaska photo by and copyright Magnus Hastings.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14 Social Justice: Surviving and Thriving Amid the Pandemic As we begin to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we look forward to a discussion with long-time San Francisco Bay Area community leaders. These community leaders are leading community-based organizations that are spearheading the way regarding social justice and uplifting our diverse communities. Join us in-person or online as we discuss how they are helping people survive and thrive, even during a worldwide health crisis. Learn more about them and the amazing community work they have continued to do throughout the pandemic, as well as how others can support and uplift our own communities. Before the program, please enjoy some light bites and drinks courtesy of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco. Rudy Corpuz Jr., Founder and Executive Director, United Playaz Susana Rojas, Executive Director, Calle 24 Latino Cultural District Jacqueline Flin, Executive Director, APRI James Spingola, Member, Juvenile Probation Commission of the City and County of San Francisco Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” on KBCW/KPIX TV

and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Host A MICHELLE MEOW SHOW PROGRAM Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco, CA 94131 Time: 2 p.m. doors open & check-in, 2:30– 3:30 p.m. program (all times PST) Notes: In partnership with the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco. The McCarthy Center is dedicated to inspiring and preparing students at USF to pursue lives and careers of ethical public service. It supports programs, curriculum and research that inform public policy and nurture purposeful lives.

Climate Change, Technology and Innovation: Views from Korea and Japan Korea and Japan are two of the most technologically advanced countries on the planet. In September 2021, the Korean National Assembly passed legislation mandating carbon neutrality by 2050, becoming the 14th country to legislate commitments to reduce carbon emissions. Earlier in May 2021, Japan’s parliament passed an amendment to Japan’s framework climate law to legally enshrine the goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 previously announced by its prime minister. What are their policies for achieving their goals? How will technology and innovations

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JOIN

How can you give support and have an impact?

RENEW OR GIVE A GIFT MEMBERSHIP TODAY commonwealthclub.org/join

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

UPCOMING PROGRAMS DECEMBER 2021–JANUARY 2022 help achieve their goals? Join us to hear experts from Korea and Japan discuss these important subjects as the world addresses ways to meet their climate change targets.

Time: noon doors open & check-in, 12:30 p.m. program (all times PST)

THURSDAY, JANUARY 6

Dr. Sung Woo Kim, Head of the Private Environment & Energy Research Institute, Kim & Chang, Seoul, Korea; member of the Carbon Neutrality Committee under the Presidential Office of the Republic of Korea Dr. Kenji Yamaji, President, Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (in Tokyo, Japan) Dr. Stephanie A. Siehr, Professor, Environmental and Energy Programs, University of San Francisco; Affiliate, China Energy Group, Energy Technologies Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—Moderator AN ASIA-PACIFIC AFFAIRS MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organizer: Lillian Nakagawa Location: Online Time: 6–7 p.m. PST Notes: Co-organized with the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco.

The Next January 6: A Week to Week Political Roundtable Special On the one-year anniversary of the insurrection that shook the country—and our international allies—join us for a special Week to Week political roundtable exploring the immediate and the lasting effects of this attack on our democratic system. How much damage was done? What happens next time? Is American democracy strong enough to survive this test?

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 17

ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt: Fighting Hate Now See commonwealthclub.org/events for details.

Annual Michelle Meow Year-End Celebration: Highlighting the contributions of the LGBTQ+ AAPI Community Join us for a celebration of another year of “Michelle Meow Show” at The Commonwealth Club, featuring speakers, food and wine, artwork and fun. See commonwealthclub.org/events for details. César Cadabes, Performance Artist; HIV/ AIDS Activist; Advisory Board Member, Castro LGBTQ Cultural District Jacqueline Chiang, Artist Devesh Radhakrishnan, Advisory Committee Member, Parivar Michelle Mijung Kim, CEO and Co-Founder, Awaken Denise Huynh Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCWQ TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Host A MICHELLE MEOW SHOW PROGRAM Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco, CA 94105

Panelists TBA A WEEK TO WEEK POLITICAL ROUNDTABLE PROGRAM Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 Time: noon doors open & check-in, 12:30 p.m. program (all times PST)

MONDAY, JANUARY 10

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO, the Anti-Defamation League; Author, It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable—And How We Can Stop It Location: Online Time: noon–1 p.m. program PST

Grief Vampire: Operation Onion Ring The February 2019 New York Times Magazine reported on Susan Gerbic and her team’s successful work exposing psychic medium Thomas John in a sting called Operation Pizza Roll. Throughout the pandemic Gerbic’s team (Guerilla Skeptics) researched and exposed multiple mediums operating on Zoom using hot and cold reading to appear to be in communication with the dead; this series of reports was called Operation Lemon Meringue. In April 2021, medium Thomas John scheduled an 8-person Spirit Circle for children ages 5–12, charging $400 per reading. After trying unsuccessfully to get the Spirit Circle cancelled, the Guerilla Skeptics decided to attend and report back on the event.

Susan will be discussing what happened in Operation Onion Ring and how they say they once again caught “grief vampire” Thomas John. For more information on the work the Guerilla Skeptics have done concerning various “grief vampires,” visit their website. About the Speaker: Affectionately called the Wikipediatrician, Susan Gerbic is the founder of Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) and the Monterey County Skeptics, and is a self-proclaimed skeptical junkie. A Skeptical Inquirer contributor Gerbic is a fellow of CSI and winner of the James Randi Foundation award for 2017. In 2018, Susan founded and manages About Time, a nonprofit organization focusing on scientific skepticism and activism. While her particular focus has been “Grief Vampires” (psychics), her activism encompasses all areas of skepticism. You can find out more at AboutTimeProject.org. Susan Gerbic, Founder, Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW); Founder, Monterey County Skeptics; Founder and Manager, About Time Patrick O’Reilly, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist; Chair, Psychology Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California— Moderator A PSYCHOLOGY MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organizer: Patrick O’Reilly Location: Online Time: 3–4 p.m. program PST Notes: Speaker photo courtesy Susan Gerbic.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 11 Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn’t End The witty, insightful, entertaining Dave Pell will discuss his book Please Scream Inside Your Heart, a real-time ride through the maddening hell that was the 2020 news cycle, when turmoil and media mania stretched America’s sanity, democracy and toilet paper. Pell, who describes himself as the internet’s managing editor, will discuss how our media consumption got out of hand, what makes lies spread faster than truth, and why his Holocaust-surviving parents found 2020 America to be all-too familiar.

commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

UPCOMING PROGRAMS DECEMBER 2021–JANUARY 2022 A MIDDLE EAST MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organizer: Celia Menczel Location: The Commonwealth Club, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 Time: 2:30 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–4 p.m. program, 4 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13

David Bodanis, Author, The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Gone Mean In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates A HUMANITIES MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Program organizer: George Hammond Location: Online Time: 10–11 a.m. program PST Notes: Main image of man working on construction of Empire State Building; Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987; Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wikimedia Commons.

BODANIS PHOTO COURTESY THE SPEAKER; HOMER PHOTO FROM BRITISH MUSEUM IN LONDON, BY JW1805.

David Bodanis: The Power of Decency in a World Gone Mean Join us to hear David Bodanis make a fresh, detail-rich argument that the most productive way to lead is to be fair to others. Conventional wisdom is that “nice guys finish last,” but maybe that just means that too many nice guys are too conventional. And it probably does not mean that one has to be a bully,

finish last,” Bodanis charts a refreshing and sustainable approach to cultivating integrity and influence.

that is reborn every time Homer is reimagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the idea of Homer is elucidated from its origins to its most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art and classical archaeology. Porter explores the many sources of Homer’s mystique and their cultural impact, starting with the first recorded mentions of his name in ancient Greece.

James Porter, Irving Stone Professor of Literature, University of California, Berkeley; Author, Homer: The Very Idea In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates A HUMANITIES MEMBER-LED FORUM PROGRAM Location: Online Time: 3–4 p.m. program PST Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Porter photo by Julie Wolf; Homer photo from British Museum in London, by JW1805.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 18 Elie Mystal: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution See commonwealthclub.org/events for details.

David Bodanis, 1.13

Homer: The Very Idea, 1.13

schooled in Machiavellian tactics, to succeed. The Art of Fairness reveals how it was fairness, applied with skill, that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year. And how the same techniques transformed a quiet English debutante into an acclaimed guerrilla fighter. In 10 vivid profiles featuring pilots, presidents, and even the producer of “Game of Thrones,” Bodanis demonstrates that the path to greatness doesn’t require crushing displays of power or a tyrannical ego. With surprising insights from across history, including the downfall of the very man who popularized the phrase “nice guys

Homer: The Very Idea Join us to discuss with James Porter our ongoing fascination with Homer—the man and the myth. The poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey was revered as a cultural icon in antiquity and remains millennia later a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived and whether he was an actual person, a myth or merely a shared idea. Whatever his source, Homer is a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him. Porter follows the cultural history of the idea of the great poet and of the obsession

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

Elie Mystal, Legal Analyst and Justice Correspondent, The Nation; Author, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution Location: Online Time: noon–1 p.m. program PST

THURSDAY, JANUARY 27 NBC’s Jacob Ward: How Technology Shapes Our Thinking and Decisions See commonwealthclub.org/events for details.

Jacob Ward, Technology Correspondent, NBC News; Author, The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco, CA 94105 Time: 5:30 doors open & check-in, 6–7 p.m. program (all times PST)

PROGRAMS INFORMATION T

he Commonwealth Club organizes nearly 500 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs

are held online and throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are

RADIO, VIDEO, & PODCASTS

PROGRAM DIVISIONS In addition to its regular lineup of programming, the Club features a number of divisions that produce topic-focused programming. CLIMATE ONE Climate scientists, policymakers, activists and citizens discussing energy, the economy and the environment. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/CLIMATE-ONE

CREATING CITIZENS The Club’s new education department. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG

INFORUM Inspiring talks with leaders in tech, culture, food, design, business and social issues targeted towards young adults. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/INFORUM

MEMBER-LED FORUMS Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MLF

MICHELLE MEOW SHOW Talks with LGBTQ thought leaders from a wide range of fields of expertise. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MMS

WEEK TO WEEK Political roundtable paired with a preprogram social. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/W2W

typically one hour long and frequently include interviews, panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session.

Watch Club programs on KAXT and KTLN TV every weekend, and monthly on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club programs air on Marin TV’s Education Channel (Comcast Channel 30, U-Verse Channel 99), C-SPAN, and on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at youtube.com/commonwealthclub

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HARD OF HEARING? To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Mark Kirchner seven working days before the event at mkirchner@commonwealthclub.org. PODCASTS Subscribe to our free podcast service on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcastsubscribe

Hear Club programs on more than 230 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States (commonwealthclub.org/watch-listen/radio). For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast. In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs select Tuesdays at KQED (88.5 FM) 7 p.m. Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

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TICKETS Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all events—including “Members Free” events—require tickets. In-person programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705. Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. Select events include premium seating, which refers to the first several rows of seating. Pricing is subject to change. commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

HEALING THE SCARS OF

the pandemic, political disruption, and the insurrection is going to take time, says Mary Trump. From the September 22, 2021, “Michelle Meow Show” program “Mary Trump: The Reckoning.”

MARY L. TRUMP, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist; Author, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal and Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man In Conversation with MOLLY JONGFAST, Editor at Large, The Daily Beast; Host, “The New Abnormal” Podcast; Twitter @MollyJongFast Introduction and Q&A by MICHELLE MEOW, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” on KBCW/ KPIX TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

Editor’s note: Just hours before this program took place, news broke that former President Donald J. Trump had filed a lawsuit (seeking $100 million or more) against his niece, Mary Trump, and The New York Times over the release of his financial information. The release of the information had been mentioned in a Daily Beast interview Molly Jong-Fast had conducted with Mary Trump. Naturally, our speaker and moderator addressed the situation in our program. MOLLY JONG-FAST: It’s very fun to get to interview you . . . after I got you sued. I’m sorry. MARY TRUMP: You know, I was actually telling somebody the other day that I really wish Donald would sue me, because it would help book sales. And turns out you’re the reason I got sued all along. So thank you. [Laughter.] JONG-FAST: My editor at The Daily Beast sent me a text that was like, “Yo, Molly.” And I wrote back, “What’s going on?” He was like, “You’re in this lawsuit.” And I was

MARY TRUMP: THE RECKONING Trump, a clinical psychologist, author and niece of the former president, discusses Americans dealing with trauma. just delighted. But then my husband, who’s like an adult, was like, “Oh, my God, what is this?” He is having a heart attack. I think the lawyer misspelled her own name at one point in the [lawsuit], I’m not sure. . . . She’s a very kind of Trumpy lawyer. TRUMP: I think her office is in a strip mall or something. But just so you’re aware. If I do indeed have to pay $100 million dollars, you’re going to have to pay your fair share. [Laughter.] JONG-FAST: I mean, I’m good for it. And I have books here I can probably sell. I’m kidding. By the way, I’m certainly not good for it. I have a lot of questions for you, obviously. First, this lawsuit is a state lawsuit; it’s not a federal lawsuit. And it’s like they did it in Westchester or— TRUMP: Dutchess County. JONG-FAST: Dutchess County, which I think is in central New York. Yes, slightly strange. TRUMP: My uncle Rob lived there. So it is a little strange, because he doesn’t live there

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

anymore. JONG-FAST: Right. OK, so let’s get to the book. The book, called The Reckoning, just came out. First I want to talk to you about the first chapter, which is like incredibly autobiographical in a way that I really appreciate. Can you talk to me about writing? Talk a little bit about that first chapter and how you came to write so personally, because I think we both are able to write about our families, but not write about ourselves. This is a departure for you. TRUMP: Yeah. You know, the first book obviously had a particular agenda attached to it. [Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man was published in 2020.—Ed.] It really wasn’t a memoir in a way, and it certainly wasn’t my memoir. So a lot of things that I might have been interested in writing about weren’t really relevant to the task at hand. In large part, the same is true of this book, which is not at all a memoir. It really has nothing to do with my family. However,

PHOTO BY AVERY L. TRUMP.

commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

as you and I have discussed over the course of the last year, COVID has touched all of us. It has traumatized a lot of people. It has retraumatized a lot of people. And for probably obvious reasons, I took it really personally, because my uncle is the one who is responsible for this mass suffering and the mass death, which was kind of hard to live with. But I also take it personally, because I have PTSD. I came into COVID already having complex PTSD, which just means it’s trauma that occurred over a long period of time. And that’s what a lot of us have been feeling for the last year and a half. I felt that it was important for me to be honest about that for a couple of reasons. One, because it gave me an in to the experiences people might be having that other people wouldn’t have. I understand that not just clinically, but personally. We do mental health and mental illness really badly in this country. We treat mental health like it’s a luxury, and mental illness like it’s still some kind of moral failing. There’s still stigma attached. That gets in the way of our ability to heal. So I felt if I can be straight with people about my own experiences, and that helps normalize the experience for some people, then I’m happy to do that, because we are all suffering so much. JONG-FAST: You and I have bonded about this before, but I’m sober since I was 19. I love to talk about it, because I feel like talking about being sober is a way to help other people. I didn’t know that people could get sober until I saw [others do it.] . . . It would have helped me a lot to know that there were people who got sober at 19 and stayed sober. So I agree, I think it’s really wonderful when you can share your experience to help other people. Did the program work? Did you feel like the program worked? TRUMP: You know, I wasn’t there long enough. I went into treatment two different times for various reasons. So the first time around, I was there for three weeks, and it should have been three months, probably, but I had to go back to New York. Then after about a month or so, I was unraveling again and knew I needed to put the brakes on it. So I went back to Tucson and it was an amazing experience. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Unfortunately, it’s inordinately expensive and it’s out of the reach of most people, which is why our government needs to do better at funding treatments for people’s mental health issues. But I broke my foot like three days before I came home. So my list of things that was going to help keep

“[The documents] were given to me in discovery during yet another lawsuit 20 years ago, because, as I recently said, that’s how my family communicates: We sue each other.” —MARY TRUMP

me contained and motivated got thrown out the window, because I wasn’t going to be hobbling into Manhattan on crutches to help Syrian refugees or whatever it was I was planning on doing. So that kind of got in the way of my healing. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t broken my foot, I’m pretty sure I would not have cooperated with The New York Times, and I wouldn’t have written the book and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. JONG-FAST: So what should we talk more about—the book, or should we talk about The New York Times? We’re going to do both. TRUMP: The New York Times. Since we’ve set up the segue let’s go there, because it’s relevant. Yeah. They’re getting sued by Donald, too, for $100 million. JONG-FAST: Is that the only amount he knows? [Laughter.] TRUMP: I think maybe it’s just all he has. I don’t know. JONG-FAST: But there are other amounts of money. TRUMP: So this lawsuit, besides being completely frivolous and you could say probably retaliatory, too, because I’m suing him—and in fact, the lawsuit is in the same county, so for various reasons—and I don’t know if it’s a bad thing, I guess it’s a good thing, but it just underscores how shoddy he is. It’s the worst reasoned, most poorly written thing that you could be subjected to, and it’s so dramatic and silly and unserious that it’s infuriating that people like him are allowed to game the system and use resources

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that could be used for much more important things, simply as a way to avoid and evade responsibility. You know, this is just a stalling tactic, I’m guessing. JONG-FAST: Some of the reporting I’ve read said that it accused you of stealing documents that had actually been given to you TRUMP: And smuggling them. You know, it’s not Cuban cigars. It’s documents that, yes, were given to me in discovery during yet another lawsuit 20 years ago, because, as I recently said, that’s how my family communicates: We sue each other. JONG-FAST: Lawsuits are the love language in that family. TRUMP: It is. [Laughter.] That’s what happens when money is the only currency. JONG-FAST: A lot of these New York families have older patriarchs who try to screw the younger kids out of stuff. It’s not so unusual. But I think the frequency of the Trump family’s [internal wrangling] is probably . . . also him being president. TRUMP: Yeah, that still gives me the chills. JONG-FAST: I want to circle back for a second on the tax stuff. It strikes me that you really did a huge service, and that also by suing you, he is actually confirming that all the documents that he said were fake are real. TRUMP: Yes. Again, it’s amazing how much of their brief is about the success of my book. It’s just quite incredible. It quotes my book, and it’s just doing me a favor, kind of. My lawyer, the brilliant Robbie Kaplan, summed it up best, basically saying that in essence, this lawsuit is Donald saying, “We need to

shut her up, because she’s revealing the truth about what we did and we need to keep in place the document that prevents her from talking about all the crimes we committed,” you know? JONG-FAST: It really is a confirmation that the guy is pretty crooked. TRUMP: And it’s the same thing with my fraud lawsuit against them, which alleges they stole quite a large sum of money [intended] for me after my dad died when I was 16 and he was 42, even though they were my trustees at the time. They don’t argue that they didn’t commit fraud. They say that there’s a statute of limitations that’s passed. So it’s the same kind of thing. JONG-FAST: I also feel like he’s sort of mad that the RNC [Republican National Committee] didn’t have to buy hundreds of copies of your book, like with Don Jr. [Laughter.] I feel like there’s a residual hostility, like your book actually became a bestseller and no one had to buy all the copies. TRUMP: Listen, I’m happy people bought it, of course. And I hope it served a purpose and people found it useful. In fact, that is one of the gratifying things; a lot of people have said that they recognize their own families in it, and it helped them feel validated or whatever. But the fact that my book sold in a day more copies than his first book sold in 30 years is pretty cool. JONG-FAST: Now, let’s talk about this

book. It’s really an interesting book, because you talk about yourself and then you go into the history of America. TRUMP: It takes a turn, because when I started thinking about the next book, it was last October, I think it was much more about the concerns we were going to be facing when we started emerging from COVID, if we ever did. I really believed that once we started coming out of our apartments and houses, we were all going to be confronted with things that we hadn’t been able to confront, because you can’t deal with your trauma while you’re being traumatized, whether it’s the PTSD or depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorders, serious mental psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, stress disorder, all that stuff. Then I realized that [you] can’t really write about that in an effective way—one, because it was a big question mark, and two, that’s a policy thing that needs to be dealt with through policy. So we were then at this incredible point of crisis; we were in the second wave of COVID, we had this serious economic crisis—ongoing —and a deep political crisis. We were a month away from an election that was uncertain. And the fact that there was uncertainty was mind blowing to me, that at that point, 250,000 Americans were dead because of Donald, and yet there was a better than 40 percent chance that he might get four

more years in the Oval Office. It was just extraordinary to me that this country got to this place in what seemed like a very short period of time. How did this happen? I realize that just as with trauma in general and PTSD in particular, in order to get through it—because you can’t cure PTSD, but you can learn how to manage it—in order to get to that point, you need to face not just what happened to you, but the feelings you felt while it was happening. And that’s why the trauma gets suspended in time, because it never gets processed and the feeling gets split off from it, and you can’t get past it. It will continue to affect you on a day-to-day basis unless you go back and you do that hard work. It’s a terrible thing to ask somebody to do, quite honestly. I realized we need to do that as a country, because, one, we’re in this amazing amount of trauma now, but we always have been and it’s never been addressed. And the white people who committed the atrocities that led to the trauma have never acknowledged their role, let alone atoned for it. I really think that’s partially because of two major things. One is the fact that white supremacy always has been and continues to be operative in America. And two, we never hold powerful white men accountable for anything. And I think that those two things lead us directly to Donald John Trump. JONG-FAST: It is incredible to me that so many people are [assuming] Trump is going

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“Eighteen months later, we are all still suffering greatly.” —MARY TRUMP

to go to jail . . . Meanwhile, I see no imminent jailing. Do you? TRUMP: It’s a terrible indictment of where we are, because it suggests that we haven’t evolved at all. And if you consider that Robert E. Lee, who was the greatest traitor to this country, owned and tortured other human beings, and he was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—not only did he not get imprisoned, he went on to lead a very successful life as a university president. And when he died, the university was named after him. Washington and Lee University, I think it’s still called that. And in [1975], President Gerald Ford pardoned him. So why would we expect a powerful white man who has committed crimes with impunity and committed other transgressions with impunity for his entire life and been allowed to fail upward so spectacularly—why would we expect that there would be justice? That is a very sad commentary on not just where we are, but where we might be headed. JONG-FAST: We were talking about Robert E. Lee, who is one of Trump’s favorite generals. I recently learned via whatever Trump’s little message app or whatever it is that he publishes those sort of [messages], he talks about [Lee] was actually a very good general; though of course he wasn’t. A friend of mine called me yesterday and was like, “Trump is going to win. Trump is going to run again and he’s going to win.” What do you think? TRUMP: I think it depends on a few things. I’m much less sanguine about it than I was in November, December of last year, because at the time, there was no way to know how far—although I suppose I should

have, I swear I feel like Charlie Brown and the football far too often, because I’m a Democrat—but there was no way to know how far they were going to take it in terms of allowing him to spread the big lie that the election was stolen from him, to the extent that they were going to repeat the big lie and failed to allow President-elect Biden’s team to get access to very vital materials, because remember, thousands of people were still dying every day from COVID. And Donald decided that it wasn’t of interest to him any more, to the extent that it ever was. There was no way to know that there was going to be an insurrection incited by Donald against his own government. So I felt at the time that he would go the way of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush and become irrelevant and his crushing defeat—because he didn’t lose as badly as he should have, and it’s demoralizing that 12 million more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016—however, he did lose by 8 million votes. And probably more humiliating than that is he couldn’t blame the Republicans, because they outperformed expectations and did much better than they should have. So he can’t blame them for his loss, because they did pretty well. So I figured he was never going to get over that narcissistic injury, because, as you know, there’s nothing worse than losing in my family. You may as well just jump off a cliff. Now, I’m not so sure, because as continues to happen and it never ceases to amaze me, everything seems to be breaking his way. JONG-FAST: It’s crazy. I feel like with Republicans, they kidnap themselves and hold themselves hostage. They had a moment to get rid of Trump. They could have done

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it and they decided like, “Oh, no, [we] don’t want to alienate the base.” And now, Trump is trying to find a challenger to go after [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell, which I mean is really fun for me as a Democrat, but they should have known this guy was not there for whatever Republican policies are any more, I guess, tax cuts for rich people and racism. I mean, I guess he is there for the race. OK. Right. No, never mind. He is there for the Republican values, because those are the new Republican values. But it strikes me that the party sort of let Trump transform them. TRUMP: Honestly, I don’t think he transformed them, I think he just revealed them. They didn’t just have one opportunity to take an off ramp away from him. They had dozens of such opportunities starting in 2015. I think part of it is that starting with, say, the Tea Party, for example, . . . that motivated the base and the Republicans felt like, “Hey, these reckless, crazy people on the far right are helpful for us. So we’re going to let that monster roam free, but we’ll be able to control it down the road.” The Tea Party basically took over the Republican Party and . . . . they have devolved to this point, because if they weren’t like this all along, they wouldn’t have allowed Donald to remain in the primary, let alone run in the general. Or they certainly would have gotten rid of him after the first impeachment. They would have convicted him in the Senate. So time after time, they decided to stick with him. And I don’t think it’s because they’re afraid of the base. I think it’s because he represents exactly what they believe in

to the extent that they believe in anything. JONG-FA ST: I think we should let Michelle ask some of the questions from the [audience]. MICHELLE MEOW: Thank you both. Yes, we’ve got a lively discussion and plenty of questions for you, Mary. The first one is, The level of psychological reconstruction we need to do as people is overwhelming. How do we appeal to others when we’re also full of resistance? What is the sweet spot to trigger engagement? TRUMP: It’s going to be different for everybody. Sometimes you have to meet people where they are, and sometimes that means just giving them room to get there on their own. You can’t force people. I used to work in a clinic that specialized in substance abuse disorders, and a lot of the patients there were mandated by court to go to treatment. Doesn’t work. If you’re resisting, if you’re that resistant, then you cannot force it on somebody. I’d say the first thing we need to do is we need to focus on ourselves. You can’t give people that much if your own resources are depleted. And I think that’s kind of where we all are right now. So as hard as it is to believe that we are still here 18 months later, we need to remember that we are all still suffering greatly. I live in New York; Molly lives in New York, it’s so much better now. A lot of people are vaccinated. You know, we’re still wearing masks indoors and all that stuff. So I feel relatively safe there. But we’re not totally out of the woods. And again, even though luckily so far it hasn’t been anybody close to me, but 2,000 Americans are dying every day still for no reason. So the very first thing we need to do is assess where we are, get help if we need it. But also remember that we’re all still a little bit isolated and we’re all still in the process of emerging from what has been very traumatic and continues to be. So we need to stay connected. We need community, which is very hard to do when we have been so isolated for so long. And we need to take steps every day to make sure that we are giving ourselves what we need or asking for things that we can’t do for ourselves. Resistance is a tough thing to deal with. The way I used to think about it is it’s as if we were at war and all of us went to war at the same time. We all served in some capacity. Some of us had desk jobs. Some of us were on the front lines and everything in between, and we all came back at the same time. So we need to understand that we are all going

through it. I do this all the time with people, if I’m annoyed with them or upset with them, I just take a step back and say, Well, you know what? It’s COVID. It’s very likely COVID. And so we need to be forgiving to ourselves, we need to be forgiving to other people and hope that when people are ready to seek help or your counsel, that they will ask and that we will be able to be there for them and for ourselves. MEOW: What are your thoughts regarding being named in a suit by Donald Trump when it comes to the discovery phase where he would be exposed to details of his businesses, business practices all while under oath? TRUMP: He doesn’t seem to have thought that one through, does he? [Laughter.] I’m thinking of sending him flowers. Actually, I might not, because, you know, I’m saving all of my money for when I have to pay him that $100 million. But I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely there will be a discovery phase here, because he never gets to that point. However, that might be different with my lawsuit against them, because I’m not going to drop it and I will see it through. So I think that’s what he needs to be more worried about. And I again, I think that’s one of the reasons this lawsuit against me happened, because at least I’d like to think I’ve got him freaked out a little bit. MEOW: Mary, was your complex PTSD related to dealing with your father and his history with a family? Was it cathartic for you? Thank you for admitting it. TRUMP: No, it had nothing to do with my dad or his family, although they didn’t help. [Laughter.] Let’s put it that way. They certainly compounded the trauma. But listen, anybody who’s grown up with an alcoholic parent understands that put a burden on any child who has to deal with that. And especially when that person’s family is so cruel. So, no, that had nothing to do with it. However, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had some form of PTSD himself, given the unspeakable cruelty he was subjected to practically his entire life. MEOW: If we’re traumatized now, what do you think would happen if Trump gets elected again in 2024? What do you think are the chances of him getting elected in 20204? TRUMP: Hmm. I will answer the question, but I think right now we need to be very concerned about what happens in 2022,

because if the Republicans win back the House or gain more seats in the Senate, I think at that point it’s over. I hate saying that, but I believe it’s true. So we need to focus on that. If we’re lucky and the Democrats increase their margins, preferably in the Senate, then yeah, 2024 becomes the next most important election of our lifetime. As I was saying to Molly earlier, I believed immediately after the election that he wouldn’t run again because he’d been so humiliated. Then the Republicans proved themselves to be even more craven than I gave them credit for and have enabled him to retain power, to remain influential. And also behind the scenes, God knows what’s happening, but out in the open, they are in every state trying to enact voter suppression laws aimed squarely at preventing Democratic-leaning voters from voting. So if they can rig the system in only three states against us and therefore make it impossible for Democrats to win statewide elections in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, for example, then Donald would run because he wouldn’t be able to lose, and he needs the powers and protections of the Oval Office—he needs them and he knows he needs them. So we need to hope, for the first time in this country’s history, that a powerful white man who committed egregious crimes against his country and against the people of his country is held accountable. He needs to go to prison, but not sure that’s going to happen. He needs to be impoverished. He needs to be kept from running for office again. You know, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment makes it impossible for insurrectionist to run for public office. That needs to be invoked. There’s also the question of his health. He’s an old 74 and he’s in terrible shape. And . . . he has serious mental illness, which is untreated. JONG-FAST: What’s your diagnosis of them? TRUMP: I don’t diagnose him because technically I can’t. But we just need to look at his behavior to know that, whether it’s technically this or not, he’s an incredibly antisocial person. Rules don’t apply to him. He lies. He’s a prolific liar. He lies a lot and has no qualms about doing so. And he’s cruel. He has no empathy. If he feels threatened—and we’re seeing how this is playing out—he will do anything in his power to take all of us down with him. . . . We are still unbelievably at the mercy of a person who literally doesn’t care if we live or die unless we support him.

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The Limits of Antiracism How the “woke” went wrong DOES THE LEFT HAVE ANSWERS

when it comes to our country’s racial reckoning? John McWhorter has a different road map to justice that he believes will help, not hurt, Black America. From the November 2, 2021, online program “John McWhorter: The Limits of Antiracism.” JOHN MCWHORTER, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; Author, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America DEBRA J. SAUNDERS, Fellow, Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership; Columnist, Creators Syndicate—Moderator DEBRA J. SAUNDERS: I’m pleased to be here today to discuss [with] John McWhorter his new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. It came out last week, and it is already making waves and inspiring debates for its insightful critiques of Critical Race Theory and antiracism. Johnson, now a regular columnist for The New York Times and the author of several books on linguistics, is an associate professor at Columbia University. John, I love the book—it never got boring, and it made me think about the world in a new way. Before I drill down, tell us, why did you write the book? And what do people who really, really don’t like your viewpoint say about it? JOHN MCWHORTER: What the book is for is exactly what you said. I’m trying to get people to look at these issues that can be so confounding in

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PHOTO COURTESY JOHN MCWHORTER.

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what might be a new way to them, which is the way that I’ve found that I see it and that I suspect might be worthy of some general discussion. The book is written not as some sweater vest [tugs on his sweater vest], starchy kind of person who is writing a book that’s designed to get money from white conservatives. That’s what a lot of people think about Black “conservative” thinkers, although what I am is a liberal who just gets on people’s nerves. But it’s not that; this is not a right-wing Black book, especially because I’m not of the right wing. What it’s for is really mostly people left of center who are listening to these voices from the radical hard left and beginning to get a feeling that somehow those people’s view must be actual truth—rather than one facet of the left—out of fear. Because there’s a certain kind of person who now basically tells you that you are racist, i.e. what we now think of as a “moral pervert,” if you disagree with what is actually a very narrow, underthought and punitive range of views. I think that what we need is left of center but constructive and unselfconcerned positions on what Black people need in this country. So I think that what most people are going to say about it—I mean, I’ve been beaten up on by that kind of person for

my views on race since late in the Clinton administration, so it’s old, old news. It’s interesting, because you’re only as good as what you did last week. There are people these days who—I can tell and completely understand it—think I first started writing for The Daily Beast in about 2015, and that right now I’m making my way, that I’m climbing up and getting a little bit of attention. They think that I’m new at this, and so I think that’s part of why they throw this at me so hard. But the main thing is that they say that I am just writing this book because they’re the sorts of things that white people want to hear. And that’s really not true. The book is written for Black people as much as for white people. I think most Black people, especially once you step about two feet beyond the intelligentsia and the media, agree with the sorts of things I’m saying, and this is the hard thing—to the extent that a certain kind of enlightened, sensitive white person wants to hear what I’ve written in Woke Racism, they should—there’s a facile idea that what white people want to hear must automatically be racist and letting white people off the hook. That’s facile. That’s simplistic. It could be, the probability does allow, that what a white person enjoys hearing is also the moral truth,

and I’m taking a gamble that my book falls into that realm. SAUNDERS: Your book starts out with the story of a food writer, Alison Roman, for The New York Times. She criticized Marie Kondo, and she criticized Chrissy Teigen for cashing in on commercialism. She was professionally destroyed for it, because Kondo is Japanese and Teigen’s half white, and people were saying she was a racist and she was “punching down.” You really don’t like that phrase punching down. [Roman] was suspended; she eventually left The New York Times, and you don’t think she would have been targeted five years ago and professionally destroyed the way she was now. Can you talk about how things changed so quickly? MCWHORTER: Yeah, it’s interesting you bring up her, because I open the book with her, and that really was what sparked me to write the book; it was something that sounds that trivial. I like her. I like the food that she was teaching me to make during the pandemic. And all of a sudden she was gone. I noticed it, and then I read why. That was when something clicked in me and I thought, “This is absolutely absurd.” I could tell it was going to continue, and it most certainly did. I thought, This is the

“. . . A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK [I AM ONE OF THE] BLACK ‘CONSERVATIVE’ THINKERS, ALTHOUGH WHAT I AM IS A LIBERAL WHO JUST GETS ON PEOPLE’S NERVES.” —JOHN MCWHORTER

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new mood. There is a newly influential group of people who are going to keep doing this, and I can’t have it. So it wasn’t me rubbing my hands together and thinking, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, I’m going to write a book that white people want to read about racism.” It was, “Where is my food columnist?” That was what it really was. She was essentially fired for not trying to battle power differentials. There’s an analysis there. The idea is that Chrissy Teigen is half Thai and therefore not completely white. Marie Kondo is a Japanese citizen, and that’s many things. It’s not a white American person or a white European person. Therefore, to criticize them if you’re white is some sort of moral transgression. All of us know, except for roughly seven and a half people who are probably responsible for getting her fired, that it makes no sense for her to lose her job for these offhanded criticisms of these two very rich, very influential people, neither of whom think of themselves as at the hands of white hegemony. Both of them were perplexed at all of this. And yet that’s the way it had to be. I thought the people who got Alison Roman fired thought they were doing a good thing. I wasn’t thinking that they’re holding pitchforks and running down a hill. I thought, these are peaceable, sensible, probably overeducated people who genuinely thought that what they did was the right thing. But the thing is, most of the rest of us know that what they did was a barbarity. What is the gap in understanding here? It’s this issue of power being everything. And I took it from there. SAUNDERS: Did she make a mistake apologizing before she was suspended? If she had fought back sooner, would that have helped? MCWHORTER: You know, she couldn’t have known, because the history has been going by so quickly. In her time, which was 15 minutes ago, it was reasonable for her to think that she could apologize and be let alone. But it absolutely didn’t work. It only made it worse, and we’ve all seen things like that. But all of that took a real, real jump starting in the spring of 2020. So in retrospect, no, she should have said, “I haven’t done anything wrong. You can say whatever you want to about me, and I will suffer the consequences, but I will admit no culpability.” But I understand why, in the spring of 2020, she didn’t know that it had gotten so bad that people like this needed to be standed down en masse across the country.

She couldn’t have known. Now she would have. Or if for some reason she asked me, I would tell her, “Don’t apologize.” SAUNDERS: By the way, thank you for pronouncing hegemony, because [as] you said in the book, a lot of people don’t know how to pronounce it, and I’m like, “Do I or don’t I?” Now I know. [Laughter.] I appreciate that you’re a linguist. Do you think things are going to get worse or are they going to get better? Are there signs that this is ending or that people are suddenly realizing that nice people are actually going out and hounding people trying to take over their jobs for trivial faults? What’s the answer to that? MC W HORT E R : Yea h, I think it’s changing. Six months ago, I wasn’t sure, but at this point I’m seeing various signs that there’s going to be a pushback against this, partly as we come out of the pandemic, partly as we see so much of it happening that we realize that it’s “a thing.” Noticing how for better or for worse, the word woke is now a slur—that happened because this kind of person has annoyed and bemused so very many, I hate to say, “normal thinking” people. I can tell that this book is going to be topical. This is going to be one which in 10 years is going to be seen as part of a certain moment. It was part of a pushback against something and I hope helps to serve a purpose. I do see it changing, and I wanted to do everything that I could to make sure that as many people as possible understood that to resist this particular extreme is not racist, no matter what the elect, as I call them, say. And no matter whether that elected person is Black, it’s not racist. Other things are. So I hope this book will be a part of that. SAUNDERS: By the way, you quote Jody Bottum; you take the phrase “the elect” from Jody Bottum, but he was talking about religious people. You’re talking about people whose politics have become a religion. I have to tell you, you’ve totally radicalized me, because I spent 24 years as a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and I was really tender about how I dealt with people. But one of the things I really got out of your book is you’re telling people, “Don’t apologize for your viewpoints. Ditch the anguish. Don’t back down.” When people start challenging you a certain way—and I try to be nice about it—give it back to them. I was on Twitter like yesterday and I was thinking about what we were going to talk about and

I just jumped down someone’s throat. You’ve made me sort of feel that when people start trying to challenge you and make you feel like maybe they’re going to say you’re a racist, that you’ve just got to slam them back. MCWHORTER: You know, I’m not a belligerent person, but I think that when it comes to this type, we need to simply stand up in the same way that they’re standing up and look them in the eye and say no. I use the analogy of bumping a shark on the nose—and I don’t want people to think that I mean you’re supposed to be physical with anybody—but with that kind of person, and not just anybody who’s arguing from the left, but this type who is poised to call you a moral pervert in the public square if you don’t agree with their views, you just have to say, “No, I am not a racist. I don’t agree with what you’re saying, and you can say whatever you want about me, wherever you will. I am not changing my mind.” If we say that enough, to the extent that we can within the parameters of our lives, to this kind of person, then this will change. But it does mean that a lot of people—and unfortunately here we’re talking about mainly white people—have a responsibility, which is that not only do you have to know that racism is more than burning crosses on people’s lawns, that was not the most natural way of thinking for white people. I think most white people got that message. Now the idea has to be to get used to being called a racist on social media; realize that the world will keep spinning, your life in most cases will keep going. But in the meantime, you can’t give these people what they want, because if you give it to them, they’ll take it. If you really want a world run by people who have taken what is supposed to be a kind of compassion into a social justice religion—it’s not about fairness, but about virtue signaling—if you don’t want that world, these people have to be told to sit back down; not to leave the room, but just to sit back down. What I really hope is that if people have that backbone—and they must understand this: I am not telling white people to tell Black people to sit down. My main mental image is it’s a white person who you’re telling to sit down, although there are certainly Black people like this. Although, it’s not the way most Black people think. That’s something I wish more people would keep in mind. SAUNDERS: One of your points [in the book] is that when you have so many people

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in the elect thinking that the important thing is how they feel about other people and think about other people, not looking for practical solutions about disparity, that is a disservice to everybody in this country. Can you talk to that for a second, please? MCW HORTER: Sure. It’s really very simple. A lot of the people that we’re talking about are under the impression that showing that you understand that societal racism exists is really key. They think that showing that you understand that is a necessary prelude to changing the world. The problem is: Says who? In what sense? Where did you get that? Nobody would have had any idea what that meant 60 years ago in the Civil Rights Movement. So what’s the proof now? I imagine some very sophisticated political science or sociology professors have answers and maybe some academic journals that nobody’s ever read or some books that I haven’t gotten to. But the point hasn’t been made in any mainstream way that we can say that all of those people who are pretending this know: it’s just that it feels right. Frankly, it’s easy. So you stand up and show that you know something and everybody does high fives. But what have you done for somebody who’s suffering? No one really asked that question, except someone like Robin DiAngelo in literally the worst book ever written. [White Fragility] is the worst book I’ve ever read. And if there’s one thing that I have done a lot of, it’s read books. She actually anticipates this question, that if you’re asking, “OK, but what are you actually going to go do?” It’s called solutionism. You’re going too fast. You’re letting yourself off the hook, because what you’re really supposed to think about how you’re complicit in a racist system. But someone like me standing on the outside asks, “Why? How is this better than what happened before?” The thing is, if somebody can give an answer, you can’t give the answer with the attitude of, “Well, of course, it’s. . . ” because no one has said what it was. We’re having a whole national discussion where nobody explains that, despite the fact that it’s a painfully obvious question, so my book in part is designed to ask it and to show that, frankly, there is no answer. SAUNDERS: You said that the most effective way to help poor Black people in America is to do three things: End the war on drugs, teach phonics and offer more vocational training. You don’t mention family. I was surprised.

MCWHORTER: No. SAUNDERS: And you think it’s really obvious. So explain to me. MCWHORTER: I’m sorry if I seem glib there. No, I’m not going to say that. SAUNDERS: No, it’s fine. I’m not fragile. MCWHORTER: [Laughter.] Good. I know many people who have written very compelling pieces about family values and the value of there being two parents in the home. I certainly know what the expansion of welfare in the late ’60s did to Black communities. It’s a little-told story. I have now and then said “I wish somebody would make a movie about that, because it would get it into the consciousness of what that did.” But in general, my feeling is [that] to write about the family, to write, “This is what people should do. More people should get married. More men should stay in relationships that they maybe don’t want to be in,” I don’t see how effective that would be. That’s all. It’s not that I don’t agree. There’s the wonderful statistic that if you graduate from high school and you get a job and you don’t have a child until you’re married or at least permanently involved, you will not be poor. Yeah, it’s true. But in terms of saying to people out in the world that, it seems to me that people have been saying that that, you could date it to the Moynihan Report [“The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” 1965—Ed.], but there have been things being written since about the mid-’80s. What I’m interested in is results. And it doesn’t seem to work. You can’t tell people to have different family values. It seems to me that those values will fall out of other policy decisions that will shape the world around people. That’s my feeling, and that’s why I’ll bet [the words] “single parenthood” is not in the book. SAUNDERS: I think you had one teensy, teensy mention, because I was looking for it. But you know, one of the things—ending the war on drugs—that’s a great idea, too. But how realistic is that? I mean, there have been people who’ve been writing about that for a long time. Hey, it’s even hard to get schools to use to teach phonics. I mean, that’s not even easy. And more vocational training—same thing. I mean, the last two things [are] less controversial, but it’s hard to get them through. I know that you want to end the complete war on drugs, which just doesn’t seem all that realistic either. Or am I wrong? Is there someplace that’s starting to do that? MCWHORTER: Those are really legitimate questions. And I include them because over

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the past 20 years . . . I’ve seen cracks in the plaster on those things. So the fact that—to be graphic— nowadays, you can walk down New York streets and smell marijuana right up your nose, and there’s somebody just standing right there. To be honest, I think that that’s fine. If you can drink bourbon, why should you not be able to [smoke] marijuana? That’s the beginning. I know an awful lot of people who have agitated for it to go further, including even some branches of the NAACP were opening up to that idea, despite the fact that in most of those cases, you’re dealing with conservative ministers where that’s not where they live. But they were beginning to open up to it. So I thought it’s not impossible. But Debra, you’re right, that’s that’s a tough one. With vocational education, we’re seeing some interest in that sort of thing going back to the Obama administration. I think that could be made to float. Phonics is a whole other story, but yeah, I take your point. SAU NDER S: From viewers, [a] first question: Critical Race Theory seems to exploit the power of words to tongue tie everyone, including me. How do you counteract such deliberate attempts to redefine common words? MCWHORTER: You know, you can’t counteract people’s re-formation of words. It’s inevitable in language change. It’s almost never deliberate. But unfortunately, with critical race theory, our discussion is polluted by the fact that there are certain legal papers written decades ago that nobody but a legal scholar could love. And then there’s that way of thinking having percolated into graduate schools in the humanities and social sciences and also education schools, such that philosophy based on those ideas are now being promulgated and foisted upon eight and nine year olds. And so someone says, What is Critical Race Theory doing in our classrooms? The smart response is opposed to say, “Who’s teaching these obscure legal scholars in class?” when that’s obviously not what anybody means? I think that at this point, it’s maybe handy that what’s happening in the classes might be called CRT and that we all know what that’s an abbreviation for. What dismays me the most—actually, on this day that we’re doing this, I’m realizing this is a thing—is that a lot of people left of center really don’t think that there’s anything going on in classrooms. They think that we should be talking about January 6th, and we should,

“WHAT DISMAYS ME THE MOST . . . IS THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE LEFT OF CENTER REALLY DON’T THINK THAT THERE’S ANYTHING GOING ON IN CLASSROOMS.” —JOHN MCWHORTER but there’s no problem with anything going on in our schools, whatever you call it. And the people like me are just making that up based on having read maybe one story about one school. I think there is an us who know that that’s not true, and I’m thinking we need to craft that message better, because a lot of really smart, well-intentioned people think that we’re just making things up, because that’s what a certain kind of person tells them, and they understandably listen to them. So there’s a messaging issue, but language will always change. Terms will always be messy. We just have to analyze what the mess is, which is where my work is beginning to intersect. But my work is beginning to straddle linguistics and race more than it ever has, because I’m beginning to have to use both halves of my brain lately. Because, yeah, the way we talk about these things often is because of how annoying the change of meaning and words can be, because it can happen so quickly. SAUNDERS: So today I am in Virginia as we speak, and it is Election Day. MCWHORTER: Nothing going on down there.

SAUNDERS: [Laughter.] [Gubernatorial candidate] Democrat Terry McAuliffe says that they don’t teach CRT in public schools. MCWHORTER: He’s wrong. If he means they don’t teach the works of Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw, he’s right. But if he means that all the parents and friends who write me saying, “Guess what sorts of things my child’s history teacher is teaching?” And “I wrote the principal and the principal wrote me back something in Hebrew that doesn’t make any sense and won’t listen.” That’s happening across the country. It doesn’t have to be Critical Race Theory itself. But if your kids are being taught that whiteness is a kind of inherent guilt, if your kids are being taught that blackness is a kind of eternal victimhood, if your kids are being taught that all subjects need to be looked at through the lens of what they signal for power relations, especially between white and brown people—if that’s what your kids are being taught to any appreciable extent such that they would come home and say, “I’m not enjoying this, Mom,” that’s Critical Race Theory. And anybody who denies that that’s an issue either doesn’t know—and you

know, some people find education policy boring—or you’re being willfully naive because you’re trying to placate a certain base and get elected. And I would completely understand that, too. But that means that we can’t listen to that fight between those two for a reflection of what’s actually happening. Either way, yes, there is something really scary going on in education today. SAUNDERS: What do you think of the “1619 Project”? MCWHORTER: The truth about it is that a lot of it is just a history lesson, and it’s a history lesson that cocks our ear more to power differentials than we might be used to. But there’s nothing wrong with it. What got it a Pulitzer was the claim that the Revolutionary War was fought to a significant degree because of people not wanting to let go of slavery. The idea being that to lose the war would mean that you could not have plantations. It would seem to me that that claim has been disproven. And that’s what I think of the “1619 Project.” Any discussion of it that purports that a central and highly celebrated tenant of it was not disproven is a discussion that I have a hard time participating in.

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HE ROLE OF PRIVATE BUSINESS IN ENDING THE COVID PANDEMIC WHAT CAN BUSINESSES DO TO STOP

this pandemic? A panel of business leaders across industries discusses solutions. From the October 18, 2021, program “Destination Health: The Private Sector’s Role in Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This program is generously supported by our partner Kaiser Permanente. GREGORY A. ADAMS, Chair and CEO, Kaiser Permanente BRETT HART, President, United Airlines MOLLY MOON NEITZEL, CEO, Molly Moon Homemade Ice Cream STEPHEN PARODI, Executive Vice President, The Permanente Federation; National Infectious Disease Leader, Kaiser Permanente JIM WUNDERMAN, President and CEO, Bay Area Council RAJ MATHAI, News Anchor, NBC Bay Area—Moderator GREGORY ADAMS: The past 18 months have challenged and tested all of us in ways we could have never imagined. The devastating effects and the tragic loss of life continue as we fight a highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19. Our intensive care units are no longer filled with only the most vulnerable. We’re now seeing the young, the previously healthy and—most concerning—our children. This additional surge of COVID-19 patients comes as hospitals and health-care organizations across the country are addressing the implications of care that was delayed or avoided in 2020. It means, again, being forced to cancel elective surgeries and limit care for other diseases and emergencies such as cancer, strokes and heart attacks. It also puts an incredible commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

strain on our already weary doctors, nurses and frontline employees who are putting their lives and well-being at risk every day. Kaiser Permanente’s mission calls us to protect the health and safety of our patients, employees and communities. On August 2, we announced that we would mandate vaccinations for more than 216,000 employees and 23,000 physicians by September 30 of this year. Since that time, we have an increase in employee vaccination rates from 78 percent to nearly 92 percent, and our physicians’ vaccination rates are now at 97 percent. No matter what lies ahead with COVID-19, the more vaccinated we are as a community, a nation and a globe, the safer we’ll be from this dangerous virus. President Biden’s decision to require federal workers, medium and large employers and the health-care staff to get vaccinated is an important and needed step in the fight against the pandemic. Our business community must work together and find a way to close the vaccination gap in our organization and our communities. It is our moral obligation to do so. More than 700,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. That’s one in every 500 people. History has shown us what we can accomplish when our nation comes together. This needs to be one of those times. [With] your vaccination, we can stop this pandemic for our families, for our friends and for each other. RAJ MATHAI: I think everyone on this panel couldn’t agree more that we really need the public to come together with the private sector, the business community, to get past this.

I think we all are in our communities, in our places of work and our families wondering, Is it going to be just the public, is it going to be the business sector that saves us? We’re not quite sure. And this is great to get all of your input in this next hour. Dr. Parodi, start with you. You’re the specialist here, and you’re the expert. Where are we? I would love to say you’re going to tell us this pandemic ends in 90 days, but I don’t think that’s the case. What’s the progress report? STEVE PARODI: Let me put it this way— this last surge taught us a lot. It is really a tale of two surges. There were communities now that are actually at vaccination rates of 85 to 90 percent of the eligible population. In addition to that, those communities tended to double down on some of the basic sensible practices, not locking down the community, but actually wearing masks where appropriate, indoors or in schools. And guess what? We did not see significant surges in the hospitals. We didn’t see excess deaths. In fact, we kind of weathered that last surge without a whole lot of impact. Then you have communities and in the southeast United States, the middle part of the United States and even parts of California, where we’re based here, where we saw significant surges, beds running out, crisis standards of care, we’re not able to provide not even just COVIDrelated care, but basic levels of care. Why? Vaccination rates are below 60 percent in those communities, a lot of times people weren’t wearing masks. When you combine those two together, things don’t work; when

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you use them together, they do work. My message to everyone here today is that the vaccines are efficacious. We’ve heard about people breaking through with infections who have vaccines. Let me just put this in perspective. For at least our hospital system across the country, if you’re vaccinated, you have a less than 1 percent chance of getting infected. And if you’re vaccinated, you have less than one-third percent chance of actually getting into a hospital. The vaccines are safe. They’re now large studies looking at the safety relative to the complications from COVID. There’s no question that the vaccines are way safer than waiting to get COVID. The last thing I’ll say here is the vaccines provide longer term immunity than socalled natural immunity. So if you get natural immunity, meaning you’ve gotten infected with the virus, you’re not necessarily protected against other variants. And these vaccines appear to be pretty durable against all the variants that are circulating around right now. M ATH A I: Can I just ask you, is it exhaustive—have you guys given up, meaning the medical community, of even trying to get the unvaccinated to get vaccinated? Because in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re talking 80, 90 percent vaccination rates. But you said other parts of the country are at 50, 60 percent. Does that battle continue, or at what point do people just check out? PARODI: Oh, we’re not done. I think we’re just actually now at the grassroots part of this whole campaign.

“A SO IT TH BE TH ST DI TH O VA

AS OON AS T BECAME CLEAR HAT VACCINES WOULD E AVAILABLE ACROSS HE COUNTRY, WE TARTED HAVING ISCUSSIONS ABOUT HE POSSIBILITY OF MANDATING ACCINES.”

—BRETT HART

So let me speak at a patient level. When I’m talking to my patients in clinic, it’s now coming down to, “What’s going on with you? What’s specifically holding you back? Let me understand your background. Let me understand your community. Where are you coming from? Where are you getting your information?” There’s a battle of misinformation versus what is actual fact. That’s why I think this panel is so important, because it’s not going to be just the health care community, it’s not just public health messaging, it’s not just going to be coming from the government. It is actually going to come from influencers in the community, and employers are a key part of this discussion. MATHAI: Let’s bring in Brett Hart. Ninety nine percent, I believe, have been vaccinated of [United Airline’s] 67,000 employees here in the United States. I think a lot of people are wondering, how could you do it? How are you doing it? BRETT HART: Throughout the first year of the pandemic, we were really aggressive about trying everything that was at our disposal, including being the first to require masks on aircraft and then in hold rooms and break rooms and then our clubs, and different processes for cleaning our aircraft and the like. But as soon as it became clear that vaccines would be available and available across the country, we started having discussions about the possibility of mandating vaccines. And we started those discussions toward the end of 2020. It wasn’t feasible at that time, but one of the things that we did at the turn of the year and the beginning of this year is we went public with our employees and we started talking about the fact that as an executive team, when it was feasible and when we thought we could do it, we would require vaccines. I think that what that did was that allowed us to have that conversation with our team members over the course of the year. And once we finally got to the point where we understood that the vaccine was widely available enough and that we could feasibly step out and require it, we did; and we think that from a cultural perspective and from the perspective of our employees having the opportunity to think about it and really embrace and understand why we will require it, we think that it allowed those who were certainly in favor of it to move quickly and to show their support and in a lot of ways help bring those among our employees who are more predisposed to oppose it, to help us actually bring them along in this process. MATHAI: We’re hearing so much from

the other airlines—we’re not asking you to comment on those airlines, but so much problems with Southwest and American and Delta. What did United do differently, or what did you do to get on this course of 99 percent? H A RT: A g a i n, one pa r t of it wa s communication and transparency. We talked very early on about our desire to do this. I think there was an expectation within our organization that when we were able to do it, we would require it. We spent a lot of time educating our employees about the vaccines. We also engaged our employees. We were the first airline to carry the vaccine from Europe to the U.S. So we shared those victories, and we shared a perspective that the one way for us to really beat this pandemic, to get our business back on track and to create an environment where both our customers and our employees and their families were safe was to get everyone vaccinated. So we were very aggressive from the earliest point in talking to our employees about it, educating them, having transparent conversations and addressing the pushback where we found it. MATHAI: The conversations with the unions, I’m guessing those are never easy, but obviously you got past some of the challenges. HART: Look, we have a terrific relationship with our with our unions. Ninety percent of our organization is unionized. We have great union leaders and great union employees. Again, I think the opportunity to have these discussions early on and throughout this process really helped. Once we made the announcement, our union representatives were very strong in terms of getting out and making it clear that this is something that we could do. They have been partners in this process from the very outset. MATHAI: Molly Moon Neitzel, let’s bring you in. You’re on the smaller level, more of the grassroots, literally selling ice cream with 187 employees in the Seattle area. You hear Brett now. Tell us your perspective on getting people vaccinated, your employees, and what your communication was like with them. MOLLY MOON NEITZEL: Well, we had similar conversations, as soon as the vaccines looked available last spring, about mandates. As a small business in a customer service economy that has been struggling all pandemic to retain and recruit employees, my company hadn’t had a hard time recruiting. But every company around us was having a hard time recruiting and retaining employees. So we kind of held back on a vaccine mandate. And 95 percent of our employees ran out

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and got vaccinated. But I hire about 100 seasonal employees every year. My fear was that if we didn’t have a vaccine mandate in place, we would be wondering if we could keep that 95 percent, 97 percent into next year. So I was so happy when President Biden announced that there would be OSHA standards and that there would be a vaccine mandate for employers with over 100 employees. That was about workplace safety, because public health and workplace safety are the same thing. We created a vaccine mandate at Molly Moons when President Biden said that every employer our size and larger would need to have a vaccine mandate in place, because that gives us the ability to be on a level playing field with every other company recruiting talent. MATHAI: You were actually invited to the White House and met with President Biden. What was said in that conversation? Why did he want your voice at the table? NEITZEL: I’m a founding member of an organization called Main Street Alliance, a coalition of small businesses that represent small business needs, sort of as sometimes the counter voice to things like Chambers [of Commerce] and the NFIB [National Federation of Independent Businesses]. We were started to make sure that there were small business tax credits included in the Affordable Care Act. And I’ve done activism for small businesses around raising the minimum wage and paid safe and sick time. So I let my voice be heard for Main Street Alliance members about the need for vaccine mandates to level the playing field so that I can compete for the same talent with Brett [Hart]. I think the White House was interested and President Biden was interested in hearing from very small companies and very large companies about how vaccine mandates can be a part of the broader solution. MATHAI: Jim Wunderman, this is a perfect setup for you. You work hand in hand and have monitored Bay Area companies here for so many years. What are you hearing just on the street level from ice cream shops, pizza parlors [all the way up to] United Airlines? JIM WUNDERMAN: This obviously was so difficult on business. Throughout more than a year and a half, there [were] so many unknowns and things were shifting. The disease took its toll, hard at some times and soft at other times. And we were hopeful at some times, and less so at other times. But I think it created somewhat a spirit of we can get through this working together, more collaboration. I know at the Bay Area

Council, the meetings that we have on a broad range of public policy issues, including health care and COVID-19, the attendance rose quite a bit, more folks wanting to get together and feel a part of something. Before the pandemic, I think that the employer business community, for the most part, was a little bit disconnected from public health care as an issue. It just wasn’t on the top of the list of things, obviously, with the exception of organizations like Kaiser, who deliver incredible public health care and are leaders in health-care policy. So we have worked on the issue. The Bay Area Council was a leader in advocating for the Affordable Care Act a number of years ago and then helped implement it here in California. But I think that things changed at that point. We became partners with healthcare leaders. Our members didn’t always agree on everything. And it’s obviously the job of public health officials to keep us safe. At times that had very, very severe impacts on business and the economy. But at the end of the day here, we’re coming through this in our region in very strong shape. We didn’t take the kind of impact from the delta variant that other regions did, because I think we all work together hand in hand to jointly protect ourselves. MATHAI: Initially, not everyone’s going to be happy with mandatory vaccines at the workplace or being pushed into this. Initially, how many businesses in the Bay Area Council that you guys work with were against this? And then what about now? WUNDERMAN: We have a lot of members, 325 members in absolutely every sector, including the public sector. There were a lot of different points of view. As Molly was pointing out, there’s a fear factor that if we make our employees do something they don’t want to do, they’ll go be employed by somebody else. Ultimately, when Kaiser and United Airlines, in particular, and there were a few others, announced that this was going to work for their organizations, we looked at the numbers and it became adamantly clear that vaccination is the path to protecting the public, protecting workers and getting past the COVID-19. So our health committee took this issue up, our executive committee took it up and unanimously put out a very strong statement to all employers saying “Get your employees vaccinated when they’re coming together in a workplace. This is your responsibility.” MATHAI: Is there a lesson plan here in terms of Molly Moon’s Ice Cream, United Airlines, where you tell some of the other

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“WE’RE USUALLY NOT IN THE HABIT OF TELLING OUR MEMBERS WHAT TO DO. BUT IN THIS CASE, WE FELT WE NEEDED TO TAKE A PRETTY STRON STANCE, THAT THERE WAS A LOT OF CONFUSION ABOUT THIS, AND WE COULD CUT THROUGH SOME OF THAT AND WE COULD DO SOME GOOD.”

—JIM WUNDERM

MAN

businesses, big or small, “Hey, this is how they did it.” WUNDERMAN: We sure did. We’re usually not in the habit of telling our members what to do. We’re a policy group. We listen to our members and we make recommendations to government and regulators and folks involved in making public decisions as to which way to go on issues. But in this case, we felt we needed to take a pretty strong stance, that there was a lot of confusion about this, and we could cut through some of that and we could do some good. I think as a result of what we did, it built on the momentum. We weren’t the first ones to do this. But I think it helped create more momentum and has had a really positive result. We’re very proud of that, and I think it’s going to have some lasting effect. MATHAI: Dr. Parodi, from the Kaiser point of view here, are we going back at all or is this kind of the new normal, the new future in terms of the public sector working with the health [industry] and working with the private sector as well? PARODI: Well, I hope it’s not the last. I can tell you that compared to prior discussions and meetings that I’ve had over the years, when it comes to either prior epidemics or other public health-related issues, the table— and now it’s a virtual table—has looked a lot different. Whether it came to testing, whether it came to supply chain and the lack of PPE, and now we’re talking about vaccines, that table now consists of health care, it consists of private business and public health, government. And we’re all trying to problem solve this together, because there’s no way to do this in any one sector by itself. The fact that we now have two thirds of all employees in the United States under some form of mandate, that couldn’t have happened without that collective table. And we’re not done. There are other variants out there. This is a worldwide problem. I’m looking at my colleague from United Airlines. Companies actually have international footprints. In as much as we’ve worked so hard in the United States to up our vaccination game and get to the levels of 60 to 90 percent, there are parts of the world that are still at 2 and 3 percent. You might ask, “Why should we care?” Beyond just the human cost, we should care because those are the areas where new variants are going to pop up, where vaccine-escape variants are going to pop up. And actually, businesses are being affected by that. Our next sort of bully pulpit here, and

this is some of the conversations that we’re having at the national level, is how can businesses that are based in the United States that have international footprints influence other countries, influence actually the U.S. government to increase vaccine access? So I would say, Raj, on the front of COVID-19, we’re definitely not done. And when I think about the American Rescue Plan that was passed earlier this year, you saw the inklings of what it’s going to take to rebuild the public health infrastructure, because we’re going to have to be ready for whatever comes next beyond COVID-19. That, again, is going to require private business, Kaiser Permanente, organizations like ours that are private health-care entities, to lean in and help with this public health. MATHAI: You said it in terms of, this is not a local or national problem, it’s global. Here in the Bay Area, there’s so much travel, international travel, [to] Silicon Valley and so forth. Brett Hart, let’s get you back in here. You’re a global footprint, in terms of what your company does and you do it well. How can you help spread this? What can you do? What conversation can you have with President Biden and Dr. Fauci and so forth, if you haven’t already, in terms of how United can help, as just one example of a company helping here. HART: Absolutely. And let me say first and foremost that one of the things that has been most gratifying and inspiring about what we’ve all been through is the transparency and the willingness to share information and to lock arms and get through this together. That goes for companies large and small and public and private entities. The information sharing, the walking and bumping in the dark and trying to figure things out together throughout this process has been really fun. MATHAI: And Brett, is that happening on his question? Is that happening within your competitors and your colleagues? HART: It absolutely is. Each of the things that we’ve all done, I think that in most instances, we have a way to share that information that’s legal, and in most instances we’ve had fast followers throughout the industry and in other industries. We have learned lessons from others as well. I think one of the things that we find, and especially as you talk about international now, one of the issues even with our business is consistency and understanding regulatory regimes. If you’re a passenger and you’re going to travel outside the U.S., you want to know exactly what’s required of you. You want to

know that that’s not going to change while you’re in mid-flight, which has happened during the pandemic. I agree with the doctor completely. Once we get to a point where we have comfort that we have this under control here in the U.S., we still have to ensure that the rest of the world gets to where we are. That means that we all have to remain vigilant and heavily engaged, both on the public and in terms of your bottom line. MATHAI: I have family in London and India. I’m hesitant to take my family to visit them overseas. And we would go United. That impacts your bottom line. What can you do to accelerate this process to get more vaccinations worldwide? HART: Well, on one side, the conversations have been occurring throughout the pandemic, and we have great access to officials in other countries. We understand what their requirements are. We’ve put technology in place to ensure that if you’re going to make that trip, you know ahead of time what the requirements are in that country, we can help you find testing and help you certify your vaccination cards. We’re also ensuring that those conversations are occurring both from the country outside the U.S., but with our government as well. The doors have been opened. We’ve had really productive conversations with our government here in the U.S., but we need uniform policies and procedures that apply across the world to ensure that if you’re going to take a trip, you know with some certainty what’s required of you and it’s not different from country to country. MATHAI: Dr. Parodi, are you optimistic in terms of the global vaccination rate in the next six to 12 months? PARODI: I think we’ve got a lot of work to do. There are parts of the world, of course, Europe, where you see vaccination rates that are similar or approaching that of the United States, but the other parts of the world that are desperate for vaccine and access. We’ve talked about partnering in the U.S.—us working with W.H.O. and working with other like-minded organizations, other international organizations and companies that have these kinds of footprints, is going to be really incumbent upon the U.S. to help lean in, lead. That’s why I think we’re in this for the long haul. I would be remiss if I put a date on it. But I think that’s going to be the work of 2022 and perhaps 2023. It really is going to take that level of effort. If you think about other contagious

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diseases, it took that kind of mobilization. You think about smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, these weren’t things that were solved overnight. What I am heartened by, is that the world is focused on this and so it’s going to take not just focus, but also resolve. MATHAI: I remember in March of 2020 when this all started, relatively speaking, Harvard researchers said January 2022, we should actually look up and see if we can make progress. But it would take that long, and we’re almost there. Molly, let’s bring you back in here. Molly Moon’s Ice Cream, from your perspective, obviously things have really taken a toll in a negative way during this pandemic for small businesses. But if you had a wish list, a magic wand, what would you like to see happen in this next year from the small business point of view? NEITZEL: Well, these vaccine mandates for employers will help. I think just communities being convinced to become vaccinated who have been victims of misinformation or fear. Kids getting vaccinated is top of my mind. I have two young daughters, eight and three years old, neither of them can be vaccinated yet. My three-year-old has worn a mask half her life. So all of her interactions with all of her friends have been from the eyes up, and kids’ brains develop how they’re going to interact with the rest of society at one, two, three years old. All of her social interactions have been stunted. So I think kids getting vaccinated and adults being vaccinated to protect our communities of children while they can’t, is probably the top priority for me. I started this company to make the world better, one scoop at a time. I’d like to get back to a place where my employees can feel joyful about serving ice cream. And that probably means mask-free. And that probably means being able to provide samples and chit chat with our customers, which is still very difficult between the two masks and the plexiglass, and the fear of interacting with your customer and the public in your community. So I just really look forward to a time when transmission rates are so low and our kids are all protected that we can take masks off and have a joyful, fun interactions with our communities. MATHAI: Has business picked up just this last few months over the summer? And what’s the forecast going into the winter now, especially in rainy Seattle? NEITZEL: Business was OK this summer, but not back to pre-pandemic levels. I thought it was kind of interesting; when I was at the

White House, I got to chit chat with Secretary [of the Treasury Janet] Yellen for a bit about business, and she was quite surprised that my business hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. I think that’s something important for folks who don’t work in customer service. Restaurants are still struggling. One of the things I would I hope for in the coming year is probably more federal support for food and beverage businesses, because we’re not going to return to normal until people’s behavior returns to absolute pre-pandemic normal. And like we were all just talking about, that could still be months, if not a year out. MATHAI: Jim, do we need more federal financial support for the companies that you work with [at] the Bay Area Council? WUNDERMAN: Well, I think especially some of the smaller businesses; we’ve lost a lot of them, and I think some of them are on the cusp. I don’t know that we can keep as a country pouring in as much resources as we have, but I think we can be more specific, incisive about where the support is needed. But, you know, without some continued support, I don’t think there’ll be as many good stories to tell as there would otherwise be. I think a lot of businesses will be able to recover, but there’s still uncertainty around timing. If you go into a lot of our communities, go to downtown San Francisco, it’s very, very quiet. I was in Sacramento the other day where the government is; folks are working from home, like a ghost town. Those businesses are really ailing. And if we can accept that, we’re just going to lose them. Well, that’s one thing, but there is going to be a cost associated with that. So I think it’s a delicate balancing act, because there’s not an unlimited amount of resources. But we’ve learned a lot and we should apply those learnings and continue to provide the support where it’s actually needed the most. MATHAI: Jim, correct me if I’m wrong, what’s the ballpark figure here, that in the Bay Area, at least the restaurants here in our seven, eight to nine counties, about a third are either closed down or are shut down for several months. Is that accurate? WUNDERMAN: Yeah, depending on where you are, it’s a third to half, and that’s a huge number. Eventually we don’t know exactly when, but the market will come back. If the original restaurant can’t come back, another one will take its place, because people like to go out and they like restaurants. I would hope and I somewhat suspect that we’re going to see some kind of a renaissance here.

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“MY THREEYEAR-OLD HAS WORN A MASK HALF HER LIFE. ALL HER INTERACTIONS WITH ALL OF HER FRIENDS HAVE BEEN FROM THE EYES UP, AND KIDS’ BRAINS DEVELOP HOW THEY’RE GOING TO INTERACT WITH THE REST OF SOCIETY AT ONE, TWO, THREE YEARS OLD.”

—MOLLY MOON NEITZ

ZEL

MATHAI: And we also are going to say in a capitalistic society, doesn’t that clear the way for new fresh ideas in terms of pro-business [initiatives]? WUNDERMAN: Yeah, and we’ve seen some of that with parklets and outdoor dining and folks being able to take drinks off the side of the restaurant and so forth. So we’re seeing some creativity happen that always happens in a crisis that can then go on into the next era and actually increase and expand the horizons of the business opportunities. So I think we’ll see some of that. At the same time, we have folks who are really hurt by this and we probably won’t see again, at least in the same form. You can’t help but be discouraged by those numbers. The travel, leisure, restaurant industries have been really, really hit hard. They’re the ones that have driven the numbers of unemployment in the country. MATHAI: What’s so fascinating about this entire pandemic, it’s not like, “Oh, I’ve heard that guy over there.” Usually it’s, “Oh, someone within my family or my neighbor or my family member or children” or something. Everyone’s been impacted. You know someone directly impacted if it’s not yourself. NEITZEL: I think another part of the economy that just is not being talked about enough is child care. MATHAI: It’s so expensive, correct? People are spending so much money on it right now. NEITZEL: Yes. But also during the pandemic, the licensing regulations have changed to keep kids safer and created smaller class sizes. I’m on the board of a preschool

that is running at a deficit into the foreseeable future until we can have larger class sizes again. So preschools and child care centers, they’ve been devastated by the pandemic and there weren’t specific federal programs for them to be supported financially in the ways that restaurants and live music venues and airlines have been. These are sort of the backbones of the economy. So I do think there’s going to be, like Jim that, targeted but additional help needed across the economy in segments. MATHAI: Just in terms of the medical point of view, things have changed. This pandemic has changed how we view doctors, how we even access doctors. I think I’m a few months behind on my regular checkup, but I just haven’t gone. I think I speak for a lot of people. We just haven’t gone to that or a dentist. How is Kaiser and the medical community changing and adapting to the new relationship we have with our doctors? PARODI: It’s a really important point. There are like three things that really come to mind. One is the revolution in telehealth, and it was already happening pre-pandemic, but really started going gangbusters, partly out of necessity, early on; in March 2020, everything changed. Being able to access care through video, chat, the telephone, secure messaging or email, all of that sort of amped up. I don’t see that going away. I do see it transforming where we’re at now, because people do need to come back. But I think we’re going to suss out how much of it does need to go back to in-person versus virtual care. The second thing that I think has been

transformative, and I’ll speak to it in the context of vaccines, is the idea that we need to have an equity lens when we’re approaching clinical care or designing clinical programs. We know there are certain communities out there that are more vaccine hesitant—Black, brown, Latinx, Asian—and we have to have culturally competent ways of communicating or getting into those communities directly. I’ve seen that transformation in the past when we’ve approached high blood pressure, hypertension. The messaging that you need to do for an African-American community as opposed to other communities is different. It’s got to be enlisting people that actually either look like the communities that they’re trying to reach or have the right messaging. The last thing I want to speak to here, and it’s a little bit of what Molly was talking about, is that focus on children. Actually our path out of this pandemic is to focus on children, because parents have been so affected. Parents are having to take time away from work, to invest in child care. If you look at California, 95 percent of children are now actually back in person school. We take care of or educate 12 percent of the nation’s children. We account for 0.7 percent of school closures. Just keep that in mind here, if we had sort of just let everyone go to school without masks and without pushing vaccination for the top of the population. Hopefully at the end of this month, you can see that we actually can get kids back to school and get them back safely. That’s important for children’s mental health, as well as physical health and also parental health.

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ORLEAN PHOTO COURTESY THE AUTHOR; CAT/DOG PHOTO BY MARIAMZA/PIXSBAY; ORCA PHOTO BY JAZAPP/PIXABAY.

N: ON ANIMALS Facing page, top: Some animals we welcome into our homes; bottom: an orca in the wild. This page, above: On Animals author Susan Orlean with donkeys.

HOW HUMANS AND

animals interact has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages. Celebrated writer Susan Orlean visits The Commonwealth Club for the first time to discuss her new book, a collection from her lifetime of musings, mediations and in-depth profiles about animals. From the October 14, 2021, program “Susan Orlean: On Animals.”

SUSAN ORLEAN, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, On Animals JULIA FLYNN SILER, Journalist; Author, The White Devil’s Daughters— Moderator

JULIA FLYNN SILER: As a nonfiction author and a journalist myself, as well as a juror for the Club’s California Book Awards Program, I am so pleased to welcome Susan Orlean to The Commonwealth Club for the first time. Susan is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of 11 books, including The Library Book, which was the California Book Awards 2019 Gold Medal winner in nonfiction. So tell us, why have you been drawn to writing about animals for so many years? SUSAN ORLEAN: This is a question that has quite a few answers. For one thing, I like animals, and so the opportunity to be around them is one that’s hard for me to resist. Secondly, I think because I do like animals, I notice them in the world more than perhaps another writer would. The story that catches my attention because I like animals might go unnoticed by someone who simply doesn’t have their antenna tuned to that frequency. I’ve also really liked the opportunity to write about humans through the lens of animals, and these stories as much as they are about animals are very much about people. There really is hardly an animal on this planet

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that isn’t in some fashion affected by human civilization. The stories that I’ve been drawn to most are those stories in which our interface with the animal world is very much what the story is about—how we manage coexisting with this alternate universe. SILER: Susan, is it true that you wrote your very first book at a very young age? And if so, what was that book about? ORLEAN: Well, according to family legend, I was only five years old and I’m not going to necessarily deliver that as gospel truth, but I was definitely young. It was a book titled Herbert the Nearsighted Pigeon, and all the characters in it were animals, which of course, to me seemed very natural. It just seemed like this was a world populated by all of these different interesting creatures. In this

case, Herbert was a pigeon who was feeling like his relationships with his friends were not going well, and he couldn’t understand why. Eventually, he goes to an optometrist and discovers that he needs glasses and that what had been happening is he didn’t even recognize his friends because he couldn’t see them clearly. So all is well in the world once Herbert gets his glasses. I think it’s interesting that rather than the protagonist being another little girl, which is what I was time, or a princess or whatever you think the fantasy life of a five-year-old would be, instead it was a sad pigeon who was having relationship problems and his relationships were with all of these other animals. Now, children’s literature, of course, is filled with animals. So the stories that I was reading, the stories I grew up on were populated largely by

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animals. So it’s not out of the blue that I would also craft my own book filled with animals. But it definitely was where my imaginative life resided, in the world of animals. SILER: And it probably gave a hint to your family of what was to come and the wonderful things you would write about. In On Animals, would you please read us the beginning of your essay “Show Dog,” because it so beautifully illustrates not only your spectacular sense of humor, but also the way you see the world of humans through animals. ORLEAN: I would love to. This is one of my favorite stories to do, and it’s called “Show Dog.” [Reading from On Animals:] If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. This is perfect. He’s friendly, good-looking, rich, famous and in excellent physical condition.

PHOTO BY SPONCHIA.

He almost never drools. He’s not afraid of commitment. He wants children. Actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun. What Biff likes most is food and sex. This makes him sound boorish, but he is not. He’s just elemental. Food he likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints and hotel soap. But he will eat just about anything. Richard Krieger, a friend of Biff’s who occasionally drives him to appointments, said, “Not long ago, when we’re driving on I-95, we’ll usually pull over at McDonald’s. Even if Biff is napping; he usually wakes up when we’re getting close. I get him a few plain hamburgers with buns. No ketchup, no mustard and no pickles. He loves hamburgers. I don’t get him his own

french fries, but if I get myself fries, I always flip a few for him into the back.” If you’re ever around Biff while you’re eating something he wants to taste—cold roast beef, a Wheatables cracker, chocolate pasta, aspirin, whatever—he will stare at you across the pleated bridge of his nose and let his eyes sag and his lips tremble and allow a little bead of drool to percolate at the edge of his mouth until you feel so crummy that you give him a taste. This routine puts the people who know him in a quandary, because Biff needs to keep an eye on his weight. Usually, he is as skinny as Kate Moss, but he can put on 3 pounds in an instant. The holidays can be tough. He takes time off at Christmas and spends it at home in Attleboro, Massachusetts, where there’s a lot of food around and no pressure and no schedule, and it’s easy to eat all day.

Any extra weight goes to his neck. Luckily, Biff likes working out. He runs for 15 or 20 minutes, twice a day, either outside or on his Jog Master. When he’s feeling heavy, he runs longer and skips snacks until he’s down to his ideal weight of 75 pounds. Biff is a boxer; he is a show dog. He performs under the name Champion HiTech’s Arbitrage. Looking good is not mere vanity. It’s business, as a show dog’s career is short and judges are unforgiving. Each breed is judged by an exacting standard for appearance and temperament. And then there is the incalculable element of charisma in the ring. When a show dog is fat or lazy or sullen, he doesn’t win. When he doesn’t win, he doesn’t enjoy the ancillary benefits of being a winner, such as appearing as the celebrity spokesmodel on packages of

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ORLEAN: I felt like this was the one and only opportunity to make that elementary school joke about the use of the word bitch to mean a female dog. And I laughed myself sick as I was writing it because I thought, I am using this joke once and can never be used again. SILER: Anyway, how did you come up with that opening line and what was the inspiration for this amazing story? ORLEAN: I’ve always been a fan of watching the Westminster Dog Show, and it was a month or so before the show and I just was idly thinking about the dogs that are in the show and thought to myself, given that these

PHOTO BY ALKEMADE.

Pedigree Mealtime with lamb and rice, which Biff will be doing soon, or picking the best looking bitches and charging them $600 or so for his sexual favors, which Biff does three or four times a month. Another ancillary benefit of being a winner is that almost every single weekend of the year, as he travels to shows around the country, he gets to hear people applaud for him and yell his name and tell him what a good boy he is, which is something he seems to enjoy at least as much as eating a bar of soap. SILER: That’s so, so funny. I love that first line, “If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale.”

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are dogs who are worth all sorts of money, who have to always look good, I wonder if they are also still in a very fundamental way dogs. Do they chase their tails? Do they play with balls in the backyard? What is their life actually like? Many of these dogs live with their handlers. They don’t even live with the people who own them. They have very rarefied lives. It just struck me as a really interesting story to write, to examine what the day-to-day life would be like to be a dog that was such a highperformance creature, when in the meantime, my dog was asleep on the sofa and chasing rabbits in her dreams and being just a very

“Given that these dogs are worth all sorts of money, I wonder if they are also still in a very fundamental way dogs.” regular dog. Once I decided I wanted to do that story, I knew that I wanted to shape it the way you might shape a human celebrity profile. Who were the people who tended to this creature’s well-being? Did they worry about their weight and their hair? What do they do on their day off? Do they ever eat takeout Chinese? All of

those questions that we have about people whose appearance is their business struck me as fascinating. It’s also true that a dog is a dog is a dog, and I met this dog; I had zeroed in on him because I began asking around who was the top show dog in the U.S., who was a contender for best in show? And his name

came up regularly. I’m not a particular fan of boxer dogs. I love dogs, but that’s not a breed that I am particularly drawn to. But I met this dog. He really had charisma. First of all, he was beautiful. Secondly, he was charming. He was delightful. I genuinely fell in love with him. I thought, You know, this is kind of the ur-dog. He is good looking and strong, and he makes a good living. I began thinking of him in terms that you might as you were going through a dating app, like this is a good match. Look at this guy. He’s got a great job, he’s good looking, he’s in shape. And it just suddenly felt very personal, writing the story from the idea that

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I was really charmed by this dog as a celebrity who was also really approachable. SILER: The deeper theme of how humans relate to animals is “Where’s Willy?” This is an essay about a killer whale that featured in the Free Willy movies. It is another astonishing essay. You never actually saw Willy. So I want to ask you the question, How did you go about reporting the world around him, the people around him? ORLEAN: Well, this is really one of my favorite stories. I suppose I can say that about all of these stories, because I feel very attached to each one of them. But “Where’s Willy” was such a fascinating saga. Where I began with it was just trying to piece together the timeline of this one orca’s

name was Willy. But the viewers of the movie who loved the movie were saying, “Wait a minute, this isn’t fair. In the movie, you’re celebrating an orca being released into the wild. We should do that for Keiko.” It’s not so simple. This was an animal who had been in captivity since a very early age, and he didn’t really know how to be a wild whale. First, he was flown to Oregon, where he was kept in a much improved aquarium situation, but he was still in captivity and people weren’t satisfied. There was still this drum roll of demand: This whale should be released into the wild. It was a very heartfelt emotion, but also one that was unfortunately not grounded in a lot of reality, namely that an animal

“Keiko wasn’t all that interested in being wild anymore. He really liked eating frozen fish. . . . He loved hanging out with his handlers. They would open the pen to let him take a walk in the ocean alone, and he wasn’t so interested in doing it.” life. This was an animal that had a truly extraordinary experience of having been born in the wild, captured when he was just a baby. First he was in an aquarium in Iceland, then was moved to an aquarium in Mexico, then starred in this movie that was a blockbuster. Went back to his aquarium in Mexico and suddenly was buoyed up by a huge public outcry, which was, This is a movie about an orca in captivity who is released back into the wild, that is the freeing of Willy the whale in the movie. Producers had no anticipation of what came next, which was people were saying, “Wait a minute. What happened to the whale who played Willy in the movies? Where is he?” Well, the answer was he was in a crummy aquarium in Mexico, living alone and being very, very sad. Even the aquarium knew he was sad that he was the only whale. He was in a small body of water there, and he was not thriving. His physical condition was very poor, probably because of stress and inadequate conditions. Millions of dollars are required to do anything with an orca, and millions of dollars were contributed by people who saw the movie and wanted to free Keiko—his real name is Keiko, his stage

that’s captured at a young age is not easily reintroduced into the wild. We’ve certainly seen instances of it, and it’s wonderful when it happens, but it isn’t always successful. It had never been done with an orca. So the idea that we were going to do it for the first time with Keiko was one that was fraught with potential problems. Keiko was then moved from Oregon to Iceland, which is where he was originally captured—off the coast of Iceland. Many, many millions of dollars [were] spent. First of all, it’s not easy to fly an orca from Oregon to Iceland. So, mere fact—you have to buy, among other things, millions of gallons of Vaseline to lubricate the whale as he’s traveling by plane to Iceland. I mean, that fact alone was, for a reporter, a dream come true. But also, Keiko wasn’t all that interested in being wild anymore. He really liked eating frozen fish. He was very, very comfortable with humans. He loved hanging out with his handlers. They would open the pen to let him take a walk in the ocean alone, and he wasn’t so interested in doing it. So this story brought up so many issues, and this is why it was one that I really enjoyed doing, which is, What does being wild mean?

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

What does captivity mean? What do we owe to the animals that we capture? What is the sort of moral meaning of spending millions of dollars on one individual animal? Is that the right thing to do? Is it wrong-headed? What animal is it possible for us not to fall in love with? You would sort of think, How do you fall in love with a whale? Well, people fell in love with this well. So I would say there is no animal [people couldn’t love]. I mean, you would think of a whale and how big they are—and our sense of orcas as being killer whales. Although there has only been one whale orca in captivity who’s ever killed a human, and it was one whale who killed two different people. But otherwise, we’ve never known them to have any particular interest in killing humans. Nevertheless, they’re gigantic. I mean, can you feel emotionally connected to this gigantic animal? The people around Keiko were smitten with him and felt an enormous connection to him. So the story had a million octopus arms, there were so many subjects that it touched on. I will say that I had gone back after I finished the story to Iceland and to Norway and I did actually meet Keiko after I had finished the story. It was sort of reassuring to see that you could meet this gigantic animal and feel some sort of tug emotionally. That is hard to describe. It defies logic, perhaps, but it definitely exists. SILER: What point did you enter the story in your reporting? I mean, how far along was the effort to free Keiko and reintroduce him to the wild when you came into the story? ORLEAN: He was in Iceland. So it was a number of years into the story, and he had been in Iceland for a while. They were already in the process of letting him get out of his pen and visit with wild whales. And as it happened, the day I arrived happened to be the day that instead of coming back to his pen after visiting with wild whales, this was the first time ever that he stayed with the wild whales. What he had been doing up until that point is he would go out and play with the whales or mostly observe the whales. And then after a while he would come back and follow the boat back to the base. This was the first time that he didn’t follow the boat back and instead continued on with this pod of whales. And he eventually ended up in Norway. And if you think whales are smart, they are very smart, but Norway is the one country in the world where whaling is legal—so, in part, not so smart. There were people in Norway who said, We should

harpoon him. He’s a whale and we hunt whales here.” But fortunately, that did not happen. SILER: Susan, it’s so extraordinary. It’s a perfect example of reporter’s luck that you arrived at that moment where he was for the first time free; he made the decision on joining the pod and move on and leave his captors. And it’s incredible to reach the end of the story and then you basically reconstructed it from the beginning up until that point, right? ORLEAN: It was pure coincidence. In fact, I had fully expected that I would arrive, and I would see Keiko and I would observe him being taken care of. So when I first arrived, I was told, “Well, actually, he didn’t come home yesterday.” My reaction was, “Oh no, my story is ruined.” I’m sure you know that feeling where you think, “Well, forget it, it’s ruined. I can’t do it. I guess I’ll go home.” And then you take a beat and you think, “Well, actually, this is a really interesting moment to be writing about it.” And this is certainly an example of how much these stories are about people, because I was mostly interacting with people. There was a large crew of people who were invested in this whale’s well-being, and they were all on site trying to figure out “Where is he going? Is he OK? Is he hungry? Is he lost?” So the story focused very much on this large kind of posse that existed around this one whale’s life. SILER: I, like everybody, loved your book

The Orchid Thief, which was made into the movie adaptation. That book is about obsession. It’s about passion, it’s about the natural world and somebody who is obsessed with an aspect of it. What’s the parallel with, for example, “Where’s Willy?” Is it similarly passionate people? Is it this interface between the wild and the free or the wild and the captive? ORLEAN: Oh, I think it’s all of those things. I am certainly fascinated by passion. I’m fascinated by people who have organized their life around a very singular item or pursuit. I’m perhaps most fascinated by people who have focused their life around a living thing, because as in the case of The Orchid Thief, you can be an orchid collector, but every minute that’s a changeable phenomenon. You don’t buy an orchid and have it in its perfect state forever. They’re living things. They die. They get fungus. They wilt. They need care. You don’t ever truly own them as much as you accept your stewardship under them. The desire to collect a living thing is one that can never be requited. So it’s particularly interesting to me. I mean, people collect anything you can think of. And if somebody decides they’re going to be a cast iron skillet collector, it’s interesting, but it’s also a very static thing. You collect these cast iron skillets. When you buy one, you have it. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t age. It doesn’t die. But collecting

a living thing or focusing your life around a living thing, you’re entering something that’s fraught with the possibility of heartbreak, of change, of evolution. In the case of Keiko, he died. He came back from Norway. He caught pneumonia, and he was probably in his mid-thirties, which is a little bit on the young side. And he died and people were bereft, and there was this whole complicated infrastructure that had been built all around Keiko. It wasn’t built around wild whales of the world. It was built around one individual whale, and it was almost as if nobody had ever grappled with the intractable fact that someday he would die. It was as if that reality just didn’t enter the equation, so it’s particularly fascinating to me. And death colored my entire writing of The Orchid Thief. I was imagining what it would feel like to have a fascination with a species that, for one thing, we don’t even know how many orchids there are in the world, so those people who have this desire to have one of every species, well, they will never achieve that. And maybe that’s part of the point. Maybe part of the draw is the imperfect ability of it, that collecting cast iron skillets is a bit of a dead end. Do you collect them when it’s done? SILER: You’re going to get angry tweets from cast iron skillet enthusiasts. ORLEAN: I know. I do not want to bring that on. I’m using that as an example!

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MARY ROACH SAYS

the greatest number of repeat criminal offenders are outside, all around us, and you’ve probably even seen some today—animals. It has only been three centuries since animals had to stand trial for their misconduct, in a court of law, with legal representation. How can humans and animals get along in the modern world? From the September 21, 2021, Inforum program “Mary Roach’s Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.” MARY ROACH, Author, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law KARA PLATONI, Science Editor, Wired—Moderator

KARA PLATONI: I know it is the tradition in interviews like these where you have to ask the author if they had some big, dramatic events that gave them the idea for this book, but since chapter one is about bear attacks— God, I hope not. MARY ROACH: [Laughter.] Yeah, I know. I wish I had the tidy and dramatic origin story, like I was raised by wolves or attacked by raccoons savagely in my backyard. But I’ve pretty much had fairly peaceful co-existence with wildlife. I got interested in this [when] I’d finished one book and I was just doing that protracted grasping and groping where you’re like, “What am I doing next?” I often write about the human body, and I felt like I’ve kind of used that up. There’s only so much turf, so many parts and there’s only so many Roachable parts. So I was kind of looking a little further afield. I went up to the National Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, because I thought there might be a book that might go around something that I’d heard about, which was there’s a woman up there who established a hair library of all these endangered species.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

So it’s not just one hair, but the guard hairs and the fluff hairs on the regular coat and the whiskers. Just the idea of a hair library appealed to me. She was also the author of a guide for wildlife crime professionals on how to detect counterfeit versus real tiger penis. So she was an interesting character. When I was there, the director of the lab said, “You [say you] want to tag along on an investigation and see how everything happens? No, no, absolutely not. If it’s an open case, legally, you cannot, and that’s that.” So I regrouped and I started thinking, Well, what if you turned it around? What if the wildlife was the perpetrator? And in that case, the science is the humanwildlife conflict. . . . Then I came upon this 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, which is an insane 400-page, very bizarre, book, but I realized I could do this. I could set it up by crime. So I’ve got initially the felony crimes—and “crimes” with quotation marks, because obviously animals are just following their instincts, not literally committing

ROACH PHOTO BY JEN SISKA; BEAR PHOTO BY REINCARNATION40/PIXABAY; GULL PHOTO BY COCOPARISIENNE/PIXABAY.

MARY ROACH: A

ANIMALS AMOK commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH

PHOTO BY PIXELCREATURES/PIXABAY

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

crimes—but I could break it down; you get manslaughter, murder, home invasion and then the misdemeanors trespassing, jaywalking, littering. That seemed like I could structure the book that way and make it a little more fun and relatable than just saying human-wildlife conflict, which sounds kind of dry. PLATONI: So there’s kind of like an implied “allegedly” with animal crimes. When we say human-animal conflict, I keep thinking, Is it really a two-way street? Is it us projecting on them? ROACH: It typically turns out poorly for the animals, because ultimately public safety is going to be the priority. So if you have animals coming into your property or whatever it is, looking for food—if it’s an agricultural situation, they don’t have a lot of rights and it doesn’t typically go all that nicely. PLATONI: I was just thinking that animals, like you said, they’re kind of doing what animals do and they’re often doing what animals have always done. But we’re the ones who change all the time. We’re the ones who build stuff. We affect the climate. There’s 8 billion of us now, and it seems like we change and then they adapt and then we get mad at them, which is just gaslighting. ROACH: Exactly. Our range is expanding and their range—talking about bears, some of these large mammals that in the last 100 years, the populations were decimated by bounties, by airdrops of poison meat; I mean, it’s kind of free-for-all annihilation campaigns. That all shifted around the middle of the last century when the environmental movement [and] the animal welfare movement started to gain traction and the public kind of shifted its attitude, and it wasn’t OK to just go in and wipe these animals out. So happily, they’ve made a recovery, these populations of bears and wolves and coyotes to the point where they’re now kind of getting all up in people’s business again and now we’re heading back into conflict. But yeah, it’s almost always our change

and our doing that is creating the conflict. Animals are just doing what they’ve always done. And now suddenly we’ve plunked down in the middle of their range, up in the mountains around Aspen, just sort of providing new sources of food and entire dumpsters behind restaurants full of sustainably grown and lovely organic produce for them to feast upon. So why wouldn’t they? So yeah, it is very much our fault, in a sense. PLATONI: One of the things that’s really fascinating about this book is you get into the idea of what a pest and what’s an animal that we love and we want to protect. I think there must be at least 100 different animals in this book that are considered pests at some point in history, including a lot of animals I think of as being extremely adorable. Did you ever find sort of a through line for what makes an animal a pest to us and what makes an animal something that we care about and we love [and] we want to bring into our home? ROACH: Oh, sure; pest is a term that gets applied by somebody who is either irritated or harmed by the animal or their bottom line is affected from agricultural pests. You know, agriculture—between the birds and the rodents, if you’re trying to grow food, those animals are considered pests. There’s lists of wildlife that are considered by the USDA or the Department of Public Health [to be pests]. There’s a long list. I’m like, “Really, chipmunks? Bobcats?” But depending on where they’re living and what they’ve decided to feed on or chew through in the case of rodents, they end up causing somebody headaches and then they become a pest. PLATONI: Here are some of the species the EPA and the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services consider pests: chipmunks, bears, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, skunks, flying squirrels, tree squirrels, little brown bats, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, cliff swallows, crows, house finches, turkey vultures, black vultures and mute swans. ROACH: And that is not a comprehensive list at all. That’s just a few of them. We seem to be irritated by just about

“It typically turns out poorly for the animals, because ultimately public safety is going to be the priority. They don’t have a lot of rights and it doesn’t typically go all that nicely.” —MARY ROACH

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maybe too nasty to use in human warfare? Could we try it out?” So there was interesting cooperation between the two. And then there was the chemical era and then the drones and the lasers. The end point that I would love to see for both of those is coexistence, and in the wildlife world, we are seeing organizations that are promoting that and they’re actively trying to bring both sides together to have conversations and to listen to each other and try to understand the issues. That is really hopeful for me. So if they are both on a parallel path, I’m like, Maybe that’ll be the case with warfare too. Maybe coexistence; maybe we’ll all get along. PLATONI: I was wondering if you could give us a couple examples of these technical solutions to animal control. And I was wondering if you might pick one that you thought worked out pretty well and then one that was just absolutely a bomb. ROACH: Well, the one that I like very much is in the jaywalking chapter, and the creatures that are jaywalking are ungulates [hoofed, typically herbivorous mammals], deer. There is a tremendous number of people who are injured, not so much when they hit the deer, but they swerve to avoid the deer. Not good for the deer and not good for drivers. And so I spent some time with a researcher who was trying to figure out the deer-in-the-headlights issue: They stand there and they look at the headlights and they don’t get out of the way.

“If you’re a deer, a large thing coming toward you [is] a predator. You calculate how much time you have to get out of the way. But when it’s just two points of light in the distance, it’s hard for the deer to process that that is a thing coming closer.” —MARY ROACH

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

Why is that and how can we help them? He explained to me why they do. The theory behind why they just stand there has to do with how animals perceive cars and cars moving toward them. If you’re a deer, a large thing coming towards you—it’s a predator. And how you deal with predators is you look at it and you watch as it comes toward you, it gets bigger, it looms, and then you are able to intuit and sort of calculate how much time you have to get out of the way before you’re going to get hit. But at night, when it’s just two points of light in the distance, they don’t loom perceptively. The deer is kind of going, there’s two bright lights there. And boom. It’s very hard just to see; it’s hard for the animal to process that that is a thing coming closer. So the idea that this guy, Travis DeVault of the National Wildlife Research Center, had was to install an aftermarket light bar on the front of a car or truck that illuminates the grille on the front of the car. So now the animal can see this is not just two little pinpoints of light, it’s a vehicle getting bigger coming toward you. And that has seemed to help. It’s just been patented and it’s not for sale yet. But I liked that it was just somebody actually sort of thinking about, Why does an animal do that? A lot of the best solutions come out of a deeper understanding of the animal’s sensory system, the animal’s behavior. Is it a predator or is it a prey animal? How does it behave and why? So wildlife biology plays into these things quite a bit. So I thought that was a nice one. PLATONI: And did he consider changing the color of the light to? ROACH: He did, yes. It emits in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, which is where deer see best. Deer can see really well at dusk. For them, it’s like high noon, because they’ve got more receptors in that in that area and less so on the red-orange. So they’re able to perceive somebody sneaking up on them—a predator. That is because whereas you and I would be like, “It’s kind of murky out there,” the deer can see just fine. PLATONI: That was a very smart solution. ROACH: Yeah. He mentioned how laundry detergents have these brightening agents that make “whiter whites.” What they are really is in the ultraviolet range. So if you as a hunter wash your camo gear in one of these detergents that makes whiter whites, you’re actually sort of glowing for the deer. PLATONI: OK, so give me one that just didn’t work out. ROACH: There’s a bunch of those in the category of, OK, we have this nuisance animal and we’d like to be rid of it. Why

PHOTO BY MOHANN/PIXABAY.

everything out there. PLATONI: So the solution to pests and pest eradication is, of course, science. I feel like we can read this book sort of as a history of technological innovation and pest eradication. So you sort of take us through the pre-World War II era, where it was mostly brute force and trickery—you know, sending somebody into a field to do something startling. And then in the ’50s and the ’60s [it was] more about mass poisoning. It’s the era of better living through chemistry. And then more recently, there’s all these kind of high tech things. There’s drones, lasers. ROACH: Yeah, if you look at the timeline of military technology, it’s amazing. Pest control and military weapons kind of have followed this parallel path, even to the extent of the National Wildlife Research Laboratories—there were two of them back then—working together and during World War II with the Division Nine, which was The National Defense Research Committee, if I have that correct. So the two of them [were] actually working hand-in-hand in the Division Nine. . . . So the people in chemical weapons were making suggestions for the wildlife people, because what happened during World War II [is that] those supplies that were necessary to make rat poisons were cut off. So the wildlife people were looking for a substitute. So like, “Hey, you guys in the chemical warfare division, what do you got that’s

don’t we import a predator that will go around and just scarf up all of these annoying animals? The simple example: Hawaii had rats in the sugar cane fields, [so they] brought mongeese. But someone overlooked the fact that the rat is nocturnal and the mongoose is diurnal. So the mongoose are like, “I hear there’s rats here somewhere, but I’ve never actually seen one.” New Zealand has had a heck of a time with that going back to when people emigrated from Europe to New Zealand. There were these acclimatization societies that would bring in animals to kind of make the woods more familiar. Or they wanted deer to hunt, because they like to hunt. So they imported animals. One of the things they imported was rabbits, and rabbits, as they had no land predators, just multiplied like crazy and were just devouring the fields and crops. So those good people decided, “Well, let’s bring in some stoats,” because they are a vicious predator; they can take on an animal larger than themselves. So they imported all these stoats and also bred some feral cats—and stole cats from people in the cities. But they let them go in the countryside, and the stoats

looked around, saw the rabbits, [but it was] a lot easier to just pick these nice eggs that these strangely flightless birds are laying all over the place. So the number of species that are gone or endangered or threatened, not just birds, but reptiles too, is staggering, because the stoats have thrived really well. They’ve also brought in possums to establish a fur trade; plus the rats that jump off the ships. So these land masses that had no natural predators for these birds now are kind of overrun. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s always those unknown knowns, unknown unknowns? What is it [Donald] Rumsfeld said? PLATONI: Known unknowns? Anytime your solution is a possum, I think you’re just headed for trouble. In all of this innovation between different ways of eradicating pests, are we slowly moving toward improvement in any dimension? Are we getting more humane? Are we getting better at killing the animal we mean to and not everything else? ROACH: Well, there’s technology going on in the realm of genetics, something called gene drive. That’s something where, say you were to do this in New Zealand,

[on] some of those islands that have seabirds but also rodents and the rodents are killing all the seabirds. So rather than dropping a hail of poison, they’re talking about doing something where you would make a genetic modification such that the animal only gives birth to males, so no females. Also, the gene drive element is that it would be passed on much more quickly, so all the offspring would have this. That would quickly lower the population, but first you have to kind of flood the island with these gene drive specimens, so initially you’re going to kind of make the problem worse. They will probably do a poison campaign and then introduce the gene drive animals as a kind of mop up and prevention going forward. For an isolated island somewhere like that, I could kind of see that. What makes me a little uncomfortable is that list you read out of all these animals that are considered pests. If the decision is made purely according to what is most damaging to agricultural production, then that’s a frightening thing, because there are so many species that find it convenient to take the produce or [at] a fish farm, you got the cormorants that are taking the fish. Where would it even end?

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THE BIG PICTURE On the Kaiser Permanente Terrace at The Commonwealth Club’s waterfront headquarters, San Francisco Mayor London Breed welcomed Distinguished Citizens Award honorees and other guests to the Club’s pre-gala luncheon November 19, 2021. (Photo by Sara Gonzalez/peopletography.com.)

THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022

On the Road to Freedom

Understanding the Civil Rights Movement March 27 - April 3, 2022 • Join a life-changing trip to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham,Selma and Montgomery with Judge LaDoris Cordell. • Visit important sites of the movement, from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to Little Rock High School. • Meet with many figures who were involved, such as 16th Street Baptist Church bombing survivor Dr. Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, Bloody Sunday foot soldier Annie Pearl Avery, and Little Rock Nine member Elizabeth Eckford. • Experience the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson. • Meet with members of the Equal Justice Initiative and learn about the work that is being done today to fight racial injustices in the legal system. • Explore the Mississippi Delta, tour Malaco Records and the B.B. King Museum. Cost: $4,195 per person, based on double occupancy

Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell (Ret.) Discussion Leader LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, a 1974 graduate of Stanford Law School, was the first lawyer to open a law practice in East Palo Alto. In 1978, she was appointed Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at Stanford Law School where she implemented a successful minority admissions program. In 1982, she was appointed to the Municipal Court of Santa Clara County. In 1988, Judge Cordell became the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court in northern California. In 2001, she retired from the bench and was appointed Vice Provost at Stanford University. From 2010-2015, she was the Independent Police Auditor for the City of San Jose. Judge Cordell has been an on-camera legal analyst for CBS-5 television and a guest commentator on Court TV and a frequent moderator and contributor to Commonwealth Club programs.

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SAND DUNES, CANYONS & WILDFLOWERS

March 13 -18, 2022 With our expert naturalist guide, explore Badwater Salt Flats and Ubehebe Crater. Marvel at the panoramic views of Telescope Peak. Watch the sunrise at Zabriskie Point and walk between the multihued walls of Golden Canyon. Learn about the resilient desert pupfish and wildflowers. Stay at the Oasis at Death Valley.

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The Commonwealth December 2021/January 2022

Articles inside

Mary Roach

Susan Orlean

Mary Trump