The Commonwealth October/November 2019 by The Commonwealth Club of California

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

ASTRONOMER

ANDREW FRAKNOI

OCT. / NOV. 2019

50 YEARS SINCE OUR FIRST STEP

Duffy Jennings Jennifer Kahn Terry McAuliffe Esther Wojcicki $5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

UPCOMING PROGRAMS Complete Guide

On the Road to Freedom

Understanding the Civil Rights Movement March 8-15, 2020 • Join a life changing trip to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery. • 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 newly opened Memorial for Peace and Social 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: $3,995 per person, based on double occupancy

Dana King, Discussion Leader Dana King’s 25-year career as a broadcast journalist earned her 5 Emmy and 2 Edward R. Murrow Awards for her work covering news in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, Central America, Eastern Europe as well as here in the Bay Area while working at KPIX TV. King is also an artist and sculptor. Black Art in America has identified King as one of 10 Emerging Black Female Artists to Collect and calls her work “important, as it places history in contemporary contexts so that we are reminded of those who fought for our freedom.” King’s public sculptures include “Guided by Justice” located at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Brochure at commonwealthclub.org/travel

| 415.597.6720

travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40

INSIDE15 THIS ISSUE 30

The Commons

News and insights from the Club

Jennifer Kahn

Two-month Calendar

The fast evolution of gene editing

The next two months at a glance

and its implications for society

On the Scene A colorful behind-the-scenes look at Club speakers

Program Listings

Terry McAuliffe The former governor of Virginia

First Word: Duffy Jennings Dangerous lives of San Francisco journalists

October and November are filled with many great programs

Charlottesville

explains what happened at

Late-Breaking Events

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi

Last Word: Esther Wojcicki

50 Years Since Our First Step

The secret of successful people

On the Cover: The moon Photo by: Public Domain

Insight By Gloria Duffy

On this Page: Andrew Fraknoi with Lisa Krieger Photo by: James Meinerth

The steps that we took on the moon 50 years ago will be there for millions of years. There is no water, no weather, nothing that will destroy these. Those footprints are pretty safe on the moon. They will be there for millions of years. Can we say the same about the creatures who made the footsteps? -ANDREW FRAKNOI

October/November 2019 - Volume 113, No.5

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Tom Siebel

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James Meinerth

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Megan Turner

PHOTOGRAPHERS

James Meinerth Ed Ritger Sarah Gonzalez

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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.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: (415) 597-6700 E-mail: feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY

The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, podcasts on Google Play and Apple iTunes, or contact Club offices to buy a compact disc. Printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink.

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Photo by James Meinerth

Siebel’s Elephant Story

hen C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel appeared at The Commonwealth Club on July 15, 2019, he told moderator Nellie Bowles the harrowing tale of his attack by a six-ton elephant during a safari in Tanzania a decade ago. Siebel underwent many surgeries following the attack to repair injuries that included the near loss of one of his feet. One of the doctors who operated on him is Dr. Gregory M. Buncke, a plastic surgeon and director of the Buncke Medical Clinic. In an interesting bit of serendipity, Buncke has also spoken at the Club. On November 6, 2018, Buncke discussed “The Miracles of Microsurgery” in a program organized by our Health & Medicine Member-Led Forum. Buncke, who has been dubbed the “father of microsurgery,” explained how his organization has pushed the envelope when it comes to

reconstructing hands, or restoring fingers and thumbs, or coming up with improved ways to perform breast reconstruction after mastectomies. He said new reconstructive techniques are being developed all the time. It sounds like Tom Siebel was in good hands for his recovery.

Rolando Esteverena

e are sad to note the passing of Rolando Esteverena, an Argentinaborn businessman who left his mark here in the Bay Area. Esteverena had a successful career as a serial tech entrepreneur, including serving as president of one of the first desktop videoediting companies, Digital F/X, and as president of Datacopy and AdflexSolutions. For a decade, Esteverena served on The Commonwealth Club’s Board of Governors. He also was devoted to sailing; he founded and chaired boats.com, one of the first online boat brokerages. Photo by Sara Levinson

LEADERSHIP OF THE

After the Trip

lub travelers often stay in touch after they’ve experienced one of the Club’s trips. Club members who went on the “Walking the Camino de Santiago” trip in Spain in May got together two months later for a reunion dinner. One of the travelers, Dennise Carter, hosted the dinner one Friday evening at San Francisco’s Metropolitan Club. See the happy travelers in the photo at right; that’s Dennise in pink at bottom left.

Burma Exhibit

ow on exhibit in the Farmer Gallery at 110 The Embarcadero is “Burma: The Land Beyond,” a series of stunning photographs from Myanmar (previously known as Burma) by photographers Anand Khokha and Sara Levinson. The photo at the bottom of page 4 is “Leg Rowing Intha Fishermen in Sync,” by Levinson. An opening reception with the photographers took place in early September. The free exhibit “Burma: The Land Beyond” is on display through December 1 during normal Club business hours.

COMMONWEALTH CLUB

Photo by courtesy Dennise Carter

Letter to the Editor

Regardless of your intentions, the drawing of a child with an AK 47 assault rifle on page 25 of the magazine is revolting and in bad taste and if this were a real picture, it would be child abuse (“Shannon Watts: Targeting Gun Violence,” August/September 2019). You attract a lot of brain power to your programs. Match it with a modicum of common sense. You owe your members and readers an apology. Eugenio Frongia Moraga, CA Contact: feedback@commonwealthclub.org or The Commonwealth magazine, Letters, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105.

CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair James Strother Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Massey J. Bambara Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman** Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Dennis Collins Kevin Collins Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley Lee Dutra Joseph I. Epstein* Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Julie Kane Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Anna W.M. Mok Mauree Jane Perry Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes* Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin** Martha Ryan George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz George D. Smith Jr. Dr. Marc Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen

Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Jed York Mark Zitter PAST BOARD CHAIRS & PRESIDENTS Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman** J. Dennis Bonney* John Busterud* Maryles Casto** Hon. Ming Chin* Mary B. Cranston** Joseph I. Epstein* Dr. Joseph R. Fink* William German* Rose Guilbault** Claude B. Hutchison Jr.* Dr. Julius Krevans* Anna W.M. Mok** Richard Otter* Joseph Perrelli* Toni Rembe* Victor J. Revenko* Skip Rhodes* Renée Rubin* Robert Saldich** Connie Shapiro* Nelson Weller* Judith Wilbur* Dennis Wu* * Past President ** Past Chair † Deceased 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 Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

ON THE SCENE Honey Mahogany, Kris Hayashi, Clair Farley & Michelle Meow November 5, 2018

The Vanity Fair Shot Cornel West & Sheryl Davis July 22, 2019

Max Brooks & ML Cavanaugh April 9, 2019

t started as a whim. Instead of asking our speakers to stand next to a blank wall, maybe we could take advantage of the setting of our green room—the preprogram speaker lounge— to get some signature photos. They echoed the photos in Vanity Fair magazine, which sometimes puts celebrities together in a nice setting. Thus began a new Commonwealth Club tradition. This page shows five such photos from the past year, demonstrating the wide range of speakers who come to The Commonwealth Club. Meanwhile, the opposite page is filled with candid shots of speakers. Clockwise from the top left: Tan France, one of the stars of Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” says hello to a young fan before his sold-out Inforum program on June 13, 2019; actress and mental health advocate Glenn Close mingled with attendees at a preprogram reception on May 7, 2019; Adam Savage (left), former “Mythbusters” co-host, poses with moderator Kishore Hari, host of the “Inquiring Minds” podcast, before their May 29, 2019, program in Campbell; and author Elaine Welteroth shares a laugh with singer Jonathan Singletary, who moderated her June 18, 2019, Inforum program and who also happens to be her fiancé.

Joe Fink & Willie Brown May 2, 2019

Diamond Stylz, Honey Mahogany & Toni-Michelle Williams November 26, 2018

Photo Credits: West: Ed Ritger; Mahogany, et. al.: James Meinerth; Fink & Brown: Ed Ritger; Stylz, et. al.: James Meinerth; Brooks & Cavanaugh: James Meinerth; France: Sarah Gonzalez; Close: James Meinerth; Savage & Hari: Ed Ritger; and Welteroth & Singletary: Ed Ritger.

First Word

WITH DUFFY JENNINGS

Photo by James Meinerth

San Francisco’s SHOCKING SEVENTIES

The most famous death threat of any Chronicle reporter was the Halloween card that Paul Avery got from the Zodiac Killer that said, ‘You are doomed.’

became a San Francisco Chronicle reporter at the dawn of the 1970s, one of the century’s most turbulent decades for crime and social unrest in Northern California. The period was marked by political assassinations, serial killings, kidnappings, a mass suicide, attacks on police, a courthouse shootout, racial murders, gang warfare, and an assortment of counterculture terrorists and whack-job loners with guns and bombs. It was also a time of profound cultural and political upheaval. In some ways it was all connected. In just over 11 years, we went from the 1967 summer of love to the 1978 winter of hate. . . . The most famous death threat of any Chronicle reporter was the Halloween card that Paul Avery got from the Zodiac Killer in 1973 that said, “You are doomed.” I spent a lot of time with Paul while he was working on the case. He was a veteran police reporter and had been a war correspondent in Vietnam; he was sort of fearless and just a hard-nosed, dogged reporter. Those of you who’ve seen the film Zodiac, Paul is portrayed by Robert Downey Jr in what I thought was at least an Academy Award nomination-worthy performance, because it was so much like Paul. So when he got this threatening card, we all came and looked at it. Someone made up these buttons that said, “I am not Avery.” [Laughter.] Everybody in the office wore them. In fact, Herb Caen did an item about this, and TV crews came scrambling up to the office to see this.

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That’s just typical newspaper humor, you know. I said, “Paul, are you really nervous?” And he said, “No, not really. You know, I’ve been threatened before.” But he wore the button himself. [Laughter.] At the same time, he started to wear something else—a shoulder holster with a .38 that he got a permit from [the police] chief to wear. Whenever we went out of the building, I just couldn’t help looking around a little bit more carefully if I was with Paul—at people around us, at cars going by. It was just a little nerve wracking. I said, “You must be nervous about this.” And he said, “Nah, not really.” And of course it never came to [any real danger]. But Paul was the only reporter that was directly threatened. You know, journalists at that time, it was pretty rare to be killed in the line of duty. . . . So we didn’t really give it much thought. I’d been to shoot-outs, and I’d been to other places—including City Hall on the day of the Moscone-Milk assassinations, when we didn’t really know if the gunman or gunmen were still in the building, if they were a hit squad left behind by [cult leader] Jim Jones to take out all of his political enemies if he didn’t make it back here. So there was some period there of genuine fear and concern about [whether] there’s still shooters in the building —Duffy Jennings, “San Francisco’s Shocking Seventies,” August 5, 2019

Program Photos by James Meinerth | Moon Photos by NASA

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi

50 YEARS SINCE OUR FIRST STEP ANDREW FRAKNOI

Chair Emeritus, Astronomy Department, Foothill College; Former Executive Director, Astronomical Society of the Pacific

We are still learning things about the moon half a century after we visited. From the July 17, 2019, program in San Francisco, “Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi: 50 Years Since Our First Step.“

his is the 50th anniversary of our first step on the moon. It’s hard for some of us to believe it’s been 50 years. How can we all be 39, and it’s 50 years? So many people are doing films, books, television specials, articles in all the media, all about the astronauts, I thought, as an astronomer, it would be my role to talk a little bit more about the moon itself. First of all, it’s odd that we have a moon. None of our neighbors have one. Mercury doesn’t have a moon; Venus doesn’t have a moon; Mars has these two captured asteroids that look like diseased potatoes. But, in general, those are not considered the kind of moons you’d want to bring home to mom with pride. So really, none of the inner planets like us have a moon. We’ll talk about the reason that we, in particular, have a moon. We also have a relatively large moon. Our moon is about one quarter the size of planet Earth, and that’s pretty big. None of the planets that do have moons, the outer planets, have a moon anywhere near as big in terms

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of the comparative size of the two. There is quite a bit of surface area on the moon; it’s a little less than the size of Asia, so there’s quite a bit of territory there. Fly Me to the Moon The gravity on the moon is less than the Earth, about 1/6. So if you weigh 180 pounds on Earth, you’d weigh only 30 pounds on the moon. That’s a lot better than Jenny Craig can do for you. The astronauts, of course, felt this. They really felt unusually light, and they took to leaping around. NASA had to tell them to cut it out, because the nearest doctor was 240,000 miles away. Also, the moon has no air, no water, so it’s important to remember to bring your space suit. There is day and night on the moon, but each lasts about 14 days, so there are 14 days of sharp sunlight and then 14 days of utter cold darkness. Of course, the Apollo missions went during the daytime. You would not send astronauts during the [nighttime]. And that, by the way, is why on the pictures we have of the astronauts, we don’t have stars on the pictures. Because they are taken in daylight, and the kind of exposures you need in daylight, don’t show the faint stars. This is always a disappointment when there’s that explanation for the conspiracy theories and not that it was filmed in a Hollywood studio. Many people think the moon is a lot closer than it is. You actually have to put 30 Earths

side by side to get to the moon. It’s further than most people think. Now, another thing that’s important to know about the moon is that it goes around the Earth at the same rate that it turns around itself. If you don’t know what that means, try it at home. One member of the family stand in the middle and another member, maybe a junior member, go around this middle person and turn your shoulders at the same rate that you are going around. You’ll find that that means you always have one [shoulder] facing toward the central person and the other facing away. That’s what happens with the moon. There’s a side of the moon that always faces the Earth, and there’s a side of the moon that always faces away from the Earth. Until we had the space program, we only saw the nearside of the moon. This is called synchronous rotation. By the way, this is something gravity likes to do. Gravity, like your uncle, is cheap, and that means it likes to get into the minimum energy configuration. When one side is facing toward the Earth, and the rotation and the revolution are at the same rate, that’s lower energy. There is a nearside and a farside, but with apologies to Pink Floyd, there is no dark side of the moon. The sides of the moon get lit up and get dark in this 14-day cycle. But no part of the moon is always dark. Only after the Space Age began did we see

the other side of the moon. Generally, all we saw was . . . the nearside of the moon. I want [to point out] the dark splotches. I submit for your consideration that every dark splotch is round. Now you say, “No, that’s not true. I’m looking at the picture and some of them are really weird[ly] shaped.” But those weird shapes are actually superpositions of round shapes. If you look carefully, all the shapes are round with some round ones on top of other round ones. The reason is that every one of those dark areas was made by some large, cosmic chunk hitting the moon so fast and so hard it exploded, and these explosions always make round craters. Eventually, lava from within the moon filled in the darker craters, and then other hits [that] came on top of them were also filled in. Now, because the moon and the Earth are connected via the tides—the moon pulls these regular tides on the Earth where the water rubs against our planet—it turns out that the Earth and the moon can actually exchange energy. If this is a surprise to you, let me be the first to tell you: Because of this exchange of energy between the Earth and the moon, the moon is moving further away from the Earth. And to pay for that, the Earth’s spin is slowing down. The moon is actually getting energy and able to move further away. And the Earth pays the bill, energetically speaking, by slowing down. So actually, the day is getting longer, the Earth is spinning slower and the moon is moving away. I will show you how the Apollo missions really proved that this was true. We already had evidence before, but they made it absolutely clear. Moon over Marin The moon is the only object in the sky [that] changes shape regularly. We call this the phases of the moon. There is a regular “moonthly” cycle of the phases that it goes through. This is because, as the moon goes around the Earth, the sun shines on it at different angles. Sometimes the sun illuminates the entire face of the moon; that’s the full moon, which we had yesterday. And sometimes the moon just has a little bit of a crescent or is completely invisible, which we call the new moon. The full moon has been an object of great fascination for all cultures. . . . This is a nice introduction to what I want to mention

briefly, which is the moon illusion. And I think you’ve all been subject to the moon illusion. When you see the full moon near the horizon, it looks really big. Gigantic. You see that same full moon just a few hours later at the top of the sky, and it looks much smaller. We’ve taken photographs; we’ve measured them; and the moon is exactly the same size. There is no difference. But your eye interprets the moon differently when you have something to compare it to. On the horizon, you have buildings, trees, chubby neighbors, things you know that you can compare the moon to. When it’s all alone up in the sky, you don’t know anything about its size, and it looks much smaller. We’ve talked about what the moon looks like from Earth. What does the Earth look like from the moon? One of my favorite Apollo pictures—an Apollo 17 picture— [shows the Earth as viewed from the surface of the moon]. Remember, the astronauts had to land on the nearside, because they had to communicate with the Earth. Because they landed on the nearside, they could see the Earth. If you had landed on the farside, you would not see the Earth. This is going to translate into different real estate values in the future. It’s going to cost more to buy a house on the nearside of the moon where you have Earth’s views and less on the farside where you can’t ever see the Earth at all. Anyway, it turns out the phases of the Earth, as seen from the moon, are opposite the phases of the moon as seen from Earth because of the way the sun shines on it. When we see little of the moon on Earth, moon observers would see a lot of the Earth on the moon. So what did we know about the moon before we visited, and what have we learned since then? The moon is covered with craters. Not just the big black and dark ones that we talked about, but craters everywhere. We divide the moon into two kinds of terrain. The dark regions, which are called the maria—maria not a character in “West Side Story,” but it means seas or oceans in Latin. They thought early on that these dark areas were smooth, and therefore must be oceans on the moon. Many of these maria are named after emotions. We landed in the Sea of Tranquility with Apollo 11.

Then the other areas, which are lighter and more cratered, are called the highlands because they are higher than low craters, the low maria. Generally, we know that about 17 percent of the moon is maria, and 83 percent is highlands. This leads us to the next big discovery, which is the farside of the moon has far fewer maria. We’re not entirely sure why. The crust is thicker. We think the maria formed early on when some part of the moon was still molten, and so when the giant impact craters formed, not only did they carve out a big bowl, but then from underneath, some lava seeped up and filled with dark lava those giant bowls made by the impact. Later, the moon cooled enough so that lava inside the moon congealed and was no longer available to come to the surface. So the later craters are not filled with this dark material. They have a much lighter appearance. So [on] the farside of the moon, you can see many more highlands and far fewer maria. As I say, we’re not sure why that is. Walking on the Moon We knew a little bit about the moon before we went, and when the Space Age began, the moon was very much on the minds of our leaders.

In September 1959, the first spacecraft to reach the moon was the Luna 2 from what was then called the Soviet Union, today Russia. It just crashed, but they didn’t care; they were first on the moon. By October of that same year, the first flyby took place, and the Luna 3 spacecraft was actually able to take photos of the farside of the moon. They were terrible pictures but sensational for just existing. We had never seen the backside before. In 1966, the Luna 9 was able to soft-land on the moon. That was the first robotic soft landing. Three years later Apollo 11 [allowed] the first human to take a step on the moon. Although many spacecraft have orbited the moon and shown us the farside in exquisite detail, no soft landing has happened on the backside of the moon. So, in January of this year, the Chinese soft-landed the Chang’e 4 spacecraft, and they actually had a cute little rover called the Jade Rabbit, and it was able to tool around on the backside of the moon. But, of course, we [Americans] had the first landing, the first planting of a flag and, of course, the first human geologist. Because every astronaut was trained to notice inter-

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esting rocks and to pick them up and bring them back to Earth. Not only did we land on the moon in 1969, but, even better, we came back, which was a very important part of the mission. When they got back to Earth, [the astronauts] were quarantined, because we were worried about the possibility of there being moon germs that in some way would infect us on Earth. Even though the moon has no air and no water, we were not 100 percent sure that it was safe. So they spent some time in quarantine and then turned out to be just fine and were released back into everyday life, although they never had an everyday life after that. The further Apollo missions not only sent people to the moon but cars. [There was] what was called the dune buggy on Apollo 16. By the way, these cars were electric cars. The first one cost $38 million to develop. It was hinged, so they could fold it up and hang it up in the spacecraft. The top speed was 8 mph—so, a Tesla it was not. But it was a very useful electric car for exploring the moon. The other thing that the astronauts did, of course, was scientific experiments. There was

a primitive suite on Apollo 11 and a much more sophisticated suite of instruments and things that they would leave behind to measure conditions on the moon. Twelve people walked on the moon. Of those, how many were scientists? Just one. Harrison Schmitt at the very end. Because they wanted test pilots for the most part. Among the instruments left on the moon were seismometers, measuring earthquakes. No, not earthquakes, but moonquakes. And there are moonquakes. Some we made ourselves, dropping some of our equipment on the moon. Some came when chunks of material hit the moon, as they continue to do. And some came naturally from inside the moon. So we know from the waves set up by moonquakes what the interior of the moon is like. But perhaps the most exciting experiment left behind by the astronauts were the laser reflectors. Do you remember this? Those of you who were not tuned in at the time, or not even alive, let me tell you what happened: We brought to the moon and pointed at the Earth reflective mirrors, essentially—big square mirrors—and then an observatory at

the University of Texas was equipped with a powerful laser that bounced a laser beam off the moon and caught it on its way back to the telescope. We reflected a laser beam from the moon many, many times. This allowed us to measure the distance to the moon. Now, you know how this works, right? I’m going to do a little math, but it’s car math. So even people with math anxiety are usually okay with car math. You have a car, which is driving at 60 miles an hour, and you cover 120 miles. How long did it take you? Two hours. Or, if you know it took you two hours, how many miles will you cover at 60 miles an hour? 120 miles. In the same way, we knew the speed of light. We knew when we sent the laser. We knew when the laser came back to within a fraction of a second. And that allowed us, ladies and gentlemen, to measure the distance to the moon to within inches. I’m not kidding—to within inches. And we’ve gotten better than that—fractions of an inch now. Over and over again, we have measured the distance to the moon precisely. What we have learned is that the moon is moving away at 1½ inches per year. Now that’s not that big. That’s roughly the

rate at which your fingernails grow‚ 1½ inches per year. So in a century, the moon moves away about 4 meters, [or] 4 yards. But over the many centuries, that begins to build up. This is the proof I was talking about before, that, in fact, the moon is moving away from the Earth. And, as I said, the Earth must slow down to pay the bills. We’ve measured that too. Because the Earth is much bigger, that same amount of energy causes a smaller change. So the day’s increasing by 0.002 of a second per century. There’s no need to adjust your watch to this issue. But 0.002 of a second per century, that’s a lot over the billions of years of Earth and moon history. We believe when the moon formed, it was much closer to the Earth and that the Earth was spinning much faster. How do we know this? It turns out there are records in the rocks that record the cycle of day and night, particularly the cycle of the high tide and the low tide. And those rocks confirm what the Apollo experiments have told us, that the Earth is slowing down, and the moon is moving away. What does that mean in practice? Well, we are not going to be able to have these spectac-

ulars. Do you remember this from 2017? In the United States, we enjoyed a total eclipse of the sun. That was the last time I was here at The Commonwealth Club, talking about that. A total eclipse of the sun means the moon, as we see it in the sky, just happens to be the same size as the sun. This is a total coincidence, but because they’re the same size in the sky, the moon can cover the sun, and you can just see the faint edge of the eruptions on the surface of the sun showing behind the moon, particularly where there are craters or there are valleys on the moon. This works because the two are the same size. If the moon is moving away, what’s going to happen? As the moon moves away, it will look smaller, and it will no longer be able to cover the sun. I want to congratulate all of you in the audience on your good taste in being born now when total eclipses are visible. Why are there not eclipses every month? You would think as the moon goes around the Earth, it should get in front of the sun every month. But here’s a quick way of understanding that: The moon’s orbit is tilted relative to the motion of the Earth around the sun. And because the two are tilted, the OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

moon is typically either above the sun or below the sun in the sky on this tilted orbit, and so, most months we don’t see an eclipse. But every six months or so, where the two circles are in alignment, it’s possible to have an eclipse season—either a solar eclipse, eclipse of the sun, or a lunar eclipse, an eclipse of the moon by the Earth’s shadow. It’s possible every six months to have an eclipse, but the eclipses, particularly the sun eclipses, only happen over a very small part of the Earth. So, [it] usually can take 100 or more years before you get another total eclipse of the sun. But I have good news for everybody; we had a total eclipse in the United States in 2017, and we’re going to have another one in 2024. That’s a very short time distance between the two eclipses. We’re very lucky. Put April 8, 2024 on your social schedule now, kids. Those of us who are older, we have to take our vitamins to make sure we are alive then, but the younger people can make plans. It’s going to go from Mexico through the United States at a different angle than the 2017 one, and then up into eastern Canada. Of course, the moon won’t move far enough away in those few years to make any difference. We still have millions of years to enjoy eclipses of the sun. Destination Moon I want to switch to a question that many people have and we’ve been able to answer because of Apollo: Where did the moon come from? Or to put it another way, how come all our neighbor planets don’t have a moon, and we have a big moon? Before we went to the moon, we had two theories about why this was. They were very simple. Theory no. 1: The moon came out of the Earth. Somehow, something launched the moon out of the Earth, and it somehow then went into orbit around the Earth because we have gravity on Earth, so the moon is a product of our planet. If that’s true, then the moon in its chemical makeup and what it’s made of should resemble the Earth. The other theory was: If the moon was not from the Earth, it came from far away. It was part of some other section of our solar system. It ventured too close to the Earth, was captured, and went into orbit around the Earth. In that case, the moon should be made up of different materials than the Earth. We used to tell this to students as the

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perfect example of how science works. You have these two competing theories. Now we’re going to go to the moon. We’re going to get rocks back. We’ll analyze what they’re made of, and we’ll be able to choose between these two simple theories. Well, of course, nature never is as cooperative as we pretend it is. When we actually got the moon rocks, neither theory was right. The moon rocks were similar to the Earth, but not outrageously similar. And the moon rocks were different from the Earth, but not outrageously different. There was just enough difference that neither theory worked. And you could see astronomers specializing in the moon tearing their hair out in 1970 when these ideas became clear. I’m not going to go into a lot of technical detail, but let me tell you three things that we learned that turned out to be the key to solving the puzzle of the moon. First of all, the moon is very dry. It has so little water, so little of materials that evaporate easily, that we think it’s unusually different from the Earth. The Earth, of course, has a lot more water, and the Earth also has a lot of lighter materials, which have gone into our atmosphere. And those materials are missing, for the most part, from the moon. The other thing is that the moon has much less iron than the Earth does. Iron is a heavy material. On Earth, it sank down into the core of the Earth and makes up the center of our planet. And then finally, we found some light rocks on the moon that looked like, forgive the technical term, geological scum. So what we think happened is that the early moon was at least on the outside molten. And you know what happens in a liquid: Lighter things rise to the top; heavier things sink to the bottom. There were rocks found on the moon, much to the excitement of geologists, which could only rise to the top, could only be on the surface, if the moon was molten. It’s deficient in light elements, it’s deficient in iron, and it must’ve been molten at some time. All of that implies that there must have been heat as part of this formation process. So we think now that there was a much more dramatic and catastrophic beginning to the moon. This was an idea that two pairs of astronomers on either side of the United States had at roughly the same time, and it’s called the giant-impact hypothesis.

What we think happened is that in the early solar system, before any of the planets settled down into their present state, there were a lot more objects, a lot more bodies going around the solar system, than we have today. What we think happened is that smaller pieces gathered together into bigger pieces, and there was a time when there were a bunch of mini planets—small, maybe Mars-sized or smaller planets—going around the solar system. And not all of them were on stable orbits, so they would hit each other. And we think early on in the history of the solar system, the early Earth, while it was still quite hot, was hit by one of these Mars-sized mini planets. Some people think it might’ve just been a glancing blow rather than a direct blow, but there’s discussion about that. But when the two objects hit, it completely destroyed the mini planet and took off quite a bit of the outside of the Earth. We think whatever iron there might have been in the mini planet was so heavy in this hot, molten situation, it sank to the bottom of the middle of the Earth, so it became part of the core of the Earth. Light materials like water were evaporated from the debris of this collision, and then the debris itself went into orbit around the Earth. All that was left were the chunks, the violent chunks, of this collision, and they went into orbit in a kind of cloud around the Earth, and that eventually coalesced into the moon. . . . So let me end with the following thought. The steps that we took on the moon 50 years ago, they will be there for millions of years. There is no water, no weather, nothing that will destroy these—maybe an impact occasionally, but those footprints are pretty safe on the moon. They will be there for millions of years. Can we say the same about the creatures who made the footsteps? Will we still be around then? For now, I think that, despite all the problems and confusion on Earth, it’s really nice for us to know that we can still continue to ask the big questions like we’ve been asking—about where we come from—and to think of big plans for where we might be going, because it’s those big thoughts, after all, that are the hallmark and pride of being human.

Program Photos by James Meinerth

JENNIFER KAHN THE FAST EVOLUTION OF GENE EDITING

& ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIETY

JENNIFER KAHN

GERALD HARRIS

Contributing Writer, New York Times Magazine; Lecturer, Magazine Program, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

President, Quantum Planning Group; Chair, Commonwealth Club Technology & Society Member-Led Forumâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Moderator

From the August 15, 2019, Technology & Society MLF program in San Francisco, “The Fast Evolution of Gene Editing and Its Implications for Society.” GERALD HARRIS: In light of the mission of the Technology & Society Forum, I can think of only a few other areas of emerging technology, perhaps AI [artificial intelligence], that is more important to inform the public about so that an informed democratic process for its use can be created and maintained. The potential uses of this technology cross many areas of our lives, and its potential to change our everyday lives is vast. Jennifer, define the terms for us so that we can all get on the same page. JENNIFER KAHN: First—most basic thing—the technology I’m going to be talking most about tonight is this one you’ve probably heard of called CRISPR. It stands for something complicated, which is Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Please forget that I even said that, because it doesn’t matter. But it just describes what the original gene looked like when they found it in bacteria. But since then it’s actually come to mean something different, which is a tool that was developed.

People found this sort of thing in bacteria, and then they were able to turn it into a tool that could edit genes. We’ve been editing stuff in mice and everything for a while. But the thing I certainly didn’t realize when I started writing about this was that it was incredibly hard to do this. It would be a student’s Ph.D. thesis to do a single edit of one gene in a mouse and see what that did. The thing about CRISPR is that it made it so much faster, so much easier, so much cheaper. Almost anybody could do it. One of the really powerful things it did was make it possible to just edit genes, see what they did. You could do it in a couple days instead of a couple years. That was the big difference. HARRIS: I know there’s gene editing, gene drive—so can you break those down for us? KAHN: Actually, one thing I should make clear is an interesting thing about gene editing versus, say, GMOs, when you hear about GMO food. Gene editing just means editing a gene. Every cell has DNA in it. If you want to change those letters—like a word processor, changing the letters that are in the DNA—that’s just gene editing. GMO nowadays refers specifically to introducing kind of a foreign gene. If you want to have a tomato that is resistant to frost, and you take a gene from a flounder, which has a thing that is resistant to frost, and you stick it in the tomato—they actually did this. It was called

a fish tomato. Didn’t really work very well. Nobody bought it. But they tried it. This was back in the ’90s. So that’s GMOs. We still do some of that. It’s still possible. But I think the conversation has really moved just to this gene editing, because with CRISPR there’s often not as much of a need to introduce things from [other organisms]—it’s called transgenic. You can just edit the genes themselves. HARRIS: As I understand gene drive, that’s a little bit more complicated. KAHN: I’m trying to take this step by step, because it is complicated, and they all use the word gene for some reason. So a gene drive is different still. So a gene drive is basically just something that helps spread a trait all the way through a population. So if you have a bunch of mosquitoes, millions of mosquitoes, and say you want none of them to be able to transmit malaria, right? So gene editing just means you can take a single mosquito, you change it up, and look, that one mosquito can’t transmit malaria. That doesn’t do a lot of good, because now you’ve got one mosquito that can’t transmit malaria, but you’ve still got 10 bazillion that can, right? So then how do you get them all to not transmit malaria? It turns out there’s a thing called a gene drive that just basically ensures that a particular trait will get inherited. So if you release, say, 1,000 of these modified mosquitoes that

Moderator Gerald Harris and Jennifer Kahn

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can’t get malaria, and if they successfully manage to breed with all the other mosquitoes out there, it basically means that all the offspring will not be able to pass on malaria. So eventually that will actually spread throughout the entire population. HARRIS: If I understand you correctly, if someone used gene drive on a human being, then the same thing would happen to their posterity. Is that not [what we’re talking about here]? KAHN: That’s a great question. So the thing about gene drives is that in practice they only work in things that reproduce really quickly—like mice and insects. In theory, we could put a gene drive in a person, but we’re people with agency, so people wait—you wait 20 years, then they have to marry someone else. I mean, it would just take forever. It takes so long, by that point, if you saw it happening, you could stop it. You could undo it, probably. So we probably don’t need to worry about it happening in us, in elephants, in other stuff. But definitely stuff that reproduces kind of quickly works. HARRIS: How much do we know versus how much [do] we think we know? As I understand it, you can change one thing in my genetic code, and it could affect thousands of things in my life. So what gives us the confidence that we kind of know what we’re doing, in light of that? KAHN: Oh, I don’t think we have that

confidence at this point. That’s part of why you guys have— Should I go to the CRISPR babies at this point? HARRIS: Please do. KAHN: This was a big thing that made a lot of news in the past six months or so. There was a scientist named He Jiankui in China who, somewhat unilaterally—there’s some debate over whether there was support from the government on this or not—basically used in vitro fertilization, but within that edited a single gene in these twin girls who ended up being born. Researchers had been doing that in embryos in the past, but certainly not taking them to term. They were just doing it to sort of see if it could be done. He was the first one who actually created children that went out in the world. The particular gene he modified was called CCR5, and he modified it because there’s people out there with a natural mutation in that gene, and they’re resistant to HIV. They just don’t get the virus at all. That would seem like a good thing. Why not do it? There’s a couple problems with it. Well, there’s several problems, but in his case, one practical problem is it’s not clear that his experiment really worked. At least one of the twins has something they called mosaicism, where the altered gene ended up in some of the cells but not [all] of the cells. That’s not automatically terrible. A lot of us have some sort of mosaicism. But it means we don’t even know—is that kid going to be protected? What’s going to happen from that? No idea. The other thing is that we’re only now

beginning to understand all the things that a mutation in CCR5 might affect. It might really just confer this wonderful immunity to HIV. But a recent thing they found was that people in the world who happen to have this mutation are 20 percent more likely to die before age 76 than people who don’t have it. That’s not great to bestow on these kids. Also, there’s some indication that they’re more susceptible to influenza and West Nile. So it’s going to be trade-offs that make it very tricky when you do this. In his case, the really significant thing is that, when you do this in an adult human, in something called gene therapy, it’s different. You just do it in the adult human. But he did it in what’s called the germ line. They idea is, when you put it in the germ line, it means that not only are those babies going to have it, but when they have kids, it’ll get passed on, and when they have kids, it’ll get passed. So that’s a pretty big ethical deal. You’d think we’d want to be pretty darn sure what the effect’s going to be before we do it. HARRIS: Let’s dig behind that a little bit further, because there were a host of ethical [and] legal . . . I’m not even sure how you explain these issues. The New York Times did an article on this, and it exposed that certain professors from Stanford were cooperating, counseling, whatever, with this Chinese scientist, and that they had a set of rules around scientific sharing and these kinds of things that really weren’t visible to the public. It wasn’t clear they were being regulated; [it] wasn’t clear who was enforcing it. KAHN: The reality is that there really isn’t regulation around this at this point. In 2017, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine tried to come up with a draft thing. Like, “Oh, these are guidelines. We recommend you don’t do this or that.” Then, unfortunately, at the conference, He Jiankui said, “Oh no, I followed all those guidelines.” So apparently these guidelines were so vague that he somehow was able to kind of think, “No, no, I’m following all the procedures correctly.” Just two days ago, there was another meeting of not just the National Academies—it’s now an international consortium—and they’re now trying to create a much more comprehensive and binding set of things that regulators can consult, that scientists can consult, that clinicians can consult when they’re thinking about doing any of this stuff. OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

We can make cows that have more muscle mass using genetic engineering, or we could just eat less meat. It’s not like we have to genetically engineer our way out of some of the holes we’re in.

The problem, as I’m sure you’re anticipating, is who’s going to enforce this. This is a global thing. I’ll say gene drive is actually kind of hard to do, but editing an embryo? It’s really not that hard. It’s not that hard. It’s hard sometimes to have them be edited and be viable to survive, but really, this is not hard. Something that happened after He Jiankui did his experiment. He somehow disappeared, but then a ton of clinics were writing him emails saying, “Boy, congratulations. This sounds great. When can we get access to this?” So this is from the UAE, the Middle East. People all over are looking into this. If this international consortium comes up with these guidelines, how are they going to police it? What’s to stop anybody from just doing it? If you’re getting national funding, maybe you can’t do it. But if you’re a private clinic? HARRIS: So we don’t know how we would enforce the rules even if we had them. KAHN: Yeah. I mean, we’re trying to set out good rules, and hopefully people will mostly follow them. But I feel like, at this point, it’s probably something that’s coming. The one thing I will say is that, something just to bear in mind—you think about doing this, [and] the reality is it takes a long time for people to grow up. If we’re talking about doing this in humans, how do we know if it’s been a success or what the possible side effects are? Normally before we do these experiments we do a million experiments in mice. We

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might even do them in primates. And we do a lot of observation to see [what happens] in individual cells. Then, when we’re pretty sure that it’s safe, that’s when we might try it in a person. It’s never going to be 100 percent certain, but that’s when you try it. But if you just start this experiment now, we literally just have to wait until these twins grow up, and then, well, what happens? Are they going to end up dying before 76? It’s actually going to take a very long time to get feedback if the way we’re experimenting is experimenting on humans. HARRIS: There are people who are convinced that the next revolution in agriculture that’s going to feed the 9 to 10 billion people on the planet cannot happen without [genetic engineering in agriculture]. KAHN: The first thing I’ll say is, there’s plenty of things we can do that don’t involve genetic engineering or gene editing. Like, for instance, we can make cows that have more muscle mass using genetic engineering, or we could just eat less meat. So it’s not like we have to genetically engineer our way out of some of the holes we’re in. But that said, we are facing climate change, and that’s going to affect us in the U.S. probably a bit. Probably what we’ll experience is higher food prices. But globally, it can be a real disaster. You can have starvation; starvation can lead to riots; you can end up with vast climate refugees fleeing the starvation. So

that can be extraordinarily destabilizing. And so if you think about it, you’re going to end up having to, if you’re kind of temperamentally inclined to not like the idea of mucking around with gene editing crops, you’re going to have to weigh that against some of the other risks we might be facing if we don’t—if you sort of really have an ideological objection to creating maybe a wheat that uses less water, or something like that. HARRIS: The first agricultural revolution came with chemicals in terms of pesticides and fertilizers, and we now have all manner of side effects and externalities based on that. In California, we have all kinds of issues with the water table in terms of phosphate in the water. So can you imagine that we may have some externalities if this was widely applied in agriculture? KAHN: Actually, there’s two interesting points here: One is that we have a real habit as human beings to think about the externalities, to worry about what’s going to happen, with new things, the next technology. We think, “Oh, I don’t know if I should trust this.” But then, as you’re saying, there’s all this devastation that’s happened because of the overuse of pesticides. But that’s the devil we know, so we tend to kind of think, “Oh, well, pesticides, we don’t love them, but that’s okay. But the idea of like this mucking around with genes? I don’t know. I don’t like that.” That said, obviously this is stuff that you

want to test first. You want to make sure, for instance, if you’re doing the GMO thing where you introduce a foreign gene, a thing you would want to make sure of is, what if you introduce the peanut gene? What if that might cause an allergy, or something like that? So there’s stuff you definitely want to be mindful of that way. I had a scientist explain this to me that when we crossbreed things, we’re often trying to select for a particular gene. Like for years people have been crossbreeding their tomato plants to get tomatoes that are a little bigger, a little sweeter, something else, right? We just do that. What people don’t realize is that when you’re doing that, you may be selecting for that gene, but you’re also dragging along a ton of other genes. It’s very messy. It’s really haphazard. The difference is, we don’t see it, because we don’t sequence those tomatoes. If we looked at them, we would see a ton of junk that would appall if we actually saw it in this deliberate gene editing. What we have now is this technology that allows us to very precisely say, “Let’s just change these. We know that this kind of tomato is a lot sweeter, and it has this particular series of letters. Let’s just put those in.” It’s actually a lot more precise and a lot less messy. That’s not to say there are no externalities, but it’s also funny, because there’s all this other stuff that somehow just because we’re not aware of it doesn’t bother us. This one, the alarming part is that we’re conscious of it. HARRIS: Let’s move on to the applications

of this technology for a disease an individual might have. My son carries what’s called sickle cell trait, which he got from me. I got it from my father’s side of the family. If he marries someone else who has the sickle cell trait, they have, I think, a 50 percent chance of creating a child that has sickle cell anemia. But recently, it seems like a young lady was treated for this and was cured. So can you talk about individual treatment and what seems to be going on here? KAHN: Yeah, this is a really great hope. Sickle cell is a monogenic disease, which means that it’s caused by a single mutation in a single gene. Imagine all the letters in your DNA, and there’s one letter that somebody got wrong, and that’s it. So it’s a tiny thing yet immensely powerful, and the disease is awful. It’s very painful. You get strokes. You die early. It’s just an awful thing to inherit. And it tends to be more common in people of African descent. So far very little can be done beyond bone marrow transplants. My understanding of this woman who was just treated: They took out the bone marrow from her, and then they took those cells, and they edited them. They edit that one letter, so now it’s the right letter. That’s literally all they have to do. Then they put her bone marrow back in. The bone marrow is what creates the blood cells. So instead of creating the broken sickle-shaped blood cells, it now will just create normal blood cells. So it’s an extraordinary thing if it works, yeah. HARRIS: As I understand it, there are com-

panies in LA who are advertising that they can give your baby blonde hair. KAHN: Oh God. Are there? I will confess, I hadn’t heard about that. But I will say that one thing that actually is possible is, we’ve been doing IVF to select for things, so presumably you could. If they think they really have a strong genetic correlation with a particular trait—height or blonde hair, whatever it is—that’s all they have to do, because they already do that. They do preimplantation diagnosis for in vitro fertilization. So it’s not that hard to look at the embryo and sort of see what it’s got, chuck out the ones you don’t want, keep the ones you do. Most traits aren’t that simple. They might be able to select for blonde hair, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to select for intelligence or wit. I mean, there’s many things that they’re not going to be able to just sort of . . . they can’t sort of promise you this stuff. Even height is actually pretty complicated. And again, they’re not. Probably, my guess—I can’t imagine that they’re doing any kind of editing on these things. They’re just probably looking at what the sequences are and picking the one that has the blonde hair. But the problem is, because they’re doing that, they’re not looking at the billion other genes. So who knows if that one with the blonde hair is going to end up better, or who knows what the rest of the genes are going on in that one? So I don’t know. HARRIS: Well, you know, we Americans will pay for a lot of things.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Photos by James Meinerth

TERRY MCAULIFFE

Former Governor of Virginia; Author, Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism

LADORIS CORDELL

Retired Judge—Moderator

From the August 8, 2019, program in San Francisco, “Gov. Terry McAuliffe: Beyond Hate and Charlottesville.” LADORIS CORDELL: First off, why did you write the book? TERRY MCAULIFFE: Charlottesville was a seminal moment in our nation’s history. We hadn’t seen in decades [a situation] where so many racists had come together in one place—neo-Nazis, white supremacists. I couldn’t do it [write the book] while I was governor because I was busy. But then, after I left the governorship, I was traveling the country. I was actually thinking of running for president of the United States, and I went to 25 states. Everywhere I went people asked me about Charlottesville: How did it happen? Where do these people come from? [A lot] of

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people thought they were Virginians. They were not. They came from 39 states and came in [to Virginia] that day. They [Americans across the country] wanted to know about the monuments, the history of Virginia, and I think the truth had to be told. I talk about Virginia’s history in the book. I talk about my history as a New Yorker running for governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. [Civil rights activist] John Lewis called me on Monday after I gave my speech on Saturday night and said, “Governor, you brought tears to my eyes.” For me, having John Lewis say that, [considering] all he had gone through, I just thought we needed to memorialize what actually happened. We have a call to action in the book: How do we go from here? CORDELL: There are 379 Confederate monuments across Virginia, most of them built during the Jim Crow era. MCAULIFFE: That’s right. CORDELL: In February 2017, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee from Lee Park, not far from the University of Virginia. You write in your book, “We knew that we might have a problem on our hands in Charlottesville.” And you were right. A few months later, in June 2017, you were surprised and dismayed when the city approved a permit for a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Now, why were you dismayed about the permit? Doesn’t the First Amendment allow for permits for public gatherings, even when the message is not one that we like? MCAULIFFE: Yeah. Good question. This is a big debate. Now, leading up to this, as soon as this permit went in from these neo-Nazis and white supremacists, I had stood up my Fusion Center [an information-sharing system] with my state police. [I have to] be careful [of ] what I say publicly, but we had undercover operations going on. I was working very closely with the FBI and the DHS [Department of Homeland Security]. We were monitoring these deep, dark websites. They were telling everybody to come to Virginia, to bring weapons and to hurt people. So we knew ahead of time that they were coming to do damage and to hurt people in Virginia. And listen, First Amendment—you can say whatever you want. I get that. But you don’t have the right to come in and hurt people, and you don’t have the right to do damage. My problem with the city of Charlottesville, when they filed the permit—you have 10 days to amend the permit. They didn’t do anything, so it was automatically permitted. You should’ve banned poles, sticks, masks. You should’ve limited the amount of time, and it never should’ve been held in Emancipation Park.

CORDELL: Who should’ve done that? MCAULIFFE: The city. The city had the authority to do that. CORDELL: And did not? MCAULIFFE: They did nothing, so it automatically got approved. I kept arguing that you’ve got to get it out of Emancipation Park, because we knew 1,000 armed people were coming, and probably 1,000 or 2,000 counterprotestors. We couldn’t control it. That park is probably four times the size of this room, honestly. There’s no way you could control this. On Wednesday, the city finally filed to move it to McIntire Park—a much bigger park. The key to crowd control and protestors is to keep them separated. You couldn’t do it in Emancipation Park. The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] sued on behalf of the neo-Nazis, and a judge ruled in favor, Friday night at 9:00, to let it stay. [I was] very tough in the book—I love the ACLU, but they were wrong here. We could not keep people safe. We had no ability, and three people were killed. We just had no ability to do it. I mean, Friday night . . . at the University of Virginia, there’s a big mountain. At 9:00, you could see hundreds of people coming down the mountain in pitch black with torches, screaming, “Jews, you will not replace us. Blood and soil.” Chanting all of the neo-Nazi chants from 1933 and 1934. This was Friday night, so we knew there was going to be an issue. Then Saturday, we got into the insanity. And I’ve never in my life, folks, to be honest with you, heard what I heard that day. Standing in front a synagogue, they’re yelling, “We’re going to burn you, and we’re going to burn that synagogue like we did in Auschwitz,” and laughing. Every other word was the F- and N-word. Every woman was called the F- and C-word. These are a thousand people. Now, I don’t like what they yell, but they were physically assaulting everybody, and finally I called a state of emergency and declared it and emptied the park out. CORDELL: We’ll get to that in a second. I want to ask you another question. On Saturday, August 12, 2017, this was the largest white supremacist gathering in the United States in decades in Charlottesville. Among them was David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK, with his Nazi salute. How did you monitor what was going on,

since you weren’t actually physically there? MCAULIFFE: Well, first of all, the governor shouldn’t be there because the last thing you want . . . I had my general in charge of the National Guard. I had my colonel in charge of the state police. I had my public safety secretary. The governor should not be in the command center telling people what to do. You hire these people; they know what to do. You don’t want the governor saying, “Oh, do this. Do that,” because that’s not your expertise. And knowing my personality, they knew I would’ve wandered out into the crowd, which wouldn’t have been good. I’ll just leave it at that. [Laughter.] I would not have tolerated these swastikas and Adolf Hitler t-shirts. But, you know, listen—we knew leading up that it was going to be trouble. I started to get calls about 6:30 in the morning. We were monitoring the situation. [Virginia’s Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security] Brian Moran, our team on the ground—they had the command center down there. At about 8:30, he called and sent a picture. What happened is all these militia groups showed up with semiautomatic weapon[s]. We’re an open carry state. So all of them [came] with long rifles, semiautomatics, and they had revolvers strapped to every part of their body they possibly could. They were all wearing military uniforms, camouflage. CORDELL: And all legal? This is all legal— carrying these weapons? MCAULIFFE: Oh, yeah. They said they were there to protect the First Amendment and Second Amendment rights and all that. Then we had a lot of skirmishes going on. [At] about 11:15, Brian Moran called me and said, “Governor, this thing’s out of control.” Remember, we’re in a support role. The city runs it. If there’s a crisis here today in San Francisco—[the] San Francisco mayor and chief of police generally will run the operation. The state will be a support role. So I wasn’t running the operation. We were there in support. I had about 975 state police and all of these National Guard, but we’re in a support role. They should have declared a state of emergency. Finally, my secretary of public safety was on the ground and said, “I can’t take it anymore. I don’t care about political.” [He] called me and said, “It’s really bad. You’ve got to do something.” I declared the state of emergency. CORDELL: Right, and you put in your

book you called it at 11:28 a.m. And then— MCAULIFFE: And remember—the rally wasn’t supposed to start till noon. CORDELL: Right. So you’re ahead of the curve here. You called the state of emergency. Then you get a call from the White House. Right? Describe the conversation you had with— MCAULIFFE: President Trump calls me, which the president will do in an emergency—will call the governor of the state to try and find out [what’s going on]. I had dealt with Trump a lot that year, because I was chairman of the National Governors Association, so I represented all the governors. I had had a lot of fights with Trump—on his Muslim ban. There were people coming into Dulles Airport, our big international airport—U.S. citizens being detained for hours because they’d gotten on a plane from one of those countries [included in the ban]. I would go and demand they’d be released. I mean, this is America, folks. Five hours detained without access to a legal counsel, and you’re a U.S. citizen? Really? I was very angry with him, with the ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in Northern Virginia. They were stopping everybody. There was a woman who was stopped for a broken taillight. They started deportation hearings against her. As governor, I pardoned her. I took away the underlying crime, hoping that would stop it. It didn’t. There was a famous picture in The Washington Post of this woman being taken away in a van with her two children hanging on to the window as it pulled away. . . . So I had a lot of fights with him. When he called, I explained to him. I said, “Mr. President, we[’ve] got thousands of these neo-Nazis, white supremacists, horrible people. This is bad for the country.” I said, “This is your opportunity, Mr. President. Bill Clinton had [the] Oklahoma City [bombing]. President Obama had the Charleston and Sandy Hook [shootings]. President Bush had 9/11.” We were looking to the leader of our country to say, “No, this stuff will not be tolerated.” We talked 15–20 minutes. I told the president, “You’ve got to stop your hate speech. This is really hurting the country.” I foolishly said, “You’re hurting my economy in Northern Virginia.” Then he went off on a 10-minute [rant on] how great the economy was . . . I mean, you know the deal. But I said, “No, Mr. President.” OCTOBER/NOVERMBER 2019

He said, “In the end, Terry, you and I got to work together on this hate stuff.” I said, “Great.” I felt pretty good. [I] hung up the phone for his press conference to go first. I’d go after him. [A] half an hour went by, [an] hour went by, [an] hour and a half went by. Two hours went by. I’m thinking, “What happened to his press conference?” You know what happened. [Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen] Bannon or [senior adviser Stephen] Miller or whatever, the White House got ahold of him and said, “No, Mr. President. You will not mention the word ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘white supremacist,’ and you will not condemn them.” And then he came out and he did his press conference, if you all remember, and he said, “There were good people on both sides.” Now, there were not good people on the neo-Nazi side. Heather Heyer was killed that day—32 years old—fighting against white extremism. I lost two state troopers that day. He [Trump] failed the country. CORDELL: We’re going to get to a little more of that. But after you got word that Heather Heyer, Jay Cullen and Berke Bates

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had been killed—all three to whom you dedicate your book, by the way—that must’ve been a governor’s worst nightmare. You get this information, and two of the three you knew. I mean, you were close to them. So, what did you do as soon as you heard that? MCAULIFFE: When I called the state of emergency, the state police went in. They said, “You have 11 minutes to clear the park.” They cleared the park. Then the National Guard went in and secured the park. [At] 11:50, 10 minutes before the rally was even supposed to start, everything was over. We’d had not real injuries. Nobody had gone to the hospital. No property damage. Zero. We actually felt the crisis was over. Then, about an hour later, I get a call from Brian. He says, “Is the TV on?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, you’re about to see something.” And, as you know, James Fields weaponized his car and ran through a downtown city street of Charlottesville and killed Heather and injured 35 people. [I] couldn’t believe it. At that point, I said, “I’ve got to get down there”—and went to the

press conference from there. The helicopter I use as governor was there in Charlottesville doing surveillance with my pilot and copilot, who’d been a member of my security detail. So I flew down on Fairfax County’s helicopter. As soon as I landed—[a] large contingent of police [were there] to take me in because of all the issues. In the front seat was the head of my security detail. He said, “An aircraft has just gone down, Governor.” Now there weren’t a lot of planes in the Charlottesville airspace, but there was an airport. I had a sinking feeling because I knew our helicopter was there. I went over to where we were going to do the press conference, and I was about to go out. I knew I had to speak for Virginia and the country, to give my speech, because Trump had just so fumbled the ball. I knew it was very important; everybody was watching. Then, five minutes before I went out, they came in and told me that the helicopter had crashed, it was ours, and that Berke and Jay were killed. Jay had been my pilot for three and a half years. Berke had been on my executive protection unit [EPU]. When you get elected

governor, you always have two state troopers with me, one with my wife and then with the kids. Berke always wanted to be a helicopter pilot. He finally got it, so he came over. It was his last day as an EPU agent, and he came over to see me. I have the picture in the book of the meeting. We had nice pleasantries, and he said, “I just want you to know I just sent your son a care package.” My son Jack is a captain in the Marine Corps, and he was stationed in Iraq. Berke said, “I just sent him a great package.” I said, “Great, Berke. What did you send him?” He said, “I sent him a whole bunch of cigars,” because my son said there’s not a lot to do over in the desert in Iraq, but when you get back, [you can] smoke a cigar, relax. He said, “I sent him some magazines.” I said, “Great. He’ll like Time, Newsweek.” He said, “Oh, no. A little more colorful than that, Governor.” [Laughter.] And the best part is he said, “And I sent him a bottle of Irish whiskey.” I said, “What? You can’t send to the military a bottle of whiskey, especially in a

Muslim country where alcohol isn’t allowed.” “Oh,” he said, “Governor, don’t worry.” He said, “I put it in a Listerine bottle.” [Laughter.] That’s the last time I talked to Berke. CORDELL: Wow. MCAULIFFE: The package took a month to get to Iraq. I said to my son, “What’d you get?” He said, “I got some cigars and some interesting magazines, Dad.” I said, “Did you get any Listerine or . . . ” He said, “No, but there was a letter in the package from a military inspector that said, ‘Tell your friend don’t ever send liquor ever again.’” [Laughter.] CORDELL: Got it. How did your press conference go, in your view? MCAULIFFE: As I say, [all] that had just happened. CORDELL: Yes. Right. MCAULIFFE: I just found out [about the officers’ deaths]. I talked to my wife, who really had a hard time even talking because Berke and she were inseparable. The family was really broken up [about what had happened].

CORDELL: And the president had just had his press conference. MCAULIFFE: He [Trump] had just had his, and he failed. I was irate at [what Trump said at] his press conference. What do you mean “good people [on both sides]?” So I went out. I had no notes. I knew what I wanted to say. I called them out. I said, “Neo-Nazis and white supremacists—you’re not wanted in this commonwealth. Get the hell out of our state. In fact, while you’re at it, get out of America.” I said, “We don’t tolerate it.” I gave about an eight-minute speech from my heart. I had no notes. I said, “You paraded around like you were a bunch of patriots. You’re a bunch of cowards. You’re a disgrace to our country.” And [I] talked about the unification, talked about my call with the president. I called the president out at that press conference in front of a thousand cameras. I had to do what I thought was right. I didn’t want people thinking, first of all, that this is who we were as Virginians. I didn’t want people around the world thinking this is who we are as Americans. We don’t act like this. We don’t talk like this. OCTOBER/NOVERMBER 2019

L ast Word How to Raise WITH ESTHER WOJCICKI

Photo by James Meinerth

Successful People You need to do something that is meaningful to you. If it’s not meaningful to the person that’s doing it, it’s usually meaningful to someone else. That is not the same thing.

lot of people ask me, “So what do I think success is?” I think a common standard of success is that you earn a lot of money or you have a really long title and that seems very important. My definition of success is not either one of those two. I think that you need enough money to have a place to live, food to put on the table, trips that you want to take. But being a billionaire doesn’t qualify as success in my book. Unless for some reason you then have a purpose—that you are going to use your billions to somehow make a difference in the world. If I look around at a lot of the billionaires that I know, I think that they’re working on figuring out what they want to do in order to make a difference in the world. I mean, some of them—I’m speaking of Bill Gates, for example; he has more of an idea [of how he wants to help the world]. Maybe it’s because he’s been doing it longer. He wants to get rid of [malaria]. He believes in donating all his money with the exception of 1 percent to some way to improve the world. And he’s very passionate about it, and he’s got a lot of people surrounding him that are working on the same mission. So I would say that he represents somebody who I think is pretty successful, because he has the resources to do what he wants. But you don’t have to have a billion dollars. You know, there’s a lot of people, a lot of kids, students, that are doing a lot of very successful things. They have a passion in life. They have enough resources to live a pretty comfortable situation as a student or maybe 20-,

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25-, 30-year-old, and they’re working on something that they care about, and they have a sense of control. So I think that they believe in themselves; they trust themselves; and they are not checking left and right to see what the neighbor thinks or what the relatives think or what their parents think. They’re actually doing something where they feel in control and supported in working on a project that they care about. So that is part of my definition of success. [The word] meaningful is this sense of purpose that you personally have. As opposed to . . . something that you are doing because you think other people will respect you more for it. That is not meaningful to you personally. It’s important to do something that you care about. So, for example, those 17 UN sustainable goals; maybe you have something in the world that you personally want to do—and it doesn’t have to even relate to the UN goals. You know, a lot of the products and companies that we have today, those young people, entrepreneurs, they were out there to somehow make the world a better place. And the byproduct is they were very successful. So that was meaningful to them. I think that you need to do something that is meaningful to you. So one of the things that I wanted to mention is that if it’s not meaningful to the person that’s doing it, it’s usually meaningful to the parent or to the grandparents or to someone else. [I] just want you to know that is not the same thing. —Esther Wojcicki, “How to Raise Successful People,” July 10, 2019

SAND DUNES, CANYONS & WILDFLOWERS

March 15 - 20, 2020

Itinerary Sunday, March 15

Arrive in Las Vegas

Arrive in Las Vegas independently, and gather at 5:00 p.m. at the DoubleTree hotel for a welcome drink, introductions, and a trip orientation on the park by your study leader. Dinner will follow near the hotel. DoubleTree Hotel (D)

Monday, March 16

Shoreline Butte, Badwater & Harmony Borax Works

Transfer to Death Valley National Park. En route stop at Ashford Mill for the chance to see wildflowers in bloom and to witness evidence of the shoreline of the historic Lake Manly. At its zenith 22,000 years ago, the lake was over 80 miles long and over 600 feet deep, but given the changing climate, it disappeared thousands of years ago. Stretch your legs at Badwater; at 282 feet below sea level, this salt flat is the lowest place in North America and the eighth lowest place on Earth! The dramatic depth is enhanced by the backdrop of the Panamint Range rising over 11,000 feet. After lunch at Furnace Creek, stop by the visitor center before touring Harmony Borax Works and learning about the mining history of “the white gold of Death Valley.” Enjoy a welcome dinner at the Furnace Creek Inn. Furnace Creek Resort (B,L,D)

Tuesday, March 17

Dante’s View, Salt Creek & Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes

Experience Dante’s View, located at 5,475 feet, and take in a stunning panorama of all 11,049 feet of Telescope Peak. Learn about the creation of the park’s many alluvial fans, the product of millions of years of sporadic yet constant erosion. Later visit Salt Creek and learn about the amazing pupfish, endemic to Death Valley and uniquely adapted to survive in the desert’s harsh environment. End the day’s activities with the chance to walk among the picturesque sand dunes. After dinner enjoy the chance of some stargazing and see firsthand why Death Valley is an officially recognized “Gold Tier” Dark Sky Park. (B,L,D)

Wednesday, March 18

Titus Canyon & Ubehebe Crater

Explore the Titus Canyon narrows and hike among the stratifications of rock marking millions of years of geological history. The opening of the canyon affords the best chance to see a chuckwalla in its natural habitat. These sizable lizards have evolved to inflate their bodies to wedge themselves in the cracks in the rock they live in to deter

predators. Marvel at Ubehebe Crater, site of a massive volcanic explosion leaving a pit in the earth over 500 feet deep and a half-mile across. If you feel up to it, enjoy a 2-mile hike around the rim of the crater. (B,L)

Thursday, March 19

Zabriskie Point, Golden Canyon & Artist’s Palette

Wake just before dawn and transfer to Zabriskie Point to watch as the sunlight slowly illuminates the surrounding mountains. After breakfast, hike through the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon toward the Red Cathedral with the option to continue for a longer hike through Gower Gulch. After lunch, relax at the hotel. This evening enjoy the sunset at Artist’s Palette before our farewell dinner. (B,D)

Friday, March 20

Ash Meadows & Las Vegas

After breakfast in the park, we head to Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. We stop at the visitor center to learn of the plight of the pupfish and explore the Crystal Spring boardwalk. After lunch, return to Las Vegas for fights home. Please book your return flights for 6:00 pm or later. (B,L)

What to Expect

Trip Details

Average temperatures during this time range from 53-80°. Our transportation around the park is by vans. Travelers should be in active good health to participate in this trip. Though walks are not too strenuous, they are over uneven terrain and may require the use of hands and feet to climb over obstructions. Our longest hike is about 2 miles, with approximately 500 feet in elevation gain. Almost all walks are “out and back” so participants can go as far as they like, and then wait for the group to return. For those who would like more active hiking, we can help arrange that during your free time.

Dates: March 15 - 20, 2020

The Furnace Creek Ranch

We are staying in deluxe rooms at the Furnace Creek Ranch. If you would like to upgrade to the Furnace Creek Inn, the supplemental charges are: $620 per person, double occupancy and $1,030 single occupancy, added to single rate above

The Furnace Creek Resort is situated in a lush oasis surrounded by the vast and arid desert of Death Valley National Park, California. The resort has two properties – the Ranch and the Inn. We have reserved deluxe rooms at the Ranch, which has been welcoming guests since 1933. The property has a gift shop, saloon, a springfed swimming pool, tennis courts, a children’s playground, and the National Park Service Visitor’s Center is just a stone’s throw away. One mile away is the 4-diamond Furnace Creek Inn. Upgrades to the Inn are available.

Tour Leader & Guide, Drew Schlachter Drew Schlachter has more than 20 years of guiding experience and has been fortunate to lead a variety of trips across much of America, from Alaska to the Desert Southwest, the Pacific States to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. He has been leading groups to Death Valley for more than 10 years and been personally visiting the Park for many years before that. Drew has engaged in a variety of interesting professional experiences, including leading trail crews for the National Forest Service, film location scout, regional manager for tutoring programs on the Navajo Reservation, and a leader for student travel programs. He has also been an instructor for recreational therapy, wilderness therapy, challenge courses, and numerous other educational programs. Drew graduated from Northern Arizona University with a Recreation Management degree, and lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, outdoor sports, reading and photography. He looks forward to showcasing the amazing locations that you will visit in Death Valley.

Group Size: Minimum 8, maximum 20 (not including staff)

Cost: $3,495 per person, double occupancy; $4,195 per person, single occupancy.

Included: 1 night at the Double-

Tree, Las Vegas; 4 nights at the Furnace Creek Ranch; daily breakfast (5) at the hotel, 4 lunches and 4 dinners; welcome and farewell dinners with beer and wine; round-trip transfers from Las Vegas Airport to Death Valley National Park; tours, entrances, and events as specified in the itinerary; mini-bus transportation for all excursions; gratuities for guides, drivers, hotel and restaurant staff; joining us all week will be expert guide Drew Schlachter; services of a professional Tour Manager; Club host to assist you throughout the program (with a minimum of 15 travelers); the camaraderie of the Club’s travelers.

Not Included: Air transporta-

tion to and from Las Vegas, Nevada; meals and beverages other than those specified as included; optional excursions and other activities done independently; trip cancellation/interruption and baggage insurance; personal items such as e-mail, telephone and fax calls, souvenirs, laundry and gratuities for non-group services.

(415) 597-6720 travel@commonwealthclub.org commonwealthclub.org/travel

Phone: (415) 597-6720 Fax: (415) 597-6729

Reservation Form March 15 - 20, 2020 NAME 1 NAME 2 ADDRESS CITY/STATE/ZIP HOME PHONE CELL PHONE E-MAIL ADDRESS SINGLE TRAVELERS ONLY: If this is a reservation for one person, please indicate: OR

I wish to have single accommodations OR

I plan to share accommodations with I’d like to know about possible roommates. I am a smoker / nonsmoker (circle one).

PAYMENT: Here is my deposit of $

($500 per person) for

place(s).

Please upgrade me/us to the Furnace Creek Inn.

Enclosed is my check (make payable to Black Sheep Adventures, Inc.) OR

Charge my deposit to my

Visa

MasterCard

AMEX

Discover

CARD # EXP. DATE SECURITY CODE AUTHORIZED CARDHOLDER SIGNATURE DATE

I/We have read and agree to the terms and conditions for this program

SIGNATURE We require membership to The Commonwealth Club to travel with us. Please check one of the following options:

I am a current member of The Commonwealth Club.

Please renew my membership with the credit card information provided here.

I will visit commonwealthclub.org/membership to sign up for a membership.

PLEASE RETURN THIS FORM ALONG WITH YOUR DEPOSIT TO: Commonwealth Club Travel, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 You may also fax the form to 415.597.6729

Terms & Conditions ELIGIBILITY: We require membership to the Commonwealth Club to travel with us. People who live outside of the Bay Area may purchase a national membership. To learn about membership types and to purchase a membership, visit commonwealthclub.org/membership or call (415) 597-6720.

We recommend trip-cancellation insurance; applications will be sent to you. Tour can also be canceled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor Black Sheep Adventures accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour.

DEPOSIT & PAYMENTS: To make a reservation, a deposit of $500 per person is required by check or credit card. Please mail your check (payable to “Black Sheep Adventures, Inc”) or charge instructions, with your completed reservation form to the address on the reservation form. You may also fax in your reservation form or call our office or call (415) 597-6720. Final payment is due no later than December 3, 2018.

MEDICAL INFORMATION: Participation in this program requires that you be in good health. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure.

CANCELLATIONS AND REFUNDS: Your deposit and payments are refundable, less the following cancel fees: • 91+ days prior to trip start date, $200 per person • 61-90 days prior to trip start, $500 deposit • 0-60 days prior to trip start, No refund

RESPONSIBILITY: The Commonwealth Club of California and our ground operators and suppliers act only as agents for the travelers with respect to transportation and arrangements, and exercise every care possible in doing so. However, we can assume no liability for injury, damage, loss, accident, delay or irregularity in connection with the service of any automobile, motorcoach, or any other conveyance used in carrying out this program or for the acts or defaults of any company or person engaged in

conveying the passenger or in carrying out the arrangements of the program. We cannot accept any responsibility for losses or additional expenses due to delay or changes in air or other services, sickness, weather, strike, war, quarantine, force majeure or other causes beyond our control. All such losses or expenses will have to be borne by the passenger as tour rates provide arrangements only for the time stated. We reserve the right to make such alterations to this published itinerary as may be deemed necessary. The right is reserved to cancel any program prior to departure in which case the entire payment will be refunded without further obligation on our part. No refund will be made for an unused portion of any tour unless arrangements are made in sufficient time to avoid penalties. The Commonwealth Club of California accepts no liability for any carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket in connection with the tour. CST: 2096889-40

CLUB PROGRAMMING SPOTLIGHTS Climate One

Climate One offers a forum for candid discussion among climate scientists, policymakers, activists and concerned citizens. By gathering inspiring, credible and compelling information, it provides an essential resource to changemakers looking to make a difference. Climate One has brought together game-changing speakers, from Dan Akerson, chairman and CEO of General Motors, to Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robert Fraley and Center for Food Safety Executive Director Andrew Kimbrell. Climate One is about building bridges and finding common ground.

Inforum An Innovation Lab at The Commonwealth Club

The Inforum division of The Commonwealth Club produces Bay Area events where attendees meet thought leaders in entertainment, tech, food, design, pop culture and politics, and where the audience is often just as inspiring as the thought leaders. Inforum produces individually curated events designed to provide attendees with cutting-edge content and a hands-on educational experience. Its programs include headline interviews, monthly happy hours, public forums, debate discussion groups and post-program socials.

Marin Conversations

Marin Conversations pairs fascinating people for discussions about important topics. In 2019, the Marin Conversation Series is being supported by a major new grant from the Marin Community Foundation (MCF). The support from MCF, along with existing support from Relevant Wealth Advisors and other funders, is enabling the Commonwealth Club to increase the reach, impact and diversity of its Marin programs throughout the year.

Member-Led Forums

Member-led Forums (MLFs) are a volunteer-driven division of Commonwealth Club programming. These diverse and timely programs cover a wide range of topics on an ongoing basis throughout the year. They range from large events to intimate discussions with speakers, from art shows and restaurant visits to book discussion groups. MLFs are volunteer-run, organized by Club members who coordinate programs within specific areas of interest.

Michelle Meow Show at The Commonwealth Club

In 2018, The Commonwealth Club and Michelle Meow teamed up to expand and broaden the Club’s programming of interest to LGBTQ audiences. Each Thursday at noon, Michelle records her “Michelle Meow Show” radio program at the Club, co-hosted by John Zipperer, the Club’s host of its Week to Week Politics Roundtable programs. Join us in-person for upcoming “Michelle Meow Show”s and meet some of the most interesting, intriguing and often controversial people in the LGBTQ community.

Sillicon Valley

Join us for our great programs taking place in the South Bay. Featuring a wide variety of topics, we bring you headliners and fascinating speakers who explore the issues and personalities that are of interest to Silicon Valley—and the nation.

Week to Week Political Roundtable

Since 2012, the Club’s Week to Week Political Roundtable program has brought together audiences and political reporters and academics for a lively, intelligent, and fun discussion of recent political news. Panelists with a range of views discuss local, state and national political events and people, explaining the background and impact of the day’s news. Before each program, enjoy a social hour for some relaxing conversation with others who share your interest in politics.

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6:30 pm Candace Bushnell: Is There Still Sex in the City?

6 pmp.m. 5:15 Reading Blinding Flash of the Obvious Californians Book 6:30 p.m. Ben Discussion: Fruit of Franklin the Drunken Circles Tree FM 6:30 p.m. Changemakers: Movement Leaders on Civil Rights in an Uncivil Time FM 7:45 p.m. The Future of America’s Political

6 pm The Cultures of the Bay Area’s Indigenous Peoples 6:30 pm New Yorker Cartoonist Liana Finck

6 pm Commonwealth Club Travel: Taking Our Mission on the Road 6:30 pm Socrates Café 6:30 pm The Immigrant Experience, with Aarti Shahani

noon End of Life Options for People Developing Dementia noon Richard Stengel: The Battle Against Disinformation 6:30 pm Wait, Wait ... It’s Peter Sagal and Doug Berman

noon 10 a.m. Capitalism Chinatown Walking Tour What Reconsidered: 6:30 p.m. Can Business SallieDo to Krawcheck: Lead the Change The Power of Women, 6 pm Protecting WorkSalmon and Wallet Wild Runs 7 p.m. Gopi Kallayil: of the Pacific Rim Brain, Body and Consciousness

6 pm 250th Anniversary of the Spanish Discovery of San Francisco Bay 6:30 pm Susan Rice: Politics, Diplomacy and Things Worth Fighting For

2 pm Nob Hill Walking Tour 6 pm Leading Ladies of the Renaissance 6:30 pm Charles Schwab: The Secrets to Success 6:30 pm Every Outfit on ‘Sex and the City’

noon A Working Mom’s Guide to Making a Comeback 5 pm Middle East Forum Discussion 6 pm A Comprehensive Road Map to Heart Health 6:30 pm Domestic Violence & Gun Laws

San Francisco

East/North Bay

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 5:15 pm Longevity Explorers: Exploring the Future of Aging 6:30 pm Chase Jarvis: A Guide to Creativity 7:30 pm Tiffany Shlain: The Power of Unplugged

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6 pm Normalizing High Quality Health Care: Looking Back, Moving Forward 6:30 pm Lauren Duca: How to Start a Revolution

6:30 pm Eve Rodsky: Playing Fair at Home

noon Roll Red Roll: Changing the “Boys Will Be Boys” Culture 2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6 pm Michelle Malkin: Inside the Immigration Crisis

6 pm New Deal to Green New Deal 6:30 pm Humanities Wet Book Discussion: The Old Gringo 6:30 pm Humanity at the End of Life 6:30 pm John Browne: Engineering the Future

Silicon Valley

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 6:30 pm Imperfect Circles 6:30 pm Stephen Kinzer: Mind Control and the CIA

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE noon NSA’s Jonathan Darby 2 pm Waterfront Walking Tour 6 pm Proof! How the World Became Geometrical 6:30 pm Cleo Wade

noon Tools for Finding & Defeating HIV 6 pm Secret Behind High Drug Costs 6 pm Common Space Forum 7 pm Shoshana Berger and BJ Miller 7:30 pm Mark Bitterman

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE noon Judith Finlahyson: The Secrets of Genetics 6 pm International Career Opportunities

11:30 am Bret Baier 6:30 pm Breaking Protocol with Diplomats Bob Satawake and James “Wally” Brewster

FM Free for members

6:30 pm Daily Show Co-Creator Lizz Winstead

noon Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan: Monetary Policy and The Economy

6:30 pm Deepak Chopra: Metahuman and Unleashing Your Power

noon Envisioning Peace: The United Religions Initiative noon James Poniewozik

FE Free for everyone

Sunday 1 pm California, Russia and the Future: A Special Event

Saturday 1 pm Up Top: Blue Angels Viewing Party and Fundraiser

MO Members-only

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6 pm The Common Wealth of Ideas 6:30 pm Home is Where the Housing is: Our Region’s Leaders Discuss the Housing Challenge

5 pm Middle East Forum Discussion FM noon Diversity 2.0: A Modern Guide to Intesectionality and Allyship at Work 6:30 pm Socrates Café 6 pm City College of San Fracisco

6:30 pm Scott Adams

6 pm The Expat Experience 6:30 pm Ian Haney López

noon National Review Editor Rich Lowry 6 pm America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation 7 pm Jerry Rice

7 pm Lindy West: The Witches Are Coming

6:30 pm California Wildefires: Community and Water Supply Protection

commonwealthclub.org/events

6:30 pm Humanities Wet Book Discussion: The Wind that Swept Mexico

noon The 2020 Presidential Election: What LGBTQI Voters Should Know 2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6:30 pm James Gordon

2 pm San Francisco Architecture Tour 6:30 pm Imperfect Circles

6:30 pm Transgender Day of Remembrance

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 2 pm North Beach Walking Tour 6:30 pm Susannah Cahalan 6:30 pm Malcolm Nance 6 pm Common Space Forum

noon The Year That Was: 1978 and Making of Contemporary San Francisco

Sunday 2 pm Violence Against Chinese Elders

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

The Commonwealth Club organizes more than 450 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs are held throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are typically one hour long and frequently include panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session. Many evening programs include a networking reception with wine. PROGRAM DIVISIONS

CLIMATE ONE

INFORUM

MEMBER-LED FORUMS

Discussion among climate scientists, policymakers, activists, and citizens about energy, the economy, and the environment.

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

Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields. Most evening programs include a wine networking reception.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/CLIMATE-ONE

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/INFORUM

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MLF

RADIO, VIDEO, & PODCASTS Watch Club programs on the California Channel every Saturday at 9 p.m., and on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club programs air on Marin TV’s Education Channel (Comcast Channel 30, U-Verse Channel 99) and on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at fora.tv and youtube.com/commonwealthclub

Hear Club programs on more than 200 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States. For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast. In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

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

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

TuneIn.com Fridays at 4 p.m.

KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m. Subscribe to our free podcast service on iTunes and Google Play to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcast-subscribe

TICKETS Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all events—including “Members Free” events— require tickets. 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.

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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.

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1 CANDACE BUSHNELL: IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

Candace Bushnell, Author, Sex and the City and Is There Still Sex in the City? (Forthcoming) Lauren Schiller, Host, “Inflection Point”— Moderator

The landscape of sex, love and romance in New York City has undergone dramatic changes in the 20 years since Candace Bushnell published the iconic Sex and the City, which broke down major barriers in cultural representations of single women and reshaped the landscape of pop culture. Now the trailblazing Bushnell is back to ask the vital question: Is there still sex in the city for women 50+? Her newest book follows a whole new cohort of female friends as they face the modern-day sex arena as middle-aged women, including younger partners, dating apps, divorce, children and the pressure to maintain a youthful appearance. SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program (followed by book signing) • Notes: In partnership with the Bay Area Book Festival’s Women Lit Speaker Series; photo by Patrick McMullan

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

We’re giving members and nonmembers free behind-the-scenes tours of our home at 110 The Embarcadero. Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

LONGEVITY EXPLORERS: EXPLORING THE FUTURE OF AGING

Richard Caro, Ph.D., CEO, Tangible Future

Richard Caro will describe the Longevity Explorers’ most recent explorations. The explorers are a unique sharing, evaluation and ideation community made up of older adults (in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s) and their friends, families and caregivers. The presentation will include promising products the explorers have tried, ideas the explorers have been discussing related to improving the quality of life for older adults and some ideas for products we wish someone would develop. The Longevity Explorers program is an initiative enabled by Tech-enhanced Life. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Grownups • Program organizer: John Milford

CHASE JARVIS: A GUIDE TO CREATIVITY

Chase Jarvis, Founder and CEO, CreativeLive; Photographer; Author, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life; Twitter @chasejarvis Jason Calacanis, Investor; Entrepreneur—Moderator

such as Apple and Nike, Jarvis is the host of ”The Chase Jarvis Live Show,” where he interviews the world’s top creative entrepreneurs and thought leaders, and is the co-founder of CreativeLive, an online learning community. Jarvis urges his audience to establish a creative practice using his IDEA system (Imagine your dream, design a daily exercise, execute your ambitions and amplify your impact). He says embracing creativity and implementing creative habits into our everyday lives could change the way we live and deliver vitality to all we do. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Club, 609 Sutter St., Crystal Ballroom, 11th floor, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

TIFFANY SHLAIN: THE POWER OF UNPLUGGING

Tiffany Shlain, Founder, Let it Ripple Film Studio; Founder, Webby Awards; Author, 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

Technology has made our lives infinitely easier. We can manage our lives, our jobs, our hobbies, our entertainment and even our relationships from the palm of our hands. But is it all too much, particularly for families with kids? And how can we exert some control over the technology and devices that increasingly dominate our lives? Internet pioneer and Silicon Valley creative force Tiffany Shlain has some answers. Shlain explores how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body and soul. She and her family call it “technology Shabbat.”

MARIN • Location: Outdoor Art Club, One West Blithedale, Mill Valley • Time: 7 p.m. check-in and complimentary light hors d’oeuvres, 7:30–9 p.m. program

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 10/3/19

Speaker TBA In a world where creativity is fi- Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Minally being rewarded, award-win- chelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)  ning photographer and visionary John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political entrepreneur Chase Jarvis argues Roundtable—Co-Host

Meet fascinating and often controversial that unleashing your creativity is the first step to rediscovering your per- people discussing important issues of interest sonal power in life. Known for his to the LGBTQ community, and have your collaborations with major brands questions ready. See this week’s speaker details

Chase Jarvis: A Guide to Creativity 10/2 (photo via creative live)

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Capitalism Reconsidered: What Business Can Do to Lead the Change 10/8

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6 CALIFORNIA, RUSSIA AND THE FUTURE: A SPECIAL EVENT

Join a discussion on how our shared history and the unique legacy of Fort Ross State Historic Park can be a platform for Russian-American cooperation and exchange.

at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

on original interviews, survivors’ testimonies and documentary research, Kinzer brings to light this massive hunt for the secret of mind control that spanned several countries, included the work of Nazi scientists, and lead to experimentation on government employees IMPERFECT CIRCLES (willing and unwilling), foreign politicians, George Hammond, Author, Conversations children, prisoners, sex workers and anyone with Socrates and Rational Idealism—Modelse the poisoner in chief deemed threatening erator or expendable. Do you never tire of talking or thinking SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarabout philosophical, scientific or religious cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San theories? Are you interested in psychological Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. insights, or attempts at such insights, into program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Part human life? Many insist that being realistic of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bermeans you should ignore such fundamental nard Osher Foundation questions—starting around the time the ink THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 dries on your diploma. But it is unrealistic to ignore the fundamental explanatory concepts VAGICAL POWER, WITH ‘DAILY underlying each successful human civilization; SHOW’ CO-CREATOR these concepts sometimes help and sometimes LIZZ WINSTEAD  hinder us in our pursuit of happiness. Such Lizz Winstead, Political Satirist; Co-Creator profound questions are naturally provoked and Former Head Writer, “The Daily Show”; simply by living an alert life. Rejoin the con- Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Abortion Access Front; Author, Lizz Free or Die tinuing conversation of human civilization. SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

STEPHEN KINZER: MIND CONTROL AND THE CIA

Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio & TV)—Co-Host John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable—Co-Host

“Lizz Winstead is a sharp-witted truth-teller”—that was Ms. magazine’s take on political satirist Lizz Winstead. From creating groundbreaking media to leading a reproductive rights organization, Winstead has succeeded in changing the media landscape, as well as fearlessly tackling serious political issues. Join us for a conversation with this sharp-witted truth-teller about politics, women’s rights, reproductive rights—and probably a bit of satire to put a smile on your face.

Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University; Author, Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control Robert Rosenthal, Board Member and Executive Producer, The Center for Investigative Reporting—Moderator SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PRO-

Stephen Kinzer tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA’s secret medical experiments of the 1950s and ’60s. Drawing

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

GRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

Panel 1—1–2:15 p.m. Anatoly Antonov, Ambassador of Russia to the United States Jerry Brown, Former Governor of California Matthew Rojansky, Director, Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.—Moderator Panel 2—2:30–3 p.m.: Russian America and the Native California Collection at the Kunstkamera Jerry and Kaylee Pinola, Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok Tribes Ksenia Vozdigan, Leading Coordinator, Exhibition Department, The Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint-Petersburg, Russia Additional Panelists TBA Panel 3—3–3:30 p.m.: Next Generation Connections: Working Together Vladislav Chernavskikh, Graduate Student, Nonproliferation Studies Program of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations Margo Poda, MBA/MA Student, International Policy and Development Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Additional Panelists TBA

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: noon check-in, 1–3:30 p.m. program • Notes: In partnership with the Fort Ross Conservancy and the Kennan Institute; attendees subject to search

MONDAY, OCTOBER 7 READING CALIFORNIANS BOOK DISCUSSION: FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE

Silver medalist of this year’s California Book Awards, Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, is a novel about life in crime-ridden, violent Bogota, Colombia, and was inspired by the author’s own life. It’s told through the eyes of the two teenage female protagonists. Author Rojas Contreras will enhance the discussion, joining us to give her input on writing the book. Our discussion should prove lively and rewarding. Join us! SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar-

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

cadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Reading Californians • Program organizer: Kalena Gregory

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8 CAPITALISM RECONSIDERED: WHAT BUSINESS CAN DO TO LEAD THE CHANGE

Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus, Young & Rubicam; Philanthropist; Author, Capitalists, Arise! In Conversation with Bobbi Silten, Managing Director, Shared Value Initiative; Former EVP of Talent and Sustainability, Gap Inc. Introductions by Joe Epstein, Member and Past Chair, The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

Peter Georgescu arrived in this country as a penniless Romanian refugee and rose to prominence as the CEO of Young & Rubicam. It’s an American dream success story that could not play out in today’s economic environment—which is plagued with disappearing jobs, flat wages and a shrinking middle class. Georgescu says the stark reality of our current economic malaise and social breakdown can be attributed, in large part, to the short-term thinking spawned by shareholder primacy. With sobering statistics and new research, Georgescu points the way toward a future that will only be possible with enlightened capitalism.

ern Rim. Their annual migrations support hundreds of species, including bears, eagles and whales, as well as dozens of indigenous groups and local fishing-based economies that provide one of the last healthy sources of wild protein for humankind. Wild salmon runs are declining on both sides of the Pacific Rim, triggering multibillion-dollar restoration efforts. Guido Rahr will describe the salmon’s fate and the campaign to save critical stronghold rivers, from Japan to the wilds of the Russian Far East, from Alaska and British Columbia to the U.S. Pacific Northwest, including the battle to stop a massive open-pit gold and copper mine proposed in the headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay—home to the greatest wild salmon runs left on Earth. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Environment & Natural Resources • Program organizer: Ann Clark

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9

Vice President, Atlas Research

In this Ninth Annual Lundberg Institute Lecture, Kenneth Kizer will provide an overview of the state of health-care quality in the United States after taking a historical look at improvement strategies over the past 4,000 years. He will especially focus on the forces and strategies driving health-care quality improvement in the past 20 years following several landmark events in the late 1990s. Despite these efforts, receiving high-quality health care remains illusory for many Americans. Kizer, the co-chair of the National Quality Task Force, will then discuss the likely strategies to normalize high-quality health care over the next 10 years. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

LAUREN DUCA: HOW TO START A REVOLUTION

Lauren Duca, Journalist; Author, How to Start a Revolution: Young People and the Future of Join us for a complimentary tour of our American Politics (Forthcoming) beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s Mina Kim, Anchor and Host of “Forum,” waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering KQED—Moderator

WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

Award-winning journalist Lauren Duca is an unmistakable voice in the middle of a chaotic post-Trump political arena, famously penning the viral Teen Vogue op-ed “Donald Trump is SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The EmbarGaslighting America” just after Trump’s eleccadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San tion. Since the piece’s publication, she’s risen Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarprogram, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Business cadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 as a fresh voice in the millennial consciousness, often unafraid to challenge anyone who crosses & Leadership • Program organizer: Elizabeth p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour her path . . . or her Twitter feed. Carney Today she argues that Trump’s election NORMALIZING HIGH-QUALITY sparked a political awakening in young people PROTECTING WILD SALMON RUNS HEALTH CARE: LOOKING BACK, that does not seem to be waning anytime soon, OF THE PACIFIC RIM MOVING FORWARD and that it’s up to them to fix our ailing politGuido Rahr, President, Wild Salmon Center Kenneth Kizer, M.D., MPH, Chief Healthcare Salmon is the keystone species of the North- Transformation Officer and Senior Executive ical system. Join Duca at INFORUM, where she will discuss her sharp and funny guide to changing the world and empowering society towards real equality. space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member.

SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. checkin, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 10/10/19

Speaker TBA Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)  John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Protecting Wild Salmon Runs of the Pacific Rim 10/8

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Roundtable—Co-Host

p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: The

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s tour operates rain or shine; limited to 20 parlong-running radio show at The Common- ticipants; tickets must be purchased in advance wealth Club. Meet fascinating and often con- and will not be sold at check-in; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (you will troversial people discussing important issues of receive notification of this at least three days in interest to the LGBTQ community, and have advance) your questions ready. See this week’s speaker details at commonPROOF! HOW THE WORLD wealthclub.org/mms.  SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

WATERFRONT WALKING TOUR

Join Rick Evans and explore the historic sites of the waterfront neighborhood that surround Commonwealth Club headquarters. Hear the dynamic stories of the entrepreneurs, controversial artists and labor organizers who created this recently revitalized neighborhood. This tour will give you a lively overview of the historic significance of this neighborhood and a close look at the ongoing development. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45

BECAME GEOMETRICAL

Amir Alexander, Associate Adjunct Professor of History, UC Los Angeles; Author, Proof! How the World Became Geometrical Edward Frenkel, Professor of Mathematics, UC Berkeley, Author; Love and Math—Moderator

Amir Alexander argues that Euclidean geometry has been uniquely responsible for how modern societies are structured. Geometry has shaped how our cities are built and has even been used as a rationale to explain political structures, because the proofs in Euclid’s Elements are not just true but are provable by reason alone. Alexander tracks the rediscovery of Euclidean geometry in 15th century Italy and recounts the French royals’ centuries-long love affair with geometrical gardening. One night in 1661, Nicolas Fouquet, a superintendent under Louis XIV, was even arrested for the peculiar crime of having dared construct a grand geometrical garden for himself. In doing so, he had violated an irrefutable hierarchy: that geometry, in its perfection, was a testament to the divine right of kings. Come hear Alexander explain the monumental story of how geometry was carved into our world, the beliefs geometry supported and how geometry continues to shape our lives to this day. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

Author, Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for Living a Better Life; Author, Where to Begin: A Small Book About Your Power to Create Big Change in Our Crazy World (Forthcoming)

With more than half a million Instagram followers who thrive off of her words of warmth and affirmation, poet Cleo Wade uses her influence to empower and motivate. Wade’s work is a trademark mix of positivity, truth, justice and love, and she has risen as a cultural fixture in several spheres, including social activism, art, the literary world and online. Wade’s newest publication is a book of poetry that encourages us to find hope in the overwhelming feeling that comes with the influx of information we experience daily in modern life, and reminds us that we all hold the power to enact change. SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. checkin, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation; Wade photo by Rony Alwin

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11 DALLAS FEDERAL RESERVE PRESIDENT ROBERT KAPLAN: MONETARY POLICY AND THE ECONOMY

Robert Kaplan, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; Former Professor of Management Practice and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School In Conversation with Evelyn Dilsaver, Chair, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; Former Executive Vice President, Charles Schwab; Former President and CEO, Charles Schwab Investment Management

Robert Kaplan has served as the 30th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas since 2015. He also represents the 11th Federal Reserve District on the Federal Open Market Committee in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy. Come for a rare conversation with a representative of the Federal Reserve about international and national economies and U.S. monetary policy. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11 a.m. check-in, noon program • Program organizer: Attendees subject to search

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12

CLEO WADE: WHERE TO UP TOP: BLUE ANGELS VIEWING BEGIN PARTY AND FUNDRAISER Cleo Wade, Poet; Activist;

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Every fall, the world-famous Blue Angels

Cleo Wade: Where to Begin 10/10

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

soar through the San Francisco skyline, captivating crowds. For the second year, you are invited to enjoy the remarkable display from the perfect vantage point up top—on The Commonwealth Club’s rooftop terrace! Join us for a truly remarkable Saturday event at the Club, with live music, savory and sweet bites, signature cocktails, and, of course, the spectacle in the sky. Take to the sky yourself in our virtual reality experience, where you can fly a Blue Angels’ plane through the cityscape of San Francisco. You’ll also have the chance to hear from two aviation experts! SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Kaiser Permanente Rooftop Terrace, San Francisco • Time: 1 p.m. check-in, 1–4 p.m. program • Notes: Contact Kate Steffy (ksteffy@ commonwealthclub.org) for any questions regarding this event; entertainment provided by the Convertibles

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 THE CULTURES OF THE BAY AREA’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

New Yorker has earned her devoted followers, who look to her columns and cartoons as a refreshing depiction of collective experiences in today’s world. She is also a social media sensation, with almost 300,000 followers who visit her Instagram page daily for their dose of comedically dark insights on love, dating, self-esteem, mental health and much more. Finck’s new book is a collection of her most beloved work, and it combines the personal with the relatable to explore common anxieties, no matter the reader. SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program (followed by book signing)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 250 ANNIVERSARY OF THE SPANISH DISCOVERY OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY

to colonize Alta California. The historical ramifications of these plans have had an impact down to the present day. For the native people, who had successfully managed the California environment for thousands of years, the event marked the beginning of the end of their way of life. This discovery took place on Sweeney Ridge, which stretches between today’s Pacifica and San Bruno. As a result, San Mateo County will celebrate the 250th anniversary of this pivotal moment in western history with the creation of a historical and recreational trail tracing the path of Portola on the San Francisco Peninsula. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

SUSAN RICE: POLITICS, DIPLOMACY AND THINGS WORTH FIGHTING FOR

Mitchell Postel, Local Historian; President, Susan Rice, Former U.S. National Security Adviser; Former U.S. Ambassador to the UnitSan Mateo County Historical Association Richard Schwartz, Bay Area Historian and Gaspar de Portolá’s discovery of San Fran- ed Nations; Author, Tough Love: My Story of Author cisco Bay on November 4, 1769, was Spain’s the Things Worth Fighting For Monday Night Philosophy remembers the In Conversation with Dan Pfeiffer, Co-Host, most significant discovery in North America “Pod Save America”   complexities of Columbus Day by investigat-

during the 18th century. It prompted a new ing the various cultures of the Bay Area’s indigstrategy on how it would use its mission system enous peoples. Richard Schwartz has searched for, found and recorded hundreds of Native American sites in the Bay Area. The difficult and complex interactions among the different indigenous cultures living in the Bay Area multiplied dramatically with the arrival of the Spanish and was further complicated when the Gold Rush brought people from all over the world to their home territory. What survives and what has been lost? Schwartz details this complexity, enhancing our appreciation of the human inhabitation of our small piece of paradise over the millennia. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

NEW YORKER CARTOONIST LIANA FINCK

Liana Finck, Cartoonist; Contributor, The New Yorker; Author, Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self (Forthcoming) Roman Muradov, Artist; Author; Designer; Professor, California College of the Arts— Moderator

Liana Finck’s insightful and delightfully odd work as a cartoonist and illustrator with The Susan Rice 10/15

Susan Rice, President Obama’s former national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is heralded as one of the most influential foreign policy voices of our time. With humor and grace, Rice reflects upon the pivotal moments of her career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy. She covers the well-known 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, as well as the untold stories involving a secret channel to Iran and behind-the-scene confrontations with Russia and China. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Grownups • Notes: Attendees subject to search; Rice photo by Christopher Patey; this program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16 EVE RODSKY: PLAYING FAIR AT HOME

Eve Rodsky, Author, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) (Forthcoming) Lauren Schiller, Host, “Inflection Point”— Moderator

There are more women earning college degrees and participating in the workforce than ever before. Yet women spend far more time OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

on unpaid labor than men. Eve Rodsky, author of the new book Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), seeks to address this universal imbalance. Rodsky began her journey to address this inequality after reaching a tipping point in her own marriage. After recording all of the unrecognized work she was doing for her busy household, she realized the disparity between her and her partner was striking. She offers four simple and practical steps to redistribute invisible work, reignite your relationship and reclaim your own time. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17

topics that range from automation’s effects on the job market to climate change. Before the event, members elect a single news topic to focus on. When a topic is chosen, the moderators will send out relevant materials, including podcasts, news articles, short videos and an easy-to-read fact sheet with the bare necessities. The goal is to have an informal but informative discussion where anyone can speak and all will listen. Bring your curiosity, your ideas and the desire to talk about anything but the daily travails of pop entertainers. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6–7:45 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: To be added to the mailing list, you can subscribe on our website at: commonspaceforum.com/contact

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18

Is it possible to venture beyond our everyday lives and experience heightened states of awareness? Deepak Chopra, a world-renowned advocate for alternative medicine and personal transformation, answers yes. Chopra believes that higher consciousness is available here and now. Chopra will explain his secrets to moving beyond our physical limitations and accessing peak experiences that revolutionize our lives. Once you wake up, Chopra writes, life becomes transformed, and through pure consciousness—which is the field of all possibilities—your infinite potential becomes your personal reality. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21

COMMONWEALTH CLUB TRAVEL: TAKING OUR MISSION ON THE Deepak Chopra, Founder, The Chopra FounMary Powell, J.D., LL.M, Director, Trucker Huss; dation; Co-Founder, The Chopra Center for ROAD THE SECRET BEHIND HIGH DRUG COSTS

DEEPAK CHOPRA

Former Associate, Cooley Goddard LLP Additional Speakers TBA

Wellbeing; Author, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential; Twitter @DeepakPrescription drug costs keep escalating with Chopra no cap in sight. Is it the drug companies that Cheryl Jennings, Emmy Award-Winning are marking up the prices, or is something else Journalist—Moderator

driving these high costs? The increase has been astronomical and affects patients’ ability to pay for drugs and take them as prescribed. This creates a dangerous situation for the patient. Come learn about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), an industry secret that explains why drug prices are both confusing and expensive. Find out how PBMs control the amount paid for prescription drugs, why discounts don’t get to the patient and what actions we can take to reduce prescription drug costs. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Judy Chan

COMMON SPACE FORUM

Charles DeLoach, Miri Miller, Tobias Snyder and James Xiao, CoHosts

This program is for all curious members of society who are eager for civil peer-to-peer discussion but are concerned with the lack of such conversation in our busy everyday lives. Every third Thursday of the month, the Common Space Forum offers an open debate for you and your peers to talk through

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

This program is sold out.

Have you been curious about Club trips and want to know more? Join us for a presentation and discussion with past travelers and staff about the unique opportunities for learning, dialogue, friendship and adventure on our trips. What is different about Club trips, and what does it mean to travel with a group of Club members? We’ll answer these and other frequently asked questions. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program

SOCRATES CAFÉ

One Monday evening of every month the Humanities Forum sponsors Socrates Café at The Commonwealth Club. Each meeting is devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic is asked to briefly explain why that topic is interesting and important. An open discussion follows, and the meeting ends with a summary of the various perspectives participants expressed. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

Depak Chopra 10/18

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org Commonwealth Club Travel: Taking Our Mission on the Road 10/21 cadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

MICHELLE MALKIN: INSIDE THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS

Michelle Malkin, Contributor, Fox News; Founder, Twitchy; Author, Open Borders, Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction?

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 NOB HILL WALKING TOUR

Explore one of San Francisco’s 44 hills, and one of its original “Seven Hills.” Because of great views and its central position, Nob Hill became an exclusive enclave of the rich and famous on the West Coast who built large mansions in the neighborhood. This included prominent tycoons, such as Leland Stanford, and other members of the Big Four. Highlights include the history of four landmark hotels: The Fairmont, Mark Hopkins, Stanford Court and Huntington Hotel. Visit the city’s largest house of worship, Grace Cathedral, and discover architectural tidbits and anecdotes about the railroad barons and silver kings.

cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

CHARLES SCHWAB: THE SECRETS TO SUCCESS

Michelle Malkin’s new book, Open Borders, Inc., is her exposé about what happens at America’s borders. Beginning with a thorough reexamination of the southern border’s history of immigration to its current state of crisis, Malkin argues that powerful special interest groups are working behind the scenes to keep America’s borders open for an influx of cheap labor in order to enrich the nation’s elite and create new generations of Democratic voters. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Attendees sub-

Charles Schwab, Founder, Former CEO and ject to search Chairman, the Charles Schwab Corporation; Author, Invested: Changing Forever the Way THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 Americans Invest TOOLS FOR FINDING AND In Conversation with Adam Lashinsky, ExecDEFEATING HIV utive Editor, Fortune Jonathan Volk, M.D., Physician & Hospital EpCharles Schwab is one of the world’s most idemiologist, Internal Medicine & Infectious influential financial executives, with, as of Diseases, Kaiser Permanente San Francisco 2019, nearly $3.6 trillion worth of assets man- Additional Speakers TBA aged by the eponymous Charles Schwab and Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Co. He founded the brokerage firm in 1971 Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)—Co-Host  SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Caffe Cento (meet with a $100,000 loan and has since grown it John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political in front), 801 Powell St. • Time: 1:45 p.m. check- into a financial services juggernaut. Roundtable—Co-Host  in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Tour operates rain or shine; limited to 20 participants; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be sold at check-in; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (you will be notified at least three days in advance)

LEADING LADIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

Carla Gambescia, Author, La Dolce Vita University: An Unconventional Guide to Italian Culture from A to Z

Discover the lives and legacies of Italy’s Renaissance women as well as several unheralded Italian women who inspired Botticelli, Raphael and Michelangelo and some of the greatest art of all time. Carla Gambescia will revitalize your amore with Italy and its remarkable art treasures and cultural gifts. Learn about Artemisia Gentileschi and Isabella d’Este, whose lives and accomplishments can still inspire us today, and gain new perspectives on some of the Renaissance’s most beloved paintings. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar-

In Schwab’s memoir, he lays out his passion Join us for a discussion with experts about to change the way we invest and the hard work, PrEP and a new tool designed to identify who ingenuity and entrepreneurship that propelled might be more at risk of HIV infection. his vision into one of the leading financial ser- SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max vice firms in the world. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: Part of our Ethics & Accountability series, underwritten by the Travers Family Foundation, with additional support from the Bernard Osher Foundation for our Good Lit programs

Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30

a.m. check-in, noon program

INTERNATIONAL CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Gabriel Risk Martins, Education Committee Chair, UN Association Dione Rivera, Assistant Director of Career WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23 Development, UC Berkeley WEEKLY CLUB TOUR Sarah Jo Neubauer, Senior Customer SucJoin us for a complimentary tour of our cess Manager, LinkedIn—Moderator

beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar-

As events, social media and media coverage bring the world closer together, professionals at all career levels (public sector, nonprofit and for-profit) are interested in international career opportunities to make the world a better place. Come to this event to learn more. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San FranOCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Richard Stengel: The Battle Against Disinformation 10/28

cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: International Relations • Program organizer: Ian McCuaig

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 ENVISIONING PEACE: THE UNITED RELIGIONS INITIATIVE

The Rev. Victor H. Kazanjian Jr., Executive Director, United Religions Initiative (URI) Michael Pappas, Executive Director, San Francisco Interfaith Council Rita Semel, First Global Chair URI The Rt. Rev. William E. Swing (Ret.), Founder and President, United Religions Initiative

We will discuss the United Religions Initiative (URI), which was begun by Bishop William Swing in 1993 after he was invited to hold a large interfaith service to mark the UN’s 50th anniversary. The URI envisions a world at peace, sustained by a global grassroots interfaith network that cultivates peace and justice.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel • Notes: In association with the S.F. Interfaith Council

JAMES PONIEWOZIK: DONALD TRUMP’S 24-HOUR TELEVISION SHOW

courted fame, achieved a mind meld with the media beast, and rode it to ultimate power. Come hear Poniewozik discuss his view that the age of Trump is a 24-hour TV production and that we live in an era where politics has become pop culture and vice versa. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing

MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 END OF LIFE OPTIONS FOR PEOPLE DEVELOPING DEMENTIA

Mike M. Turbow, M.D., Retired Physician Specializing in Medical Oncology; Former Hospice Medical Director; Adjunct Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine; Volunteer, Compassion and Choices

Having dementia is the greatest fear shared by most people as they age. One needs to plan for the time when you may no longer have a clear mind and the ability to make decisions about your own medical care. The advance directive (AD) in its usual format is insufficient if you suffer from dementia. In this case, a dementia provision should be added to your AD to describe what kind of medical care you’d like. Various options and strategies will be discussed to help you develop a plan should you develop dementia.

Former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs; Former Editor, Time; Author, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

During the final three years of the Obama administration Richard Stengel was on the front lines of a new global information war. He was the one person in the U.S. government tasked with unpacking, disproving and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump rode to victory, in part because of how disinformation was weaponized on social media domestically and internationally. According to Stengel, the battle against weaponized disinformation has only gotten worse since, and democracies such as the United States are proving not to be very good at fighting it. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Stengel photo by Mary Pfaff-Stengel

WAIT, WAIT . . . IT’S PETER SAGAL AND DOUG BERMAN

Peter Sagal, Host, NPR’s “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!” Doug Berman, Producer, “Wait Wait ... Don’t James Poniewozik, Chief Television Critic, SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar- Tell Me!” The New York Times; Author, Audience of cadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco In Conversation with Mark Zitter, Member, One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Frac- • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • Commonwealth Club Board of Governors MLF: Health & Medicine, Grownups • Program turing of America; Twitter @poniewozik The comedy news quiz “Wait Wait . . . Don’t

James Poniewozik says that television has organizer: Bill Grant not only entertained us, but, with the election of Donald Trump, it has conquered America. RICHARD STENGEL: THE BATTLE Against that background, he offers a portrait AGAINST DISINFORMATION of Trump as the chameleonic celebrity who Richard Stengel, Political Analyst, MSNBC;

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Tell Me!” is the most popular show on public radio. But it wasn’t always that way. The program didn’t take off until Doug Berman (who also produced the NPR hit “Car Talk”) took a chance on a playwright named Peter Sagal to

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

serve as host. Ever since, the show has drawn enthusiastic audiences both on radio and in person, at its Chicago home and on the road. The program covers current news and is consistently both informative and entertaining. What’s the secret to the show’s success? SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29 MIDDLE EAST FORUM DISCUSSION

The Middle East Forum Discussion group, which primarily covers the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan, discusses political and cultural subjects in a civil atmosphere with respect for others and their opinions. Those interested in contributing to our conversation and learning more about the regions we cover are encouraged to attend. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 4:30 p.m. check-in, 5 p.m. program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLFs: Health & Medicine, Grownups • Program organizer: Patty James

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 NEW DEAL TO GREEN NEW DEAL

Richard Walker, Professor Emeritus of Geography, UC Berkeley

The Green New Deal has raised hopes for a major push to address climate change and social injustice. Is it just pie in the sky? Not at all, according to its supporters. The original New Deal of the 1930s brought a revolution in conservation and public health, worker rights and wages, income and regional equality, and public investment for the common good—all during the worst depression in history. Richard Walker says a Green New Deal is possible, because we have done it before. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND GUN LAWS

Hammond

to ensure a better future.

Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries claims both men in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict. Discussion led by Lynn Harris.

HUMANITIES WEST BOOK Katie Albright, CEO, Safe & Sound Robyn Thomas, Executive Director, Giffords DISCUSSION: THE OLD GRINGO Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence Join us to discuss one of Carlos Fuentes’ Additional Panelists TBA greatest works. The Old Gringo tells the story of

ated 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primary debates, and covered international relations and local news. Baier’s experience as former chief White House and national security correspondent brought him to the Pentagon, reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. Three Days at the Brink is a memoir of the Tehran Conference. It chronicles Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin’s meetings to end the war through critical decisions, such the infamous D-Day invasion. This epic centers on the importance of FDR and contains analysis of rare, declassified government documents. Join us as we welcome Baier for a discussion on political reporting, longtime war correspondence, and critical decisions made by the democratic leaders of history. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 10:30 a.m. check-in, 11:30 a.m. program, 12:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

BREAKING PROTOCOL WITH DIPLOMATS BOB SATAWAKE AND JAMES “WALLY” BREWSTER

Bob Satawake, Author, Breaking Protocol: Forging a Path Beyond Diplomacy; Senior Adviser to the Ambassador, U.S. Embassy Santo Domingo; Twitter @bsatawake Join Katie Albright, Robyn Thomas, and Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier James “Wally” Brewster, Former U.S. Ambasour panel of experts as we have a conversation and journalist, and of his last mysterious days sador to the Dominican Republic; CEO, Insigabout domestic violence, gun laws and what in Mexico living among Pancho Villa’s soldiers, nias Global; Twitter @wallybrewster political and local solutions we must fight for including his encounter with General Tomas Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The MiSAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: This program is generously supported by Blue Shield of California Foundation

A COMPREHENSIVE ROAD MAP TO HEART HEALTH

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Executive Office, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: In association with Humanities

Akil Palanisamy, M.D., Physician, the Institute for Health and Healing West’s program on Mexico’s artistic revolution

Harvard-trained physician Akil Palanisamy will describe the outlines of a comprehensive road map to heart health, sharing research on the optimal heart-healthy diet, cutting-edge nutritional science, key vitamins and supplements, and the evidence-based practices and techniques of integrative medicine. He will share tips on what to eat to maintain lifelong cardiovascular well-being and vitality, and he will have detailed information about implementing these concepts in our daily lives.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31 FOX NEWS ANCHOR BRET BAIER

Bret Baier, Chief Political Anchor, Fox News Channel; Anchor and Executive Editor, “Special Report with Bret Baier”; Author, Three Days at the Brink: FDR’s Daring Gamble to Win World War II; Twitter @BretBaier

Bret Baier is no stranger to Washington, D.C. He reported on the Sept. 11 attacks, co-anchored 2010 election coverage, moderBret Baier 10/31

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2019

The Year That Was: 1978 and the Making of Contemporary San Francisco 11/1

chelle Meow Show”—Co-Host (1988–1991) John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Corey Busch, Former Press Secretary to Mayor George Moscone (1976–1978); Senior ExecRoundtable—Co-Host In 2013, Bob Satawake accompanied his utive, San Francisco Giants (1979–1992) husband, Ambassador James “Wally” Brewster, Louise Renne, Member, San Francisco Board to the Dominican Republic for what would be of Supervisors (1978–1986); San Francisco a historic and controversial tour of duty rep- City Attorney (1986–2001) Alvin Orloff, Songwriter, Jennifer and the resenting the United States in the island naBlowdryers; Author, Disasterama! Adventures tion. As the first gay diplomatic spouse in the in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997

western hemisphere, Satawake received little if any guidance from the U.S. State Department on navigating his new role. As a result, he had little choice but to break the sometimes rigid protocols of diplomatic life. Come hear Satawake and Brewster talk about their experience making a new path as openly gay diplomats in a conservative and religious country, overcoming obstacles with kindness and sensitivity. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 THE YEAR THAT WAS: 1978 AND THE MAKING OF CONTEMPORARY SAN FRANCISCO

Lincoln Mitchell, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University; Author, San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third Place Baseball Team Art Agnos, Member, California State Assembly (1977–1987); Mayor of San Francisco

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

San Francisco is a city of contradictions. It is one of the most socially liberal cities in America, but it also has some of the nation’s worst income inequality. It is a playground for tech millionaires, with an outrageously high cost of living, yet it also supports vibrant alternative and avant-garde scenes. So how did the city get this way? Lincoln Mitchell traces the roots back to 1978, when three key events occurred: the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk occurring fewer than two weeks after the massacre of Peoples Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana; the explosion of the city’s punk rock scene; and a breakthrough season for the San Francisco Giants. Through these three strands, Mitchell explores the rifts between the city’s pro-business and progressive-Left politicians, the emergence of Dianne Feinstein as a political powerhouse, the increasing prominence of the LGBT community, punk’s reinvigoration of local radical cultural politics, and how the Giants helped unify one of the nation’s most ethnically and culturally diverse cities.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 VIOLENCE AGAINST CHINESE ELDERS

See website for speakers Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)—Host

Join our panelists for an in-depth look at violent attacks on Chinese elders in our community. Full info at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 1:30 p.m. check-in, 2 p.m. program

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4 HOME IS WHERE THE HOUSING IS: OUR REGION’S LEADERS DISCUSS THE HOUSING CHALLENGE

See website for panelists

A July poll found that 85 percent of Bay Area voters believe California has a housing crisis on its hands, and 81 percent support building more housing for low-income people. But digging the state and region out of this predicament, one that was decades in the making, is going to require collaboration on an unprecedented scale. Who is working on

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

the challenge? What ideas are being proposed? What comes next? Come hear from leaders in the community, philanthropy, public and private sectors to hear how they plan to work together to address the housing crisis and ensure that we can all go home again. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program

THE COMMON WEALTH OF IDEAS

tition, discussion and dispute. Could that set the stage for sorting out long-standing but still competing cultural assumptions about justice, virtue, the meaning of life, and the purposes of community, nation and civilization building? Hammond’s predictions about where trends in how we pursue happiness are headed will probably surprise you. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer:

George Hammond, Author, Conversations George Hammond with Socrates and Rational Idealism

Monday Night Philosophy celebrates its 10th anniversary by making predictions about the future of our common wealth: the ideas and assumptions that underlie all human cultures. The Commonwealth Club is dedicated to finding truth and turning it loose in the world. But what is truth? Whatever it is, that ancient question remains provocative. To come closer to an answer, George Hammond distinguishes between those ideas that describe inherent patterns in life and those cultural ideals that are basically a group consensus on how to live life. Our 21st century cultures are rapidly increasing in cultural communication, compe-

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5

THE EXPAT EXPERIENCE

Denise Schickel, Psychologist

What happens when you go abroad to live and work in another culture, surrounded by the strange sounds of a different language, food, music and customs? What does it take to achieve a successful expatriate experience? Come and learn about the diverse experiences of 14 Americans who worked and lived in various countries—from England to Vietnam, Belarus to India. Learn about their challenges and how they finally adjusted and thrived in their foreign environments. Schickel presents

the results of her recent qualitative research, conducted years after she herself experienced the expat life during her two years in the U.S. Peace Corps in Morocco, which inspired her continuing interest in these issues and led to her recently successfully defended dissertation. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ

Ian Haney López, Earl Warren Professor of Public Law, UC Berkeley; Author, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America

Today more than ever, warnings to fear immigrants and people of color bombard us incessantly. Ian Haney López has spent the last two years collaborating with a team of union activists, racial justice leaders, communications specialists and pollsters. Based on conversations and interviews with people all over the country, the team discovered that a large majority of the population (people of color included) fall into “the persuadable middle”—they hold both progressive and racist views and can be

UP TOP

Blue Angels Viewing Party Join us for a truly remarkable special Saturday event on the Club’s private rooftop terrace, with live music, savory and sweet bites, signature cocktails, and of course, the spectacle in the sky. As the extravaganza occurs right above us, two aviation experts will help us understand the planes and stunts. Take to the sky yourself in our virtual reality experience, where you can virtually fly a Blue Angels plane through the cityscape of San Francisco.

Saturday, October 12th from 1–4 pm 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco 94105 For tickets call Billy Bean at (415) 597-6738 or visit our website

America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation 11/12

shifted in one direction or another based on different stories about America. López distills the results of cutting-edge new research: naming racism as a weapon of the rich and calling for cross-racial solidarity builds unity across the base and enlists the broad middle in supporting progressive dreams.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTURE WALKING TOUR

Explore the Financial District with historian Rick Evans, and learn the history and stories behind some of our city’s remarkable structures, streets and public squares. Hear about the famous architects who influenced the building of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Discover hard-to-find rooftop gardens, art deco lobbies, unique open spaces and historic landmarks. SF • Location: Galleria Park Hotel, 191 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: The tour involves walking up and down stairs but covers less than one mile

of walking in the Financial District; the tour operates rain or shine; limited to 20 participants; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be sold at check-in; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (you will receive notification of this at least three days in advance)

IMPERFECT CIRCLES

George Hammond, Author, Conversations with Socrates and Rational Idealism—Moderator

Are you a person who never tires of talking or thinking about philosophical, scientific or religious theories? Are you interested in psychological insights, or attempts at such insights, into human life? There are many who would insist that being realistic about human life means you should ignore such fundamental questions—starting around the time the ink dries on your diploma. But it is unrealistic to ignore the fundamental explanatory concepts which underlie each successful human civilization; these concepts sometimes help and sometimes hinder us in our pursuit of happiness. Such profound questions are naturally provoked simply by living an alert life. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. pro-

gram • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 AMERICA’S JOURNEY FROM SLAVERY TO SEGREGATION

Steve Luxenberg, Associate Editor, The Washington Post; Author, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation

Steve Luxenberg presents the myth-shattering story of how our nation embraced separation and the devastating consequences of that decision. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with “separate but equal,” created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their nearly unanimous

Celebrate the Holidays

Join us on Wednesday, December 11th at 5:30 pm for our HOLIDAY SOCIAL before that evening’s Week to Week Political Roundtable.

commonwealthclub.org/memberparty

Give the gift of conversation with a GIFT of MEMBERSHIP to the Club.

commonwealthclub.org/gom

RENT OUT THE CLUB for your holiday events, birthdays, weddings and other special events. Contact Lisa Moschetti at

lmoschetti@commonwealthclub.org 44 THE COMMO N WE AL TH

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org Jerry Rice 11/12

decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is at the center of one of the most dramatic stories of the 19th century, and its cultural reverberations are still felt today.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

in 1910 with the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Díaz. The Wind That Swept Mexico, originally published in 1943, was the first book to present a broad account of that revolution in its several different phases. In concise but moving words and in memorable photographs, this classic sweeps the reader along from the false peace and plenty of the Díaz era through the doomed administration of Madero, the chaotic years of Villa and Zapata, Carranza and Obregón, to the peaceful social revolution of Cárdenas and Mexico’s entry into World War II. Discussion led by Lynn Harris.

gions we cover are encouraged to attend.

Humanities West’s program on Mexico’s artistic

To promote women in the workplace, we need to understand how to advance and support working women of all kinds: women of all races, women with disabilities, immigrant women, women of various religions, women of all ages and generations, working moms, queer/trans women, and women who are first, only or different in any way. You are invited to join a vibrant panel discussion featuring experts and intersectional feminists from various angles of the diversity and inclusion world. There will be plenty of time for audience questions. You should attend if you want to get a sense of the first critical things about being a supporter to several key areas of diversity so you can be a better ally to groups that you’re not in and so that you can strengthen your feminism and your women/ workplace efforts with an understanding of all women.

revolution.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14 TRANSGENDER DAY OF REMEMBRANCE: THE CONTINUING CRISIS

the majority of them African-American transgender women. So far in 2019, Human Rights Campaign reports that 18 transgender people have been killed. Join us for a special program six days before the 2019 Transgender Day of Remembrance. Our panel of speakers will feature transgender leaders who will discuss the ongoing violence and murders of black trans women. SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: TBA • Time: 5:30 p.m. checkin and reception, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes:

SILICON VALLEY • Location: Villa Ragusa, 35 S. 2nd St., Campbell • Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program • Notes: Rice photo by Daymion

See website for details.

Mardel

MIDDLE EAST FORUM DISCUSSION

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13

Menczel

DIVERSITY 2.0: A MODERN GUIDE TO INTERSECTIONALITY AND ALLYSHIP AT WORK

Anastasia Bacigalupo, Director, Inclusivision Emily Meghan Morrow Howe, President, American Association of Corporate Gender Strategy SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar- Steven Huang, Head of Diversity and Inclucadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco sion, Culture Amp • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Marco Lindsey, Diversity and Inclusion • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: Champion and Ally; Chief of Staff, Haas George Hammond • Notes: In association with School of Business, UC Berkeley

Panelists TBA Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The MiJERRY RICE: AMERICA’S GAME—THE chelle Meow Show” (Radio & TV)—Co-Host John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & EdNFL AT 100 itorial, The Commonwealth Club; Host, Week Jerry Rice, Retired NFL Wide Receiver; Co-Auto Week Political Roundtable—Co-Host thor, America’s Game: The NFL at 100 In 2018, at least 26 transgender people were In Conversation with Raj Mathai, Anchor, NBC victims of fatal violence in the United States, Bay Area; Twitter @rajmathai

Football legend Jerry Rice is regarded as one of the best wide receivers to ever play in the NFL. He is a three-time Super Bowl champion and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and College Football Hall of Fame. Rice celebrates some of the most memorable moments in NFL history and reflects on his own love of the game. He offers a comprehensive look at the players and coaches who helped define and transform football to the cultural phenomenon it is today.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 4:30 p.m. check-in, 5 p.m. program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18

The Middle East Forum Discussion group, which primarily covers the Middle East, North HUMANITIES WEST BOOK Africa and Afghanistan, has been meeting for DISCUSSION: THE WIND THAT over 10 years. We do not debate; we discuss SWEPT MEXICO political and cultural subjects in a civil atmoJoin us to discuss The Wind That Swept Mex- sphere with respect for others and their opinico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of ions. Those interested in contributing to our 1910–1942. The Mexican Revolution began conversation and learning more about the re-

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Executive Womxn • Program organizer: Emily Meghan Morrow Howe

SOCRATES CAFÉ

Socrates Café is devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic is asked to briefly explain why she or he considers that topic interesting and important. An open discussion follows. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8 p.m. program • OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO: ENGINEERING, ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Peggy Lopipero-Langmo, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, City College of San Francisco Keith Mueller, Department Chair of Engineering, City College of San Francisco John Rizzo, Member, Board of Trustees, City College of San Francisco Ann Clark, Ph.D., Chair of the Environment and Natural Resources Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California

Join us for an exploration of the depth of talent, expertise, learning, knowledge and experiences at City College in making important improvements to combat global environmental issues. Environmental flexibility and plans for the college’s adjacent 17 acres that were leased to City College by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission for many decades will help the college and area communities learn, address and implement important knowledge and advancements to enhance solar, wind, charging stations and sustainable learning opportunities now and in the future.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Environment & Natural Resources • Program organizer: Ann Clark

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 LINDY WEST: THE WITCHES ARE COMING

Lindy West, Contributing Opinion Writer, The New York Times; Author, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and The Witches Are Coming (Forthcoming)

In the age of #MeToo, where women are empowered to tell their truth rather than worry about the consequences of speaking out, best-selling author Lindy West has emerged as a role model. She first came to prominence as a young blogger with a no-holds-barred approach to topics like feminism, racism, sexism and fat shaming. Now, she flips the language of #MeToo critics on its head. West calls for a witch hunt to examine the chasm between who we are and who we think we are. She pulls no punches calling out misogyny in the media and the exclusionary nature of U.S. politics for women and minorities. She argues that the only way out is through the uncomfortable reality of today’s polarized politics and through the pressure to stay silent on issues that matter.   SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: WHAT LGBTQI VOTERS SHOULD KNOW

Annise Parker, President & CEO, Victory Fund and Victory Institute; Former Mayor, Houston Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW/KPIX TV)—Co-Moderator John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable—Co-Moderator

In recent years, LGBT candidates have made major strides in getting elected to office across the country. At the same time, protections have been weakened against discrimination in health-care coverage, employment, military service, and access to public and private ser-

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

vices. Hate crimes have risen. Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker— the first openly LGBT mayor of a major American city—will review the results of the recent November 2019 election and look ahead to the 2020 presidential election to highlight the issues of importance to LGBTQI Americans. SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

JAMES GORDON

James Gordon, M.D., Founder and Director, The Center for Mind–Body Medicine; Author, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma

Acclaimed mind–body medicine pioneer James Godron presents his evidence-based program to reverse the psychological and biological damage caused by trauma. Offering inspirational stories, eye-opening research and innovative prescriptive support, Gordon makes accessible for the first time the methods that he—with the help of his faculty of 160 plus 6,000 trained clinicians, educators and community leaders—has developed and used to relieve the suffering of hundreds of thousands of adults and children around the world.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Gordon photo by Rebecca Hale

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 11/21/19

Speaker TBA Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)  John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable—Co-Host

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s long-running radio show at The Common-

The 2020 Presidential Election: What LGBTQI Voters Should Know 11/20

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org James Gordon 11/20

wealth Club. Meet fascinating and often controversial people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready. See this week’s speaker details at commonwealthclub.org/mms.  SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

NORTH BEACH WALKING TOUR

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

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Victoria Pastry Cafe, 700 Filbert St., San Francisco (at Columbus Ave., across from Washington Square Park) • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Take Muni bus 30, 41 or 45; use North Beach Parking Garage on 735 Vallejo St.; tour operates rain or shine; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be sold at checkin; photo by Flickr user Clemson; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (you will be notified at least three days in advance)

SUSANNAH CAHALAN

Susannah Cahalan, Author, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness and The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness In Conversation with Judge LaDoris Cordell (Ret.)

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness. How do you diagnose it, treat it or even know what it is? In the 1970s, Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other people—sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society—went undercover in asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry’s labels. Forced to remain inside until they’d “proven” themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling stories of their treatment. Rosenhan’s watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever. But, as Cahalan’s explosive new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors, and what does it mean for our understanding of mental illness today? SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San

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

MALCOLM NANCE

Malcolm Nance, Counterterrorism Analyst, NBC News and MSNBC; Author, The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It

When former FBI Director Robert Mueller III was assigned to the special counsel investigation looking into the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, many Americans felt relieved. But when the report was delivered in April 2019, it was clear that the case was far from closed—and pinning down Donald Trump on conspiracy charges was going to be a lot more difficult than it had first seemed.   Renowned intelligence expert Malcolm Nance reveals exactly how Trump and his inner circle conspired, coordinated, communicated and eventually strategized to commit the greatest act of treachery in the history of the United States: compromising the presidential oath of office in exchange for power and personal enrichment. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Photo by Jason Schneider

COMMON SPACE FORUM

Charles DeLoach, Miri Miller, Tobias Snyder and James Xiao, Co-Hosts

This program is for all curious members of society who are eager for civil peer-to-peer discussion but are concerned with the lack of such conversation in our lives. The Com-

mon Space Forum offers an open debate for you and your peers to talk through topics that range from automation’s effects on the job market to climate change. Before the event, members elect a topic to focus on. When a topic is chosen, the moderators will send out relevant materials, including podcasts, news articles, short videos and an easy-to-read fact sheet with the bare necessities. The goal is to have an informal but informative discussion where anyone can speak and everyone will listen. Bring your curiosity, your ideas and the desire to talk about anything but the daily travails of pop entertainers. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6–7:45 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: To be added to the mailing list, you can subscribe on our website at: commonspaceforum.com/contact

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 SCOTT ADAMS

Scott Adams, Creator, “Dilbert”; Chief Strategy Officer, WhenHub; Author, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Running America; Twitter @ScottAdamsSays

What is loserthink? According to Scott Adams, creator of the ”Dilbert” comic and a lifelong student of group psychology, it is the epidemic of sneaky mental habits trapping its victims in their own bubbles of reality. Even the smartest and most educated among us can slip into its seductive grasp. If we’re not careful, loserthink would have us believe that every Trump supporter is a racist, addicts should be responsible for fixing the opioid epidemic, any gun control is a slippery slope to full confiscation and that your relationship OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

California Wildfires: Community and Water Supply Protection 11/25

fell apart simply because you chewed with cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San cadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisyour mouth open. Adams will explain how Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. pro- co • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon–2:30 p.m. to spot and avoid loserthink before it starts gram • MLF: Environment & Natural Resources program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Bill Grant to influence you—and will give you scripts • Program organizer: Ann Clark to respond when it’s being brandished against you, whether by well-intentioned friends, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 DON’T UNPLUG: HOW strangers on the Internet or political pundits. HUMANITY AT A CROSSROADS: NEW TECHNOLOGY SAVED MY LIFE SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES: COMMUNITY AND WATER SUPPLY PROTECTION

Jennifer Montgomery, Director, California’s Forest Management Task Force Kimery Wiltshire, President and CEO, Carpe Diem West Marguerite Young, Board President, East Bay Municipal Utility District

We have all inhaled a lot of wildfire smoke over the past few years in Northern California. Fueled by a rapidly warming climate, these catastrophic wildfires are burning down our communities, are hard on our physical and mental health, and can play havoc with our water supply. What are communities doing to protect their homes and their water supply? What are drinking water utilities and the state of California doing to address these terrible problems? During our program, we will discuss the actions a large Bay Area water utility is taking to protect the green and build infrastructure that delivers our water. We will hear from the state’s forest health lead on the focus of their work. Finally, we will present examples of steps other communities around the West are taking. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar-

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

INSIGHTS INTO TECHNOLOGY RISKS AND CAN SAVE YOURS TOO FOR HUMANS AND THE PLANET Chris Dancy, Keynote Speaker, Executive

Dolf Zantinge, Former Telecom Research and Development Director; Pioneering Health Researcher on Natural and Manmade Electromagnetic Fields Karl Maret, M.D., M.Eng., President, Dove Health Alliance; Researcher in Electromagnetic Fields and Energy Medicine Nicholas Kardaras, Ph.D., Former Clinical Professor, Stony Brook Medicine; Author, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance; Founder and CEO, Omega Recovery Camilla Rees, MBA, Senior Policy Adviser, National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy; Author, The Wireless Elephant in the Room; Founder, ElectromagneticHealth. org, Campaign for Radiation Free Schools and Manhattan Neighbors for Safer Telecommunications

Explore the biological and health effects of natural electromagnetic waves innate to the body and man-made electromagnetic waves from wireless technologies, including 4G/5G antenna densification. We will also address the mental health and relational impacts of tech overuse and addiction. New scientific understanding will be shared by a former telecom industry director of research and development about what is driving the biological effects—that relates to our body being mostly comprised of water. Join us for a provocative program about technology risks to humanity. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar-

Workshop Retreat Facilitator

In 2002, Chris Dancy was overweight, unemployed and addicted to technology. He chain-smoked cigarettes, popped pills, and was angry and depressed. But when he discovered that his mother kept a record of almost every detail of his childhood, an idea began to form. Could knowing the status of every aspect of his body and how his lifestyle affected his health help him learn to take better care of himself? Thus begins the story of “the most connected man on Earth.” Dancy will recount his story of rebirth and redemption, sharing how you can improve your life by paying attention to how we move, what we eat, who we spend time with and how it makes us feel. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Patty James

LATE-BREAKING PROGRAMS THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10 NSA’S JONATHAN DARBY: SPIES, SOLDIERS AND HACKERS— NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS TO THE UNITED STATES

Jonathan Darby, Director of Operations, the National Security Agency/Central Security

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

Service (NSA/CSS) rated Character Dr. Gloria Duffy, President and CEO, The Lauren Garroni, Writer; Digital Content Creator, @EveryOutfitOnSATC; Co-Author; We Commonwealth Club—Moderator SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar- Should All Be Mirandas: Life Lessons from cadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francis- Sex and the City’s Most Underrated Character co • Time: 11 a.m. check-in, noon program • Notes: Attendees subject to search

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 SHOSHANA BERGER AND BJ MILLER: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE END OF LIFE

Shoshana Berger, Editorial Director, IDEO; Co-Author, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death Bruce (BJ) Miller, Jr., M.D., Palliative Care Physician, UCSF; Co-Author, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death SILICON VALLEY • Location: Cubberley Theatre, 4000 Middlefield Road (near Montrose and Middlefield), Palo Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. checkin, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing

WHAT MAKES FOOD “GOOD?”— WITH MARK BITTMAN

Mark Bittman, Author; Editor in Chief, Heated

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 7 p.m. check-in, 7:30 p.m. program, 8:30 p.m. book signing • MLF: Business & Leadership, Food Matters • Program organizer: Elizabeth Carney • Notes: Part of our Good Lit Series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21 THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE, WITH AARTI SHAHANI

Aarti Shahani, Silicon Valley Correspondent, NPR Nellie Bowles, Tech and Culture Reporter, The New York Times—Moderator

SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation; in association with American India Foundation

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 EVERY OUTFIT ON ‘SEX AND THE CITY’

Chelsea Fairless, Creative Director; Digital Content Creator, @EveryOutfitOnSATC; Co-Author; We Should All Be Mirandas: Life Lessons from Sex and the City’s Most Under-

SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 FINDING HUMANITY AT END OF LIFE: A PROVOCATIVE EVENING WITH PASTOR COREY KENNARD AND DR. JESSICA ZITTER

Corey L. Kennard, Pastor, Amplify Christian Church Jessica Nutik Zitter, M.D., MPH, Critical and WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23 Palliative Care Specialist; Author, Extreme Measures ROLL RED ROLL: CHANGING THE In Conversation with the Rev. Cynthia Carter “BOYS WILL BE BOYS” CULTURE Nancy Schartzman, Documentary Film Direc- Perrilliat, MPA, Executive Director, Alameda tor, Producer, and Media Strategist, Roll Red County Care Alliance Roll, Anonymous Comes to Town, xoxosms; SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The EmbarTech Founder and Creator, Circle of 6 cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV); program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program Twitter @msmichellemeow organizer: Mark Zitter • Notes: Part of ReimagJohn Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political ine End of Life, a festival exploring big questions Roundtable, The Commonwealth Club—Coabout life and death through creativity and conHost

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m check-in, noon program

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 JUDITH FINLAYSON: THE SECRETS OF GENETICS

versation, taking place throughout the Bay Area, Oct. 24–Nov. 3

JOHN BROWNE: ENGINEERING THE FUTURE

Lord John Browne, Former CEO, British Petroleum; Author: Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilisation Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate One

Judith Finlayson, Author, You Are What Your Grandparents Ate: What You Need to Know SAN FRANCISCO • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • About Nutrition, Experience, Epigenetics, and Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Famthe Origins of Chronic Disease SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29 A WORKING MOM’S GUIDE TO MAKING A COMEBACK

Jennifer Gefsky, Co-Founder, Après; Co-Author, Your Turn: Careers, Kids and Comebacks—A Working Mother’s Guide; Labor and Employment Partner, Epstein Becker Green Stacey Delo, CEO, Après; Co-Author, Your Turn: Careers, Kids and Comebacks—A Working Mother’s Guide; Journalist Mags Baker, Founder, Rebel Mom Methodology; Lead Content Producer, Happy Millennial Mags—Moderator

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, S.F. • Time: 1:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Executive Womxn • Program organizer: Emily Meghan Morrow Howe

ily Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m.

check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. networking reception

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 NATIONAL REVIEW EDITOR RICH LOWRY

Rick Lowry, Editor, National Review; and Author, The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing

NEVER MISS A PROGRAM New programs are added to our schedule every week. Visit commonwealthclub.org/ events-calendar for new and updated events. Subscribe to our email newsletter at commonwealthclub.org for just-added programs, deals and discounts, and more. OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

INSIGHT How Bad Is DMV?

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy, President and CEO

he California Department of Motor Vehicles has been in the news for its long lines, IT issues and other problems. Steven Gordon, a former Cisco Systems executive, is the fourth DMV director Governor Newsom has appointed since February to fix the agency. Just how bad are the problems at DMV? Pretty bad, in my personal experience. My 95-year-old mom, Gloria Sr., lives with me. She uses a wheelchair, and we have a handicapped placard so we can park in disabled spaces to load and unload her from the car. We must use a disabled space, because the driver cannot drop my mom off in her wheelchair, then leave her to park in a more distant space; she must be accompanied at all times. The disabled placard is good for two years, and DMV supposedly automatically renews the placard just prior to its expiration, sending the new placard in the mail. There is nothing one can do to obtain the renewal except wait for it to arrive. My mom’s most recent placard expired at the end of June 2019 and should have been automatically renewed by DMV with a new placard expiring June 30, 2021. At the end of June, because I had not received the automatic renewal in the mail, I filed a DMV “application for replacement plates, stickers, documents” form stating that the placard had not been received. There was no response to the form and no placard arrived. In early July, I visited DMV in person, at the Mt. Shasta office in Siskiyou County. It takes two months to get an appointment at the DMV in the Bay Area, and I could not wait this long to obtain the disabled placard renewal. They told me their records indicated that the renewed placard had been sent to me in May, and it should arrive by the time we returned to our home in Santa Clara County on July 10th. They informed me that we should continue using my mom’s current placard because it is automatically renewed and it would show as valid if DMV records were checked. The updated placard still did not arrive in the mail. On August 27, I visited the DMV again, this time at the Yreka, California office. They informed me that their records showed the renewed placard had been issued that very day! Because that did not sound plausible, I filled out and submitted another copy of the DMV “application for replacement plates, stickers, documents,” stating that the placard had not been received, and I submitted the form there in person.

DMV again informed me that we should continue to use my mom’s current placard. On a visit to Ashland, Oregon on September 1, we received a $190 ticket for parking in a disabled space without a permit (actually, with a permit that was expired, since our disabled permit was hanging on the rear-view mirror.) On September 6, I spoke with the Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy California DMV on the phone. They informed me that the renewed placard had been issued three days previously, and I should be receiving it soon. At this point, they had told me that it had been issued in May, in August and in September. The DMV suggested that I visit the California State Automobile Association, where I am a member, and that they could issue the renewal and also a print-out of the record for the disabled permit, showing that it had been in force, so that this proof could be used to have tickets dismissed. I visited CSAA, who informed me that the DMV record they had showed “no action” on the permit “this year,” but they were not able to help or provide me with the record. On September 9, my mom’s caregiver and my mom parked in a handicapped space at a Trader Joe’s in San Jose. My mom’s handicapped placard was displayed on the rear-view mirror. We received a citation for “disabled space: PKG in or Blocking,” with an invalid placard, with a fine of $400. Finally, I had a caregiver and my mom go to DMV in Los Gatos on September 10, and they were able to obtain the handicapped placard renewal, from June 30, 2019 to June 30, 2021. DMV would not provide them with a print-out of the placard record to assist in fighting the tickets in Ashland and San Jose. After three months, three visits to DMV at far-flung locations with shorter lines, filing two forms, multiple phone-calls after being on hold for hours, two tickets totaling nearly $600, and multiple letters and online objections to the tickets, we finally have a valid handicapped placard for my mom, when it should have been automatically renewed in June. The problems that beset DMV range from not taking actions automatically when their policy calls for this, to providing misinformation, to not acting on forms that have been filed. Nothing short of a complete overhaul can fix DMV.

No t h i n g s h o r t o f a complete overhaul can fix California’s DMV.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Inland Sea of Japan ABOARD THE FIVE-STAR LE SOLÉAL MAY 19 - 30, 2020

Kyoto • Hiroshima • Miyajima • Matsue • Himeji • Osaka

Explore Japan and South Korea during a 7-night cruise aboard the luxurious 110-stateroom Le Soléal along the Inland Sea of Japan, plus three nights in Kyoto. Visit five UNESCO World Heritage sites. Explore Kyoto’s Nijō Castle; Hiroshima’s Memorial Peace Park; Miyajima’s inspiring Itsukushima Shrine; and the Buddhist wonders of Gyeongju, South Korea. Optional extensions to Tokyo and Osaka. from $6,195, per person, double occupancy Detailed brochure available at commonwealthclub.org/travel | 415.597.6720 | travel@commonwealthclub.org CST# 2096889-40

To purchase tickets:

The Commonwealth Club of California

visit commonwealthclub.org or call (415) 597-6705 or call (800) 847-7730

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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15

Details on page 37

MONDAY, OCTOBER 28

SUSAN RICE

PETER SAGAL & DOUG BERMAN

Susan Rice, Former U.S. National Security Adviser; Author, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For

Peter Sagal, Host, “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me”

Dan Pfeiffer, Co-Host, “Pod Save America”; Author, Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump—Moderator

Doug Berman, Producer, “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me”

The comedy news quiz “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” is the most popular show on public radio. Here’s a chance to laugh and go behind the scenes of this NPR phenomenon.

Susan Rice reflects upon the pivotal moments of her career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy. A dedicated public servant, Rice will look at some of her biggest triumphs and failures, while teaching some important life lessons for everyone who dreams of success and aspires to serve.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12

Details on page 45

JERRY RICE

Jerry Rice, Retired NFL Wide Receiver; Co-Author, America’s Game: The NFL at 100 Raj Mathai, Anchor, NBC Bay Area—Moderator

Football legend Jerry Rice is regarded as one of the best wide receivers ever to play in the NFL. He is a three-time Super Bowl champion and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame. Join us as Rice celebrates some of the most memorable moments in NFL history and reflects on his own love of the game. He’ll offer a comprehensive look at the players and coaches who helped define and transform football into the cultural phenomenon it is today.

Details on page 40

Come with your own questions to stump Sagal and Berman.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19

Details on page 46

LINDY WEST

Lindy West, Contributing Opinion Writer, The New York Times; Author, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and The Witches Are Coming

Award-winning writer Lindy West flips the language of #MeToo critics on its head. She calls for a witch hunt to examine the chasm between who we are and who we think we are. She pulls no punches calling out misogyny in the media and the exclusionary nature of American politics for women and minorities. By extolling the world-changing magic of truth, she says the only way out is through the uncomfortable reality of today’s polarized politics.