The Poems of Billy Collins -- Point Loma Writer’s Symposium By the Sea 2013 American poet Billy Collins reads a selection of humorous poems for appreciative audience in this keynote event of the 2013 Writer's Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University.
	The New Frontiers of Design with Paola Antonelli Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, delves into design's many directions and into its future. She takes us on a fascinating tour of design to ask some very serious questions.
	Luis Alberto Urrea - Dinner in the Library San Diego-raised novelist and UC San Diego alumnus, Luis Alberto Urrea '77 is the featured speaker at the UC San Diego Library annual gala. Urrea, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist, has written about the border and has knitted together stories in a way that makes them familiar and impactful for everyone. Recorded on 09/21/2018.
	An Evening with Nnedi Okorafor - Writer's Symposium by the Sea 2019 More recently known for her Black Panther and Wakanda Forever Marvel Comics, Nnedi Okorafor is an international award-winning novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi's work titled, "Weapons of Mass Creation," The New York Times called Nnedi's imagination "stunning." Game of Thrones author, George R.R. Martin and HBO are currently developing a show based on her World Fantasy Award Winning novel, Who Fears Death. Ta-Nehisi Coates has passed the torch on writing the Black Panther comics to Nnedi, and the women warriors from the mega-hit movie were such fan favorites that Marvel has tasked Nnedi to create a new spinoff comic, Wakanda Forever.
	Inventing Genocide The suite of international conventions and declarations about genocide, human rights, and refugees after the WWII is known as the "human rights revolution." It is regarded as humanizing international affairs by implementing the lessons of the Holocaust. In this presentation, Dirk Moses, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, questions this rosy picture by investigating how persecuted peoples have invoked the Holocaust and made analogies with Jews to gain recognition as genocide victims. Such attempts rarely succeed and have been roundly condemned as cheapening the Holocaust memory, but how and why does genocide recognition require groups to draw such comparisons? Does the human rights revolution and image of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic genocide humanize postwar international affairs as commonly supposed? Recorded on 04/10/2019.
	Computer-Mediated Communication and Hyperpersonal Interaction Communicating through the Internet is different than face-to-face interaction. No matter how familiar people are with email, chat, and the web, differences in the availability of nonverbal cues lead people to underestimate the interpersonal and emotional impact of online interaction. Joe Walther (UCSB Communication) explores the hyperpersonal model of communication and explains how people actually create more intense impressions and relationships as they influence each other online, often more positive than those occurring face-to-face. The results of studies from several online settings show how we and our communication partners sometimes unwittingly affect our perceptions of others and ourselves through computer-mediated interaction. Recorded on 07/11/2018.
	Enlightenment Now: The Future of Progress with Steven Pinker Join Peter Cowhey, Dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy for an in-depth conversation with Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist and Johnstone Family Professor Psychology at Harvard University. In his new book, Enlightenment Now, Pinker makes a powerful argument that by every measure, the conditions of human life have been improving steadily for the past 200 years. This improvement can be attributed not just to the spread of eighteenth-century principles of enlightenment, but also to the evolved properties of the modern human mind.
	Zucked with Roger McNamee - Helen Edison Noted tech venture capitalist Roger McNamee, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, woke up to the serious damage Facebook and other social media outlets are doing to our society and set out to try to stop it. McNamee is in conversation with Jeff Light, publisher and editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Recorded on 02/20/2019.
	Black Power Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s Undermining widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance, Marc Dollinger, Professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, describes a new political consensus, based on identity politics, that drew blacks and Jews together and altered the course of American liberalism. Dollinger's most recent book takes a new and different look at Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, showing how American Jews leveraged the Black Power movement to increase Jewish ethnic and religious identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Recorded on 01/14/2019.
	The Three Cantors The Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies at UCSB hosts a live musical performance by The Three Cantors: Cantor Mark Childs (Congregation B'nai B'rith, Santa Barbara) Cantor Marcus Feldman and Organist Aryell Cohen (Sinai Temple, Los Angeles) and Cantor Shmuel Barzilai (Chief Cantor of the Vienna Jewish Community). Recorded on 02/24/2019.
	Central Park Five with Anthony Davis Opera News has called UC San Diego Music Professor Anthony Davis A National Treasure, for his pioneering work in opera. His six operas include works centered on recent historical figures & events, including Malcolm X and Patty Hearst. Davis' latest opera The Central Park Five, an exploration of the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color in NYC in the 1980s, premiered at Long Beach Opera in 2019 to international acclaim. In this conversation with UC San Diego Music Professor Emeritus Cecil Lytle, Davis explains the genesis of The Central Park Five, and the challenges that ensue when art collides with current events. Recorded on 12/7/2019.
	An Evening with Alice Walker - Writer's Symposium by the Sea 2020 An internationally celebrated American novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist, Walker's work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. She wrote The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker's collected work includes poetry, novels, short fiction, essays, critical essays, and children's stories. She was the recipient of a Rosenthal Foundation award and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award for In Love and Trouble.
	Deep Soul: Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles and the Making of the Modern World Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles transformed both US and World History. These seminal liberation struggles include the important yet relatively unknown series of early twentieth-century southern African American streetcar boycotts as well as the iconic Civil Rights-Black Power Insurgency (1935-75). First, Waldo Martin examines why and how these foundational freedom struggles proved essential to the making of the modern African American Freedom Movement. Second, he examines the centrality of the modern African American Freedom Movement to both the creation of the modern United States and the development of the modern world. Waldo Martin is the Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History & Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley.
	Script to Screen: Seinfeld Writer/Producer David Mandel talked with Pollock Theater Director Matt Ryan about the challenges and successes involved in breaking the mold of Seinfeld and transporting the sitcom to an alternate universe. Recorded on 02/20/2020.