Posts by Live Talks LA

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.
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Colson Whitehead  brings his latest novel to our stage: Crook Manifesto, a kaleidoscopic portrait of 1970s Harlem. In his trademark scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, he writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride. 
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It’s the continuing story he began in Harlem Shuffle, which the Associated Press called a “wildly entertaining romp that delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-twentieth century New York.” 
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Colson Whitehead is the bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, for which he won Pulitzer prizes. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City. He was recently awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Here’s the video from a virtual event we did with him in conversation with Mary Karr  in 2020.
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Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology.

The inside story of one woman’s quest to bring transparency and accountability to Big Tech, by the Facebook whistleblower who is determined to help us all retake control of our lives.
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Frances Haugen is an American data engineer and scientist, and whistleblower. A graduate of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and Harvard Business School, she worked at Google, Yelp, and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019 and working in its civic integrity department. In the spring of 2021, she disclosed tens of thousands of internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal, revealing Facebook’s awareness and complicity in radicalization and political violence around the world..
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Brian Merchant is the bestselling author of The One Device. His work has appeared in WIRED, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Guardian, and beyond. He is the founder of Terraform, VICE Media’s speculative fiction publication, and Automaton, a special project examining AI and automation at Gizmodo. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently a writer for the Los Angeles Times. His newest book, BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, is on sale September 5, 2023.
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In 2021, when news outlets feasted on “the Facebook Files,” Frances Haugen went public as the former employee who blew the whistle on the company by copying tens of thousands of pages of documents. She testified to Congress and spoke to the media. She was hailed at President Biden’s first State of the Union Address. She made sure everyone understood exactly what the documents revealed: Facebook knew it had accidentally changed its algorithm to reward extremism and refused to fix it; it knew that its customers were using the platform to foment violence, to spread falsehoods, to diminish the self-esteem of young women, and more. But how was it that Haugen was the only employee at the company who dared to step forward?
 
Her story is an inspiring tale of one young woman’s life and the choices she made. From an isolated childhood in Iowa to an unaccredited college, to one among the few women at Google in its heyday, Frances Haugen learned how to focus on what mattered, and to ignore her critics. To harness the strength of standing in the truth.

Michael Milken says the best is yet to comefrom an astonishing medical revolution.

What if cleaning early-stage cancers from your body could become as routine as going to the dentist to clean your teeth, or if a single vaccine could protect you against multiple viruses, or if gene editing could eliminate many birth defects and slow the aging process? Milken believes these, and many other advances, are within reach.
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Beginning with a description of the culture that helped shape Milken’s early views, Faster Cures: Accelerating the Future of Health traces the life-extending acceleration of progress in medical research, public health, and clinical treatments over the seven decades since Milken’s childhood—and shows how he helped transform the process of developing disease cures to accelerate medicine’s evolution from a dark past to a bright future.
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After two decades of actively supporting medical research as a philanthropist, Milken became a patient in 1993 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Over the last three decades, he has increased his focus on making the research process more effective and efficient.