Posts by Live Talks LA

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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS,
June 25, 6pm PT/9pm ET (click here)
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + book
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs. Ticket includes shipping to US addresses only.
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From “master of the genre” (Washington Post) Walter Mosley, Detective Easy Rawlins’ latest client sends him down a warren of memory and nostalgia—blinding him to reason and risk.
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Walter Mosley is one of America’s most celebrated modern-day crime fiction writers. In 2020, he received the 2020 National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. His work has been translated into 25 languages. As an executive producer, he adapted his novel The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey for AppleTV+ and serves as a writer and executive producer for FX’s Snowfall.
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This will be Walter Mosley’s fifth appearance at Live Talks LA. In 2019, we hosted him in conversation with Pulitzer prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen on the art of writing fiction. Here’a the video.
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Easy Rawlins returns in Walter Mosley’s latest, Farewell, Amethystine, set in January 1970. All is right in the world of LA’s premiere Black detective… and then Amethystine Stoller arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. And as Easy takes his first step in the investigation, he trips and falls into the memory of things past— loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own on the streets of Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.
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Easy finds himself pressed into a reckoning and has to make a choice that will almost certainly hasten a permanent descent, one that might sunder his soul.
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Conor Dougherty is a reporter at the New York Times who is a California native and based in Los Angeles. He covers housing and has been a fan of the Easy series for 20 years and read every book.

VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS
June 18, 6pm PT/9pm ET (click here)
TICKETS:
$15 Virtual Admission
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs.
*Signed copies of Eric Weiner’s books and Rainn Wilson’s book can be purchased in this link.
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Now a new series on Peacock with Rainn Wilson, The Geography of Bliss is part travel memoir, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide that takes the viewer across the globe to investigate not what happiness is, but WHERE it is.
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Eric Weiner is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss (now a docu-series featuring Rainn Wilson) and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God and The Socrates Express. A former international correspondent for NPR, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the anthology Best American Travel Writing. He lives with his family and a menagerie of animals in the Washington, D.C. area. For more information, visit his website.
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Rainn Wilson is an Emmy nominated and SAG award-winning actor best known for playing the inimitable “Dwight Schrute” for nine seasons on NBC’s, The Office.  His robust and diverse career includes television, movies, Broadway, unscripted series, animation, and podcasts. He has an MFA from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts and spent 10 years doing theatre in NYC before moving to LA. In addition, he is also a NYT Bestselling author, having written The Bassoon King, SoulPancake: Chew on Life’s Big Questions and his latest book Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. Rainn founded a digital media company SoulPancake and co-founded Lide Haiti, an education non-profit that empowers women and girls through the arts and scholarships in rural Haiti. 

The Geography of Bliss
Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy?  In a unique mix of travel, psychology, science and humor, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.
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Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life
Not a conventional biography, Ben & Me is a guide to living and thinking well, as Ben Franklin did. It is also about curiosity, diligence, and, most of all, the elusive goal of self-improvement. As Weiner follows Franklin from Philadelphia to Paris, Boston to London, he attempts to uncover Ben’s life lessons, large and small. We learn how to improve a relationship with someone by inducing them to do a favor for you—a psychological phenomenon now known as The Ben Franklin Effect. We learn about the printing press (the Internet of its day), early medicine, diplomatic intrigue and, of course, electricity. And we learn about ethics, persuasion, humor, regret, appetite, and so much more.
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At a time when history is either neglected or contested, Weiner argues we have much to learn from the past and that we’d all be better off if we acted and thought a bit more like Ben did, even if he didn’t always live up to his own high ideals. Engaging, smart, moving, quirky, Ben & Me distills the essence of Franklin’s ideas into grounded, practical wisdom for all of us.

Frank, funny and open-hearted, You Never Know is an intimate memoir from one of the most beloved actors of our time. With never-told stories from all corners of his personal and professional life, Tom Selleck recounts his friendships with Frank Sinatra, Carol Burnett, Sam Elliott, James Garner and more.
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Tom Selleck is an award-winning actor and producer best known for his iconic role as Thomas Magnum in the original Magnum P.I. television series. Among the many unforgettable roles he has played are PI Lance White on The Rockford Files, Peter Mitchell in Three Men and a Baby, Matthew Quigley in Quigley Down Under, and Peter Malloy in In & Out. He was beloved as Dr. Richard Burke, Monica’s older boyfriend, on Friends and is currently starring as NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan on the hit crime drama Blue Bloods, now in its 14^th season. 
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In Tom Selleck’s new memoir, You Never Know, the star of Magnum P.I. and Blue Bloods shares his backstory—from the University of Southern California business school and basketball court to his co-star turn with Mae West and his recurring role as Monica’s boyfriend on Friends. 
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Selleck clears up an armload of misconceptions and shares dozens of never-told stories from all corners of his personal and professional life. He also shares what it was like to emerge as a mega-star in his mid-thirties— and how he adjusted his career to protect his family’s privacy and normalcy. 
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With charm, talent, and self-deprecating humor, Selleck reveals himself as someone who reached incredible heights by always insisting on being himself. His journey offers a fresh perspective on a changing industry and a changing world. 
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George Pennacchio is the longtime entertainment reporter for ABC7 Eyewitness News. He’s also the host of all the “On The Red Carpet” specials broadcast on the ABC-owned stations around the country.  During his career, George has won four Emmy Awards, several National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and has been honored with The Luminary Award by the L.A. Press Club for his body of work. George is now in his 28th year at ABC7.  

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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS,
June 3, 6pm PT/9pm ET (click here)
TICKETS:
$15 Virtual Admission 
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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A provocative, brilliant analysis by recently retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer that deconstructs the textualist philosophy of the current Supreme Court’s supermajority and makes the case for a better way to interpret the Constitution.
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Stephen Breyer is a former associate justice of the Supreme Court who served there for twenty-eight years until retiring in 2022. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
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“A rocket from a Supreme Court justice… Justice Breyer shows how the current Supreme Court’s alleged textualism and originalism are unsound. His book is a judicial arms-control agreement advocating moderation and a path to what he calls ‘workable democracy.’ You will not read a more important legal work this election year.”  — Bob Woodward, Washington Post reporter and bestselling author.
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READING THE CONSTITUTION: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism is a provocative analysis by recently retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. In it, he deconstructs the textualist philosophy of the current Supreme Court’s supermajority and makes the case for a better way to interpret the Constitution.
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Textualists claim that the right way to interpret the Constitution and statutes is to read the text carefully and examine the language as it was understood at the time the documents were written.
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Justice Breyer recalls Chief Justice John Marshall’s exhortation that the Constitution must be a workable set of principles to be interpreted by subsequent generations. Most important in interpreting law, says Breyer, is to understand the purposes of statutes as well as the consequences of deciding a case one way or another. He illustrates these principles by examining some of the most important cases in the nation’s history.
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Jessica Levinson is a professor at Loyola Law School, where her work focuses on constitutional law, the law of the political process, including election law and governance issues, and the Supreme Court. Levinson is a legal contributor for CBS News, a columnist for MSNBC, and has a weekly legal segment on NPR member station KCRW. She regularly appears as a legal and political expert on television, radio, podcasts, online outlets, and in print. Levinson is the founding director of Loyola Law School’s Public Service Institute, which is dedicated to creating the next generation of leaders in government service.  Visit here for more on her work and publications.