Events

(this event was taped with an audience on March 12, 2024)

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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS,
March 17, 3pm PT/6pm ET (click here)
TICKETS:
$40 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses only)
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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From one of the leading grief therapists, Conscious Grieving is a compassionate and accessible guide to grieving offering a new framework for understanding and navigating loss..
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Claire Bidwell Smith is a therapist specializing in grief and the author of four books of nonfiction, published in 22 countries: The Rules of Inheritance, After This: When Life is Over Where Do We Go?, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, and Anxious Grief: A Clinician’s Guide to Supporting Grieving Clients. Claire offers numerous online programs for grief in addition to working with people one-on-one, as well as training other clinicians to work in the field of grief and loss. Led by her own experiences with grief, and fueled by her work in hospice and private practice, Claire strives to provide support for all kinds of people experiencing all kinds of grief. Claire has written for and been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Scientific American, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, MSNBC, Forbes, The Today Show, The Chicago Tribune, Oprah Magazine, and Psychology Today. She is devoted to expanding the conversation about grief and loss. Visit her website. 
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Conscious Grieving is a book for anyone seeking guidance and support after loss.  What does it mean to grieve consciously? Most of the time, when we lose someone we love, it feels like grief is just happening to us. We feel out of control, and overwhelmed. Claire reminds us that while loss is something that inevitably happens to all of us, how we choose to grieve is up to us. When we can consciously engage with our grief, rather than avoiding it, we can access profound pathways to healing.
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Conscious Grieving offers a new framework for each stage of grief: Entering, Engaging, Surrendering, and Transforming.
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* Entering – staying present and taking care of ourselves as we navigate the shock and upheaval of a new loss. 
*Engaging – navigating that first year after a loss by staying in tune with our needs as more complicated feelings of depression, guilt or anger surface.
*Surrendering – facing the changes to our identity and who we are becoming in the face of loss.
*Transforming – through ritual, honor, hope, and grace, and learning to carry our grief with intention so that we can continue to grow, heal, and thrive.
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Grief asks a lot from us. But the ability to grieve is a birthright. We grieve throughout our lifetimes. We grieve the deaths of loved ones yes, but also moves, divorce, illness, injustice, time lost, changes in the world and healing from these losses requires that we evaluate everything we ever considered meaningful. Healing means making our lives worth the pain we endure when we lose someone we love. And transforming through grief is an opportunity afforded to all. 
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Alua Arthur is a death doula, recovering attorney, and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization that exists to support people as they answer the question, “What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?” Going with Grace works to improve and redefine the end-of-life experience for people rooted in every community using the individual lived experience as the foundation. Alua has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Refinery29, The Doctors, and InStyle.  Arthur is the author of the upcoming book, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End.

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VIRTUAL EVENT TIX AVAILABLE, March 11 (click here)
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + signed book (shipping to US addresses only)
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.
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Award-winning journalist Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway. She was also the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, host of the Recode Decode podcast, and co-executive producer of the Code conference. A former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and host of its Sway podcast, Swisher has also worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. This is her third book.
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Burn Book: A Tech Love Story is part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech’s most powerful players— the inside story we’ve all been waiting for of modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world. It’s a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.
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While tech titans bragged they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. Covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the truth of this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and for Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once say: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”
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It’s only a slight exaggeration to say Swisher has interviewed everyone. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few who Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in one famous case, literally.
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Ted Sarandos was named co-CEO of Netflix in July 2020. He has been responsible for all content operations since 2000, and led the company’s transition into original content production that began in 2013 with the launch of the series House of Cards, Arrested Development  and Orange Is the New Black among numerous others. Ted was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2013 and received the Producers Guild of America Milestone Award in 2019. He is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a trustee of the American Film Institute, and on the boards of Exploring the Arts and Spotify.

VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS, Mar. 2, 3pm (click here)
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses)
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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Billy Dee Williams recalls his remarkable life of nearly eight decades—a heralded actor who’s played the roles he wanted, from Brian’s Song to Lando in the Star Wars universe—unchecked by the racism and typecasting so rife in the mostly all-white industry in which he triumphed.
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Billy Dee Williams was born and raised in Harlem in 1937. He studied painting, first at the High School of Music and Art with fellow student Diahann Carroll, and then at the National Academy of Fine Art, before setting out to pursue acting with Herbert Berghof, Stella Adler, and Sidney Poitier. He has starred in forty movies, seven Broadway plays, and has made more than forty television shows and TV movies combined. 
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In What Have We Here: Portraits of a Life, Williams writes of landing the career-making role of a lifetime in 1971, co-starring alongside James Caan in Brian’s Song, the made-for-television movie that was watched by an audience of more than fifty million people. Williams calls it “the kind of interracial love story America needed.”
And when, as the first Black character in the Star Wars universe, he became a true pop culture icon, playing Lando Calrissian in George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back (“What I presented on the screen people didn’t expect to see”). It was a role he reprised in the final film of the original trilogy, The Return of the Jedi, and in the recent sequel The Rise of Skywalker.

This heralded actor tells, in his own words, all that has sustained and carried him through a lifetime of dreams and adventure. 

Sam Rubin is the entertainment anchor for the KTLA Morning News. He is a multiple-Emmy winner; has received the Golden Mike Award for best entertainment reporter; has received a lifetime achievement award from the Southern California Broadcasters Association; and has been named best entertainment reporter by the Los Angeles Press Club.

VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS, Feb 19 (click here)
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses only)
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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A heartfelt and wry career memoir from the director of Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, About Last Night, and Glory, creator of the show thirtysomething, and executive producer of My So-Called Life, gives a dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
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Ed Zwick’s long career has spanned four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins).  His filmography as director includes Glory, Legends of the Fall, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Courage Under Fire, Love & Other Drugs, and Defiance; with producing credits including Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Shakespeare in Love, for which Zwick won the Academy Award.  
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From early-career, breakout performances from Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, to career-defining roles for Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and more, Zwick has directed many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. His mark on television is equally impressive, including two series he co-created with longtime creative partner Marshall Herskovitz: the Emmy award-winning thirtysomething, regarded as one of the most influential dramas in modern TV history; and ABC’s Emmy-winning ensemble drama, Once and Again.
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“Ed Zwick is responsible for some of the best entertainment of the last forty years. (His new book) takes its place alongside Adventures in the Screen Trade and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as an indispensable behind-the-scenes books for fans of movies and television.”  –Aaron Sorkin
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Patty Jenkins is an award-winning writer and director best known for directing the blockbuster Wonder Woman and her debut Oscar-winning feature Monster. She also directed the pilot and series finale of AMC’s hit show The Killing, for which she received a Primetime Emmy nomination and the 2012 DGA Best Director Award. In 2017, Jenkins became the first woman in history to direct a live action film with a budget over $100 million with her critical hit Wonder Woman. Following the success of the first, Jenkins directed, wrote, and produced the equally successful sequel Wonder Woman 1984, making her the first woman to helm a live action film with a budget over $200 million. Up next, Jenkins is set to developing Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, which would make her the first female to direct a Star Wars feature film. She is also writing an original project and producing the anticipated Gal Gadot-starring Cleopatra, Chris Pine’s Poolman, and Best Men, a film based on Sid Karger’s novel.

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VIRTUAL EVENT ONLY, February 13 (click here)
TICKETS:
$42 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses)
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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Acclaimed Harvard sociologist makes the case for reexamining what we value to prioritize recognition—the quest for respect—in an age that has been defined by growing inequality and the obsolescence of the American dream.
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Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. An influential cultural sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has tackled topics such as dignity, respect, stigma, racism and anti-racism, class and racial boundaries, social change, and how we evaluate social worth across societies.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War ; and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
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“Michèle Lamont’s book Seeing Others is so important for this time we’re living through — as our country grapples with changing ideas of “who matters” and how we can move to a more equitable and understanding nation. Her extensive research encompasses the intersectionality that is the key to making a better world for us all. A must read.” — Joey Soloway, creator of Transparent
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Michèle Lamont unpacks the power of recognition—rendering others as visible and valued—by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition—from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay. She shows how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity.
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Decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups. The solution, Lamont argues, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: By reducing stigma, we put change within reach.
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Just as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone did for a previous generation, Seeing Others strikes at the heart of our modern struggles and illuminates an inclusive path forward with new ways for understanding our world. 

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VIRTUAL EVENT, February 12 (click here)
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses)
*Includes access to watch the event on video-on-demand for five days after it airs
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From bestselling author, media pioneer, and curator of TED, comes an inspiring guide to amplifying kindness and igniting a movement on both an individual and global scale.
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Chris Anderson has led TED since 2001, overseeing its transformation from an annual conference to a nonprofit with global reach, sharing TED Talks, podcasts, and TED-Ed videos freely to all.
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Today’s culture seems to be trending ever meaner and more divisive: INFECTIOUS GENEROSITY offers an antidote. Chris Anderson argues that by rethinking generosity in this connected era, we can shape it into a force that can spread across the world. Generosity? Really?! It seems too small a force arrayed against today’s problems. But the pandemic taught us that even a tiny virus can have global impact by virtue of being infectious.  So what does it take to make generosity infectious? There are dozens of inspiring people out there, toiling away from the limelight, who have demonstrated how this is possible. The book is filled with their stories, which collectively offer a playbook we can all make use of. The result? A fundamentally more hopeful view of human possibility in the 21st century.
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As the curator of TED for over twenty years, Anderson has seen first-hand the ways in which ideas can spread. Through the power of the internet, he has helped the world’s boldest thinkers share their most uplifting and world-changing concepts and with INFECTIOUS GENEROSITY, Anderson encourages all of us to harness the internet as a force that brings people together instead of driving them apart. Through a combination of inspiring stories, cutting-edge psychological research, and practical guidance INFECTIOUS GENEROSITY serves as both a manifesto and a playbook for embarking on a journey of generosity. Broken into three sections, WHY Infectious Generosity’s time has come; HOW we each can play part; WHAT IF? Imagining a world in which Infectious Generosity has claimed its rightful place.

Irwin Miller is an award-winning designer, artist and thought leader who has worked in the design industry for over 30 years with a focus of architecture and interior design. He had been a Principal and Design Director at Gensler for 20+ years working on projects of every scope and scale around the world. Before that, he worked with a variety of international architects throughout Europe after receiving degrees from RISD and Harvard Graduate School of Design. His current passion is ceramic work – and stop motion animation for television and music videos.