Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

 Young children often seem especially creative and imaginative. But can we prove that scientifically? And what is it about children’s minds and brains that makes them so imaginative? Alison Gopnik, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher and author of the new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, discusses her cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn and how thinking like a child can make adults more creative too.For photos from the program, click here. 

 In what author C. Nicole Mason calls an “insider’s story, ” Born Bright follows the journey of her own childhood in Los Angeles—an improbable path from episodic homelessness, hunger, and living in poverty—to becoming a leading voice on public policies impacting women and communities of color and low-income families. With grace, insight, and first-hand experience, Mason sheds light on the systematic structures that render an escape from poverty nearly impossible.  Joined by Ms. Magazine’s Education Director and Editor Karon Jolna, they will discuss a range of issues from poverty to the future of feminism and the ability of storytelling to accelerate social and political change.For photos from the program, click here.  

 Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare remains relevant in our contemporary American world. From expressions of black rage to the challenges facing systems of justice, they hope to illustrate how Shakespeare’s plays provide rich texts through which the most pressing problems in our world can be debated and solutions become, perhaps, imaginable.

 Based on years of research and in-depth interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and diplomats—authors Alexa Koenig, Victor Peskin and Eric Stover examine the global effort to capture the world’s most wanted fugitives in their seminal book, Hiding in Plain Sight. The authors trace the evolution of international justice and how to hold accountable mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, Saddam Hussein, Ratko Mladic, Joseph Kony, and Osama bin Laden.  The authors will also discuss the United States’ increasing reliance on military force to capture—or more often simply to kill—suspected terrorists, with little or no judicial scrutiny.Click here for photos from the program.

 Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is a clutterbug—perhaps even a hoarder. In his hilarious and poignant memoir Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act, he unpacks the psychology and culture of hoarding, clutter, and collecting, presenting a compelling look at a mysterious compulsion. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, Yourgrau embarked on a wide-ranging project to clean up his chaotic New York apartment and life. Known for his books of magical absurd stories, including Wearing Dad’s Head, Haunted Traveller, and The Sadness of Sex, in whose film version he starred, Yourgrau will join magical realist writer Aimee Bender to ponder the power of objects and memories, and the pain of letting go.For more information about the program, including photos, visit the event page.  

 Writers, musicians, and cultural critics gather to pay tribute and explore the forty-year career of Prince. Drawing on original work, music clips and the emerging field of Prince Studies, cultural workers will consider the impact of Prince on literary culture and beyond.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Leading philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in his latest book Other Minds. Combining science and philosophy with first-hand accounts of the remarkable intelligence of the octopus, Godfrey-Smith explores how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colors and human beings to speak. Follow along as Godfrey-Smith shares from his underwater adventures and sheds new light on the octopus brain, the human brain, and the evolution of consciousness.Click here for photos from the program. 

 In his new book, How to Survive a Plague, David France– the creator of the Oscar-nominated seminal documentary of the same name– offers a definitive history of the battle to halt the AIDS epidemic. Joined by Dr. Mark H. Katz, a physician activist on the frontlines of the affected HIV community of Southern California, and Tony Valenzuela, a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation, and gay men’s health, France shares powerful, heroic stories of the gay activists who refused to die without a fight.View photos from this program. 

 In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared stories the younger man had never heard before. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany and the heyday of the space program, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. Hear from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author as he discusses his latest literary masterpiece—a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure.Click here for photos from the program. 

 In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and other efforts to harvest our attention. In his new book, The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch who coined the phrase “net neutrality,” explores the rise of firms whose business models are the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. Wu visits ALOUD for a revelatory look at the cognitive, social, and unimaginable ways that industries feeding on human attention are transforming our society and ourselves.Click here for photos from the program.

 What makes a place? The stories of a city are inexhaustible and contradictory as cities themselves are in constant conflict between memory and erasure. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest work in a trilogy of atlases (New York, New Orleans, San Francisco) portrays the myriad ways we coexist and move through a city depending on our race, gender, age and so much more.  In conversation with architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, Solnit expands our ideas of how cities are imagined and considers how they might look in the immediate future. Join a discussion with two people who have thought deeply about the possibilities of the infinite city.Click here for photos from the program.

 One of today’s greatest American novelists, bestselling author T.C. Boyle visits ALOUD to take audiences deep inside his electrifying, eco-visionary new novel. An epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, The Terranauts follows the high-pressured lives of eight scientists—four men and four women—closely monitored under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. With characteristic humor and sharp wit, Boyle plays out his real-life environmental concerns as he experiments with the future of humanity.Click here for photos from the program.

 When Hisham Matar was a university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent critics in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Matar, the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, chronicles his journey home to his native Libya after the fall of Qaddafi in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. Matar shares from The Return, his impassioned new work that weaves the intimacy of a memoir with the suspense of journalism to offer a moving reflection on exile, art, family, and the history of a revolution.Click here for photos from the program.

 With all the propulsive tension that made Room an international bestseller, Emma Donoghue’s new masterpiece, The Wonder, is a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives. Set in Ireland in the 1850s, an English nurse arrives in a small village to keep watch over a young girl who has been fasting for months and claims to be living only on manna from heaven. Is it a miracle or fraud or something else? Donoghue shares with ALOUD audiences her latest riveting psychological thriller with Ramona Ausubel.Click here for photos from the program.

 “What happens to revolutionaries in America?” This was the question photojournalist Bryan Shih sought to answer through his lens and the first-person narratives gathered in this powerful new book, Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution, released on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party’s founding.   These intimate and rarely heard stories of rank and file party members whose on-the-ground activism—from voter registrars, medical clinicians, and community teachers—contribute missing pieces to a skewed historical record and offer lessons for the future. #BlackLivesMatter activist and organizer Melina Abdullah joins Panthers Ericka Huggins, Norma Mtume, and Phyllis Jackson for an important examination of the past, present and future of groundbreaking social movements.Click here for photos from the program.

 Leading chronicler of science and technology and best-selling author of The Information and Chaos, James Gleick visits ALOUD with a mind-bending exploration of time travel through literature and science. His latest book, Time Travel, tracks our cultural, philosophical, technological, and evolutionary understanding of time—from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from the electric telegraph to the steam railroad. Novelist Charles Yu, a masterful storyteller who turns time inside out in his fiction, joins Gleick in conversation to delve into the looping paradoxes of the past, present, and future. Click here for photos from the program.

 Best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf shares from his highly anticipated continuation of The Arab of the Future—a recollection of his childhood as his family shuttled back and forth between France and the Middle East. Sattouf’s latest graphic memoir travels to his father’s hometown of Homs, where the young Sattouf attends schools and attempts to dedicate himself to becoming a true Syrian in the country of a dictator. Hear from one of today’s most original voices as Sattouf acutely observes life’s small daily moments while sweeping through issues of politics, religion, and poverty in a voice both darkly funny and piercingly direct.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ newest book of poems, Odes, addresses and embodies love, gender, and sexual politics through the powerful and tender age-old poetic form of the ode. National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis’ stunning poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus, considers the roles of desire and race in the construction of the self through lyrical meditations on the black female figure. Join us as these poets read from their intimate work and interrogate the structure of the body through its pleasures and sorrows, complex aesthetics and universal truths. 

Before you cast your ballot this November, join ALOUD for an evening of political takes and takedowns with New York Times Pulitzer-winning columnist Maureen Dowd. The bestselling author has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton since the ‘90s and now in her new book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, she plunges into one of the most bizarre and divisive campaigns in modern history. With her trademark cocktail of wry humor and acerbic analysis, Dowd traces the psychologies and pathologies behind this treacherous battle for our nation’s highest office.

 In SPQR, an instant classic from one of our foremost classicists, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome while challenging the comfortable historical perspective that has existed for centuries. With precision and flair, the National Book Critics Circle finalist guides us through ancient brothels, bars, and back alleys to sift fact from fiction, myth and propaganda from historical record. Hear from Beard as she unpacks the unprecedented rise of a civilization that– even two thousand years later–still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty, while simultaneously adding to the narrative entire groups of people omitted from history.