Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

What do we do when the Supreme Court challenges the entire nation? The 2021-2022 term of the Supreme Court was arguably one of the most tumultuous in U.S. history. Over three days in June of 2022, the conservative supermajority overturned the constitutional right to abortion, possibly opening the door to reconsidering other major privacy rights. The Court also limited the authority of the EPA, loosened restrictions on guns, and embraced originalism, a legal theory asserting that the constitution should be interpreted by its original intent instead of in the context of current times. In The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America, attorney and former White House speechwriter Michael Waldman explores what the term means for thousands of cases — and millions of Americans. He examines past, present, and future, drawing deeply on history to examine other times when the Court controversially veered from the will of the majority, inciting anger and backlash among the people. Waldman also analyzes import

While people of color have been more widely represented in media in recent years, most of that media is neither created nor consumed by them — white Americans still comprise the majority of content creators and storytellers. But media makers of color are working to amplify long-silenced voices in order to advance a set of different narratives, offering stories and perspectives to counter the racism and disinformation that have dominated America’s political and cultural landscape. In Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar focuses on shifting perspectives in news media, entertainment, and individual discourse. Kolhatkar highlights the writers, creators, educators, and influencers who are successfully building a culture of affirmation and inclusion. Rising Up is Kolhatkar’s guide to narrative-setting through the lens of advancing racial justice, advocating for a reallocation of power in the media and entertainment industries to more people of color

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? Not long ago, activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had an unsettling experience—she was confronted with an online doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define. As lifestyles of internet celebrities have caused reality itself to become unmoored, Klein asks, “Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?” Join us at Town Hall for a trip into what Klein calls the “Mirror World,” a series of reflections on the distorted edges that exist at the borders of our daily lives that we try to unscramble. This deep dive uses a combination of studied critique and reportage along with more personal per

How can we fix the problems in our criminal justice system? In a feat that can seem insurmountable, a common approach is to leave the solution to experts and technocrats. But what if, instead of deferring solely to their knowledge, some of this much-needed change was carried out by the people? In her new book Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration, former attorney and law professor Jocelyn Simonson tells the stories of ordinary people joining together in collective acts of resistance: paying bail for a stranger, using social media to inform the public about courtroom proceedings, making a video about someone’s life for a criminal court judge, and other acts. When people join together to contest what we have been taught about justice and safety, they challenge the ideas that prosecutions and prisons make us safer. Through collective action, these groups seek to create change from within, reframing ideas of what justice can look like and showing the vital role that grass

To study history, we often look at court cases as representations of the societal issues and debates of their day. With landmark cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe v. Wade, Brown v. The Board of Education, we see how the trajectory of society’s ethical and legal foundation shifts over time. You might say that major disputes serve as a mirror of sorts, where we see our society and ourselves reflected back. Federal prosecutor and top defense lawyer James J. Brosnahan takes us into the courtroom in Justice at Trial: Courtroom Battles and Groundbreaking Cases, exploring the disputes that reflect some of the most pressing issues of our time. He traces his career through critical cases like refugees on the Mexican border, the constitutional right to speak and print the truth, sexual taboos on national television, poverty and murder on Native American Reservations, hunger in America, and many others. Join Brosnahan at Town Hall as he shares his first-hand experience navigating the tensions, excitement, and challenge

These days, it feels like customer service has been nearly all digitized. While confusion over ticket orders and lost packages can be frustrating, one space where it feels necessary for technology to hit the mark is health and wellness care. While online services and rapidly evolving technology should be making this process more fluid, moments like the crash of Healthcare.gov in 2013, as well as the shaky and muddled attempt for online services to provide benefits during COVID, call the effectiveness of this technology into question. But what is the reason for such outdated and inefficient systems when it comes to providing vital aid for people? Former deputy chief technology officer, Jennifer Pahlka, responds to this query in her new book Re-coding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. Pahlka argues that the government is stuck in an industrial-era culture, in which lofty goals set by the elite will often take years to be fully set in place. As time passes, the techn

If you consider yourself a Millennial or part of Generation Z, chances are you’ve felt a little jaded by the usual dusty office job. According to bestselling author and Town Hall veteran Chris Guillebeau, you’re not alone. Many of the post-Baby Boomer generations are choosing to rewrite the rules of capitalism. In his latest book, Gonzo Capitalism: How to Make Money in An Economy That Hates You, Guillebeau details how many of today’s young people are burdened with debt, stagnant wages, and the ever-rising cost of living. Disillusioned with traditional, draining work models, they eschew more conventional ways of earning a living, instead opting to pursue new and creative ways to make money — alternate options to the 9-to-5 lifestyle inherited more readily by generations before. Enter a new world where creativity is currency and creators have control. Anything goes: from communities of gamers getting paid to play; to armchair pundits betting against bookies in online markets; to TikTok “Sleepfluencers,” AI arti

Long-time disability advocate Barry Long and Dave Tatro from Sound Generations share their lives and learning with Rebecca Crichton, ED of Northwest Center for Creative Ageing. They will discuss how we can all learn how to interact with and support people with both visible and invisible disabilities. Barry Long has faced life-altering challenges that have taught him the value of positive attitude and perseverance. Through his work as a professional speaker, trainer, and leadership coach, Barry has shared his message of motivation with thousands of people; helping them to take action and reach their goals through real conversation, direct guidance, and actionable plans. Long-time Seattle resident Dave Tatro Dave was diagnosed as a teenager with a hereditary, degenerative eye disease called Choroideremia. It’s the gradual loss of the rod cells in the retina. These cells are crucial to peripheral vision and night vision. As he ages, his range of vision continues to narrow to a type of tunnel vision and night bli

If journalism is the lifeblood of our democracy, then why does it feel like its chronically on life support? Nationally, thousands of news outlets have been crushed under the weight of financial distress. The few that survive are driven by profit motives, rather than seeking to educate and inform. Locally, we’ve witnessed the closures of the Seattle Chinese Post, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Weekly, and the Seattle Globalist. While other outlets have been forced to either go exclusively online or operate with skeleton newsrooms. So, what is to be done to halt the decay of one of society’s most essential organs? While many bemoan the decline of journalism, there are also solutions being explored for how to ensure that every community both locally and nationally is afforded journalism that is factual, accurate, and accessible. Join Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen, KNKX News Director Florangela Davila, and South Seattle Emerald Executive Director Michael McPhearson as they discuss a pathway

With today’s emerging technologies, including things like artificial intelligence, are quickly becoming mainstream. AIs like ChatGPT, the chatbot that can produce answers to questions and write essays and poems, have become sensational hits in our culture. What’s the cost of all of these so-called advances? If you ask economist Simon Johnson, the cost could be astronomical. In his latest book, Power and Progress (co-authored with MIT’s Daron Acemoglu), Johnson believes that we are at a pivotal point in history where technology could either provide widespread prosperity or accelerate the power and wealth gaps in our society. Many people throughout history, and in current today, have assumed that technological advances mean progress for all. Johnson explores how this assumption actually played out throughout history. The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals while peasants remained on the edge

In his life, Aziz Shehadeh was many things — among them a lawyer, a political detainee, and the father of activist and author, Raja Shehadeh. Raja’s latest book, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, is a subtle psychological portrait of a complicated father-son relationship. Set against the backdrop of continuing political unrest, Raja describes his failure as a young man to recognize his father’s courage as an activist, and, in turn, his father’s inability to appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. Then in 1985, Aziz Shehadeh is murdered, and Raja undergoes a profound and irrevocable change. We Could Have Been Friends acts in part as the story of Palestine’s continual fight against multiple foreign powers, but at its core presents a poignant unraveling of a complex father-son relationship, unlike many we have seen before. Raja Shehadeh is Palestine’s leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. S

  950,000 years ago a family of five walked along the beach and left their prints behind. Now, we can view that poignant portrait etched in time — fossils of footprints on the beach — and think of our own families and what memory we might leave in our wake. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these familiar footprints serve as an inspiration for his latest research in world history — one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In his book The World, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the families at the heart of the human drama. These families are diverse and span across space and time. Montefiore tells the stories of the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps,

Airships, those airborne leviathans that occupied center stage in the world in the first half of the twentieth century, were a symbol of the future. The British airship R101 was not just the largest aircraft ever to have flown and the product of the world’s most advanced engineering — it was also the linchpin of an imperial British scheme to link by air the far-flung areas of its empire from Australia to India, South Africa, Canada, Egypt, and Singapore. No one had ever conceived of anything like it, and R101 captivated the world. There was just one problem: beyond the hype and technological wonders, these big, steel-framed, hydrogen-filled airships were a dangerously bad idea. Journalist S.C. Gwynne’s book, His Majesty’s Airship, features a cast of remarkable and often tragically flawed characters, including: Lord Christopher Thomson, the man who dreamed up the Imperial Airship Scheme and then relentlessly pushed R101 to her destruction; Princess Marthe Bibesco, the celebrated writer and glamorous socialite

Home to over 730,000 people, with close to four million people living in the metropolitan area, Seattle has the third-highest homeless population in the United States. In 2018, an estimated 8,600 homeless people lived in the city, a figure that does not include the significant number of “hidden” homeless people doubled up with friends or living in and out of cheap hotels. In Skid Road, Josephine Ensign digs through layers of Seattle history—past its leaders and prominent citizens, respectable or not—to reveal the stories of overlooked and long-silenced people who live on the margins of society. Josephine Ensign is a professor in the School of Nursing and adjunct professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling through the Safety Net, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, and the Washington State Book Award Finalist Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle. Anna P

A primer on police abolition from veteran organizers. What could it look like to live in a world where, instead of relying on policing and prison to put halt to harm, violence is stopped before it even has a chance to begin? In No More Police, organizer and attorney Andrea J. Ritchie and New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba detail why policing doesn’t stop violence and instead perpetuates widespread harm. Outlining the many failures of contemporary police reforms, they explore demands to divest from policing and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens. No More Police centering survivors of state, interpersonal, and community-based violence, and highlights uprisings, campaigns, and community-based projects. Part handbook, part road map, the book calls on readers to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it, and instead turn toward a world where violence is the exception — a world where safe, well-resourced and thriving commun

Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe, or one of the hundreds of other tribal-specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Despite centuries of colonialism, the Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Gregory D. Smithers’s book, Reclaiming Two-Spirits, seeks to decolonize the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground to preserve their stories. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits span

Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States.  Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality — but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, economist Nate Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. Hilger makes the case that America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff, and suggests that we need a program like Medicare — call it Familycare — to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents must organize to wield their political power on behalf of children — who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. In his new book The Parent Trap, Hilger exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a prof

Nate Gowdy had previously photographed 30 Donald Trump rallies. He thought he was fully prepared for what should have been the grand finale, but the events that unfolded on January 6th, 2021, were more than anyone could have expected.  As the event transformed from protest to outright insurrection, Gowdy never stopped photographing. The result is his first monograph, Insurrection — a comprehensive yet intimate account of the events of that fateful day. The 150-page book moves readers through the day in timestamped, chronological order, bringing them a firsthand account of not just the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but what it was like to be a journalist on the front lines. Juxtaposed are scenes of domestic terrorists kneeling and praying, posing for group photos, eating hotdogs, rampaging against the Capitol’s sworn protectors, and defiling the Inauguration Day stand, historically reserved for the stately pomp and circumstance of our representative government. On assignment for Rolling Stone, Gowdy was deemed “

The Roaring Twenties – the Jazz Age – has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors, and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a see

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable.  Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit — a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. McLaughlin investigates the thin evidence that pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. In the process, she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plas