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Date: 5/4/2018
Cosmologist and author of "Losing the Nobel Prize" Brian Keating tells the inside story of BICEP2's mesmerizing discovery and the scientific drama that ensued in this interview with science fiction author David Brin. Keating describes a journey of revelation and discovery, bringing to life the highly competitive, take-no-prisoners, publish-or-perish world of modern science. Along the way, he provocatively argues that the Nobel Prize, instead of advancing scientific progress, may actually hamper it, encouraging speed and greed while punishing collaboration and bold innovation. In a thoughtful reappraisal of the wishes of Alfred Nobel, Keating offers practical solutions for reforming the prize, providing a vision of a scientific future in which cosmologists may, finally, be able to see all the way back to the very beginning. Recorded on 04/25/2018.
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Date: 10/2/2017
Celebrated author, literature champion, and bookstore owner Ann Patchett electrifies the audience as she describes her evolving relationships with various books, ranging from classics by Leo Tolstoy and John Updike to more contemporary works by Min Jin Lee ("Pachinko"), Matthew Desmond ("Evicted") and Ta-Nehisi Coates ("Between the World and Me"), among others. Patchett reads both for pleasure and for business, as the co-owner and buyer for Parnassus Books in Nashville. Why would a best-selling author bother with opening a book store in 2011, when all of the others in her hometown had closed? Because, she says, she couldn't bear to live in a city without one so she and a partner opened their own! And, as she tells here, Parnassus Books has been a huge success. Patchett is the featured speaker of the 2017 Dinner in the Library event at UC San Diego. Recorded on 09/08/2017.
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Date: 6/26/2017
In his highly-acclaimed book, The Nazis Next Door, Eric Lichtblau tells the shocking and shameful story of how America became a safe haven for Hitler's men. Lichtblau explains here how it was possible for thousands of Nazis -- from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich -- to move to the U.S. after WWII, and quietly settle into new lives as Americans. Some of them gained entry as self-styled refugees, while others enjoyed the help and protection of the CIA, the FBI, and the military, who put them to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers. Lichtblau's book draws from once-secret government records and interviews, telling the full story of the Nazi scientists brought to America, and the German spies and con men who followed them and lived for decades as Americans. He is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego.
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Date: 5/8/2017
The International Tracing Service, one of the world's largest Holocaust-related archival repositories, holds millions of documents detailing the many forms of persecution that transpired during the Nazi era and their continuing repercussions. Based on her recently published book, "Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research," Suzanne Brown-Fleming provides new insights into human decision-making in genocidal settings, the factors that drive it, and its far-reaching consequences. Brown-Fleming is director of the Visiting Scholar Programs of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is presented here by the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego.
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Date: 3/3/2017
Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and German Studies at Brown University, explores the dynamics of the horrifying genocidal violence which took place in the East Galician town of Buczacz following the German conquest of the region in 1941 and its subsequent erasure from local memory. For centuries, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews coexisted in the region, but tragically, by the time the town was liberated in 1944, the entire Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis. They were assisted by local Ukrainians, who then ethnically cleansed the region of the Polish population. Bartov is presented as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Recorded on 02/13/2017.
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Date: 12/19/2016
Author Zohreh Ghahremani talks with Babak Rahimi, associate professor of Communication, Culture and Religion at UC San Diego about the novel, "Sky of Red Poppies," the 2012 selection for One Book, One San Diego.
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Date: 11/4/2016
In his new book, Spitting in the Soup: Inside the Dirty Game of Doping in Sports, UC San Diego alumnus and sports journalist Mark Johnson traces the doping culture in professional sports, from the early days when pills meant progress, to the current day, when athletes are vilified for the use of performance-enhancing drugs. In his book, Johnson, who has covered cycling as a writer and photographer since the 1980s, explores the complex relationships that underlie elite sports culture.
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Date: 7/18/2016
In his new book, Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals, author Joel Dimsdale draws on decades of experience as a psychiatrist and the dramatic advances within psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience since the Nuremberg Trials to take a fresh look at four Nazi war criminals: Robert Ley, Hermann Goring, Julius Streicher and Rudolf Hess. Dimsdale, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, is presented by the UC San Diego Library.
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Date: 4/19/2016
Writer and artist Charlotte Salomon, the daughter of a highly cultivated Jewish family in Berlin, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered at the age of 26. In her final work "Life? or Theatre?" Salomon envisioned the circumstances surrounding the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. Darcy C. Buerkle, an Associate Professor of History at Smith College, explores Salomon's tragic life as she discusses her remarkable book, "Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide," as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop sponsored by UC San Diego.
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Date: 1/4/2016
Investigative journalist Bob Woodward and former White House aide Alex Butterfield join Michael Bernstein for a conversation about Butterfield's decision to reveal the existence of tape recordings that eventually led to Richard Nixon's resignation from the presidency.
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Date: 1/1/2016
A riveting Q&A session with Bob Woodward and Alex Butterfield as the reporter and source share even more details about the personality and character of Richard Nixon. Recorded on 12/04/2015.
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Date: 11/23/2015
An evening of conversation and celebration at the close of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Jonas Salk featuring his sons Jonathan and Peter, author Mary Walshok and Gary Robbins, science editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. The panel reflects on how Jonas Salk, his wife Francoise Gilot and his Institute shaped San Diego and its fledgling biomedical community; the interplay between Salk and other leaders in building the civic infrastructure, and other remembrances from the Salk brothers about their father's discovery of a vaccine for polio.
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Date: 1/16/2015
Dr. Seuss was well known for his children's books, but how did he go about putting them together and where did his ideas come from? Lynda Claassen, director of the Special Collections & Archives at the UC San Diego Library, walks us through his process of notes and sketches for the popular Green Eggs & Ham.
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Date: 1/9/2015
Eminent California historian Kevin Starr traces the emergence of San Diego's role in the distinctly Southern California aesthetic of "Mediterranean-ism," as seen in the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park.
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Date: 12/8/2014
Award-winning historian Wendy Lower discusses the lives and experience of German women in the Nazi killing fields. Her study chillingly debunks the age-old myth of the German woman as mother and breeder, removed from the big world of politics and war. The women Lower labels "furies" humiliated their victims, plundered their goods, and often killed them, and like many of their male counterparts, they got away with murder. Lower is the John K. Roth professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and has published widely on the Shoah in Eastern Europe. She is presented here as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Recorded on 11/13/2014.
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Date: 10/6/2014
Internationally recognized biographer Noel Riley Fitch offers some food for thought in "Sharing Julia Child's Appetite for Life," the title of her keynote address to the annual Dinner at the Library at UC San Diego. Fitch gives a revealing look into how Child's passion for French cuisine made her a culinary icon to generations of Americans. Fitch is the only biographer exclusively authorized by Julia Child; her other subjects include fellow expatriates to Paris Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach and Anais Nin.
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Date: 7/18/2014
A love of learning and teaching about pirates inspired UC San Diego's Mark Hanna to tap the world-renowned Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages, housed in Special Collections & Archives at the UC San Diego Library, to bring history to life in his mobile classroom. Hanna's students discover the authentic Golden Age of Piracy by reading the Hill Collection log books and other original documents, touring the Real Pirates! exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and sailing on the Californian at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. Here Be Pirates: The First Citizen Scientists is presented by the UC San Diego Library Channel.
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Date: 4/7/2014
The UC San Diego Library Channel presents a talk by William Lanouette, author of "Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard." Lanouette explains how Szilard's fear of German dominance of nuclear research in the 1930's inspired the Manhattan Project, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb used by the United States in World War II. Szilard could see its potential for mass destruction in the wrong hands and became a strong advocate for nuclear arms control and disarmament. Szilard spent his final days as a founding member of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego.
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Date: 1/10/2014
UC San Diego sociologist Amy Binder explains two prevalent conservative styles that she and her co-author Kate Wood found on today's college campuses. At "Western Public," students often engaged in a provocative style, looking to poke fun and enrage liberals, whereas at "Eastern Elite," conservative students embraced a more civil style, leading to friendlier interactions with other students who disagreed with them. The authors argue that these styles emerge from the cultural and organizational features of each campus.
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Date: 11/29/2013
Anne Willan, the founder of La Varenne Cooking School, and co-author Amy Friedman share stories, pictures and secret ingredients to a life well-lived as they discuss Willan's autobiography, "One Souffle at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France." This event is sponsored by the UC San Diego Library. Recorded on 11/07/2013.
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Date: 10/14/2013
Renowned author and Middlebury College Professor Jay Parini charms his dinner audience with selections from his "Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America." From "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Walden," through "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "The Feminine Mystique," Parini offers a compelling narrative on the evolution of American culture. Parini was the keynote speaker at the UC San Diego Library's "Dinner in the Library," which takes place annually in Geisel Library.
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Date: 9/6/2013
Seth Lerer discusses his moving memoir, "Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love and Theater," a record of the tempestuous relationship between Lerer and his father which is later echoed in Lerer's relationship with his own son. The narrative is framed by elements of literature and performance, with particular reference to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and its evocation of father as magician.
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Date: 11/18/2011
Authors and UC San Diego political scientists Steve Erie and Vlad Kogan present a compelling narrative on how San Diego leaders have consistently mismanaged city finances since the 1978 passage of Prop 13. They continue with a bleak assessment on whether the city will ever be able to provide sufficient, equitable services throughout its economically diverse neighborhoods.
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Date: 4/12/2007
An enjoyable look at Dr. Seuss' artwork and words on display at the UCSD Geisel Library.
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Date: 1/15/2007
UCSD political scientist Steve Erie shatters the movie myth about how the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California supposedly stole water rights from the Owens Valley to irrigate Los Angeles and instead holds up the MWD as a model for responsible water management and environmental sustainability.
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