The Commonwealth June/July 2016

ASHTON CARTER page 46

CORY BOOKER page 7

GLORIA DUFFY page 54

$5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

PATAGONIA EXPEDITION

Join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. Jared Diamond on a 13-day sea and land adventure. Sail four nights aboard the M/V Stella Australis. Experience Glaciers National Park, Torres del Paine National Park, and the Remota Lodge. Horseback ride, hike, bird watch, kayak past glaciers or join a wildlife photographic safari.

Detailed brochure at commonwealthclub.org/travel | (415) 597-6720 | travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40

Inside T H E CO M M O N W E A LT H J U N E / J U LY 2016

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EDITOR’S DESK

Now you can get the Club’s podcasts on Google Play

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JOHN KASICH The Ohio lesson for America at large The governor’s political RX.

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THE COMMONS

Book Awards, Obama dines, Climate One pedal power, and Frances McDormand and Conleth Hill.

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THE CAMPAIGN COMES TO CALIFORNIA

Week to Week panel.

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UNITING THE STATES Cory Booker with Gavin Newsom The story behind the New Jersey Senator

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Photo by Nina Subin

SOMINI SENGUPTA The people and politics of the new India Millennials changing India.

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INSIGHT

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy President and CEO

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U.S. DEFENSE SECRETARY ASHTON CARTER SPEAKS In conversation with Gloria C. Duffy National security priorities.

On the Cover

Sociology professor, author, political analyst, and Baptist minister Michael Eric Dyson talk s race, politics, President Obama, Clinton, and more, starting on page 11.

Photo by Nina Subin

EVENTS Program Information 17 Language Classes 17 Two Month Calendar 18 Program Listings 20

Photo by Ed Ritger

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THE POLITICS OF RACE Michael Eric Dyson

What should Obama be saying to white audiences?

Who’s throwing whom under the bus? And more.

Photo by Ed Ritger

My only plea is, if you know you can’t say it to white folk, don’t say it to black folk.

M I C H A E L E R I C DYS O N

V O LU M E 110, NO. 04

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EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question and answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub.org/media, podcasts on Google Play and Apple iTunes, or contact Club offices to buy a compact disc.

Printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink.

Copyright © 2016 The Commonwealth Club of California.

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Image by Yagraph

You Can Google Play with Us

O

N LY T W O D AY S after Google opened up its music-streaming service Google Play to podcasts, The Commonwealth Club was up and running, becoming part of the first group of podcasters to join that popular online service.

For many years, people have subscribed to our podcasts on iTunes. But in the past couple years, our podcasts have really taken off, with annual downloads increasing from about 1 million to 1.5 million; and the most recent numbers put us closer to 2 million.

Some people say no one’s interested in hour-long talks anymore, but our podcasts suggest otherwise. We send a lot of programs to our podcast subscribers each month, and they just continue to grow in popularity.

That might be because in a world with lots of sound bites and micro-blogging, we have in-depth explorations of topics.

In the iTunes store or in Google Play’s Music section, search for commonwealth club. Whether you use iTunes, Google Play or both, you can either subscribe to our regular podcast feed or download and listen to individual Club programs. And on either service, our podcasts are free for everyone. politics takes center stage this issue.

Heading into the June 7 California primary, for a while it looked like the Golden State

would play a role in selecting at least one of the parties’ presidential nominees. Then a decisive round of primaries led Republicans Ted Cruz and John Kasich to drop their bids, and though Democrat Bernie Sanders remains in the race (as of this writing), the math, as they say, is now very much against him.

So does it matter if you vote in June?

I happen to think it always matters. The city supervisor who writes zoning laws or the state legislator who influences business taxes or the district attorney who implements crime policy—these are all important positions that can directly affect you. That doesn’t even include the referenda that Californians love so much.

This issue, Professor Michael Eric Dyson both criticizes and praises President Obama, Ohio Governor John Kasich talks about what has made him such a popular governor (and we include an exchange he had with a Club member on gay rights that hit the news cycle and went viral), Cory Booker talks with Gavin Newsom, Week to Week panelists preview the primary, Somini Sengupta explains Indian politics, and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter tells how the Pentagon carries out the security plans set by our nation’s elected leaders.

Read on—or find these programs in your podcast feed.

JOHN ZIPPERER V P, M E D I A & E D I TO R I A L

TA L K O F T H E C LU B

The Commons

Climate Ride 2016 Greg Dalton pedals for the environment

Book Awards Supersized

Climate One, the Club’s energy and environmental initiative, is nearly nine years old, and it’s notching up another first.

Climate One founder and Director Greg Dalton pulled together a team of cyclists to participate in the California North Coast Climate Ride in late May. The 330-mile route will take the cyclists from Fortuna to San Francisco, all for the cause of raising funds to support organizations working to combat and deal with climate change. This year, for the first time, Climate One is a recipient of this valuable support. Go Greg!

Greater recognition, new book club

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OR 85 YEARS, the Club has recognized the best new books in the state with the California Book Awards . Winners have included John Steinbeck, Amy Tan, and other major (and many upand-coming) authors. Now the awards are about to go to the next level.

A long-time member of the California Book Awards jury, Dr. Martha Heasley Cox, passed away in September and left an endowment to the Club of more than $1 million, the income from which will allow a significantly increased cash prize to the award winners. This will raise the importance and profile of the California Book Awards as a literary prize, and by doing so will highlight the importance of great writing, reading and appreciation of literature. “We are deeply grateful to Martha Cox, for her dedication to the Club, to the jury, and to the teaching and appreciation of great literature,” said Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy. “And we are grateful to the other donors, including Bank of the West, which make it possible for the Club to administer the awards every year, costs the Cox funds do not cover.”

That’s not all. The Club is launching a new book discussion group based on the books and authors celebrated in our book awards. The first meeting of this new member-led forum will take place June 6 and will focus on Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women.

And just one week later, on June 13, The 85th Annual California Book Awards ceremony will take place.

Official White House Photo: Pete Souza

The President Took Our Seats Club travelers to Cuba set the trend When President Barack Obama made his historic visit to Cuba in late March (see Talk of the Club, The Commonwealth, April/May 2016), he and his family had their first dinner at a restaurant that was familiar to the Club’s travelers: San Cristobal Paladar.

The family-owned restaurant, located in Central Havana, was visited by the Obamas just days after a group of Club travelers stopped there and met with owner-chef Carlos Cristóbal Márquez Valdés. Even then, our sources tell us, Carlos was excited about the American president’s visit. We aren’t sure if he already knew he would host the First Family, but our travelers know San Cristobal is a place for good food and service.

IN THE NEWS VIRAL TALK You might remember a Commonwealth Club campaign from earlier this century in which Club members talked about how they had wanted to ask some notable person about an important topic; the ad concludes with them saying, “So I did.” That campaign was very visible here in San Francisco, and it even spawned some snarky parodies.

At the end of April, the truth of that message was visible when Ohio Governor and thencandidate for the White House John Kasich came to The Commonwealth Club for a town hall. The event, which quickly sold out, included discussions of economics, faith, r e g u l a t i o n , w o m e n’s health, and much more.

But one question went viral. Commonwealth Club member Kelly Bryan wanted to ask if the conservative Ohio governor believed people are born gay. So he did.

The two then proceeded to have a spirited backand-forth.

Our YouTube clip of that nearly seven-minute exchange very quickly was viewed more than 13,000 times. Our Facebook post about it was seen by more than 16,000 people.

See page 36 and see for yourself.

J U N E/J U LY 2016

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THE BIG PICTURE

“Olive Kitteridge”’s Frances McDormand (left) pauses for a moment with “Game of Thrones”’s Conleth Hill before their Commonwealth Club program in February.

The two were in town co-starring in a Berkeley Rep production of Macbeth.

Photo by Ed Ritger.

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UNITING THE STATES

New Jersey’s junior U.S. senator discusses what drives him—from his mother’s advice to the urgent issue of mass incarceration.

J U N E/J U LY 2016

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Cory Booker, U.S. senator from New Jersey, in conversation with Gavin Newsom, California lieutenant governor. From Inforum’s “Senator Cory Booker: United” on February 19, 2016, a Good Lit program underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Photos by Ed Ritger.

Becoming Cory GAVIN NEWSOM: All right, my first question. I read your book— CORY BOOKER: I’m blown away that you actually read the book.

NEWSOM: I know, a politician that actually reads.

[Laughter.] But apparently, you’re a politician that writes.

What struck me about this book, the reason I really liked it, [was that] it wasn’t about Washington D.C. It’s not a book about who’s to blame. You’re not sitting around finger-pointing. It’s a book about the dialectic between you and a community of people making a big difference, people with formal authority, people mostly with moral authority. People that stood tall day in and day out, that are these unsung heroes that exist from a composite perspective everywhere, all across this country.

You connect it with your own journey in a very personal and pointed and, I would argue, passionate way. But I want to talk to you about some of those characters. And I wanna start appropriately with your mother. She said something to you when you were relatively young that struck a chord

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

and ignited in your mind dreams, you said. That was a question she wanted you to ask and answer. And that question was what?

BOOKER: Just to give one more framing for it: Our twenties are a very difficult decade, I think, because you just have a lot of uncertainty. You don’t know what you’re going to do, what your job’s going to be, where you’re going to live, who you’re going to marry. I had this moment of having my life really laid out for me from the time I was in grade school. Being a very ambitious guy, always having goals set for myself, a clarity of purpose in school and sports, and everything laid out for me until I got to the last possible degree I could do.

My father would joke, “Boy, you got more degrees than the month of July but you ain’t hot. Get a job.” [Laughter.]

“When are you gonna actually do something?” So I was suddenly second-guessing myself. And I felt this calling to do great things and make contributions, but I became very afraid because I didn’t know what to do.

NEWSOM: Was this your time in law school?

BOOKER: Yeah, I was in law school and I couldn’t find another degree to do. So my mom was annoying me, as I think mothers are often developed—at mother training school—to either embarrass or annoy their children.

I was sitting with my mother and she had been constantly asking me, or at least it seemed like she was constantly asking me, what am I going to do after law

At San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, Senator Cory Booker (left) talks politics with another Democratic elected official, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom.

school. One time she confronted me and I just sort of blew her off and said, “Mom, I don’t really care what I do. I just want to be of service to people in whatever form that takes,” and sort of just whined to her. Then she just got very quiet, and then she laid into me with a speech I hadn’t heard before.

She just said this amazing speech to me, leading with the question, “Are you saying these things out of fear, or are you saying these things out of faith?” And she set up this sort of dialectic between what is fear and what is faith.

Then she led that into a powerful question that sort of changed my thinking, which was, “What would you do if you could not fail?”

And she says, “Why not live life that way? And if you fail, you will be better off.” She ended up telling me the story from the Bible of the talents, where three men were given monetary amounts from a master who left and came back. Two guys went out on the market, risked it all, had some success. The other guy, thinking he was doing the responsible thing, buried his talent, sat on it. The master came back and praised the two that risked and then rebuked the one that didn’t. This is one of the famous Bible quotes where God says, “Well done, my good and faithful servant” to the people who went out and risked what they had been given, and then rebuked and called the [third] man wicked.

My mom was just saying, “You were given blessings

like we all are as Americans,” and I don’t care what your background is, just in terms of the global comparison, we’re given so many gifts. My mom was just saying, “How can you greet this with fear and not faith?”

NEWSOM: You ran against an incumbent mayor, who allegedly or quite literally was tapping your phones, was sending folks out to put parking tickets on your car.

Were threatening members of your staff. He called you a Republican who took money from the KKK, among many other things that I can’t talk about though you write about.

BOOKER: Yes. But you mention a lot of other slurs in there of other ethnic groups and the like. And I joke, I’m a uniter. I mean if I’m bringing all those people together to support me, there must be something going on there.

[Laughter.]

Whatever you think of him, he was one of the more amazing political characters in our country at the time.

Friends of presidents, leaders around the country. He was Mr. New Jersey for delivering a Democratic base, and when I ran against him, he had the governor against me and pulled in every favor he had to beat me in 2002.

In the Senate BOOKER: It was on a very auspicious day that I got sworn in, when I began my Senate career—on Halloween.

[Laughter.] So I swear my oath, and then senators come J U N E/J U LY 2016

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Since 1980, the federal prison population has gone up 800 percent, the overall prison population [is up] 500 percent. over and shake your hand. I ran a special election and then swooped into the Senate and was sworn in. [This one other senator] had been in days if not weeks before slamming me. He was the only senator who came in to campaign against me. And then I’m on the floor and I see him walking over to me and I’m like, “Yeah, come over here.” [Laughter.] And then not because he had campaigned against me, but because I had heard him speaking about an issue that’s close to your heart and my heart­­—he had been talking about criminal justice reform.

It was Rand Paul.

And it was our first policy conversation; it was about drug policy reform. For me, it was this urgency, because when I was a mayor, I was still dealing with horrible violent crime.

It’s like a cancer on the soul of our country that we have a criminal justice system in the land of the free where we only have 5 percent of the globe’s population, but one out of every four imprisoned people on the planet Earth is here in America.

It’s being fought in inner cities, and our jails are full of mentally ill, of poor people, of addicted people, of people of color. So much so there’s no difference in this country between Latinos, blacks and whites for using drugs; we’re all the same rate of drug usage. There’s a little bit higher rate for young white men for selling drugs, but if you’re black, you’re gonna get arrested for drug use or sales about 3.7 times more likely. And when you do get arrested for the same crime, if you’re black you’ll get about a 20-percent

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

longer sentence.

I had watched this cancer eat at the soul of our country, draining our national treasury while we were disinvesting in public universities and high speed rail. But the one area we were dominating the globe in infrastructure investment was building a new prison in the United States, about one every 12 days.

We’re this weird country where we say innocent until proven guilty. But in most states in America, just by having an arrest record you can be legally discriminated against even if you’ve been proven innocent, you can be legally discriminated against in the workplace, in housing and the like. But even if you have been arrested for a non-violent drug offense for doing things the last two presidents admitted to doing, you can’t get a job, you can’t get food stamps, can’t get a Pell Grant, can’t get business licenses.

So we wonder why then we put people on a course to do more crime—75-percent recidivism rates.

NEWSOM: You made the point about Rand Paul, but it’s also interesting, people may not know this, some I imagine do, but the Koch Brothers?

BOOKER: Yep. NEWSOM: Grover Norquist.

BOOKER: Yep. Newt Gingrich.

NEWSOM: Senator Mike Lee. BOOKER: Yes. NEWSOM: Many other Republicans and libertarians agree with you, and have been working with you on criminal justice reform, drug policy reform, and reforming our prison system.

BOOKER: Whatever your bent—if you’re Christian evangelical, this violates the biblical precepts in so many ways. If you are libertarian, this is government stealing the liberty of people unnecessarily, in ways that’ve never before really been seen in the modern world. If you are a fiscal conservative—as I’ve said before—government bureaucracy’s exploded. Since 1980, the federal prison population has gone up 800 percent, the overall prison population, 500 percent.

And you all know this in California and have done some courageous things in this state in ending “three strikes.” In fact most states that are doing things like that, lowering their prison population, surprise, surprise, crime is going down as well.

So this is something that, whatever your political background, you should be in favor of.

I’ve had a certain way of doing things in the Senate where I’ve really worked across the aisle, bipartisan. Most of my bills are in partnership with Republicans, finding common ground. But this is the kind of thing [with which] there’s such an urgency that should this begin to fail, I’m going to be one of the loudest, angriest senators that has ever been witnessed, I think.

NEWSOM: I like to hear that. So we move from love to anger.

BOOKER: They’re consistent, they’re consistent.

THE POLITICS OF RACE

Michael Eric Dyson talks about the impact of race on the nation’s politics and its people, and he explains why he took President Obama to task for publicly reprimanding some African-Americans.

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Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times columnist, Georgetown University sociology professor and author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America; with moderator Judge LaDoris Cordell (ret), chair of the Santa Clara County Jail Commission. From the March 8, 2016, program“The Politics of Race.”

LADORIS CORDELL: In 2006, there was a book series where scholars and writers were invited to write about the seven deadly sins. Your deadly sin was pride. You wrote about the importance of books in your life when you were “an 18-year-old, laid-off from work, welfare-receiving, teen father-to-be.” And you wrote of how important public libraries were in your life when you were growing up.

You wrote, “but it was nonfiction writers that made me even hungrier to do what they did. And it is the example of nonfiction writers, whose art and craft have inspired me in a sense of excellence, that, although rarely attained in my work, fills me with pride when I hit the mark.”

Obama was denied legitimacy of being the father of the nation because he can’t even be seen as a son of this democratic experiment.

So my first question to you is, with the book Black Presidency, your 18th book, have you hit the mark?

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: [Laughter.] I’ve attempted to be as clear, and as lucid, and as eloquent, as possible. The writers who inspired me—James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Tony Morrison, within the canon of African-American literature—continue to inspire me and pull me forth. I am forever in search of the better way to say it, to speak it, to talk it, and to write it.

I had the opportunity earlier today to interview Kobe Bryant for 25 minutes, because I’m writing a cover story on him for Slam magazine as he retires. To talk to a figure who is obsessed, as Kobe Bryant is, with excellence, with trying to be better each time out, with five championship rings and not satisfied, still hungry, it always reminds me of when I was at Princeton, in graduate school, and I saw Wynton Marsalis perform at the McCarter theater there, and he had just seen Mike Tyson demolish some unlucky soul.

He said, “When I saw Tyson do what he did, it’d make me wanna practice my horn more.” [Laughter.]

So when I see other examples of excellence, it makes me want to practice my horn more. To find the rhythm, the ability to tell a story, or to write a narrative that is better than when I did it before.

So no, I didn’t hit that mark, though I hope I came closer. And when you are surrounded with such powerful

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examples of the elegance, the eloquence, the incredible insight that you’re striving for, it continues to fuel and feed that hunger.

CORDELL: Black men got the vote in 1870 with the 15th amendment, before women of any color got the vote­—that was in 1920 with the 19th amendment. So we have a black president; we’ve never had a women of any color elected president. So does this mean that in America sexism is far more pernicious than is racism?

DYSON: I see why you are a famous judge. [Laughter.]

You know that’s a tough question. I’m reminded of my very dear friend, the late, great Dr. Barbara Christian, who was a professor at Berkeley and one of the most renowned theorists that we’ve produced in African American culture.

As a black woman, she said, we must resist the seduction of oppression derbies—mine’s worse than yours, mine has been more horrible. Because on the one hand, we could obviously argue if black men got the vote before white women, what position did it place those black men in, in the broader culture in society, right? So that their legal standing, their political pedigree, did not, in any sense, obviate or alleviate both the political suppression that so many other African American people endured, nor did it elevate their position permanently beyond the precincts of prejudice and the vile bigotry that had prevailed in the culture. White women who could not vote yet forged connections with white men who continue to rule and prevail in American society, as partners with white men, forging, even from a subordinate position, an extraordinary influence over the broader culture even as they were simultaneously forced into this inferior position. So, in one sense, even though black men had more standing in public spaces, that testifies to the grand vision of patriarchy.

But in patriarchy, the greatest threat to one male is another male, right? So in one sense patriarchy’s elevation of black men made them more obvious as victims and targets.

Now, at the same time, black women of all [members] in the broader sense of the American society were more victimized than any. They were both black and female at a time when white women enjoyed elevated status. Now we know the politics of respect, where respect was used to keep women in their place. So we elevate you on a pedestal, and should you fall off of that pedestal, we will retroactively and anachronistically slut shame you.

All right, Kim Kardashian wasn’t the first. So in that sense, black women were doubly demonized because black women didn’t even have the elevating status up on a pedestal of white womanhood, even though that subordinated them in the political economy of American society and neither did they enjoy the patriarchal fruits that black men enjoy, relatively speaking.

So black women were doubly indemnified, so to speak, and had the vicious double whammy of gender and race, and we can add other elements of class, region and the poverty that black women and children are so viciously subject to. So I think that sexism is, however, a very powerful force,

and when you put it in the terms you have—and when I look at what has happened to President Barack Obama on his thin frame and his powerful shoulders rests the experimentation in the democratic energy that has come to grips with the relegation of blackness to the margins, and now it is charged to the center.

He has been in so many ways attacked, assaulted viciously, undermined; a Congress that has obfuscated and obstructed and refused to acknowledge his legitimacy so often as a political figure and even as the president, because presidents are substitute fathers, policas patronus, if you will.

The fathers of the nation, some are cheating daddies like, let’s just say, cheating in the sense of refusing to give democracy its just due, like a Richard Nixon or big southern daddies like LBJ or loving paternal figures like FDR—you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Or Slick Willy daddies, like Bill Clinton.

Obama was denied legitimacy of being the father of the nation because he can’t even be seen as a son of this democratic experiment. But I must hasten to add, the way in which sexism has marked the body of Hillary is extraordinarily vicious and has been mostly unremarked on. So that John Boehner can cry—the former political figure speaker of the House—and he is celebrated as an example of masculinity coming to grips with its vulnerable side. Hillary Clinton cries—”There’s no crying in baseball.

What are you doing?”—she’s demonized, and she is constantly subjected to a double standard that is utterly and depressingly evident to those of us who are sensitive to it.

So for me, when I see Hillary Clinton having won so many of the states, it’s a remarkable testimony to her durability, to her invincibility, and to her determination to persist even in the face of such obvious odds to claim her rightful place as I think the next president of the United States of America.

CORDELL: So let’s talk about President Obama. You write [that] Obama seems to feel he cannot hold white folks’ feet to the fire even as he warms up to criticizing black folk explicitly. You went on to call him “reprimander in chief.”

What is wrong with the occasional reprimand? Aren’t his reprimands coming from a place of love and compassion?

DYSON: This is the danger with people who actually read your book. [Laughter.] Look, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional reprimand. It’s a tradition that is rife in African-American culture. Every leader worth his or her salt has done so—chided black people into greater consciousness, cajoled them, implored them to do better.

But it was a “both/and,” not an “either/or.” They also chided white America. They also held white America to account. Many of the things that Barack Obama said are tired, old rehashes of what Jesse Jackson said 40 and 50 years ago. It takes more than a human being; if you want to be a man, you’ve got to not just have a baby, you’ve got to rear that baby.

So Obama ain’t saying nothing new. The fact that it sounds new, the fact that he would represent it as new,

the fact that he would take advantage of and exploit the ignorance of many white Americans to a vibrant tradition of relatively speaking conservative discourse, and rhetoric tethered to what has been called by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham “the politics of respectability,” that’s part-andparcel, woof-and-warp of the very fabric and structure of African American culture. Booker T. Washington. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an advice column in Ebony magazine, for God’s sake. So he was telling folk what they should be doing and not be doing, and do this and do that, both the existential and the intimate aspect of blackness and the decorum that people should have, as well as fighting the broader forces of white supremacy.

The president has been great on the reprimand and short-sighted and late on the equal demand of the weight of the broader society, especially white America, to treat black people with respect. When you do the one without the other, it looks as if you’re saying only black people are deserving of a reprimand, only black people have certain pathologies that must be uprooted, and only black people must be held to account in public. So the problem with him reprimanding black people is that white folk go, “Well, I felt guilty about saying these things. But if the president is saying them, then they must be true.” Even white liberal folk say, “I thought it was some of the structural stuff. But he doesn’t talk too much about that; he talks about getting yourself together, and doing your own personal thing and not making excuses and not getting anything you don’t deserve. So hey, maybe I should not do the structural stuff, and instead focus on the personal stuff. And, hey, it’s up to black people themselves.”

That’s dangerous; it is not only mendacious, it’s not only wrong, it is dangerous, because it misrepresents the truth, the truth that he knows too well. All too well, because of the exceeding eloquence of his own memoir, one of the greatest written in the history of black letters.

Up from Slavery by Booker T Washington, Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown. Makes Me Wanna Holler

by Nathan McCall, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and now Dreams from My Father. Black men grappling with the existential anxieties and miseries, and the nervous tics that are the peculiar manifestation of black struggle in public and in private, with what it means to be a human being.

So with all that rich heritage, why reduce the complexity of that quest for a moral narrative of both self-respect and self-criticism to the fact that “Aha, you’re messing up.

Therefore I have to tell you what you’re doing before white Americans, and let me end by saying this, and when you do that and don’t hold white folk accountable.”

Now we know we can’t hold white folk accountable, that’s the nature of the deal, right? Because he tried out here in San Francisco at a tony fundraiser when he was running the first time. He said, what he thought was off the record, [laughter] the white folk in certain Midwest parts, they be getting bitter, cling to their guns and their religion. White folk weren’t taking that at all; that went over like a brick J U N E/J U LY 2016

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White anger is real. S discomfort with what to be an economy that cloud. White America said, “No you can’t do that.” And Obama has never since stepped to that podium and said what he knows to be true.

White America is equally involved in a project of struggling with their own definitions of identity and what it means to be American. When he saw the Confederate flag, when he knows that there are pockets of white people who are bigoted beyond belief, because they express their spleen and venom toward him. But he will never say that because he doesn’t have the opportunity.

My only plea is then, if you know you can’t say it to white folk, don’t say it to black folk. Because when you say it to black folk and not white folk, you make it look like only the black folk are deserving of it. So you talk about Kanye but you ain’t got nothing to say about Miley Cyrus. So you jump on one side but not the other, and yes I think that’s problematic. Not the impulse to reprimand, not the impulse to hold accountable, not the impulse to chat.

I’m an ordained Baptist minister, been one for 35 years, I preach on most Sundays. You go to any black church, you hear what Obama said plentifully, and he knows that, and he knows black folk wouldn’t argue with him against that.

CORDELL: [You have] described the anger of the tea party folks and their ilk, who see in our president, and I quote you, “his utter otherness, his fatal foreignness, and his essential and fundamental un-Americanness.” You also wrote Obama would never get to the White House except as a visitor if he came off as too angry, or for that matter if he appeared angry at all. You wrote it is okay to be white and angry, it is not okay to be black and angry. So talk to us about the difference between black and white anger, and are you angry?

DYSON: I ain’t mad at you. [Laughter.] Donald Trump [said] “I could go into the middle of the street and say I’m gonna shoot somebody, and I could still get votes.” Dude, if Obama dreamed he could say that he better wake up and apologize. He’s the president, and Donald Trump is

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running to become the nominee of his party.

White anger is real. White brothers and sisters here know that, people who have been victims of white anger know that. White anger takes multiple forms and we see among all of these exit polls and in some of these primaries where white Americans are extremely angry in certain regions but not just there in the South, across America. Some of it is legitimate disquiet and discomfort, discomfort with what many people perceive to be an economy that didn’t work for them.

Though I would argue that in general, middle-class white Americans ought to thank Obama more than anybody else, because they done got the hook-up big right. I mean the unemployment is 4.9 percent, Jiminy Cricket! Black people’s unemployment continues to be somewhere around 8 percent; at its height 14.3 percent. Latino unemployment hovered around 8, 9, 10, 11 sometimes at its height 11.5, 12 percent. So it’s certainly down now, but for the majority of Americans who have benefited from the extraordinary job creation of the Obama administration, it does make one wonder why there would be such vast reaches of anger among the white [voters]. So that white anger is real and sometimes it’s the unconscious bias and resentment of a black man being in charge.

We don’t wanna say it that way but for real, aren’t there multi-evidential factors that must be taken into account?

What you reductionistically assert that it’s just because he’s black, well, he’s the only president in the history of this nation not to have the debt ceiling automatically raised, Democratic or Republican, all right? Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Bush. All of them, without question, because the debt ceiling is about the bill you already got. That’s your American Express coming due.

You done already put the stuff on the card.

Many presidents have been hated, have been treated with extraordinary disrespect, but there’s an overlay even with Obama that is a racially tinged one. Here you are

Some of it is legitimate many people perceive t didn’t work for them. in a joint meeting of Congress, and a congressman from South Carolina calls you a liar in public. Here you are on the White House lawn trying to give a press conference, and you are interrupted by a conservative white journalist.

Here you are on the tarmac in Arizona, and white female governor—white female governor, because there are many more female senators and governors than there are black ones, so if women started from behind, they done caught up and surpassed, collectively speaking, African-American constituencies—so this white female governor puts her finger in Obama’s face, treating him as if he were her little boy.

All the nastiness and the vitriol; the death threats that are unimaginable, much more than any other president has endured; so when you put all that stuff together—and calling him a cipher and a simian; and comparing him to anything but a human being; and the birther element that denied his legitimacy, either as a citizen and in some cases for some people as a human being; conservative brothers and sisters say they stand against abortion, but they wanted to retroactively abort Obama, and uncreate him, unmake him, unbirth him. And the leading figure of the birther movement is now the leading figure for the Republican nomination to be president. If that don’t tell you everything you need to know, you don’t really wanna know. I think that there are some deep and profound gashes in the body politic that have been delivered as a result of the ruinous reach of race.

CORDELL: You write this about Bill Clinton: “If throwing friends under the bus were an Olympic sport, Clinton might win the gold medal for a triathlon of black dissing that also included Jesse Jackson, Joycelyn Elders, and Lani Guinier.”

Has President Obama thrown any black folks under the bus? And I’m thinking of Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod.

CORDELL: She said it. That’s a brilliant, brilliant question, really. I’ve never been asked that question. That’s a powerful analysis and yes, he has, of course, he has. All presidents

do. Tony Morrison said that America, in part, is built on the backs of blacks.

Even recently arriving immigrants know that if they dis the lowest rung on the totem pole, if they dis blackness more broadly, that’s a way of forging connection with other Americans to become more American. Even as immigrants themselves, especially from Central and South America, are being dissed and profoundly mistreated with various forms of social injustice, and political marginalization.

So yeah, you’ve named two of them. I mean Shirley Sherrod didn’t even get a chance. She just got straight up dissed. Van Jones with the green jobs and the like, not much of a chance. Jeremiah Wright, not much of a chance.

And maybe Bill Clinton and Barack Obama share Jesse Jackson in common.

But Joe Lieberman did worse than that. He joined the other side, and then ran against the president—that is, by standing with his very dear friend John McCain. And what is the first thing Obama said when he was elected and Joe Lieberman was going back to the Senate? “Do not punish him!” Because Obama is gracious and grand, and he wanted to be post-partisan, but he had no such words to say, “Let me bring Jesse Jackson in from the cold.” After all, we’ve collectively got on the coattails of this man for nearly 40 years, from King’s assassination darn near to Obama’s inauguration, 40 years in the wilderness....

As I’ve said before, I think Barack Obama is the Shaquille O’Neal of presidents. Right? Shaquille O’Neal won four rings—an amazing man, an amazingly gifted athlete. One of the most dominant athletes of all time, but he was a poor free-throw shooter. So when you tell the story of O’Neal, you can’t pretend he shot free-throws well.

He was a great figure. He was a great basketball player, he was. Obama’s a great president, he is; he will go down as one of the greatest ever. But he also did great things about race and didn’t throw black people under the bus—that’s not true, right?

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So at the end of the game the Hack-a-Shaq came in.

The vulnerability of Shaq was used against the team, and the vulnerability of race is used against the team of black people. When he went to the Congressional Black Caucus I was sitting there that night, I heard it with my own ears.

Obama says he was mad that black politicians would dare have the unabashed temerity to hold him accountable, even gently. [He] said to them, stop complaining.

Did he say that to Latinos? Of course he wouldn’t.

Did he say it to Jews? Jews, Poles, Italians, Lithuanians— no. Did he say this to environmentalists? Did he say this to LGBT? No. But he would say it to black folk. He said stop complaining. He said take off your bedroom slippers and put on your marching boots. To people, from when he was knee high to a tadpole, was having their skulls cracked—John Lewis, John Conyers was on the front line, and Maxine Waters a long-distance runner. Charles Rangel. I was there;

Secret ser vicemen heard [ Mi c h e l l e O b a m a ] s a y t o Obama, ‘Every now and again, take the black people’s side.’ they were stunned and insulted.

So yes, he has thrown black people under the bus. And he has done so for the purposes, A, because he honestly believed those kinds of conservative things; B, because it played well in the white population that was skeptical about him that might be won over; and C, it was the replay of a struggle he’s often had in his own mind and heart and soul and body, in his community and now against the backdrop of American political history and destiny, an argument about the right way to figure ourselves through the morass of black suffering and the structural impediments that prevent black flourishing, as well as the need to hold black people accountable and responsible.

All that stuff was going on. But there’s no question that he did his fair share of dissing as well.

CORDELL: Let’s just do a quick lightning round. I want you to imagine that each of the following black Americans has just become president of the United States. I want you to give each a grade, A to F, for how effective you believe each would be.

First up. Ben Carson.

DYSON: F-minus. [Laughter.] Genius as a surgeon, not so much as a politician. Known for separating twins, separate yourself from that craziness that you believe politically.

CORDELL: All right, next up, Al Sharpton.

DYSON: B-plus. Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Put a silhouette of Al Sharpton against George Washington. They’re the same dude. [Laughter.]

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Okay, A-minus for Al Sharpton, Al Sharpton is a throwback to an earlier era. Al Sharpton gets an A-minus in my book, and if I keep talking he might get an A. He gets an A-minus, because like Emerson he’s a self-rebegetting character.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and—in the hetero-patriarchial norms by which we judge certain varieties of black leadership—Martin Luther King Jr. died [and] Jessie Jackson emerged; Jessie did not die. So in order for Al Sharpton to emerge, he had to kill himself. He cut himself in half.

He lost, he’s not half the man he was before, but he’s better than he’s ever been. He’s more open, he’s more powerful and he gives an incredible insight into American democracy. He’s one that is beautiful. He said, “I was looking at Ray Charles singing one night, and he’s singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ and it occurred to me he’s singing about something he ain’t never seen.”

Because it was an act of faith, that is the faith that has animated us best as Americans. That’s a beautiful Ray Charles democracy, that we need to embrace.

CORDELL: All right, Michelle Obama.

DYSON: I think I’d have to give her an A. [Applause.]

A former secret serviceman wrote a book, and in that book he said that he loved Michelle Obama for two reasons.

First, because she was nice and loving to them. She touched them, she hugged them, she loved them. [Second], because she also chided Obama, “Hey, stop wasting these men’s time. You’re often making them late. They’ve got schedules, too.” They loved her for that. They didn’t like her because she dogged the Republicans, my girl.

And in the front seat, the white secret servicemen heard her in the back of the presidential limo say to Obama, “Every now and again, take the black people’s side.”

That’s a woman who understands the fact that she had to tell him is remarkable. The fact that she told him is edifying. I think she has grown to such a degree that people love her, and would respect her, and that her policies would probably be equally as appropriate as her husband’s in the long run [for] people who don’t love truth, but for those who embrace it, and who understand the beauty of democracy, I think that she would do an extraordinary job. And she is just not only a phenomenal woman, but a woman who’s dipped deep into the waters of her community while embracing the broader mainstream.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: There’s been a furious attempt to erase President Obama’s presidential legacy. Do you think that will succeed?

DYSON: No. Obama’s like the black Reagan. Twenty years from now when he’s, what 75—that’s frightening, he’s got 20 more years before he’s even 75, right?—20 years from now Obama will be seen as a juggernaut, as one of the greatest figures we’ve ever produced.

I mean if Ronald Reagan could go from what he was when he really was in there to where he is now, bro, Obama might be cosmic dictator by then.

Programs PROGRAM OVERVIEW

TICKETS

The Commonwealth Club organizes more than 450 events every year—on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs are held throughout the Bay Area.

Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all Commonwealth Club events— including “Members Free” events—require tickets.

Programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705.

Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. Select events include premium seating; premium refers to the first several rows of seating. Pricing is subject to change.

STANDARD PROGRAMS Typically one hour long, these speeches cover a variety of topics and are followed by a question and answer session. Most evening programs include a networking reception with wine.

PROGRAM SERIES CLIMATE ONE programs are a conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. To understand any of them, it helps to understand them all.

GOOD LIT features both established literary luminaries and up-and-coming writers in conversation.

Includes Food Lit. INFORUM is for and by people in their 20s to mid-30s, though events are open to people of all ages.

MEMBER–LED FORUMS (MLF) Volunteer-driven programs focus on particular fields. Most evening programs include a wine networking reception.

FORUM CHAIRS MEMBER-LED FORUMS CHAIR Dr. Carol Fleming carol.fleming@speechtraining.com ARTS Anne W. Smith asmith@ggu.edu Lynn Curtis lynnwcurtis@comcast.net

ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Ann Clark cbofcb@sbcglobal.net GROWNUPS John Milford Johnwmilford@gmail.com

ASIA–PACIFIC AFFAIRS Cynthia Miyashita cmiyashita@hotmail.com

HEALTH & MEDICINE William B. Grant wbgrant@infionline.net

BAY GOURMET Cathy Curtis ccurtis873@gmail

Patty James patty@pattyjames.com

BOOK DISCUSSION Carol Fleming carol.fleming@speechtraining.com BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Kevin O’Malley kevin@techtalkstudio.com

HUMANITIES George C. Hammond george@pythpress.com INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Norma Walden norwalden@aol.com

LGBT James Westly McGaughey jwes.mcgaughey@me.com MIDDLE EAST Celia Menczel celiamenczel@sbcglobal.net PERSONAL GROWTH Eric Siegel eric.siegel@comcast.net PSYCHOLOGY Patrick O’Reilly oreillyphd@hotmail.com SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Gerald Harris Gerald@artofquantumplanning.com Beau Fernald bfernald@gmail.com

Hear Club programs on more than 200 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States. For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs on select Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

KLIV (1590 AM) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

TuneIn.com Fridays at 4 p.m.

SF DEBATE Deborah Binder dbinder0912@gmail.com

FOREIGN LANGUAGE GROUPS

HARD OF HEARING?

Free for members Contact group leaders below for information

To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Valerie Castro seven working days before the event at vcastro@commonwealthclub.org.

FRENCH, Advanced Conversation Gary Lawrence garylawrence508@gmail.com

RADIO, VIDEO & PODCASTS

Watch Club programs on the California Channel every Saturday at 9 p.m., and on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley programs air on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at fora.tv and youtube.com/ commonwealthclub

GERMAN, Int./Adv. Conversation Sara Shahin sarah_biomexx@yahoo.com SPANISH, Advanced Conversation (fluent only) Luis Salvago-Toledo, lsalvago2@gmail.com

Subscribe to our free podcast service on iTunes and Google Play to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcast.

J U N E/J U LY 2016

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JUNE

T WO MONTHS CALENDAR

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

1

THURSDAY

2

6 p.m. A Small Indiscretion 7:45 p.m. How to Change the World: A User’s Guide

12 p.m. Managing the Impact of Technology in Our Lives 6 p.m. A Perfect Brew: Blue Bottle Coffee and Japan’s Culture

FRIDAY

3

SAT/SUN

4/5

10 p.m. The Unlikely Governor: From the Caves to the Federal Reserve

Wavy Gravy & Larry Brilliant June 1

6

7

12 p.m. Queensland, Australia Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk FM 6 p.m. Book Discussion: A Manual for Cleaning Women FM 6 p.m. Environment and Climate Action: Priority for Latinos

13 6 p.m. 85th Annual California Book Awards 6 p.m. The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence FM

8

9

7 p.m. Joshua Kendall: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama FM

14 12 p.m. San Francisco Giants’ Bruce Bochy: Insights on Baseball and Life 6 p.m. Can California Get to 100-percent Clean Power?

15

1:45 p.m. San Francisco Architecture Walk 6:30 p.m. Anja Manuel: The New Superpowers

16

7:10 p.m. Time to Choose

6:30 p.m. Dr. Lucy Kalanithi: When Breath Becomes Air

10

11/12

12 p.m. Jordan FM

17

9 a.m. Mineta National Transportation Policy Summit FE 12 p.m. A Rare Book Day in June

18/19

Dr. Lucy Kalanithi June 16

20

21

12 p.m. Senator Barbara Boxer: The Art of Tough 6 p.m. The Sake Revolution: Sequoia Sake FM 6:30 p.m. Socrates Café FM 6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour

12 p.m. End Childhood Hunger: What You Can Do to Help 12 p.m. William Kristol: Where Is the Republican Party Headed?

6:30 p.m. An Evening with Emma Cline, Author of “The Girls” 7 p.m. Mary Roach: The Curious Science of Humans at War

27

28

5:30 p.m. Middle East Forum Discussion FE 6:30 p.m. Public Health, Public Spaces FM

22

23

12 p.m. Wellness in the Schools 5:15 p.m. Sail into Retirement 7 p.m. Janna Levin: Black Hole Blues

29

24

25/26

12 p.m. How to Have a Holistic, Healthy, Happy Home: Solutions for Parents of Kids with Challenges 1:45 p.m. Russian Hill Walk 6 p.m. Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

30 12 p.m. The End of Business As Usual 6 p.m. Fearless Women Founders on Succeeding in Tech World

Senator Barbara Boxer June 20

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www.commonwealthclub.org/events

JULY MONDAY

4

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

5

THURSDAY

6

7

FRIDAY

SAT/SUN

1

2/3

8

9/10

15

16/17

1:45 p.m. Chinatown Walk

Mary Elizabeth Williams July 12

11 6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour

25

13

14

6 p.m., The Brazen Age 7:45 p.m. The Way of Wanderlust

6 p.m. Off the Grid: The Disruptive, Japan-inspired Food Truck Revolution 6:30 p.m. Finding Your Wine Personality

19 6:30 p.m. Redefining National Parks and Family Farms in a Changing Climate

26

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

18 6:30 p.m. Socrates Café FM 6:30 p.m. Wired’s Kevin Kelly: The Future of Tech FM

12 6 p.m. A Series of Catasrophes and Miracles 6:30 p.m. How Computers Influence Human Decisions 7 p.m. Hacking for Defense: Making the World a Safer Place

Kevin Kelly July 18

20 5:15 p.m. OMG: I Forgot to Plan for a Good Death!

21

22

23/24

28

29

30/31

5:15 p.m. Race and Relationships in Health Care: Basic Psychology I Didn’t Learn in Med School (But Wish I Had)

6 p.m. The University of California’s Role in Confronting Climate Change and Leading the World on a Sustainable Environmental Path FM

1:45 p.m. North Beach Walk

27

5:30 p.m. Middle East Forum Discussion FE 6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour

Denise Davis July 28

www.commonwealthclub.org/events

J U N E/J U LY 2016

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JUNE 1-6 WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1 1 WEDNESDAY, JUNE A Small Indiscretion Jan Ellison, Author, A Small Indiscretion

Jan Ellison’s debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015. A graduate of Stanford, Jan left college for a year at 19 to study French in Paris, work in an office in London, and try her hand at writing. Twenty years later, her notes from that year became the germ of her acclaimed debut. She will discuss that journey, along with the long and winding road — paved with rejection and revision — to publishing her first short story, which went on to win an O. Henry Prize.

Jan Ellison June 1

Wavy Gravy & Larry Brilliant June 1

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

Sherry Turkle June 2

How to Change the World: A User’s Guide Larry Brilliant, M.D., Chairman, Skoll Global Threats; Former Executive Director, Google.org Wavy Gravy, Entertainer, 60’s Icon, Activist, Philanthropist Zoë Elton, Director of Programming, Mill Valley Film Festival—Moderator

Robert Heller June 3

Hon. Annastacia Palaszczuk June 6

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to common wealthclub.org

20

Long-time friends, humanitarians and cultural heroes Larry Brilliant and Wavy Gravy share stories about what it takes to live your dreams, to live “ambitiously without ambition”—and to change the world. Their accomplishments, both individually and together, are extraordinary, manifesting the best of sixties idealism.

Best remembered for his role at Woodstock and as a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor, clown, entertainer and peace activist Wavy Gravy’s love for humanity transcends his hippie stereotype. He founded Camp Winnarainbow—a circus and performing arts camp for children—and co-founded the Seva Foundation with Larry Brilliant.

Dr. Larry Brilliant has spent his life finding solutions for humanity’s greatest ills, notably overseeing the eradication of the last cases of smallpox, saving millions from blindness, and building technologies for the future. Today, he is chairman of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, addressing

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

global threats such as climate change, pandemics and nuclear proliferation, and is a recent TED Prize winner.

NB • Location: Outdoor Art Club, One West Blithdale, Mill Valley • Time: 7 p.m. check-in with light hors d’oeuvres and cash bar, 7:45–9 p.m. program

THURSDAY, JUNE 2 2 THURSDAY, JUNE Managing the Impact of Technology in Our Lives Sherry Turkle, Ph.D, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society; MIT; Founder and Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self; Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Sherry Turkle, M.I.T. professor, researcher, consultant and author, will discuss the timely topic of digital influences on our personal lives, from how we relate to our family, friends, and lovers, plus how technology affects how we think, conduct our business, our productivity, creativity and innovation. The emphasis will be on the strategies to reintroduce conversation and put technology in a supporting, not default, mode of communication.

Referred to by many as the “Margaret Mead of digital culture,” Professor Turkle has 30 years of experience researching the psychology of people’s relationship with technology. She is the author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Personal Growth, Science & Technology • Program organizers: Sandy Hunt, Gerald Harris

A Perfect Brew: Blue Bottle Coffee and Japan’s Culture James Freeman, Founder and CEO, Blue Bottle Coffee; Author, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee

The Bay Area’s own Blue Bottle Coffee is known for its delicious coffee, clean, modern spaces and rapid expansion. Entering the Japanese market had been a longtime dream for Blue Bottle Coffee founder James Freeman, an enthusiastic fan of Japanese culture. Blue Bottle uses Japanese equipment and embraces the Japa-

nese tradition of kodawari, or pursuit of perfection in one’s craft. Freeman has made numerous visits to Japan, and recently celebrated the opening of a Blue Bottle outlet in Tokyo. Join us as Freeman shares the story of Blue Bottle’s Japan market entry, from adjustments the company made to Japanese culture (and what they didn’t change), to its most interesting and surprising Japan experiences, as well as the inspiration he draws from Japan’s traditions.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Asia Pacific Affairs • Program organizers: Lillian Nakagawa, Cynthia Miyashita • Notes: Part of the Japan Food Series, co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco

FRIDAY, JUNE FRIDAY, JUNE 3 3 The Unlikely Governor: From the Caves to the Federal Reserve Robert Heller, Former Governor of the Federal Reserve Board; Former President, VISA U.S.A.; Author, The Unlikely Governor

Robert Heller chronicles his journey from the caves and cellars of war-ravaged Germany to the United States and his eventual rise to be a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and president and CEO of VISA USA. Accompanied by never-ending disasters, his career takes him through academia, business and government service as he witnesses the collapse of the international monetary system, the near failure of Bank of America and the most monumental banking crisis in U.S. history.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Business & Leadership • Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley • Notes: This event was rescheduled from March 2. This event is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

MONDAY, JUNE 6 6 MONDAY, JUNE Queensland, Australia Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk Hon. Annastacia Palaszczuk, MP, Premier of Queensland, Australia Jeffrey Bleich, Former U.S. Ambassador to Australia—Moderator Introduction by Dr. Jaleh Daie, Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

Queensland is Australia’s second

SF: San Francisco SV: Silicon Valley EB: East Bay NB: North Bay

JUNE 6-13 largest state and the third most populous, with more than 4.5 million inhabitants. The Hon. Annastacia Palaszczuk MP, premier of Queensland, is one of her country’s leading political figures.

She will outline how her state is diversifying its economy from a traditional reliance on natural resources to innovation and ideas, and the potential that Queensland has as a launchpad for investment in the Asia-Pacific. She will also discuss the strategic importance of Australia to the world economy and international security.

Ms. Palaszczuk holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland, Master of Arts (Hons) from the University of London, Bachelor of Laws from the University of Queensland, and a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice from the Australian National University.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 11:45 a.m. check-in, noon program

Environment and Climate Action: Priority for Latinos Adrianna Quintero, Director and Founder, Voces Verdes; Director, Partner Engagement, Natural Resources Defense Council

Latinos face some of the most serious environmental problems. They disproportionately suffer the effects of environmental harm and climate change. For Latino families and communities, environmental issues are real and personal not just for now but for Earth’s future.

The Hispanic Public Policy Agenda, of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), has designated environment and climate action as a priority for Latinos. The NHLA emphasizes the importance of Hispanic leadership on critical environmental and sustainability issues to their communities and neighborhoods.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program • MLFs: Environment and Natural Resources, International Relations • Program organizer: Ann Clark • Notes: In association with the Natural Resources and De

WEDNESDAY, JUNE WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 8 Joshua Kendall: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama Joshua Kendall, Associate Fellow, Trum-

bull College, Yale; Author, First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama

Work-life balance is a constant struggle for parents, but how does it change when you are the president of the United States?

Of the 43 men who have served as U.S. president, 38 have had biological children and 5 have had adopted children. Kendall offers a fascinating look at these First Dads and what their individual parenting styles reveal about their personal beliefs and leadership qualities.

SV • Location: Schultz Hall, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing • Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation; in partnership with the Oshman Family JCC; photo by Rachel Youdelman

THURSDAY, JUNE 9 9 THURSDAY, JUNE Anja Manuel: The New Superpowers Anja Manuel, Co-founder and Partner, RiceHadleyGates LLC; Author, This Brave New World: India, China, and the United States

In the next decade and a half, China and India will become two of the world’s indispensable powers— whether they rise peacefully or not.

During that time, Asia will surpass the combined strength of North America and Europe in economic might, population size, and military spending. India and China will have vetoes over many international decisions, from climate change to global trade, human rights, and business standards.

From her front-row view of this colossal shift, first at the State Department and now as an advisor to American business leaders, Anja Manuel will take us on an intimate tour of the corridors of power in Delhi and Beijing. We wring our hands about China, Manuel writes, while we underestimate India, which will be the most important country outside of the West to shape China’s rise. Manuel shows us that a different path is possible: We can bring China and India along as partners rather than alienating one or both, and thus extend our own leadership in the world.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6:00 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program,

commonwealthclub.org/events

7:30 p.m. book signing

FRIDAY, JUNE 10 10 FRIDAY, JUNE Jordan Maher Kalaji, Ph.D. Celia Menczel, Chair, Middle East Member-Led Forum

Jordan, a strong American ally, is one of the most historically and strategically important countries in the Middle East. It is also one of the most welcoming. However, tourists to Jordan were markedly fewer this March when Menczel toured Jordanian archeological sites, including Petra, one of the seven new wonders of the world. She will show images and discuss her wonderful experience with Professor Kalaji, who was born and raised in Jordan.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

MONDAY, JUNE 13 13 MONDAY, JUNE 85th Annual California Book Awards Since 1931, The Commonwealth Club has honored the Golden State’s literary giants at the California Book Awards. At our special awards ceremony, we will bestow gold and silver medals in several categories, including fiction, non-fiction, first fiction, poetry, young adult and juvenile.

Come hear from some of California’s most gifted writers.

Adrianna Quintero June 6

Joshua Kendall June 8

Anja Manuel June 9

85th California Book Awards June 13

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: The California Book Awards is sponsored by Bank of the West.

The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley; Co-Director, Greater Good Science Center; Author, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence

Monday Night Philosophy investigates a revolutionary reconsideration of power. It is taken for granted that power corrupts. This is reinforced culturally by everything from Machiavelli to contemporary politics.

But enduring power only comes from empathy and giving, because power is given to us by other people.

This is the crux of the power par-

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J U N E/J U LY 2016

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JUNE 13-17 adox: by fundamentally misunderstanding the behaviors that helped us to gain power in the first place, we set ourselves up to fall from power. We can’t retain it, because we’ve never understood it correctly. Dr. Keltner lays out exactly—in 20 original “Power Principles”—how to retain power, why power can be a demonstrably good thing, and the terrible consequences of letting those around us languish in powerlessness.

Bruche Bochy June 14

Time to Choose June 15

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

TUESDAY, JUNE TUESDAY, JUNE 14 14 San Francisco Giants’ Bruce Bochy: Insights on Baseball and Life Bruce Bochy, Manager, San Francisco Giants; Three Time World Series Champion; Author, A Book of Walks In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt, Lecturer in Sports Law, UC Berkeley Law School; Former President, Oakland A’s

Lucy Kalanithi June 16

San Francisco Giants CEO Larry Baer has stated that hiring Bruce Bochy was “probably the best move [Giants management] ever made.”

Here’s a chance to get Bruce Bochy’s take on the Giants’ 2016 season and on his personal side as well. As a Major League manager, Bochy has one of the more stressful jobs imaginable.

What does he do to relax? He goes for long walks as a way to clear his head, calm his soul and give his body a workout, all of which is the subject of his new book, A Book of Walks. Here’s a rare chance to meet Bruce Bochy off the field. Bring your questions.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 10 a.m. check-in, 11 a.m. program, noon book signing • Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

Can California Get to 100-percent Clean Power?

Mark Ferron, Member, California Independent System Operator Mark Jacobson, Professor, Stanford Geisha J. Williams, President, PG&E

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Mark Jacobson leads a team that says California and other states can get to 100-percent renewable power by 2050. Celebrity activists Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio are backing him. But critics say the theo-

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

retical plan doesn’t consider the hard realities of the power grid and that renewables are sometimes oversold.

California recently passed a law requiring half of the state’s power be renewable by 2030. Should the state be more ambitious? What does PG&E think about going all-in on renewable power?

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. networking reception

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15 15 WEDNESDAY, JUNE Time to Choose Charles Ferguson, Oscar-Winning Director, Inside Job

This documentary from Academy Award winner Charles Ferguson examines the power of climate solutions already available. Through interviews with world-renowned entrepreneurs, innovators and brave individuals living on the front lines of climate change, Ferguson takes an in-depth look at the remarkable people working to save our economy and planet.

Post-screening conversation with Charles Ferguson and Climate One’s Greg Dalton.

SF • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • Location: Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center, San Francisco • Time: 7:10 movie start, followed by discussion • Notes: Purchase tickets from Embarcadero Center Cinema

THURSDAY, JUNE THURSDAY, JUNE 16 16 Dr. Lucy Kalanithi: When Breath Becomes Air Lucy Kalanithi, M.D., Faculty, Stanford School of Medicine; Widow of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, Author of When Breath Becomes Air In conversation with Mark Zitter, Co-founder and Former Chairman, Vital Decisions

Stanford neurosurgery resident Paul Kalanithi was 36 years old when he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. A gifted writer, he spent the last two years of his life giving birth to both a baby and a book. When Breath Becomes Air describes his experience as a doctor facing a terminal illness.

The book became a number-one New York Times best-seller.

Paul Kalanithi’s widow, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, shepherded the book through publication and wrote a moving epilogue. She will be interviewed by

Mark Zitter as part of the Commonwealth Club’s ongoing series on endof-life issues.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:45 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation; in association with the Zen Hospice Project.

FRIDAY, JUNE 17 17 FRIDAY, JUNE Mineta National Transportation Policy Summit See website for panelists

This year’s Mineta Transportation Institute policy summit will address the financing challenges facing the U.S. transportation infrastructure.

Congress says that Americans won’t pay more taxes and fees for mobility. Is that true? What exactly are the funding challenges, and how are transportation leaders addressing them? At this summit, MTI presents results from the seventh year of a national telephone survey about opinions regarding transportation taxes and fees, as well as expert perspectives from the regional, state and national levels. The event will begin with a keynote address by California State Transportation Agency Secretary Brian Kelly, followed by a presentation of survey results by Dr. Asha Weinstein Agrawal. A panel of experts will then discuss their viewpoints. Please see website for further details.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 8:15 a.m. check-in and continental breakfast, 9-10:30 a.m. program • Notes: Underwritten by the Mineta Transportation Institute

A Rare Book Day in June Catherine Williamson, Ph.D., Vice President, Director of Fine Books & Manuscripts/Entertainment Memorabilia, Bonhams, Los Angeles

Dr. Catherine Williamson, who frequently appears as an appraiser for PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” is vice president and director of fine books and manuscripts and entertainment memorabilia at Bonhams in Los Angeles. She will talk about the challenges and issues facing appraisers and collectors today, and share stories of some great discoveries on the “Roadshow”—and elsewhere.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. networking reception, noon

SF: San Francisco SV: Silicon Valley EB: East Bay NB: North Bay

JUNE 20-21 program • MLF: The Arts • Program organizer: Anne W. Smith

MONDAY, JUNE 20 20 MONDAY, JUNE Senator Barbara Boxer: The Art of Tough Barbara Boxer, U.S. Senator (D-California); Author, The Art of Tough: Fearlessly Facing Politics and Life

“One goal of this memoir is to inspire people to fight for change. It takes what I call the ‘art of tough,’ and I’ve had to do it all my life.” —Senator Barbara Boxer Barbara Boxer has made her mark, combining compassionate advocacy with outspokenness in a political career spanning more than three decades. Now, retiring from the U.S. Senate, she continues the work to which she’s dedicated 30 years in Congress. She will share her provocative and touching recollections of service, and her commitment to the fight for women, families, quality, environmental protection—all in a peaceful world. Sometimes lauded, sometimes vilified, but always standing tough, Boxer fought for her values even when her personal convictions conflicted with her party or the majority rule.

SF • Location: TBA • Time: 11:15 a.m. checkin, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • Notes: No large bags; attendees are subject to search; this event is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

The Sake Revolution: Sequoia Sake Jake Myrick, Co-Founder, Sequoia Sake

Sequoia Sake, which produces the first artisan sake (pronounced saKEH) in San Francisco, is leading the next revolution in beverages.

Sequoia blends the traditional art of making sake learned from Japan, where it has been brewed for more than 2,000 years, with the enterprising spirit and unique qualities of San Francisco.

Sequoia produces small batches of hand-crafted, premium sake with full rich flavors. It is part of the new American “micro-sake” revolution.

Myrick will help us understand how sake is made and how to enjoy its complex flavors and varieties.

Come hear and taste!

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco •

Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Asia Pacific Affairs • Program organizer: Lillian Nakagawa, Cynthia Miyashita • Notes: Co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco

Socrates Café On one Monday evening of every month the Humanities Forum sponsors Socrates Café at The Commonwealth Club. Each meeting is devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic is asked to briefly explain why she or he considers that topic interesting and important. An open discussion follows, and the meeting ends with a summary of the various perspectives participants expressed. Everyone is welcome to attend.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Hammond

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour Panelists TBA

We’ll explore the biggest, most controversial, and sometimes the surprising political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil, and have a good sense of humor. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political news, including the recent state primary election, audience discussion of the week’s events, and our live news quiz!

And come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our member social (open to all attendees).

SF • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program

TUESDAY, JUNE TUESDAY, JUNE 21 21 End Childhood Hunger: What You Can Do to Help Debbie Shore, Co-Founder, Share our Strength

Childhood hunger is a problem that threatens an entire generation of future leaders, innovators and problem-solvers. Share Our Strength’s

commonwealthclub.org/events

primary mission is “to end hunger and poverty in the United States and abroad by mobilizing industries and individuals, and creating community wealth to promote lasting change.

Educators, parents, and anyone involved with kids and interested in eliminating hunger can attend and come away with ideas and direction about what to do to help end childhood hunger.

Barbara Boxer June 20

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Patty James

William Kristol: Where Is the Republican Party Headed?

Week to Week June 20

William Kristol, Editor, The Weekly Standard; Political Commentator and Columnist

William Kristol has been called “the godfather of neoconservativism.”

Most recently, he has been outspoken in his concern over a Donald Trump presidency, having said, “Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination makes Hillary Clinton president for the next four years, probably.”

He has also written, “Donald Trump has brought to light the rot of an ideological movement that many of us had thought was alive and reasonably well. He has revealed, to some degree, the degradation of a public for whom many of us had higher hopes and expectations.”

Kristol is the editor of The Weekly Standard, a regular on ABC’s “This Week” and on ABC’s special events and election coverage, and appears frequently on other leading political commentary shows. Before starting The Weekly Standard in 1995, he led the Project for the Republican Future, where he helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 Republican congressional victory.

Prior to that, Kristol served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the first Bush administration and to Education Secretary William Bennett under President Reagan. Before coming to Washington in 1985, Kristol was on the faculty of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here’s your chance to hear from one of the major voices of the Republican establishment on where the party and

Debbie Shore June 21

William Kristol June 21

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JUNE 21-23 the country are headed.

Director, Wellness in the Schools

SF • Location: 555 Post St. Francisco • Time: 11:15 a.m. check in, noon program

An Evening with Emma Cline, Author of “The Girls” Emma Cline June 21

Mary Roach June 21

Nancy Easton June 22

Larry Jacobson June 22

Janna Levin June 22

Beth Greer June 23

Emma Cline, Author, The Girls Claire Bidwell Smith, Grief Therapist; Mother; Author, The Rules of Inheritance and After This: When Life is Over, Where Do We Go?—Moderator

The Girls, the forthcoming, highly anticipated debut novel by Emma Cline, tells the story of Evie, a young woman who gets drawn into the mysterious world of a gang of girls and quickly finds herself immersed in their world and in over her head.

Emma’s writing has been praised by everyone from Lena Dunham to Mark Haddon for her deeply insightful observations about girls and the women they become. Emma rose to prominence when she signed a three book deal in 2014, at the age of 25.

SF • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:45 p.m. check-in and premium reception, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: This event is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

Mary Roach: The Curious Science of Humans at War Mary Roach, Author, Bonk, Stiff, Packing for Mars, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

Millions of people serve in our armed forces, but what does it take to get them prepared and keep them alive?

Roach tackles the science behind some of a soldier’s most challenging adversaries – panic, exhaustion, heat and noise. She shares some of her bizarre experiences dodging hostile fire as part of a training exercise with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team and staying up all night with the crew manning missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee.

Take a tour of duty with Roach and you’ll never think about our nation’s defenders the same way again.

SV • Location: Schultz Hall, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing • Notes: Photo by Jen Siska

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Wellness in the Schools Nancy E. Easton, Co-Founder/Executive THE COMMO N WE AL TH

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program Organizer: Patty James

Sail into Retirement Larry Jacobson, Author; Speaker; Retirement Transition Coach

Larry Jacobson will describe how to make a meaningful and fulfilling transition from career to retirement.

Jacobson is a non-financial retirement transition coach whose coaching program, “Sail into Retirement,” is specifically designed to answer the question “What am I going to do with my time in retirement?” Not accepting that retirement is a time to stop growing, he will describe how he coaches clients to discover untapped passions beyond their previous careers, and combines these passions with the knowledge from their vocations to build a plan of action for a retirement of fulfillment and purpose.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. networking reception, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Grownups • Program organizer: John Milford

Janna Levin: Black Hole Blues Janna Levin, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Barnard College; Author, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

WEDNESDAY, JUNE WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22 22 Mark Danner June 23

Wellness in the Schools (WITS) inspires healthy eating, environmental awareness and fitness as a way of life for kids in public schools. Through meaningful public/private partnerships with school leadership, teachers, chefs, coaches, parents and kids, WITS develops and implements programs that provide healthy foods, healthy environments and opportunities for regular play to help kids learn and grow. Today WITS programs serve approximately 30,000 public school children.

In an effort to combat childhood obesity and create healthier learning environments, WITS developed Cook for Kids and Coach for Kids, hands-on food and fitness programs that are poised for replication nationwide. Cook for Kids has even received national accolades from First Lady Michelle Obama, and the WITS model served as inspiration for the Chefs Move to Schools Initiative.

If black holes collide in outer space

and no one can see it, does it make a sound? A black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. But when black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated, emanating only gravitational waves. The only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing.

Levin shares the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, 50year endeavor to capture these elusive waves and record the soundtrack of the universe.

SV • Location: Cubberley Theatre (near Montrose & Middlfield), 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing • Notes: Photo

by Sonja Georgevich

THURSDAY, JUNE THURSDAY, JUNE 23 23 How to Have a Holistic, Healthy, Happy Home: Solutions for Parents of Kids with Challenges Beth Greer, Award-winning Journalist; Environmental Health Advocate; Holistic Lifestyle Educator; Author, Super Natural Home: Improve Your Health, Home and Planet … One Room at a Time

Beth Greer, known as the Super Natural Mom, bestselling author, holistic health coach and one of the foremost experts on sustainable and toxin-free living, will give a talk on things you need to know to help kids who have challenges. She will offer powerful information on the toxins in everyday products that can have triggering reactions in a child’s nervous system; five things in the home to avoid to create a safe, healthy, toxin-free home; practical and convenient solutions that give dramatic results; and symptoms to look for in kids that indicate they’re being impacted by toxins in their home environment.

She’ll also discuss a non-psychological approach to behavioral changes in kids. Don’t miss this talk to help you enhance your child’s well-being as well as your own (caregiving can be stressful).

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program Organizer: Patty James

Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War Mark Danner, Author, Former Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Chancellor’s Professor of

SF: San Francisco SV: Silicon Valley EB: East Bay NB: North Bay

1. Charles Munger, Jr., Gloria C. Duffy; 2. Elizabeth Holmes; 3. Robyn Denholm; 4. James C. Hormel, John Boland; 5. Charles Geschke, Jaleh Daie; 6. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus; 7. Members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus

8. Dan Ashley; 9. Kavita Krishnan-Shah, Lata Krishnan-Shah; 10. Willie Brown, Jr., Richard Rubin; 11. Jaleh Daie; 12. Colleen Wilcox, Charles Garvin, Leslie Saul Garvin, Carlo Almendral; 13. Gail Gannon, Sara Wardell-Smith; 14. Charles Munger, Jr., Tad Taube, Dan Ashley

15. Jay Emmons, Dan Reed; 16. Eric Gillespie, Jeanie Hirokane; 17. Abe Ostrovsky, Christine Hughes, Joe Epstein

SUPPORT THE NEXT TITANS OF CHANGE. Our programs give the leaders of tomorrow the chance to step up and ask questions of the leaders of today.

Give today to support the Club’s student ticket program. Simply mail a check with the envelope found on page 28 or contact our Vice President of Development, Kimberly Maas, at 415-597-6726.

The Commonwealth Club

putting you face-to-face with today’s thought leaders

2017

Commonwealth Club Travel

World-Class Destinations Exceptional Experiences Engaging Speakers Insightful Discussions Superb Staff Outstanding Company

commonwealthclub.org/travel travel@commonwealthclub.org (415) 597-6720

Patagonia Expedition January 5-17, 2017 Join Pulitzer-prize winning author Dr. Jared Diamond on a land and sea adventure to witness Patagonia’s Andean peaks, unique wildlife, vast pampas and aquamarine lakes. Spend four nights aboard the M/V Stella Australis. Explore the Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn. Disembark and journey to stunning Glaciers National Park. Continue to Torres del Paine and enjoy hiking, bird watching, horseback riding, kayaking or a photo safari. Optional extension to Easter Island.

Cost: from $9,995 per person, double occupancy

Wonders of the Galápagos Islands January 29 - February 7, 2017 This incredible 10-day journey is a nature lover’s dream. After two nights in Quito, sail five nights aboard the Santa Cruz II and visit six distinct islands to observe the exotic birds, animals and plants that inspired Charles Darwin, including species unknown anywhere else in the world. Snorkel alongside tropical penguins and playful sea lions. Come face-to-face with blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas and giant tortoises. Optional extensions to Ecuador’s rainforest and Machu Picchu.

Cost: from $6,095 per person, double occupancy

Exploring Australia & New Zealand February 8 - March 2, 2017 Begin your epic 23-day journey in Cairns. Ride the historic railway to the mountain village of Kuranda.

Cruise out to the Great Barrier Reef. Learn about the ancient Walpiri culture. Take a catamaran sail around Sydney Harbor and tour Koala Sanctuary Park. Fly to New Zealand and explore Mt. Cook National Park. Sail through the breathtaking fjords of Milford Sound. Discover Rotorua and experience the Maori culture at a traditional hangi dinner and performance. Optional extension in Auckland.

Cost: $8,295 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Death Valley National Park February 26 - March 3, 2017 Explore this magnificent land of extremes with study leader Frank Ackerman, former Death Valley National Park ranger. Visit Badwater Salt Flats (282 feet below sea level) and enjoy a stunning panoramic view of all 11,049 feet of Telescope Peak. Hike through the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon; experience sunrise at Zabriskie Point; and visit Ubehebe Crater. Learn about the park’s dramatic geology and remarkably hardy flora and fauna, and perhaps experience wildflowers in bloom.

Cost: from approximately $2,995 per person, double occupancy

Journey to Cuba March 12-19 (Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Havana) & December 3-10, 2017 (Havana & the Viñales Valley) Explore old Havana’s history and architecture. Meet with farmers and enjoy a private flamenco performance by some of Cuba’s best dancers. Discuss U.S. foreign policy and economic changes during lectures with local experts. Learn about Cuban music and visit private art collections. In the Viñales Valley, take in views of the dramatic landscapes and limestone mogotes. The March program includes the site of the Bay of Pigs and the colonial cities of Trinidad and Cienfuegos.

Cost: approximately $5,495 per person, double occupancy, including round-trip air from Miami

Southern Africa Odyssey March 23 - April 9, 2017 Journey to South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. From Johannesburg, tour Soweto and the home of the late Nelson Mandela. Experience spectacular Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and enjoy a rhino safari. Explore Chobe National Park, and marvel at the vast Namib Desert with its towering sand dunes rising more than a thousand feet high. Spend four nights in vibrant Cape Town and visit Robben Island. Finally, discover the Winelands, South Africa’s renowned wine-growing region.

Cost: approximately $6,395 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Spain & Portugal: Paradores & Pousadas April 24 - May 8, 2017 Experience distinctive lodgings during this two week Iberian sojourn. Explore Lisbon and the National Palace of Queluz. Traverse the Alentejo region of olive groves and vineyards. Discover Evora, a treasure-trove of Portuguese history and architecture, and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visit Seville, Andalucia’s capital, and Ronda, one of Spain’s oldest and most charming towns. Experience Granada’s famous Alhambra, medieval Toledo and Madrid’s Prado Museum. Extension to Barcelona available.

Cost: approximately $4,595 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Ancient Traditions of the Inland Sea of Japan April 30 - May 10, 2017 Explore Japan and South Korea during a seven-night cruise aboard the small ship m.s. L’Austral along the Inland Sea of Japan, plus two nights in Kyoto. Visit five UNESCO World Heritage sites. Explore Kyoto’s Nijō Castle; Hiroshima’s Memorial Peace Park; Miyajima’s inspiring Itsukushima Shrine; and the Buddhist wonders of Gyeongju, South Korea. Optional pre-trip extension in Tokyo and Kyoto and post-trip to Kanazawa’s gardens and temples.

Cost: from approximately $5,795 per person, double occupancy

Moroccan Discovery May 12-25, 2017 Travel to the imperial cities of Rabat, Meknes, Fez and Marrakech. View the ancient Roman ruins at Volubilis; wander the alleys of Fez; visit a Berber Museum; take a sunset camel ride at the edge of the Sahara; and view the spectacular scenery of the High Atlas, including the 984-foot Todra Gorge. Explore Ait ben-Haddou, one of southern Morocco’s most scenic villages. Discover Marrakech’s medina and Djemaa el Fna Square. End in Casablanca, and visit the Hassan II Mosque.

Cost: approximately $5,095 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Changing Tides of History: Cruising the Baltic Sea Featuring Lech Wałęsa, Former President of Poland & Dr. Sergei N. Khrushchev June 8-17, 2017 Cruise aboard the exclusively chartered five-star m.s. Le Boréal from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Stockholm, Sweden. Experience the renaissance of Gda´nsk, Poland; the medieval charms of Tallinn, Estonia and Visby, Sweden; the stunning architecture in cosmopolitan Helsinki, Finland; and the grandeur of St. Petersburg, Russia. Norway pre-cruise and Stockholm post-cruise optional extensions are available.

Cost: from approximately $5,995 per person, double occupancy

Utah’s National Parks June 21-27, 2017 Explore the history, ecology and scenery of five national parks and monuments on the Colorado Plateau. Experience the dramatic cliffs of Zion and the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon. Hike amid multi-hued cliffs, spires, and arches of Cedar Breaks; the Waterpocket fold of Capitol Reef; and slot-canyons in Grand Staircase-Escalante. Learn about federal policies that have led to notably different development of these parks. Former Park Ranger Frank Ackerman leads our trip.

Cost: approximately $3,895 per person, double occupancy

Exploring Iceland July 15-25, 2017 In Borgarnes visit the Reyholt Cultural Centre, based on the life of saga writer Snorri Sturluson. See small fishing villages, bizarre rock formations and nesting cliff birds on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula. Enjoy three nights in Akureyri and explore Lake Myvatn and its environs of bubbling mud flats, lava fields and lunar-like volcanic craters. Visit Godafoss Waterfall and “Glacial River Canyon” National Park. Take a bird-watching cruise to Puffin Island; explore Thingvellir National Park; and conclude in Reykjavik.

Cost: approximately $5,595 per person double occupancy, including air from SFO

Grand Danube Passage: Prague to Sofia August 23 - September 6, 2017 Journey through eight countries, discover old-world capitals and stroll through charming villages along the Danube River. After three nights exploring Prague, embark the MS Amadeus Silver for an eight-night river cruise. Visit Passau, Melk and Dürnstein before sailing through the Wachau Valley toward the Austrian capital of Vienna. Explore Bratislava and Budapest. Wander through Kalemegdan Citadel in Belgrade. Sail through the Iron Gate Gorge. Disembark for two nights in Sofia.

Cost: from approximately $4,695 per person, double occupancy

Walking Below & Beyond Mont Blanc: Switzerland, Italy & France September 23 - October 5, 2017 Discover charming villages, grand castles and the majesty of the Alps on this active walking adventure. From Geneva, travel to Villars-sur-Ollon for three nights. In Italy visit the Valle d’Aosta, Cogne and the Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso. Hike in France’s Chamonix Valley enjoying views of Mont Blanc.

Take a thrilling cable car ride up Mont Blanc for a spectacular panorama. Between hikes bake bread in the Valnontey Valley; sample local wines; and enjoy Swiss fondue in an alpine farmhouse.

Cost: approximately $4,895 per person, double occupancy

Eastern & Oriental Express: Bangkok to Bali September 24 - October 6, 2017 Marvel at Bangkok’s Grand Palace, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the impressive Reclining Buddha. Experience the golden age of travel with three nights aboard the opulent Eastern & Oriental Express train as it rolls past the rice paddies of Thailand and Malaysia. From the River Kwai Bridge station, travel along the Kwai Yai River. Explore the Malaysian town of Kuala Kangsar and see Singapore’s iconic Merlion Park and Civil District. Admire Bali’s breathtaking scenery and traditional life.

Cost: from approximately $5,995 per person, double occupancy

Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey September 26 - October 2, 2017 Board the National Geographic Sea Bird in Portland, and cruise the Willamette River to the Columbia River. See the reconstruction of Lewis & Clark’s Fort Clatsop, the Lewis & Clark Wildlife Refuge and Multnomah Falls. Journey through the Columbia River Gorge, and the river’s elaborate system of locks.

Explore the Maryhill Museum, and kayak along the still waters of the Palouse River. Taste local wines and stroll through a vineyard while enjoying stunning views of Mt. Hood.

Cost: from approximately $4,990 per person, double occupancy

Tashkent to Isfahan: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan & Iran October 10-27, 2017 Trace the path of the great camel caravans along the Old Silk Road. Explore seven different UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including the historic old towns of Samarkand and Bukhara and the archaeological site of ancient Merv. Wander through fabulous bazaars; meet with local artisans and scholars; and admire Persian architecture. Stand in the shadow of the colossal pillars of 2,000-year-old Persepolis in Iran and learn about the modern geopolitics of this historic crossroads.

Cost: approximately $7,995 per person, double occupancy

Southern China October 14-26, 2017 From Shanghai travel to Kaili, Huanggang, Zhaoxing, Tangan, Longsheng, Guilin and Hangzhou during this off-the-beaten-path trip through Southern China. In Guangxi province, marvel at the spectacular karst limestone landscapes that cradle the stunning Li River. Walk the Longji rice terraces sculpted into the mountainside. Experience the beauty and harmony created by the gardens, tea farms and temples of Hangzhou’s West Lake. Optional trip extensions available.

Cost: approximately $5,345 per person, double occupancy

Colombia Rediscovered November 10-20, 2017

Commonwealth Club Travel Informed Travel for the Discerning Mind

Visit Bogota’s Gold Museum and Botero Museum, and explore the city’s markets and Spanish colonial neighborhoods. Explore the Coffee Triangle and Los Nevados National Natural Park in the Central Cordillera. Driving north to Medellin view flower-growing facilities and take a ride on the city’s iconic gondola. Discover the walled city of Cartagena, and take a birdwatching canoe trip through mangroves. Witness the country’s indigenous cultures, lush landscapes and Caribbean sun.

Cost: approximately $3,895 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Commonwealth Club Travel

Polar Bear Adventure in Canada November 2017

Experience the wildlife of the Arctic tundra and come face-to-face with the world’s largest land carnivore, the polar bear. In Winnipeg, Manitoba explore the city’s Legislative Building and the impressive Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Continue to Churchill, to begin your expedition into polar bear Commonwealth country. Learn from some of the top polar bear experts as you watch these majestic mammals in their Club Travel natural environment.

Skies permitting, witness the dancing northern lights.

Informed Travel for the Discerning Mind Cost: In development

Commonwealth Club Travel commonwealthclub.org/travel travel@commonwealthclub.org (415) 597-6720 CST# 2096889-40

“I am so grateful that the Club offers travel opportunities as part of its mission to educate & inform!”

Nanette Stringer, Commonwealth Club Traveler

JUNE 23 - JULY 12 Journalism and English, UC Berkeley

In his latest book, Spiral, Danner describes a nation altered in fundamental ways by 9/11. Fourteen years of armed conflict makes the War on Terror the longest war in U.S. history, even though only a tiny percentage of our citizens fight in actual combat.

Now Al Qaeda has been replaced by multiple jihadist and terror organizations, including the most notorious: ISIS. Guantanamo, indefinite detention, drone warfare, enhanced interrogation, torture and warrantless wiretapping are all words that have become familiar and tolerated in the name of security. By defining the War on Terror as boundless, apocalyptic and unceasing, we have, Danner concludes, “let it define us as ideological crusaders caught in an endless war.”

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: International Relations • Program organizers: Norma Walden, Linda Calhoun

built. From higher car use in suburban sprawl to urban neighborhoods lacking green space and walkways, every aspect of the built environment surrounding us impacts our health.

What is being done to rethink the structure of our towns and cities?

How can we improve the health of our communities through design?

Come for a discussion on our cities, our health, and what we can do to increase the number of healthy spaces in our growing communities.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: This program is underwritten by The California Wellness Foundation.

THURSDAY, JUNE THURSDAY, JUNE 30 30 The End of Business As Usual David Burkus, Professor, Oral Roberts University; Founder and Host, “Radio Free Leader”; Author, Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business As Usual

Middle East Forum Discussion The Middle East Forum discussion group that primarily covers the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan has been meeting for more than eight years. We do not debate. We exchange ideas and opinions. The discussion is considered a perk of membership, but those interested, especially students, are welcome to attend.

Should employees know each others’ salaries? Can companies win by putting their employees’ welfare first, and their clients second? Are annual performance reviews necessary?

Burkus challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management—proving that they’re outdated, outmoded and simply don’t work—and presents winning strategies using case studies and in-depth research. You’ll learn how the nature of work is changing—and what that means for business, society and your own career.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5 p.m. networking reception, 5:30 p.m. program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • MLF: Business & Leadership • Program organizer: Kevin O’Malley

Public Health, Public Spaces

Fearless Women Founders on Succeeding in Tech World

MONDAY, JUNE MONDAY, JUNE 27 27

Lisa Chen, Planner, Citywide Division, San Francisco Richard J. Jackson, M.D, Professor and Former Chair, Environmental Health Sciences, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA Fran Weld, Vice President of Strategy and Development, San Francisco Giants Bill Worthen, Executive Director, Urban Fabrick

In recent years, there has been growing scientific evidence indicating a connection between public health and how places—particularly our cities and suburbs—are designed and

Amanda Kahlow, Founder & CEO, 6sense Mada Seghete, Co-Founder, Branch Metrics Promise Phelon, CEO, TapInfluence

According to a 2015 North American study by McKinsey & Company, women are almost four times more likely than men to think they have fewer opportunities to advance because of their gender.

How can we change this? During this candid discussion, you’ll join three leading women in tech as they share their experiences of being a

commonwealthclub.org/events

woman in the technology industry, what challenges they’ve faced along the way, how they overcame them and ways to encourage more women to pursue careers in tech.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Science & Technology • Program organizer: Gerald Harris

David Burkus June 30

MONDAY, JULY MONDAY, JULY 11 11 Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour Panelists TBA

We’ll explore the biggest, most controversial, and sometimes the surprising political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil, and have a good sense of humor. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, audience discussion of the week’s events, and our live news quiz!

And come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our member social (open to all attendees).

Week to Week July 11

Mary Elizabeth Williams July 12

SF • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program

TUESDAY, JULY TUESDAY, JULY 12 12 A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles Mary Elizabeth Williams, Journalist; Author, A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer In conversation with Peggy Orenstein, Author

Journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams was one of the first people in the world to get a new form of treatment for her stage 4 cancer diagnosis that’s revolutionizing cancer care: immunotherapy. In October of 2015, her treatment protocol became the first immunotherapy combination approved by the FDA; it’s the same treatment that former President Jimmy Carter underwent. In her witty, wry and deeply moving new memoir, A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles, Williams shares her personal journey with malignant melanoma in her early forties and how—thanks to cutting-edge science—she was restored back to health with no signs of disease.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco •

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to common wealthclub.org

J U N E/J U LY 2016

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JULY 12-18 Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Bill Grant • Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths July 12

How Computers Influence Human Decisions Brian Christian, Co-author, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Tom Griffiths, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, UC Berkeley; Co-author, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems.

These might seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not.

Computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such issues for decades. Christian and Griffiths show how the algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions.

Steve Blank July 12

Don George July 13

NB • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

Hacking for Defense: Making the World a Safer Place

Kevin Kelly July 18

Steve Blank, Educator, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Columbia University J.D. Schramm, Lecturer in Organizational Behavior, Stanford Graduate School of Business—Moderator

In a crisis, national security initiatives move at the speed of a startup, yet in peacetime they default to decades-long cycles. Startups operate with continual speed and urgency and using Lean Startup methodologies have become extremely efficient with resources and time. Blank, father of the Lean Startup movement, has created a class, Hacking for Defense, that connects the Department of Defense and the intelligence community with Silicon Valley’s innovation culture mindset. He will discuss how the class helps the U.S. protect the homeland and Americans around the world and prevents the need to put our brave men and women in harm’s way.

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to common wealthclub.org

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SV • Location: Silicon Valley Bank, 3005 Tasman Drive, Santa Clara • Time: 6 p.m. networking reception, 7–8:30 p.m. program • Notes: In association with IDEA-TO-IPO

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

WEDNESDAY, 13 13 WEDNSDAY,JULY JULY The Brazen Age David Reid, Author, The Brazen Age

The Brazen Age is a sweeping look at the rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between 1945 and 1950. Reid also reaches back to the early 1900s to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation and burgeoning bohemian culture, to the quickly growing media, movie and radio businesses in the 1920s, and to the influx of talented Europeans in the 1930s, vastly enriching the sciences and the arts.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

The Way of Wanderlust Don George, Author, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George In Conversation with Kristina Nemeth, Travel Director, The Commonwealth Club

Join noted travel writer and editor Don George for a delightful, world-roaming evening discussing his new book, his life as a travel writer, and opportunities for meaningful travel around the world. Whether you are looking for adventure, culture, food or spirituality, George will offer inspiring stories, insights and advice.

NB • MARIN CONVERSATIONS • Location: Outdoor Art Club, One West Blithdale, Mill Valley • Time: 7 p.m. check-in with light hors d’oeuvres and cash bar, 7:45–9 p.m. program

THURSDAY, JULY 14 14 THURSDAY, JULY Off the Grid: The Disruptive, Japan-inspired Food Truck Revolution Matt Cohen, Founder, Off the Grid Services

Off the Grid, curator of gatherings of street food and other amenities at Fort Mason Center, the Presidio, and 38 other locations, began in San Francisco six years ago and is a uniquely Bay Area re-creation of Asia’s vibrant night markets. Founder Matt Cohen developed the concept from his time living in Japan, and he added modern elements to build community spaces through temporary events in underused urban places using social media and partnerships with small businesses. Cohen will discuss how his experience living in Japan in-

spired and continues to influence the evolution of Off the Grid’s various businesses.

SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Asia Pacific Affairs • Program organizers: Lillian Nakagawa, Cynthia Miyashita • Notes: Co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco

Finding Your Wine Personality The Boisset Wine Ambassadors will guide you through a wine tasting that explores your wine style.

They’ll serve as your personal wine concierge—sharing exclusive new releases, the stories behind the wines and the vineyards, and the knowledge to guide you to wines best-suited for your palate. Join us as wine and style unite, and embrace l’art de vivre!

SV • Location: Schultz Cultural Hall, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto • Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8:30 p.m. program and wine tasting • Notes: Advance reservations are required as space is limited.

All attendees must be 21 years or older.

MONDAY, JULY 18 18 MONDAY, JULY Socrates Café Socrates Café is devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic is asked to explain briefly why she or he considers that topic interesting and important. An open discussion follows.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Hammond

Wired’s Kevin Kelly: The Future of Tech Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future; Twitter @kevin2kelly

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In his provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in

SF: San Francisco SV: Silicon Valley EB: East Bay NB: North Bay

JULY 19-29 everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly describes these deep trends—flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking and questioning—and says they will revolutionize the way people buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Photo by Jamie Tanaka

TUESDAY, JULY TUESDAY, JULY 19 19 Redefining National Parks and Family Farms in a Changing Climate Jordan Fisher Smith, Author, Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature John Hart, Author, Farming on the Edge: Saving Family Farms in Marin County and An Island in Time: 50 Years as Point Reyes National Seashore

How will national parks adapt to volatile climate? Jordan Fisher Smith, a former park and wilderness ranger in the American West, writes about the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled 20th-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Now climate change is presenting a new set of challenges to America’s best idea.

Family farms face a comparable and different challenge as they struggle to cope with a changing climate.

Can farmers, ranchers and environmentalists come together to protect the environment and food supply as species migrate and weather changes?

Join a conversation about how farms and parks are adapting to their new reality.

SF • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. networking reception

WEDNESDAY, JULY 20 20 WEDNESDAY, JULY

THURSDAY, JULY 28 28 THURSDAY, JULY

OMG: I Forgot to Plan for a Good Death!

Race and Relationships in Health Care: Basic Psychology I Didn’t Learn in Med School (But Wish I Had)

Regina Sneed, Advocate, The California End of Life Option Act

The California End of Life Option Act will be effective on June 9, 2016.

The speaker will discuss the options people have for dying based on their choices, including the new option of medical aid in dying. People will also have time to discuss what each of us can do to ensure our wishes can be fulfilled for a death with dignity.

The audience will be provided with helpful supplemental material and afforded the opportunity to better understand the choices and protections inherent in this important legislation.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. networking reception, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Grownups • Program organizer: John Milford

MONDAY, JULY MONDAY, JULY 25 25 Middle East Forum Discussion The Middle East Forum discussion group, primarily covering the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan, has been meeting for more than eight years. We do not debate; we exchange ideas and opinions. The discussion is considered a perk of membership, but those interested, especially students, are welcome to attend.

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5 p.m. networking reception, 5:30 p.m. program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour Panelists TBA

Denise L. Davis, M.D., Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California San Francisco; Fellow, American Academy on Communication in Healthcare

In 2014, health professions students around the country staged White Coats for Black Lives protests, which focused the attention of UCSF and other medical schools on issues of race, power and health. Dr. Davis will discuss the art and science of improving doctor-patient communication that could change the culture of medicine.

Denise Davis July 28

SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. networking reception, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Psychology • Program organizer: Patrick O’Reilly

LATE-BREAKING EVENTS LATE-BREAKING EVENTS Book Discussion: A Manual for Cleaning Women

Antonio Villaraigosa June 6

Monday, June 6 SF • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Book Discussion • Program organizer: Carol Fleming

Fmr. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Monday, June 6 Antonio Villaraigosa, Former L.A. Mayor SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program

S.F. Architecture Walking Tour Thursday, June 9 SF • Location: Meet in lobby of 191 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2-4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Must pre-register

We’ll explore the biggest, most controversial, and sometimes the surprising political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil, and have a good sense of humor. Join our panelists for informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, audience discussion of the week’s events, and our live news quiz! And come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our social hour.

Russian Hill Walking Tour

SF • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. wine-and-snacks social, 6:30 p.m. program

SF • Location: Meet at 700 Filbert St., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2-4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Must pre-register

commonwealthclub.org/events

Week to Week July 25

Thursday, June 23 SF • Location: Meet in front of 1999 Hyde St., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2-4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Must pre-register

Chinatown Walking Tour Thursday, July 7 SF • Location: Meet in Starbuck’s, 359 Grant Ave., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2-4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Must pre-register

North Beach Walking Tour Thursday, July 20

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to common wealthclub.org

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THE OHIO LESSON FOR AMERICA AT LARGE

Ohio’s Republican governor and former presidential candidate touts his conservative revolution in that swing state and argues that the rest of the country could learn a thing or two from the Buckeye State.

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John Kasich, Ohio Governor, former Republican presidential candidate, in conversation with Kori Schake, a research fellow at Hoover Institution. From the April 29, 2016 program. Photos by Sonya Abrams.

KORI SCHAKE: Can I ask you to say a little bit about what you think Ohio has done particularly well economically, in your time as governor?

JOHN KASICH: We’ve diversified our state, we’ve privatized economic development—that’s a big deal. We don’t run economic development through our bureaucracy, because a bureaucracy would move at [a slow] speed.

We believe that this is the 21st century, okay? [Borrows cell phone from audience member.] This is the world today.

We communicate like this. We buy on this. We are hearing about, in San Francisco, the self-driving car. Everything is moving at the speed of light, except two fundamental things that I can think of.

One is higher education and K-through-12 education, which is trapped [in] I don’t know what part of the 20th century. And government; government does not change.

Government does not innovate; because any time you try to innovate, things get in the way, and then government actually tries to stop innovation. Think about Uber. Now everybody’s trying to figure out how to restrict them because the taxi union is powerful, right?

So we privatized economic development [in Ohio]. We actually have created a not-for-profit. The not-for-profit bought Ohio’s liquor business. The state still runs it, but the profits go into this organization. The bonds were sold for a very low price, because in good times, people drink, and in bad times, they drink more.

So we pay off these bonds, and now we’ve hired people who actually understand business.

We have common-sense regulations. I mean, we don’t have no regulations, but our regulations are common sense.

Secondly, we’ve cut taxes on businesses and individuals and we’re running a surplus; we’re up [about] 420,000 jobs. And now we’re into workforce big time. We’re into trying to match education with people’s skills. I mean, it’s just been the whole sort of 360.

At the same time, we’ve reformed our criminal justice system. We’re paying attention to the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the working poor. Our minority community feels as though they have a role. We’re not perfect by any stretch, but I think we’re doing pretty well.

The lesson there is forget politics, look at a problem, be creative, don’t worry about reelection, and go solve it.

And pull people together. How hard is that? I’ve done it throughout my whole career, and we don’t seem to do it anymore, because we’re trapped by ideology, we’re trapped by fear of reelection, and our leaders are not getting people to rise to a higher level. [Applause.]

SCHAKE: We have a terrific line-up of questioners. I’m going to give the first question to Dan Oppenheim.

DAN OPPENHEIM: The Republican mantra on

Obamacare is “repeal”. You can’t get elected if you’re Republican, at any level, if you don’t say that. So the question is, How would you phase it out and not harm 11 million people who are covered under it?

KASICH: The problem with Obamacare is it fails to do three things. It doesn’t control the rapidly increasing cost of health care. Number two, it’s driven up the cost of health insurance in my state by 80 percent on average.

And small businesses don’t want to expand because they could get caught in the web. Other than that, it looks like it’s working great.

Now there’s one provision that I like: no one should lose health insurance because of a pre-existing condition. That ought to be carried on forever.

What I want to do is, sir, I want to have complete transparency. Now we don’t know how our hospitals are doing, and neither do you. You have no clue whether the Stanford hospital system is better than some other hospital. You don’t know what things cost, and you don’t know the quality. It’s the only thing I can think of that we do in our lives where we shop without any knowledge of price.

What we’re doing with the help of the Cleveland Clinic and all the health organizations in our state is we are moving forward with complete transparency. Quality and price measured at every level. Then what we intend to do is if you are below the mean in quality and price, we will give you a financial reward. If you’re a hospital and you reduce the number of readmissions, if you reduce medical mistakes, if you’re in a position of you don’t have high infection rates and your prices are low but your quality is high, we will make it worth your while.

The same thing is true with our primary-care doctors. If the primary-care doctor keeps the cost of your health care down, you have high quality and it’s below the median, they get a financial reward. Everybody is involved in this, insurance companies, the health-care providers. Because I think we all know that if we don’t get a control with market transparency, things are gonna continue to gyrate out of control and we’ll end up with rationing.

OPPENHEIM: That’s great, I just wanna know what happens to those 11 million. Do they— KASICH: That’s a good question there; I’m sorry I missed that. We would take some of the federal resources that are available now, combine it with the state Medicaid resources, which I would send to the states, and you could create your own state exchange. You should cover the 11.5 million who are the working poor. That’s what we would do. But we have to move beyond that quickly to this issue of transparency, market and putting downward pressure on these health-care costs. What’s so interesting about it is we’re gonna do this in Medicaid for sure.

CHRISTINE KRISHARIAN: As a Republican, and as a woman, I would like to know: Do you have an alternative to Planned Parenthood? Given that you have recently signed a bill to defund it but also are known to support the welfare net.

Ohio Governor John Kasich spoke to a sold-out Commonwealth Club audience in San Francisco just a few days before he exited the presidential race.

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KASICH: I didn’t figure this out till somebody said defund Planned Parenthood, it means defund—no, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not gonna reduce any of our women’s health-care services at all. Some are going to be in hospitals.

Some will be in the federal clinics. They will be available to people, because women’s health is critical. Now I also have expanded Medicaid in Ohio, something that, believe it or not, Ronald Reagan did five times. The interesting thing is by doing that, we’ve extended health care to over 330,000 women who didn’t get health care before we expanded.

KELLY BRIAN: Hello, governor. My name’s Kelly Brian, I’m a proud resident of San Francisco. Do you believe that some people are born gay? I’m a 62-year-old gay man who came out to both of my parents at 19. Gay people are human beings and not a lifestyle choice. Please respond without prayer being an answer.

KASICH: Let me tell you, I think we would all be better off in this country if we prayed more. I’ll tell you what

I’m not out to discriminate against you. I think you ought to have as good a life as anybody else; how can I be more clear about that? religion means to me. Religion’s about the dos and not the don’ts. Religion for me is about loving somebody who doesn’t like you, humility, love your neighbor as yourself.

Treat your spouse better, live a life bigger than yourself.

And all the don’ts come down the road, and that comes to everybody as they spend more time thinking about their eternal destiny and they can figure that out.

In terms of me, I don’t believe in discrimination. I think there is a balance, however, between discrimination and people’s religious liberties. But I think we should just try to take a chill pill, relax, and try to get along with one another a little bit better. Instead of trying to write some law to solve a problem that doesn’t, frankly, exist in big enough numbers to justify more lawmaking. So— BRIAN: Republicans don’t believe in marriage equality, it’s your platform.

KASICH: Well, is it? I haven’t read that thing lately.

BRIAN: You should know what you’re doing.

KASICH: Well, they don’t they tell me what to do about the platform. Republican party is my vehicle and not my master, okay? I have a right to define the Republican party too, okay? [Applause.]

Now, I gotta tell you, sir, I believe in traditional marriage, I just went to a gay wedding. A buddy of mine, just went got married. My wife and I went to the wedding; it was great, it was fine.

BRIAN: But do you feel people are born gay.

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KASICH: I’m not gonna get into the all that analysis of this or that. I’m not gonna do that.

BRIAN: It’s not analysis. Are people born gay?

KASICH: In all probability they are, okay?

BRIAN: Then don’t we deserve free, regular rights like everybody?

KASICH: Well, you will have free regular rights, we’re not denying you in any rights, I’m not in Ohio. I’m not out to discriminate against you. I think you ought to have as good a life as anybody else; how can I be more clear about that?

BRIAN: In Kentucky you’re— KASICH: But I’m not in Kentucky.

BRIAN: —Mississippi— KASICH: I’m not in favor of this.

SCHAKE: Our next questioner— KASICH: No, no, no, let me finish. I’m not in favor of that. I’m not in favor of discrimination against anybody.

BRIAN: But they’re using religion.

KASICH: Well, they are, not me, okay? They are not me, I’m telling you my view, okay? [Applause.]

I don’t agree with gay marriage, but I went to a gay wedding. And I’m not saying because you happen to be gay that somehow, somebody should hold something against you.

Now here’s the question, so somebody has deep religious beliefs, so you go to—and I talked about this repeatedly— you go to somebody who’s a photographer, you want them to come and be the photographer for the gay wedding. The guy who’s a photographer, or the woman, says “Yeah, I’d really rather not do that, kinda against my principles.” So my feeling is, well, find another photographer. Let me give you another one. So if I’m making cakes and somebody comes in and says, “I’m gay, I’d like to have a cake.” Sell them a cake!

We cannot be pushing each other’s buttons. We don’t want to discriminate anybody, but we also don’t wanna run over anybody’s deeply held religious beliefs, either. So I think there’s a balance, sir. And here’s what I would tell you.

If I saw that this was becoming this huge problem, then we might have to write a law. But every time somebody writes a law around this subject, guess what happens? You have to rewrite the law, cuz they never get it right. So let’s just respect one another a little bit more, tolerate each other’s individual beliefs. I’m not gonna sign any law in Ohio that is going to create a discrimination against anybody.

And do I think that people are born gay? Probably, I’ve never studied the issue. But I don’t see any reason to hurt you, or discriminate you, or make you feel bad, or make you feel like a second class citizen. I don’t think that’s right, cuz you know what, everybody’s created in the image of the Lord.

One other thing. Sometimes people say that they’re religious. Just because I say that I’m a Ford Falcon doesn’t make me one. [Laughter.] Just because I say I’m faithful doesn’t mean that I am, just because I make a statement.

And don’t put everybody who you think has religion and believes in God, don’t put everybody in the same barrel.

THE CAMPAIGN COMES TO CALIFORNIA California voters will play an important role in the primaries on June 7, helping decide the fortunes of presidential candidates, Senate hopefuls, and referenda.

Carson Bruno, Hoover Institution research fellow; Melissa Caen, CBS SF political analyst; Joe Garofoli, senior political writer for the San Francisco Chronicle; Carla Marinucci of the Politico California Playbook; C.W. Nevius, San Francisco Chronicle columnist; and Dr. James Taylor, political science profesor at the University of San Francisco. From Week to Week Political Roundtable on April 4 and April 18, 2016. Illustration above by DonkeyHotey.

Presidential Race JOHN ZIPPERER: This long national primary campaign will be here soon. But first, ... the New York primary.

CARLA MARINUCCI: New York is a big one. For Hillary Clinton, I think New York is a chance to reset. She’s had a couple of weeks where she’s gotten bad headlines, and Sanders has just come up on her, doing these fabulous, J U N E/J U LY 2016

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huge rallies, making so much hay about the fundraising.

Here in San Francisco, you may have been stopped by the motorcade on Friday when she came through; the protestors were out front [of the fundraiser location]. George Clooney came out and engaged with the protestors, at which point they called him a corporate shill. Then even worse they said, “And you sucked as Batman”—[laughter] and he said, “You’ve got me there.”

She’s been faced with these headlines that the money she’s raising is obscene, meanwhile Sanders is doing these $27 average [donation receipts] and raising more than she is.

On the other side, we have to talk about Trump. [He is] double-digits ahead of Ted Cruz [in New York].

JAMES TAYLOR: Trump has to win over superdelegates for the second round of this process [at the convention].

He has to be very careful in talking about them about how rigged the system is.

ZIPPERER: In a recent Week to Week program, we were talking about how the delegate system worked, and

Everyone in politics is saying, ‘Yeah, we know, it’s how it works, and it’s a very difficult s y s t e m .’ ” — C . W. Ne v i u s I asked, “There’s no rule against a candidate just buying delegates, right?”

TAYLOR: That’s right.

ZIPPERER: Today, Donald Trump is saying, “You know what, I’ve got lots of toys that I could share with these delegates.”

MARINUCCI: It’s true. I just talked to Sal Russo, who founded Tea Party Express, who told me that Paul Manafort, who Trump has hired to engage this whole system, is going to be [at the Republican National Convention] offering these people memberships to Trump golf courses, trips on Trump Force One, front-row seats to whatever. It’s totally legal to do that, and Trump has the bank account to do it.

C.W. NEVIUS: I’d say, look at it logically. Trump and Hillary Clinton should win New York. Those are their places.

Yet, they consistently do something that is so-Trump and so-Hillary, that it puts them back. Hillary comes off this debate, where she’s slammed for taking big money, flies to San Francisco, and has this unbelievable gala. That is so Hillary. And Trump has all of this momentum, and yet he keeps putting his foot in it—the abortion thing, the [claim that] it is all rigged—as everyone in politics is saying, “Yeah, we know, it’s how it works, and it’s a very difficult system; and by the way, maybe you should have put some people on the ground ahead of time.” And now he’s doing that.

ZIPPERER: Is there something to be said for Hillary on

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this giant George Clooney fundraiser and a lot of the others, where most of the money from that George Clooney fundraiser isn’t going to her campaign, it’s going to the DNC and the down-ballot Democrats, the people she’s going to need in Congress if she gets elected.

MARINUCCI: George Clooney ... said “This money is obscene, but I’m doing this because I’ve got to raise money for a Senate and House if Democrats are going to win, that’s what I’ve got to do, like it or not.” It is a criticism that has been put at Bernie Sanders: “Where are you?”

TAYLOR: This is part of Bernie’s problem. He’s not playing the insider’s game. In other words, these delegates have no loyalty to Bernie, they are hostile to him because he’s never done anything for any of them, except for a handful that he’s named. So by definition of being the outsider, he doesn’t play their game. Hillary is deeply embedded in the game, and there are many relationships and loyalties.

So it’s going to be very difficult for Bernie Sanders to pull these people away, when even though Bernie’s logic is we can change the game by changing what happens going forward. He’s counting on California.

ZIPPERER: What are his chances in California?

TAYLOR: Not good.

Senate Race ZIPPERER: Let’s talk about the U.S. Senate primary race.

There are 31 candidates — CARSON BRUNO: 33.

MELISSA CAEN: See how easy it is to get on the ballot?

[Laughter.]

ZIPPERER: Kamala Harris has raised $9 million as of January, Loretta Sanchez $2.7 million. On the GOP side, Duf Sundheim has raised $300,000, Tom del Beccaro $188,000. Are those the four candidates we’re likely to be talking about as having any chance?

JOE GAROFOLI: That’s a major reason—the fundraising.

I talked to Duf a couple weeks ago, and he goes, “Well, now that California’s going to matter, we’ll have all of this attention here, because of the sort-of Trump bump, so I’m able to hire a fundraiser now.” Dude, it’s March. [Laughter.]

Duf’s a very earnest guy, but those guys are driving themselves around, it’s not a very major operation. That’s hard.

They’re Republicans in California. Because of the top-two finishers, the people with the most votes who move on to the general election could be two Democrats.

BRUNO: Republicans have a math problem in June.

When you’re talking about 33 candidates—there are 11 Republicans, there are 7 Democrats, 2 Libertarians, 1 Green, 1 Peace and Freedom, and 11 nonpartisan. Even at a very favorable, 40-percent Republican turnout, in the 2012-2014 [election], the kind of nonmajor Republicans, still win votes, they still win percentages. You’re starting to look at Duf and Tom del Baracaro splitting roughly 20-25 percent of the votes.

ZIPPERER: Does [the Trump bump] potentially make it more likely that one of those Republicans can get into the

Left to right: Loretta Sanchez and Kamala Harris, both Democrats, are also the two most likely primary winners in California’s U.S. Senate race.

final two, where they might not in another year?

GAROFOLI: Del Baracarro told me that, “I don’t know if there’s a direct line from the Trump voter to our campaign.” So they’re excited about more Repbulicans voting, but they’re not quite sure where—are those guys going to come in and vote just for the presidnetial race, and then “I’m going to go to lunch,” or do they stick around and vote for everything on the ballot? They don’t know.

BRUNO: And are they actually Republicans?

CAEN: I think as long as they’re spread out among so many of them, even an increased turnout is not going to result [in a general election placement]. You’ve got to consolidate, or they’re not going to be able to compete, even with Loretta Sanchez.

ZIPPERER: There are some other measures on the ballot.

One is called measure AA, a Clean and Healthy Bay ballot measure. Carson, can you tell us what it is?

BRUNO: In June, in the nine Bay Area Counties—San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Sonoma, Napa, and Marin— ZIPPERER: Wow. [Audience applause.]

BRUNO: I was practicing that in the car ride up—could I get them all? [Laughter.] We will have a proposition on the ballot in each of those counties that will increase taxes to pay for the San Francisco Bay restoration and flood protection and some other issues related to the Bay. It is interesting, because it is one of those rare ballot measures

that, while it’s on the ballot in each county independently, it’s actually a multi-county coalition effort to make it pass.

If San Francisco votes for it but everyone [else] votes against it, there’s a very big chance that it won’t happen at all, not even in San Francisco. All nine counties, of the total votes, two-thirds need to vote in favor of it.

ZIPPERER: There are some other things on the ballot.

Measure C in San Francisco on affordable housing; San Jose has a Measure C, but it’s on medical marijuana, so you don’t want to get those two mixed up. [Laughter.] But AA is probably the big one.

CAEN: There’s a statewide ballot measure, [Prop 50]— which is going to pass with flying colors—that allows members of the legislature to be suspended without pay.

This goes back of course to the Leland Yee issue, where they found there was no legal mechanism—you could either remove someone from office after they were convicted, or they got to sit there and keep collecting their paycheck.

This measure would create this suspended-without-pay designation.

MARINUCCI: Even after they had been indicted, they’re still collecting salaries, still collecting benefits, and the political establishment up in Sacramento is [saying] “We can’t do anything, that’s just the law.”

This is an important one. Having seen the three senators come up and continue, for months, to get their salary and benefits, this is sort of a no-brainer, I think.

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THE PEOPLE AND POLITICS OF THE NEW INDIA

India has more young people than any other country at any time in history. How will they change the world’s largest democracy?

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Somini Sengupta, foreign correspondent for The New York Times and author of The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young; with moderator Alison van Diggelen, host of “Fresh Dialogues” and a BBC contributor. From the March 21, 2016, program. Photo by Nicole Bengiveno.

I was born in India. I left when I was quite small, and there are not a lot of memories that I have of my childhood there. But there are some that have really stayed planted in my brain.

There’s one of my grandfather who was a complete and total news junkie. He had a transistor radio on the window sill next to his bed. It was turned on to All India Radio day and night. He had a stack of newspapers on his table.

And as I was just learning how to read, I must have been maybe seven, about the same age as my daughter is now, he was beginning to lose his eyesight. He was starting to go blind. And I remember being summoned into his room and being ordered to read a few things.

So maybe I could manage a headline, maybe one paragraph, the first paragraph of a story. I had absolutely no idea what any of it meant. But I knew that it meant something to him, because at the end of every day when the heat of the day subsided, he would go outside, he would sit on his stoop, and all his friends from the neighborhood would come around, some of them with their canes, all in varying states of frailty.

They would come and sit on that stoop and argue about the day’s news. They would argue about who was going to war in which country and which politician was a swindler and why was the price of vegetables and lentils going up at the market. They would talk, they would argue, and then when it got dark they would all get up and go home. And the same thing would happen the next day. So for me, as a kid watching this, I knew that the world beyond my grandfather’s stoop was a vast and interesting world that I wanted to explore.

And I knew that the news mattered. Perhaps it was then that a small seed may have planted itself in my brain, because I grew up to be a newspaper woman. I grew up to be a journalist, and I came back almost exactly 30 years after I left. I came back in 2005 as the bureau chief for The New York Times, and almost instantly I realized how young this country had become. Not just young in the sense that there were a lot of children, because there were always a lot of children in India. In fact, India’s fertility rate has gone down quite dramatically since independence. So the population as a whole has fewer children to take care of, fewer older people to take care of relative to the rest of the population. Really what’s happened is that this working-age cohort has just really bulged.

I’ll give you what to me is a mind-boggling number.

The number of Indians between the ages of 15 and 34 today exceeds 420 million. That exceeds the combined population of the United States, Canada, and Britain. It’s astonishing. Every month 1 million Indians turn 18. So

they can go out looking for work, they can register to vote.

Many of them are embracing the Internet for the first time in their lives. They’re speaking out, they’re falling in love, they’re coming of age. In so doing I think they’re really transforming the soul of Indian democracy.

So I set out to explore what this generation of young Indians was all about. And the heart of this book is really what I call “noonday children.” Noonday children are those who come of age after 1991, after the Indian economy slowly, quietly begins to open up, and it leads to all kinds of profound changes.

Anupam I met when he was 17 years old. Anupam is the son of an auto rickshaw driver from a tough north Indian town called Patna. Anupam’s father, six, seven days a week, 12 hours a day, drove one of those three-wheeled auto rickshaws throughout the city of Patna.

Anupam not only did not want to be an auto rickshaw driver, he wanted to get into one of the toughest univer-

Anupam dropped out of school in fourth grade, and said ‘I’m going to study by myself.’ And his mother never once doubted him. sities in the world, the Indian Institutes of Technology, which many of you in this room would know. What made Anupam’s ambition all the more improbable was that in his neighborhood, both the government schools and the private schools that his parents could afford, they didn’t work. The teachers didn’t show up to teach. He remembers, in the government school, the bricks tumbling down from the schoolhouse. The electricity didn’t work in his neighborhood half the day. There was a ribbon of raw sewage running down each end of his lane. Anupam didn’t let any of that stop him.

Anupam dropped out of school in fourth grade, came home, and told his mother that his teacher wasn’t reading properly from the textbook that she was teaching from. He came home and he said, “I’m going to study by myself,” and his mother never once doubted him. His mother never said go back to that school or go work in a factory or do housework.

She completely believed in him. She had no idea what the IITs were, but it didn’t matter. She believed in him.

So, spoiler alert, Anupam did make it. He literally cut his own hole through the fence and crawled right through.

And when he got to the other side, he began a kind of discovery of India for himself and slowly came to get to know himself better.

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young men and women like himself. I tell you the story of Anupam not because Anupam is typical. He is an extraordinary young man. I’ve known him now for 10 years. He is a man of remarkable resilience, remarkable persistence.

I tell you the story because his aspiration is the story of so many Indians and so many young Indians of his generation.

I tell you his story because his story is the story of a golden child. Every family has a golden child, and the story of a mother who really believes in him.

If there’s one country that I have found myself comparing India to, again and again, it is not China. Many of you will have heard the commonplace comparisons of India and China. I actually think that comparison is quite limited.

India and China’s storylines are very, very different. But India and the United States—we have remarkably parallel trajectories.

We are both really unlikely democracies. We are not based on a single ethnicity or a single religion. We are both

In America chattel slavery is very much part of our history.

In India the caste system is very much a part of [their] history. incredibly diverse countries. We are also born of profound degrading forms of inequality. In America chattel slavery is very much part of our history. In India the caste system is very much part of our history. Yet remarkably we both have these constitutions that guarantee, that promise, equality in the eyes of the law. That’s an extraordinary thing. I think for both countries the journeys have been precisely to realize that promise, in fits and starts, not in a straight line, not always in pretty ways.

But as you see in this country, Black Lives Matter is very much about realizing that promise made in the Constitution. There’s one pillar of Indian democracy that I would argue has been pretty wobbly from the very beginning, and that is the right to free expression, the right to free speech.

Because India, really unlike any other country in the world, has had to balance these two things. On the one hand, the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech; on the other hand, the chance that something someone says or paints or posts online can really upset a community based on their religion, based on their caste group, their ethnic group. And then it can lead to unrest. As you know, India has had many bouts of communal unrest. So for India’s leaders from the very beginning, this has been a really delicate balancing act. But I do think that this has become so much sharper in the Internet age.

This is a really profound challenge for India today. One of the stories I tell is of a young woman, her name is Renu;

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she gets arrested, a few years ago, for posting something online. She gets arrested under a provision of the law that criminalizes online speech if it can spark unrest offline.

Renu kind of becomes a test case of this. It infuriates the members of her generation when she is arrested and charged with a criminal offense for a Facebook post. Ultimately the charges against Renu are dropped. The law under which she was arrested is overturned by India’s Supreme Court.

But the story doesn’t end there. This is a really significant and urgent fault line of Indian democracy today. Many of you will have been following the news, just in the last couple of weeks, of some protests that have been going on in Delhi, in the heart of the capital, at a university called Jawaharlal Nehru University. It’s like the Berkeley of India, and it’s extremely prestigious. There were some student protests there a few weeks ago at which some slogans were shouted for Kashmiri independence, and the student leader there stood up for his fellow students’ right to free speech.

Shortly after that he was arrested not under a new law but an old law, a colonial-era law, and charged with sedition.

His arrest and what has ensued after that has really revealed what a polarizing issue this is for Indian society today. It’s not necessarily old-versus-young. It has polarized young Indians on these lines, between those who say that unpatriotic speech should be punished and those who say that the very fabric of a healthy democracy relies on the ability of students, especially students, to express their views, their political views.

There’s one last story that I will tell you about, and that is of a young woman named Varsha, and Varsha I met when she was 14 years old. She’s the daughter of a press wala [someone who presses clothes for a living]. Her parents have a small stand in a prosperous suburb; they press other people’s clothes. Ever since Varsha was a little girl, she’s been carrying bundles of clothes from people’s apartments and nice houses. She’s helped her mother iron the clothes, she’s carried them back. And because she’s the oldest girl of five siblings, she also helps her mother every night with making chapatis.

She helps her siblings with their homework. She does all of this, but she is totally and utterly devoted to school.

She’s nuts about school. Why? Because school is her exit ticket. She does not want to be a press wala, she does not want to be a press wala’s wife. What does Varsha wanna be?

Varsha wants to be a police officer. She wants to wear a khaki pressed, starched uniform with the silver stars on her lapel, the handcuffs on the belt loops. She wants to be a police officer because when Varsha was about 16 years old, another young woman, slightly older than her, was brutally gang raped on the streets of Delhi, and you’ve all heard about this case.

Varsha wanted to serve her country. Varsha wanted to be a police officer to keep women and girls like her safe. Now Varsha’s father, he loved her, he totally backed her, he knew that she was a special kid. He would be able to find her a better husband if she got a good education. But while he

was her champion, he was also the defender of the very rules that circumscribe girls like Varsha. So while he wanted her to get an education, he was wary of too much education.

He was of mixed minds about her working outside the home and certainly, absolutely opposed to the idea of her becoming a police officer. So Varsha pushed and nudged and pushed and nudged her father, and the story of Varsha is really an unfinished story. She’s only 19 years old.

But Varsha’s story is really a story of a young woman who tries to grow her wings, and of her father who has to decide how far he’s going to let her go.

Question and answer session with moderator Alison van Diggelen ALLISON VAN DIGGELEN: One of the points that you made in your opening remarks was that amazing statistic: every month 1 million Indians turn 18. Talk about what you call that youth bulge and the implications for that furious part of India’s future.

SOMINI SENGUPTA: The youth bulge first of all, just to put it in context a little bit. At a time when the world is aging, particularly the rich world is aging, India is home to more young people than any other country in the world at any point in human history.

This is a really historic concentration of young people.

Meeting their expectations for economic opportunities is a staggering challenge. An example of fury that some of you may have heard about recently: In Haryana, a prosperous state next to Delhi, there were some protests a few weeks ago, and they were described as caste protests.

They were led by a prosperous, land-owning caste called the Jats. The sons of the Jats no longer can survive on the land, and they’re not educated enough to get the kinds of jobs that they would like. So they were agitating for reservations, or quotas, set-asides, in government jobs. They blocked the streets for several days, they burned some cars and trucks, and really dominated the newspapers for several days with pictures of that kind of fury.

Now India is too big and too vast for there to be just that one story. I do not want to say that it’s typical of what’s happening all over the country. It’s simply impossible to make that kind of a generalization. But that is certainly an example of the immediate fury that you see on the streets.

VAN DIGGELEN: When you talk about caste, you told a short story in your book about a very famous and well-respected musician who goes into a posh hotel in India and they will not serve him. Can you describe what happened and why that happened in today’s modern India?

SENGUPTA: This story was told to me by a dear friend of mine who is a concert promoter. He promotes the traditional music of Rajasthan, and he was taking one of his musicians, a very famous musician who had won lots of national awards, and he was taking him to perform. He invited him to his fancy hotel for a cup of tea beforehand.

This was a very traditional part of the country, where some of the social customs are observed more strictly

than many other parts of the country. This musician was not served a cup of tea, because the waiter who came to serve said, “No, we don’t serve Manganyas.” That’s the community that he belonged to. My friend was appalled and summoned the hotel manager, and the hotel manager stuck by the waiter and said, “Well, he’s absolutely right. We have certain customs here, and we don’t serve him.” So my friend, who happens to be a travel agent, then said, “Then I will not recommend that anyone come and stay in your hotel.” It was an example of how in some places—certainly not all—some of these prohibitions still survived.

VAN DIGGELEN: One of the other factors that you write about in your book that leads to this fury is the gender imbalance in India. Can you explain what it is, what this gender imbalance is, and why you feel this could lead to more fury, more violence [because] the share of Indian boys to girls is imbalanced?

SENGUPTA: So much so that it is worse today than any point in Indian’s history. Let me correct that though: the last couple of years h ­ as shown us slight improvement in the numbers, but as ultrasound technology has become more widely available, girls are culled from the population so much so that—if I am remembering correctly—there were 17 million extra boys among Indians between the ages of 10 and 24. That’s a lot of extra boys.

In many parts of the country where the gender imbalance is particularly high, young men have a very hard time finding a wife. For example, in Haryana, that’s the state with the worst gender imbalance, in fact. So it didn’t surprise me that those protests that were so fierce in that state. Because the marriage market is extremely competitive where you have so few women and so many without a job.

VAN DIGGELEN: There’s an incredible chapter, it made my jaw drop. Rakhi [is] a 21-year-old female commander of a guerrilla squad. She’s actually killed several people with her bare hands. She’s part of an extreme communist group fighting against the state to return power to the people.

SENGUPTA: The Maoist insurgency first emerged in a really big way in the late ’60s. But what I found really striking is when I came back to India in 2005, this was such a prosperous time, a golden age for India, and the Maoists had come up again. This insurgency was thriving again. It was thriving in precisely that part of India that had been most left behind by the years of economic growth; it was thriving in the Adivasi Belt. Adivasis live in some of the richest lands, so their lands are full of natural resources.

Timber, iron ore, coal, all kinds of minerals, and the Adivasi belt is also home to the poorest people in India. Some of them have left their villages and have seen what life is like in the other parts of India, and they know exactly how their home communities are deprived.

Also it’s where the environmental damage, the ecological damage, has been grave and stands to be much graver in the coming years, as India expands coal mining and power generation. So I think it’s a very important part of the country for all of us to pay greater attention to.

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U.S. DEFENSE SECRETARY ASHTON CARTER SPEAKS The Pentagon chief discusses the country’s military and security priorities, including terrorism, freedom of the seas, digital security, and dealing with China.

Dr. Ashton Carter, the U.S. secretary of defense; Dr. Gloria Duffy, the president and CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California. From the March 1, 2016, program. Photos by Ed Ritger.

Last week I laid out our defense budget for 2017. In that budget, we are [taking] a long view in our mission to defend the United States. We have to, because even as we fight today’s fights, we must also be prepared for what might come 10, 20 or 30 years down the road. This is particularly important today, because today’s security environment, like everything else, is rapidly changing.

It’s competitive. It’s dramatically different from the last 25 years. [It is] going to require of us new ways of investing and operating for the U.S. military.

Five evolving challenges—namely Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and terrorism—now drive DOD’s [Department of Defense’s] planning and budgeting. I want to describe briefly each of them to you before I dive more deeply into some issues that I know are top of mind to this particular community.

The first two of the five challenges reflect a return in some ways to great-power competition. One is in Europe, where we’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russian aggression. The second challenge is in the Asia-Pacific, the single most consequential region for America’s future, where China is rising—which is fine—but behaving aggressively—which is not. Now, we don’t desire conflict with either of those countries; while I need to say that they pose some similar challenges militarily, they’re very different nations and very different situations.

Our preference is to work together with important nations, but we also cannot blind ourselves to their apparent goals and actions. Meanwhile, two other longstanding challenges pose threats in specific regions. North Korea is J U N E/J U LY 2016

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one, that’s why our forces on the Korean peninsula remain ready—as they say and have said for decades now—to fight tonight. The other is Iran. Because while the nuclear accord is a good deal for preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we must still deter Iranian aggression and malign influence against our allies and friends, particularly Israel.

The fifth challenge, very different from the other four, very important, is our ongoing fight against terrorism and especially ISIL, which we must and will deal a lasting defeat, most immediately in Iraq and Syria, where we’re accelerating our campaign in every dimension, as well as where ISIL is metastasizing around the world. We’re doing that in North Africa. We’re doing that in Afghanistan, where we continue to stand with the Afghan government and people to counter Al-Qaeda and now ISIL. And all the time, all the while we’re continuing to work with other government agencies to protect our people here in the homeland. We don’t have the luxury of choosing among these challenges, but we do have the ability to set a

That’s why we’re opening all combat positions to women—to expand our access to 100 percent of Americans for an all-volunteer force. course for the future, a future that’s uncertain but will surely be competitive and demanding of America’s leadership, values and military edge.

That’s why a common theme across our budget is that the DOD has to innovate to be competitive in a competitive world. That’s why, just to give you one measure, we’re spending $71.8 billion on research and development next year alone, constantly increasing. And for a little local context, that is more than double what Intel, Apple, and Google spent on R&D last year combined. Those funds go to things like making DOD a leader in cyber security, advancing our commanding lead in undersea capabilities, and developing new hypersonic missiles that can fly over five times the speed of sound.

It involves advancing artificial intelligence, autonomy, and robotics, so that no matter what our enemies throw at our systems, they just work. It enables taking long-existing systems and giving them surprising new capabilities. And it invests in new strategic approaches to preventing and winning conflicts against 21st century threats.

All this reflects our understanding of how much technology development has changed in recent decades.

When I began my career, most technology of consequence originated in America, and much of that was sponsored by the government, especially by DOD. Today, much more technology is commercial, and [much of ] the competition is global.

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For these reasons, our budget also invests hundreds of millions of dollars next year in building and rebuilding bridges with America’s technology and business community, including here in the Bay area, because we need a strong partnership to succeed in the 21st century. Protect our people, make a better world for our children.

One way we’re reaching out is through our Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUX. [We explore] a variety of different ways for DOD to better tap into the region’s innovation ecosystem and build relationships with local companies, some of which I’ll be meeting with later today.

And we’re still exploring, we’re still innovative, because we want to be iterative, we want to be agile.

In the future we must continue to recruit and retain the very best talent from future generations. That’s also why we’re opening all combat positions to women—to expand our access to 100 percent of Americans for an all-volunteer force, competing for good people, for an all-volunteer force is a critical part of our military edge.

And everyone should understand this need and my commitment to it. Just as companies here in San Francisco continually seek greater efficiency to benefit both their customers and their shareholders, we in DOD are pushing Congress for much-needed reforms across our enterprise, from acquisition reform to closing bases that we don’t need to reducing overhead, so that your taxpayer dollars will be spent more wisely and so that our troops get everything that they need to succeed and come home safely.

We’re doing all these things to make sure the remarkable stability and prosperity that’s been achieved in the Asia Pacific Region and around the world can endure. Trade requires safe passage. Investment requires stability. Innovation requires freedom. And each of these requires security.

It’s been said that security’s like oxygen. When you have enough of it, you tend to pay no attention to it. But when you don’t have it, it’s all you can think of. Security is what enables the stability and success of global markets, and the very foundation that shapes the global order depends on the physical and perceived security that the Department of Defense provides….

The remarkable diversity of commerce and people who crossed the Golden Gate over the centuries proves that the Pacific has never been the domain of any one nation. It belongs to and benefits all. But that common benefit relies upon a foundation of stability and peace.

Since the end of World War II, the United States and our military have played an indispensable role in helping create that foundation of security allowing people, economies and countries to rise, prosper, innovate and win.

First Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, then the nations of southeast Asia, and now, yes, China and India, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted into the middle class, and in many nations, democracies have taken hold.

America’s policy of rebalancing to the Asia Pacific is about sustaining this progress and maintaining our pivotal role to ensure stability and prosperity in a changing region.

The U.S. Navy patrols the seas to ensure the free flow of commerce as we have for generations, not only for the United States, but for every nation. We will also continue to forge stronger bonds between the nations of this critical region, including the bonds between our respective defense industries. When we build things together, the bonds between nations grows stronger and others can share the burden of common defense.

We’ll also continue to provide defense systems to friends and allies, and train with them to advance the security of all our nations, as we’re doing increasingly, and more Asia-Pacific nations from India to Vietnam to Japan are drawn to partner more with us. We’re investing in this in our budget with, for example, a $425 million maritime security initiative for Southeast Asia. America’s efforts in this region have never been aimed at holding any nation back or pushing any country down. The United States wants every nation to have the opportunity to rise, and that includes China. We welcome its rise and its inclusion in this architecture, but we don’t welcome aggressive behavior. We all have a fundamental stake in the security of Maritime Asia, including in the South China Sea. Nearly 30 percent of the world’s maritime trade transits its waters

annually, including approximately $1.2 trillion in shipping trade bound for the United States. That’s why the United States joins virtually every nation in the region in being deeply concerned about the artificial island construction and militarization in the South China sea, including steps especially by China that it has taken most recently by placing systems and military aircraft on a disputed island.

These activities have the potential to increase the risk of miscalculation and conflict among claimant states. President Xi stated in Washington a few months ago that China would not do this. China must not pursue militarization in the South China Sea. Specific actions will have specific consequences. Indeed, while some in the region appear determined to play spoiler, the United States and our many friends in the region don’t plan on letting anyone up-end seven decades worth of progress.

For our part, it should be clear that the U.S. military will continue to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows around the world, because the maritime domain must always be open and free to all. To ensure the U.S. military’s continued ability to project power in the maritime domain and around the world, our budget makes key investments in our naval strength.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter contemplates an audience question asked

by Commonwealth Club President and CEO Gloria Duffy.

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(opposite page) Uniformed members of the military joined hundreds of civilians in the audience for the defense secretary’s speech.

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One is in undersea capabilities, where we continue to dominate, and where we’re investing over $8 billion just next year to ensure ours is the most lethal and advanced undersea and submarine force in the world. Including, by the way, with new undersea drones. Another investment is of course our surface fleet, which in our budget grows both the number of ships and their capabilities to deter even the most advanced potential adversaries and protect the maritime security we all depend on.

More is coming. All of these military investments are necessary. They’re not sufficient, because security and prosperity are inextricably linked. So America must build on its growing political and economic engagement in the Asia Pacific as well. Most important, Congress must complete action on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, or TPP. As our military preserves freedom of navigation and the free-flow of commerce at sea, we’re equally committed to the free-flow of information and commerce online. The Internet was created by DOD, academia and industry working together. And since then, we’ve seen it enable boundless transformation and prosperity across all sectors of our society, making many things easier, cheaper and safer.

But as we’ve also seen in recent years, these same technologies present a degree of risk to the individual people and the businesses who rely on them everyday, making it easier, cheaper and so it seems safer to threaten all that. Like so many Bay Area businesses, the Defense Department relies on networks heavily, which is why defending our networks and weapon systems is job one for the Department of Defense in cyberspace. They’re no good if they’ve been hacked.

DOD’s second mission in cyberspace is to help other agencies defend the nation against cyber attacks from abroad, especially if they would cause loss of life, property destruction, or significant foreign policy and economic consequences.

And the third mission is to provide offensive cyber options that can be used in a conflict, as we’re doing now against ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

In the defense budget we’re investing more in all three of these missions, a total of $35 billion over the next five years with much, much more than this going to modernizing and securing DOD’s hundreds of networks. Part of that goes toward building and training a cyber mission force, some of whom I’ll meet in Seattle later this week. These are talented people, some active duty but also reservists, National Guardsmen, who hunt down intruders and perform the forensics that help keep our systems secure.

China and Russia are pursuing a different vision. Just last week, China’s government further restricted foreign companies from publishing and distributing online content in China and made it clear that state media would speak for the party’s will alone. We’ve seen that China aims to rewrite the rules of the global internet, limiting the access of their 1 billion-plus citizens to an open society. China has also indicated intent to require backdoors to all new

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technologies, potentially forcing the world to operate and innovate on China’s terms.

That’s not right. Clearly this approach is contrary to the values we share as a nation here in the United States.

The United States government and the United States Department of Defense share the same underlying objectives and values as America’s technology community, and we believe in living the values we defend in the Department of Defense. We believe we all have a stake in protecting intellectual property, making sure the internet remains free, open, secure and prosperous. And that means we must continue to respect and protect the freedoms of expression, association and privacy that reflect who we are as a nation.

As secretary of defense, my mission is ensuring our military can defend our country and make a better world.

And DOD is at its best when it has the best partners.

Knowing how we’ve worked together in the past with those of you in the innovative tech sector and how critical your work is to our country, strengthening that partnership is very important to me. I’m glad we’ve started to make real progress on that over the last year.

Apple and the FBI There are limits on what I can say about the case that’s been in the news lately, I’m sure you know which one I’m talking about. Particularly because it’s under litigation, and it’s a law enforcement matter. So let me speak more broadly, because this is one of the most complicated challenges of our time.

First, it’s important to take a step back here, because future policy shouldn’t be driven by any one particular case. Second, encryption is a necessary part of data security, and strong encryption is a good thing. DOD is the largest user of encryption in the world, principally because our troops need it. It helps keep our fighter jets and our sensor networks from getting hacked. It allows us to surprise our adversaries, and lets our people deployed around the world communicate securely with their families back home, from sailors aboard aircraft carriers to soldiers in Afghanistan. For all these reasons, we need our data security and encryption to be as strong as possible.

Third, as we together engineer approaches to overall human security in the information age, I know enough about technology to recognize that there will not be some simple overall technical approach, including the so-called backdoor. The bottom line is that the tech community and policy makers need to work together to solve these complex challenges, just like they have in the past.

Future technology will only grow more complicated.

And in this global marketplace, failing to work together would risk letting others set the standard on their terms, and according to their values.

It’s easy to see the wrong ways to go about this. One would be a law hastily written in anger or grief. Another would be to have the rules written by Russia or China.

That’s why the Department of Defense will continue seeking to work with Bay Area companies, because we’re

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living in the same world, with the same basic trends and the same basic threats, and we must innovate the way forward together.

My pledge to you is this: You’ll always have a strong and willing partner in America’s Department of Defense. You can count on your military, the finest fighting force the world has ever known, to do its part so you can continue to innovate and excel with us for generations to come.

Question and answer session with Dr. Gloria Duffy.

GLORIA DUFFY: You made history last December when you opened all combat jobs in the military to women. What led you to this decision? How is implementation of the decision going? Are the military services supporting it? What challenges remain to fully integrate women into all jobs in the military, and when will that integration be complete?

ASHTON CARTER: Sure. All good questions. Fundamentally, the question is why did we do this in the first place? What’s the point? And a lot of people think fairness.

Fairness is important, but the real reason is that females are half of our population and we’re an all volunteer force.

What’s important to me, for mission effectiveness, is to have access to the entire population that includes the half of the population that is female.

Let me just remind you that we don’t let that many people in. We like picking and choosing and, sad to say, about three quarters of young Americans don’t qualify for our military. We need the very best. Now, it’s important to say you’re asking about implementation, just declaring

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positions open to women is not successful implementation.

There are real issues here. By the way, this was the recommendation I received from the chief of staff of the Army, the chief of naval operations, the chiefs at the Air Force, the secretary of the Air Force, secretary of the Army, the secretary of the Navy, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

The commandant down at the Marine Corps raised some issues which are very valid ones that I thought could be dealt with, but had to be dealt with in implementation, and that’s what we’re doing. To get to your point, implementation is really critical here. We need to do it right and we will, but I’m confident that we’ll be able to do that and it’s part of the way I think we need to think about the future.

DUFFY: There’s been some discussion about whether women should register for the draft. Who makes that decision?

CARTER: It’s not made, and I don’t want to speak for it, because there’s a separate part of the government that does Selective Service. And by the way it’s all prescribed in law.

It stands to reason that Congress would reconsider that given that women are now qualified. Qualified women who can meet the standards are allowed to compete for any position in the U.S. military, and it would stand to reason that they would look at the Selective Service law. I just want to say one thing: As secretary of defense, I don’t want a draft for the reason I just told you. I want to pick people. I don’t want to be given people, because sad to say, half of the young people in America don’t meet our phys-

ical standards, 10 percent of them have law enforcement records that prevent them entering our military, about a third of them don’t have a high school diploma. And almost everybody we recruit in the military—99% have a high school diploma. And so, we want an all volunteer force. That’s our strength.

DUFFY: I believe the 101st Airborne Division is about to deploy troops to fight in Iraq, striking at the root of the terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria. What’s our strategy in this more traditional military campaign?

CARTER: We’re going to take back the territory that ISIL is now terrorising. We’re going to help the people who live there do it. That’s the strategic approach, and that’s in simple recognition of the fact that after ISIL is defeated, for them to remain defeated, somebody has to govern and give people back a decent life. That’s not us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help them to regain that territory.

Think of it in terms of a map in Iraq, think that we’re working with the Iraqi security forces now. We train them, we equip them, we help them and to answer to your question, are we gonna do more? Yes, we’re looking for opportunities to do more with the Iraqis, because we want them to move now from Ramadi, eventually Mosel, which is Iraq’s second largest city which is in the hands of ISIL and needs to be taken back, and will be taken back as soon as we can accomplish that with the Iraqi security forces.

Over in Syria, things are much more complicated, because there’s civil war going on. We’re not a party to the civil war, but among other nasty things, refugees and so forth, the civil war has given opportunity for ISIL there.

The key place there is Raqqa, which if you’ve never heard of it before, you have now, because it is the place ISIL claims is the capital of its caliphate.

We can’t have a state based upon an ideology like this.

So Raqqa, like Mosul, needs to fall, and it needs to fall at the hands of the people who live there, and we’re doing exactly that also. In fact, forces enabled by us just took the city of Shaddadi again I forgive you if you don’t know all this geography; Shaddadi is between Mosul and Raqqa. By taking Shaddadi, we closed the last major road between Mosul and Raqqa, which means severing the parent tumor of the cancer of ISIL in half and isolating it in the Iraq side from the Syria side, which obviously have totally different political contexts. And then, we need to make those cities fall. Then it will be clear to everyone that there’s no such thing as a state based on ISIL. DUFFY: Is Russia a threat to the United States or a new partner in combating the emergence of the supposed caliphate of ISIS and ISIL? CARTER: The overall story is that sadly from my point of view, Russia has in recent years wanted to, and they say this, turn back the clock to another time. I don’t personally think that’s good for the Russian people, but that’s not my call to make; it is the Russian leadership’s, and that’s the direction they seem to be going that’s creating a lot of problems.

First and foremost in Europe, we are having now for the

first time in a quarter century to revisit our playbook with NATO and make sure that we can deter and respond to any aggression by Russia, particularly on NATO territory, on the kind of thing we’ve seen in Ukraine.

It’s not just standard aggression. We need to worry about that, too, but it’s the “little green men” phenomenon, called hybrid warfare. So in Europe, in Syria, the Russians have gotten off to a completely wrong footing. They said they were coming to fight ISIL, that’s not what they did. They joined the Syrian civil war on Assad’s side, which will have the effect of prolonging the civil war. Where they could be helpful if they choose to be but haven’t been yet is to persuade Assad to step aside.

DUFFY: This is an audience question. Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to human civilization and the whole biosphere. What are you doing to stop carbon emissions?

CARTER: It’s a good question, and it’s a serious concern.

If the question is what is the Department of Defense doing per se, we are a carbon emitter, but not a driver of that.

We are doing things both in the name of efficiency as well as carbon footprint, like everybody else is. More efficient buildings, more efficient fuel, more efficient jet engines, which also have a greater thrust-to-weight and other things that are important to us from a military point of view.

But climate change does have strategic implications for us. So another question is, “What are you doing to adapt and how is that affecting us?” We don’t have a whole lot of

We need to make those cities fall. Then it will be clear to everyone that there’s no such thing as a state based on ISIL. effect on it, but it does have an effect on us. One thing it’s doing is opening up the Arctic, which is already causing people to jockey and position.

I was talking about freedom of navigation and I mentioned the South China Sea, which happens to be a place that everybody is focused on today. But don’t forget that the reason to stick up for freedom of navigation is it’s everywhere. Straights of Hormuz, Arctic Ocean, Straight of Malacca, South China Sea—all of that is an important part of the human future.

Climate change in the Arctic [is] having a strategic effect on us. It also has an effect on sea levels, which will, particularly for Pacific islanders and everything, have a material effect on them. Patterns of climate affect human security, because they cause people to move and famines to occur and things like that that have security implications....

It does have implications for us very much. We watch all that very closely, try to make adaptations where we can.

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InSight Nunn-Lugar, 25 Years On

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy, President and CEO

O

N MAY 9TH, I ATTENDED the 25th anniversary ceremony for the Nunn-Lugar program, hosted at the Pentagon by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. Retired senators Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard Lugar of Indiana were present, as well as other current and former officials.

In 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons, nuclear materials that could be used to make thousands more nuclear weapons, components and delivery systems were dispersed on the territories of the newly independent Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The latter three countries had no experience handling or securing nuclear weapons, and no agreements with the United States—or with Russia, for that matter—limiting their number of weapons or how the weapons would be handled. The early 1990s post-Soviet problem of “loose nukes” provided a veritable shopping mall for countries or terrorist groups seeking to obtain or build nuclear weapons, threatening to make the world an infinitely more dangerous place.

The Nunn-Lugar approach was conceived of in 1990-91 by a Harvard-Stanford team of policy scholars who were funded by private philanthropy, primarily the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Leading the way in conceptualizing it were then-Harvard professor Ash Carter and Stanford professor William Perry, both of whom would later become secretaries of defense. Other early contributors were Lugar staffer Ken Myers (now deceased), Nunn staffer Richard Combs, and at the Carnegie Corporation President David Hamburg and Cooperative Security Program Chair Jane Wales.

The Nunn-Lugar “Cooperative Threat Reduction” legislation was sponsored in 1991 by the two senators, and in a miracle of bi-partisanship more common then than now, quickly approved by Congress. The approach was quite innovative. It directed the U.S. Defense Department to spend funds to assist the former Soviet countries to dismantle and dispose of their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and to undertake other measures to prevent the further spread of weapons of mass destruction. Over the years, other U.S. agencies, including the departments of State and Energy, joined DoD in the effort, as well as more than 20 other countries, including NATO, Japan and other foreign allies.

Nunn-Lugar took a preventative rather than reactive approach to the problem, seeking to eliminate the weapons and materials before they could be turned against the U.S. or other countries, rather than having to defend against the weapons later on. It was, as Secretary Carter said on May 9th, an approach that was both creative and paradoxical, assisting our recent adversaries to dismantle their Cold War weapons.

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The approach was successful. Within four years, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan agreed to become non-nuclear states, and Russia cooperated on a variety of nuclear safety, security and dismantlement measures on its own territory. The concrete results in the past 25 years have included the elimination of 2,650 Soviet missiles and bombers capable of delivering nuclear warheads to the Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy U.S., eliminating or contributing to the elimination of more than 11,000 Soviet nuclear warheads, securing the warheads that were allowed to remain in Russia under the START agreement, destroying 2 million artillery rounds in Russia with 5,400 metric tons of lethal chemicals, steps leading to the elimination of an anthrax biological weapons facility in Russia, protecting nuclear material from terrorists, transitioning many former Soviet weapons of mass destruction scientists to civilian work, and many other measures.

While the most dramatic successes were realized during the Clinton administration, every administration since George H. W. Bush has supported and implemented the Nunn-Lugar program.

The U.S. has spent more than $15 billion on Nunn-Lugar projects, which, though it might seem pricey, is far less than would have been required to defend against thousands of nuclear weapons.

And of course, cost aside, preventing terrorists from obtaining a nuclear weapon or its components is crucial to our security, in an era when Al Qaeda, ISIS/ISIL and other groups are looking for ways to put our society at devastating risk.

There is much work left to be done in reducing the nuclear danger, and efforts like Nunn-Lugar must continue. North Korea continues to rattle its nuclear saber, the deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program must be monitored and upheld, and terrorist groups continue to be on the hunt for destructive weapons.

As Secretary Carter pointed out at the Pentagon ceremony, the Nunn-Lugar history provides an important lesson. In 1991, the threat of thousands of “loose nukes” spread across the former Soviet Union seemed both frightening and overwhelming. Prior to that time, we did not have the policy tools to deal with such a problem.

But within a few years, the problem was largely solved. Nunn-Lugar shows that the right proactive approach, entrepreneurial thinking, great leadership, collaboration, resources and diligent execution can produce major strides in solving the most challenging problems. If we could do it with nuclear weapons, we can certainly do it with other challenges our society faces.

• Admire the magnificent work of Mughal architecture at the Taj Mahal.

• Experience Amber Fort and the opulent forts and palaces of Jaipur.

• Explore the Pushkar Camel Fair, where locals come to trade, parade and race camels.

• Search for the elusive Bengal tiger and other wildlife at the Ranthambore Tiger Preserve.

• Witness Hindu pilgrims performing their rituals on the Ganges River in Varanasi.

Cost: $5,687, per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Detailed brochure at commonwealthclub.org/travel | (415) 597-6720 | travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40

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PROGRAMS YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS Tuesday, June 14

Tuesday, June 21

Monday, June 20

Bruce Bochy

Barbara Boxer

Bruce Bochy, Manager, SF Giants; Three Time World Series Champion; Two Time National League Manager of the Year; Author, A Book of Walks In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt, Lecturer in Sports Law, UC Berkeley Law School; Former President, Oakland A’s

Ba rba ra Bo x e r, U.S. Senator (D-California); Author, The Art of Tough: Fearlessly Facing Politics and Life

Here’s a chance to get Bruce Bochy’s take on the Giants 2016 season and on his personal side as well. As a Major League manager, Bochy has one of the more stressful jobs imaginable. What does he do to relax? He goes for long walks as a way to clear his head, calm his soul and give his body a workout, all of which is the subject of his new book, A Book of Walks.

Barbara Boxer has made her mark, combining compassionate advocacy with outspokenness in a political career spanning more than three decades. Now, retiring from the U.S. Senate, she continues the work to which she's dedicated 30 years in Congress. She will share her provocative and touching recollections of service, and her commitment to the fight for women, families, environmental protection—all in a peaceful world. Sometimes lauded, sometimes vilified, but always standing tough, Boxer fought for her values even when her personal convictions conflicted with her party or the majority rule.

for event details, see page 22

for event details, see page 23

Mary Roach

William Kristol

Mary Roach, Author, Bonk, Stiff, Packing for Mars, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

William Kristol, Editor, The Weekly Standard; Political Commentator and Columnist Kori Schake, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution—Moderator

Millions of people serve in our armed forces, but what does it take to get them prepared and keep them alive? Roach tackles the science behind some of a soldier’s most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat and noise. She shares some of her bizarre experiences dodging hostile fire as part of a training exercise with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team and staying up all night with the crew manning missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee.

Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never think about our nation’s defenders the same way again. for event details, see page 24

Kristol has been called “the godfather of neoconservativism.” Most recently, he has been outspoken in his concern over a Donald Trump presidency, having said, “Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination makes Hillary Clinton president for the next four years, probably.” He has also written, “Donald Trump has brought to light the rot of an ideological movement that many of us had thought was alive and reasonably well. He has revealed, to some degree, the degradation of a public for whom many of us had higher hopes and expectations.” for event details, see page 23

Tuesday, June 21