Town Hall Seattle Science Series

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The northernmost stretches of Alaska host an environmental wonder that very few people will connect with in their lives — millions of acres of largely undisturbed public land along the Arctic Circle. This region contains pristine tundra landscapes, unrestricted rivers shaped only by nature, and unique wildlife like polar bears, the only caribou herds in the United States, and more aquatic birds than can be found in any other Arctic wetland. And while the features and roles of these lands may be foreign to many even within the United States, science writer Lynda Mapes is committed to the importance of preserving one of America's most significant wildlands against a newly emboldened push of political interference.

Join veteran journalist Mapes alongside longtime Arctic defenders for a multifaceted presentation on the wonder of these lands and the risks they face under a new agenda under the Trump administration, angling for maximum oil, gas, and mineral extraction in Alaska. The evening will open with an excerpt from the film The Arctic: Our Last Great Wilderness — shot by National Geographic photographer Florian Schulz — showcasing the spectacular beauty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and urgency of protecting it.

Mapes will then present on her own reporting just completed in the Arctic, with photography from the field taken in the actively threatened National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Her findings will expand on the non-commercial value of these wildlands that act as home to ancient Native cultures and some of the most important bird, salmon, caribou, and polar bear habitats on the planet. Already vulnerable to rapid changes brought on by the climate crisis, Mapes emphasizes the critical nature of keeping these lands shielded from the lasting impacts of development, drilling, and the selling of public lands. Learn why everyone is connected to what happens next in America's Arctic—and what you can do to protect it.

Lynda Mapes is an award-winning journalist and science writer. She is the author of six books on the natural and cultural history of the Pacific Northwest, including The Trees are Speaking and Orca: Shared Waters Shared Home. She worked previously as an environment reporter for The Seattle Times — focusing on nature, Native cultures and governments, and environmental news throughout her 27 years with the Times. She was named a finalist for a team award for the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2025 and serves on the board of the Northwest Science Writers Association.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Braided River.

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Limits are the key to stimulating creativity, innovation, and collaboration. In a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and prizes freedom above all else, we have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be, and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful, but it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don't necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. In his new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, David Epstein argues that all of us — individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies — can benefit from narrowing our options.

Epstein dives into the science and practice of constraints, exploring exactly when and how guardrails can be beneficial, whether we're working with limited resources or using self-imposed boundaries to tap unexpected wells of focus and innovation. Inside the Box reveals how boundaries create breakthroughs, and how setting the right constraints can help you become the most creative, productive, and satisfied version of yourself.

David Epstein is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Range and the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and as an investigative reporter for ProPublica.

Katy Sewall is the host and creator of The Bittersweet Life podcast. She's a writer, podcast consultant, and a Public Radio professional frequently heard on 94.9 KUOW. She's also the former Program Director at Town Hall.

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Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better Elliott Bay Book Company

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Grief is one of the most universal yet isolating experiences we endure—and psychedelics may offer a path through it. This Salon explores how substances like psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT are being used to support those navigating loss, whether from death, identity shifts, or life transitions. This session sheds light on how altered states can help us reconnect to love, soften the sharp edges of sorrow, and reorient to a life forever changed. Attendees will gain insight into the science and integration practices that support emotional processing and meaning-making in the context of grief.

Dr. Sunil Aggarwal is a physician in hospice and palliative medicine, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and a medical geographer. Dr. Aggarwal's primary clinical work is as an Integrative Pain, Palliative Care, and Rehabilitation Physician in private practice at the AIMS Institute in Seattle, Washington, and as an on-call Palliative and Hospice Physician within a Puget Sound–based healthcare system. He has a petition to reschedule psilocybin that is currently under review at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Aggarwal's medical geography scholarship focuses on the geographies of access, delivery, and development of cannabinologic and psychedelic integrative medicine—particularly as these relate to pain management, hospice and palliative medicine, and rehabilitation services.

After two decades in journalism and content direction, Laura Sullivan Cassidy (she/her) used the early pandemic years to begin building a new career serving communities in grief and loss. She's trained as a grief work facilitator, creative coach, and death doula, and is employed at Recompose, the Seattle-based green funeral home known for pioneering the process of human composting. Her role at Recompose involves outreach, community, and client work—specifically with communities for whom a death is approaching, either via terminal diagnosis or hospice care. Laura writes a Substack called Griever's Ball and offers creative expression, listening groups, and death awareness workshops.

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Psychedelic Salon: Cultivating Conscious Connections

Join Seattle-based psychedelics educator and podcast host April Pride in a dynamic series co-produced with Town Hall Seattle. Psychedelic Salon explores the transformative potential of psychedelic medicines through engaging conversations, expert panels, and interactive community discussions. Rooted in scientific evidence, each event highlights unique themes—including grief, seniors, menopause, and more—emphasizing their role in mental health, spiritual growth, and personal optimization. Designed to be inclusive and insightful, this series invites attendees of all backgrounds to discover how psychedelics can foster profound connections, healing, and well-being.

About April Pride

April Pride is a Seattle-based creative entrepreneur and harm reduction advocate with over two decades of experience building brands at the intersection of lifestyle, cannabis, psychedelics, and women's health. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Vice, and The Guardian. April is the founder of SetSet, the world's first clinician-approved woman-focused platform for safe, accessible psychedelic integration. To learn more, follow April on Substack – aprilpride.substack.com

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Try to imagine a world without birds. It's quite a challenge, given that we share the planet with tens of billions of birds spanning an astonishing 14,000 species. Birds find homes nearly everywhere that people do – and many places we do not – and their prowess and plumage have captivated human imagination throughout the ages. But impressive aerial feats and collective choirs of song aside, part of our fascination with birds is rooted in the awe of something so delicate and strange. How did such seemingly fragile creatures made of hollow bones and downy feathers break the mold of terrestrial life and survive millennia?

In his newest book, The Story of Birds: A New History, from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present, esteemed paleontologist Steve Brusatte embarks on a deep dive through the history of avian evolution. The Story of Birds begins by exploring how dinosaurs gradually developed the trademark features of birds one-by-one—feathers, wings, beaks, big brains, keen senses, and warm-blooded metabolisms. Brusatte investigates how these features contributed to birds emerging as the only surviving dinosaurs of the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago, and how their numbers soared to new heights of diversity in the barren landscape that followed.

Along this journey through time, meet extraordinary extinct species like the 1.5-ton elephant birds of Madagascar, giant Pelagornithid seabirds with 20-foot wingspans, and flightless 10-foot-tall terror birds with beaks that sliced flesh. Brusatte follows these remarkable species all the way down to the present, urging readers to share the same appreciation for the many impressive birds of today– penguins that literally fly underwater, parrots that can mimic human speech, and hummingbirds that hover mid-air and dive at 50 miles per hour. Presented with keen research and soaring enthusiasm, The Story of Birds unearths the unique origins of birds and the legacy they continue to live to this day.

Steve Brusatte, PhD, is an American paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. The paleontology advisor on the Jurassic World film franchise, Brusatte has named more than fifteen new species, including the tyrannosaur "Pinocchio rex" (Qianzhousaurus), the raptor Zhenyuanlong, and several ancient mammals. His research and writing has been featured in Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications.

David B. Williams is an author and naturalist whose award-winning books include Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound and Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography, as well as co-authoring Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State. His newest book, Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature is a best-of collection from his free weekly Substack newsletter, the Street Smart Naturalist. He has been called an "evangelist for the practice of paying attention."

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The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present Elliott Bay Book Company

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A conversation about the emerging potential of psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, in addressing eating disorders—a psychiatric area marked by persistent treatment challenges. This Salon dives into groundbreaking research showing how psychedelics disrupt entrenched thought patterns, ease cognitive rigidity, and foster self-compassion and emotional reconnection. April Pride and invited experts will discuss the limitations of current treatments and how psychedelic therapies could offer new hope. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how psychedelic-assisted therapy might revolutionize the path to healing for those struggling with disordered eating.

Dr. Amanda Downey is a pediatrician and psychiatrist who cares for adolescents and young adults with eating disorders. She works with patients and their families to develop a treatment plan that honors their unique strengths and challenges. Through education, advocacy, and research, she strives to dismantle the systems that increase risk for eating disorders and improve evidence-based eating disorder treatments. She is the assistant medical director of the UCSF Eating Disorders Program and a member of the UCSF Translational Psychedelic Research Program (TrPR).

Psychedelic Salon: Cultivating Conscious Connections

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Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has long been fascinated by the sharing of natural knowledge. From the interconnected root systems she studied in her book Finding the Mother Tree to her ongoing work as an educator, Simard has learned to see the importance of cooperative efforts to share resources and knowledge. Joined in conversation by Seattle-based nature journalist Lynda Mapes, Simard expands these connections into a considerate exploration of the elaborate cycles of forest ecosystems, the challenges they currently face, and the intergenerational value they can provide through her new book When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World.

Raised in a family of loggers committed to sensible forest stewardship, Simard has watched as modern practices and timber companies have left forests vulnerable to damage and depletion. In her research, Simard explores the finely honed cycles of regeneration forests inherently use to maintain themselves. From mushrooms breaking down logs to dying elder trees passing their genetic knowledge to younger growth, When the Forest Breathes presents these cycles as a key component in the protection and preservation of our forests. Working closely with Indigenous communities and the models of responsible forestry they've upheld over time, Simard examines the damage caused by industrialization and wide-scale human intervention– particularly the impact on the overstory's mother trees that are responsible for sharing intergenerational wisdom and supporting new growth.

As Simard seeks to understand the importance of stewardship and how older lives can facilitate the conditions for new growth to flourish, she considers similar patterns of loss and regeneration in her own life. Savoring her final days with her ailing mother and watching her daughters grow into adults, Simard draws thoughtful parallels around what caretaking looks like within the forest and within our own communities. Animated by wonder and the urge to honor the tools that trees have honed over generations, When the Forest Breathes aims to use the lessons of the natural world to encourage paths of adaptability, resilience, cooperation, and valuing our forests.

Dr. Suzanne Simard is the New York Times bestselling author of Finding the Mother Tree. She is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, where she leads The Mother Tree Project and co-directs the Belowground Ecosystem Group. Dr. Simard has earned a global reputation for pioneering research on tree connectivity and communication and the productivity, health, and biodiversity of forests. Her work has been published widely, with over 170 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Ecology, and Global Biology, and she has co-authored the book Climate Change and Variability. Her research has been communicated broadly through three TED Talks, TED Experiences, as well as articles and interviews in The New Yorker, National Geographic, NPR, CNN, and many more. She lives with her family in the mountains around Nelson, British Columbia.

Lynda Mapes is a journalist, nature writer, and the author of six books on the natural and cultural history of the Pacific Northwest. Her previous publications include The Trees are Speaking and Orca: Shared Waters Shared Home. She was previously an environment reporter for the Seattle Times, focusing on nature, natural history, Native cultures and governments, and Pacific Northwest environmental news, where she was named a finalist for a team award for the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2025.

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When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World Elliott Bay Book Company

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Comedian, historian, and bestselling author Cate Osborn brings a special program derived from her live touring show, Wildly Unprepared. This evening features a curated portion of the performance, exploring the strange and surprising history of magic, spectacle, and belief, along with storytelling and conversation about curiosity, culture, and the stories we inherit.

While this program draws from the larger theatrical show, it is designed as a standalone event created especially for Town Hall audiences. The show will be followed by a Q&A with Cate.

About the Book

Just shy of her thirtieth birthday, Cate Osborn, a teaching artist with two master's degrees, realized that things that had seemed routine before were falling through the cracks. An evaluation finally led to a diagnosis: ADHD. Erik Gude, who was diagnosed in his teens, had a slightly different path. While an ADHD diagnosis might explain the cause of some of his academic challenges, it would take years before he understood the other ways it affected other aspects of his life. When they connected as adults, it didn't take long before they realized other people might feel just as lost as they had.

With roughly eight million adults living with ADHD and more people seeking and receiving diagnoses each year, The ADHD Field Guide for Adults is a witty, thoughtful, and practical guide to living with ADHD in adulthood, from two people who know what it's like. Featuring the most important foundational information about ADHD, it also explores issues that are rarely discussed, such as navigating sex and intimacy, the healthcare system, and home care. And unlike existing titles on the topic, it is intentionally structured to incorporate ADHD accessibility features by offering bite-sized pieces of knowledge in a format that caters to the unique needs of ADHD readers.

Cate Osborn, widely known as Catieosaurus, is an award-winning creator, author, and international speaker whose work sits at the intersection of ADHD, decision-making, sex, relationships, and intimacy. With over 2 million followers and hundreds of millions of annual views across her platforms, Cate has built a global audience by blending humor, storytelling, research, and radical honesty about what it means to live in a brain that does not follow the rules. She is the host of Sorry I Missed This on the Understood network, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, GQ, Cosmopolitan, the Washington Post, and most notably, Ships of the Northern Fleet. Cate is also the creator of the Wildly Unprepared live tour, a one-of-a-kind experience that fuses comedy, history, magic, and audience interaction into a powerful exploration of resilience and chaos.

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The ADHD Field Guide for Adults Brick and Mortar Books

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Local beekeepers, gardeners, and native plant experts join in a conversation about turning your own backyard into a native ecosystem oasis. Learn about the benefits of mason bees, the importance of best-gardening practices to protect Puget Sound salmon, and how you can make a difference in keeping our city climate change resilient.

Featuring Dave Hunter, author of Mason Bee Revolution: How the Hardest Working Bee Can Save the World One Backyard at a Time,along with panelistsJessi Bloom, Bill Thorness, Kim M. Camara, and Swil Kanim, this event hopes to empower everyone to play a part in rebuilding healthy pollinator networks — and securing a thriving, sustainable planet.

Dave Hunter is the founder of the Orchard Bee Association and Crown Bees, which helps people support pollinators with the right supplies, expert guidance, and easy-to-follow programs. His work has been featured in Urban Farm, The Seattle Times, NPR, and more. He lives in Woodinville, Washington. Visit him online at crownbees.com or on Instagram @crown_bees

Jessi Bloom is an ecological landscape designer, author, arborist, and teacher. Over the years, she has worn many hats professionally, helping thousands of land stewards with consulting and design/build work, and educating through books and educational events. Jessi started NW Bloom EcoLogical Services, based in Woodinville, WA, in 2000 to innovate and emphasize awareness of permaculture, sustainable landscape design, construction, and land management. The Seattle Times named her a "rockstar in the ecological gardening movement," where her leadership led NW Bloom to numerous environmental awards. She sits on the advisory committee for the WA State Dept. of Natural Resources Urban Forestry Programs, where her decades as a private sector arborist serve in behalf of the PNW ISA (International Society of Arboriculture).

Bill Thorness is a writer and gardener who's been doing both in Seattle since the mid-1980s. He is the author of Cool Season Gardener: Extend the Harvest, Plan Ahead, and Grow Vegetables Year Round and Edible Heirlooms: Heritage Vegetables for the Maritime Garden, and writes for many regional publications, including The Seattle Times. He is also a King County Master Gardener.

Kim M. Camara serves as Executive Director of Windz of Change Alliance, based in Seattle for over 25 years. Kim is a visionary collectively working with Indigenous inter-Tribal community peoples on contemporary and traditional sacred pathways. Her roles interweave project developer, grant writer, teacher/educator, choreographic and event producer, visual design artist, and youth mentor. With a focus on imparting knowledge, bridging, engaging, and inspiring creative leadership and relationships, she advocates the Windz vision to respectfully bridge and strengthen Indigenous Tribal community Peoples, Presence, Place, Sacred Spaces and Relationships. Accomplishment activities encompass artistic cultural heritage events, eco-cultural parks activation installations, presentations, and workshops, festivals, art shows, youth teaching, and artist opportunity referrals and granting assistance.

Swil Kanim is a U.S. Army veteran, storyteller, actor, and classically trained violinist from Washington State. A board member of the Seattle Symphony, he blends original compositions with powerful stories drawn from his life and heritage, inspiring audiences nationwide. His music and compositions are the direct result of a well-supported public school music program, which he credits for nurturing his artistry. Swil Kanim is the recipient of the Woodring College Professional Excellence Award, the Bellingham Mayor's Arts Award, and has been recognized as a Certified Virtuoso Violinist by the Whatcom Chapter of the Washington Music Educators Association. In 2008, he was also honored to perform with His Holiness the Dalai Lama during the Seeds of Compassion event in Seattle.

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Mason Bee Revolution: How the Hardest Working Bee Can Save the World One Backyard at a Time (2nd edition) Third Place Books

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Psychedelic therapy is rapidly gaining traction as a promising approach for addressing substance use disorders—from alcohol and opioids to nicotine and beyond. This session will explore how psychedelic compounds like ibogaine, ketamine, and psilocybin may help interrupt compulsive cycles, uncover root causes of addiction, and support sustained recovery.

Featuring Dr. Nathan Sackett of the UW Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry, this conversation will examine how pairing psychedelic compounds with evidence-based behavioral interventions could transform the treatment of addiction. Drawing on his team's cautious, research-driven approach, Dr. Sackett will discuss what's known, what remains to be discovered, and how rigorous clinical study can help bring safe, effective psychedelic-assisted therapies to those who need them most.

Nathan Sackett, MD, MS, is an addiction psychiatrist and Founding Director of the UW Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry. He completed medical and nursing school at UCSF, graduate studies at UC Berkeley, and residency and fellowship training in psychiatry and addiction psychiatry at the University of Washington, where he is now a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. His research explores how psychedelics can enhance psychotherapy and support lasting behavioral change.

Psychedelic Salon: Cultivating Conscious Connections

About April Pride

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

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When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have a subjective experience of the world remains one of nature's greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view — assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to "plant neurobiologists" searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan's exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.

Michael Pollan is the author of ten books, including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine. A Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow, Pollan has taught writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. In 2010, Time named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Jon Mooallem is the author of three books, Wild Ones, This is Chance! and the essay collection Serious Face. He lives on Bainbridge Island.

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A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness Elliott Bay Book Company

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Whether you're married, dating, or flying solo, Dr. Nicole McNichols has some sex advice for you. And you may want to pay attention because McNichols is not only the professor of University of Washington's most sought-after class in its history, she's one of social media's most popular educators on the topic of sex. Pulling from her book, You Could Be Having Better Sex, McNichols shares the latest data that shows good sex is one of the most powerful and effective sources of joy.

Good sex, McNichols argues, is a gateway to better health, stronger relationships, and the diverse forms of self-actualization we all crave. And yet, the data suggests that good sex is not happening as often as it could. So how do we start having better sex?

As a renowned human sexuality expert, McNichols explains through data how to elevate our sex life through practical tools and relatable case studies. She offers all of it with a gender and orientation inclusive, pleasure-forward perspective. Covering everything from sexual anatomy to orgasm and response, hook-up culture, long-term relationships, ethical non-monogamy, kink, pornography, and consent, McNichols emphasizes a holistic philosophy that eliminates shame and stigma. She aims to normalize open and frank conversations and illustrate how connected sex is a pathway to self-awareness, self-expression, true thriving, and happiness. McNichols wants you to know just how important good sex is, and that she has the advice on how to get it.

Dr. Nicole McNichols is an internationally renowned human sexuality professor, author, and speaker whose groundbreaking course, The Diversity of Human Sexuality, is the most popular in the history of the University of Washington, enrolling over 4,000 students annually. Dr. Nicole McNichols received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and completed her master's in psychology at NYU and PhD in social psychology at the University of Washington. She currently lives in the Seattle area with her husband and three children.

Dr. Julie Gottman is a highly respected licensed clinical psychologist and educator and the co-founder of the Gottman Institute. She is sought internationally as an expert advisor on marriage, the treatment of trauma and affairs, sexual harassment and rape, domestic violence, same-sex marriage, and gay and lesbian parenting. She is author or co-author of many books, including best-sellers like Fight Right, The Love Prescription, and Eight Dates, as well as The New Marriage Clinic, and The Marriage Clinic Casebook, Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, The Man's Guide To Women, and And Baby Makes Three.

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You Could Be Having Better Sex: The Definitive Guide to a Happier, Healthier, and Hotter Sex Life Third Place Books

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As life expectancy increases, so does the need for mental, emotional, and spiritual support in later years. This Salon delves into the ways older adults are exploring psychedelics for healing, spiritual deepening, meaning-making, joyful intimacy and making peace with mortality. With insights from geriatric practitioners, researchers, and individuals with lived experience, we'll examine how today's older psychonauts are rewriting the narrative around aging.

Scott Paul Wright is a filmmaker and screenwriter based in Paris and New Orleans. His adventures in film followed previous careers as a radio personality, record business executive, and award-winning winemaker. He's written five feature films, and made two documentaries that are now in international distribution. He took his first psychedelic journey at age 68 – resulting in his new documentary – Psychedelics for Seniors, which is now in post-production and scheduled for release in June 2026.

Abbie Rosner is a writer and cultural observer exploring how the modern psychedelic renaissance is reshaping our understanding of aging—individually and collectively. Her forthcoming book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, July 2026), examines how baby boomers are once again intersecting with psychedelics, this time with the insight and perspective of a lifetime behind them. Through her Substack ELDEREVOLUTION, Rosner documents the experiences of older adults turning to psychedelics for healing, growth, and spiritual exploration—revealing how later life can become a profound period of renewal and meaning. Rosner's work has been featured in Forbes, Next Avenue, DoubleBlind, and other publications. She regularly speaks on the intersection of psychedelics and aging, and closely follows emerging research and evolving frameworks for legal and spiritual access to psychedelics.

Dr. Emily Whinkin (she/they) is a naturopathic physician and integrative mental health specialist blending psychedelic and entheogenic medicine with mental, reproductive, and generative health. Trained at the National University of Natural Medicine and the AIMS Institute in Seattle, she is a board-certified Fellow of the Psychiatric Association of Naturopathic Physicians and holds certifications in perinatal mental health (PMH-C) and Holistic Pelvic Care™. Her work centers on community, belonging, and social justice, weaving somatic therapy and botanical medicine into care for people of all genders across the lifespan. Dr. Whinkin is licensed in Oregon and Washington, provides global consultation, and is dedicated to research, education, and individualized integrative mental health. Learn more at emilywhinkin.com.

Psychedelic Salon: Cultivating Conscious Connections

About April Pride

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

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What intelligence really is, and how AI's emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.

It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the "predictive brain" hypothesis.

In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.

The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI, drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields, including computer science and machine learning, biology, physics, and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a researcher and author focused on artificial intelligence, sociality, evolution, and software development. He is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). He is a frequent speaker at TED and has been featured in the Economist and Noēma, and has previously published the books Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt.

Buy the Book What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds Elliott Bay Book Company

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Seattle's 2021 ordinance decriminalized entheogens — plants and fungi that contain psychoactive indolamines, tryptamines, or phenethylamines—such as psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, mescaline cacti, and iboga. This Salon weaves together two threads: the little-known plant and fungal allies often left off the psychedelic main stage, and the laws that shape how we can (and cannot) work with them today. Legal experts Perry Salzhauer and Daniel Shortt explore what this ordinance means in practice, including how it shapes access, cultivation, and community use of approved entheogenic plants and fungi. Key to this discussion is analyzing the parameters of what decriminalization allows and, more importantly, does not allow. The Salon will cover the interplay between local, state, and federal law and share insights from Perry and Daniel's work in the field. Attendees will gain practical insight into the evolving legal and cultural landscape of entheogens in Seattle and beyond.

Perry Salzhauer is a corporate transactions attorney with extensive experience advising businesses in highly regulated and emerging industries, including cannabis and psychedelics. He co-founded Green Light Law Group, a boutique firm focused on cannabis and psychedelics, and has served as both outside and in-house counsel to corporations, investors, and government agencies. His background encompasses securities, environmental compliance, and corporate governance, providing clients with a strategic advantage in navigating complex regulatory frameworks.

Daniel Shortt is a regulatory and corporate attorney who advises clients across cannabis, hemp, and psychedelics. His work spans federal agencies, multinational corporations, and entrepreneurial startups, with expertise in transactions, compliance, and regulatory frameworks. A frequent commentator in national outlets like The Washington Post and Bloomberg, Daniel also teaches cannabis law at the University of Washington School of Law. Recognized as a Top 200 Cannabis Lawyer and a Super Lawyers "Rising Star," Daniel bridges legal intricacies with pragmatic business insight in emerging psychedelic markets.

Psychedelic Salon: Cultivating Conscious Connections

About April Pride

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

Events are offered for informational, entertainment, and educational purposes only. Read Town Hall's Program Content Policy.

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https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9798887702018Your brain has a favorite beverage, a surprising way to add new neurons, and strong opinions about multitasking—and it's not what you think. In this engaging conversation, cognitive scientist Therese Huston and podcast host Katy Sewall unpack the small changes, many of which take 5 minutes or less, that can keep your brain sharp and your body calm. Based on Huston's new book Sharp, they'll explore topics like how to turn a scattered mind into focused energy and why switching doctors, while annoying, might be your secret weapon for your health. This is a night filled with science-backed advice for anyone who wants to think clearly and age wisely.

Therese Huston is a cognitive scientist at Seattle University, where she turns good research into great practice. She's the author of four books and her latest is Sharp: 14 Simple Ways to Improve Your Life with Brain Science, published with Mayo Clinic Press. She's written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian,and Harvard Business Review and although she has taken the stage internationally as a speaker, her favorite audiences are right here in Seattle.

Buy the Book Sharp: 14 Simple Ways to Improve Your Life with Brain Science Third Place Books

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Menopause is often portrayed as a period of decline, but what if it could be reframed as an awakening?

Join co-authors Dr. Patricia Singh, psychotherapist and psychedelic integration specialist, and Kelly McGinty, nurse practitioner specializing in hormonal and integrative wellness, for a groundbreaking exploration of menopause as a transformative threshold. This session will delve into how psychedelics, especially psilocybin, offer a radical new perspective, easing cognitive rigidity, reducing internal narratives of decline, and fostering emotional and spiritual growth. Attendees will gain fresh insights on navigating midlife with strength, clarity, and empowerment.

About Mycelopause: Uncovering the Magic of Menopause with Psilocybin

Co-authored by Dr. Trish Singh, PhD, LPCC and Kelly McGinty, CNP, MSN, Mycelopause is not your typical menopause guide. It's a rebellious, witty, and deeply insightful journey into the intersection of psychedelics, perimenopause, and personal transformation. Combining science, storytelling, and satirical humor, we explore how psilocybin and other holistic tools can help reframe menopause from a crisis to a rite of passage.

Kelly McGinty is a nurse practitioner accredited by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, with a Master's in Nursing from Gonzaga University. After over a decade as an emergency department NP, Kelly sought holistic approaches to address pandemic-related burnout and mental health crises. Her transformative experiences with psychedelics led her to study psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Kelly integrates Reiki, herbology, and Druidic traditions to help clients—particularly first responders, end-of-life patients, and those with treatment-resistant conditions—achieve holistic wellness in mind, body, and spirit.

Dr. Patricia Singh, Ph.D., LPCC, is an independently licensed mental health counselor in New Mexico and California with over 25 years of experience in behavioral health. She holds a doctorate in Mind-Body Medicine with a specialization in Integrative Mental Health and is certified in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy through the California Institute of Integral Studies. Dr. Singh integrates Ayurvedic principles, trauma-informed care, and psychedelic preparation and integration into her clinical work, where she focuses on post-traumatic stress, addiction, and family trauma. She is the founder of A New Awakening Counseling, a progressive rehabilitation facility serving individuals reentering society after incarceration. Her current research centers on holistic weight loss strategies for menopausal women. Dr. Singh splits her time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Oxnard, California.

Psychedelic Salon: Cultivating Conscious Connections

About April Pride

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

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For 20 years, Dr. Shelley Sella saw patients whose diverse backgrounds and circumstances led them to the same difficult decision: to end their pregnancies. In her new book, Beyond Limits, Sella draws from her experiences to offer a window into a typical week at her clinic, weaving together patient stories—including those of a mother navigating a devastating prenatal diagnosis, a woman confronting unexpected test results after IVF, and a parent weighing safety and stability for her existing children.

Dr. Sella offers a testament to a standard of care grounded in competence, compassion, and sensitivity, as well as a call for a paradigm shift that moves beyond Dobbs, beyond Roe, beyond limits to provide care. It is a tribute to the real people whose hearts, reasons, and stories are more complex than politicized conversations about abortion lead us to believe.

Dr. Shelley Sella is a board-certified OB-GYN and the first woman to openly practice third-trimester abortion care in the US, which she did for 20 years. She was prominently featured in the Emmy Award–winning documentary After Tiller. Dr. Sella served two terms on the board of the National Abortion Federation and in 2022 was awarded its highest honor, the Christopher Tietze Humanitarian Award. She is retired from clinical practice and now focuses on advocacy.

Amelia Bonow is the Cofounder and Executive Director of Shout Your Abortion, a nationwide organization working to normalize abortion and elevate safe paths to access, regardless of legality. Amelia is the coeditor of SYA's eponymously titled book, which sits in the recovery rooms of hundreds of abortion clinics, as well as Abortion is Everything, a new children's book about abortion. Amelia is honored to serve as the Co-chair of the Board of Directors of Abortion Care Network, the national organization that serves and represents independent abortion providers.

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It’s only human to project the notions we already hold onto the world around us. We want to feel connected, and we start from what we know – categories, similarities, rules, expectations. But nature is endlessly expansive, at once wildly different from the societies we are used to and yet surprisingly similar to the nuances we hold as individuals. In her debut book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, author Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian invites readers to wander off the prescribed trails and embrace the full range of what we can take away from unexpected corners of the natural world.

Growing up, Kaishian felt most at home in some of these less-traveled pockets – namely, the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley, studded with wildlife and odd creatures. As a child who frequently felt out of place – too much of one thing or not enough of another – she found acceptance in these settings, mainly among amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and especially fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her – and a personal path to a life of science.

Equal parts lyrical memoir, academic exploration, and a love letter to the vastness of identity, Forest Euphoria introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. In this richly observant and insightful study, Kaishian presents myriad examples of nature defying human dichotomies. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes, and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Forest Euphoria aims to illuminate that nature is filled with lessons stemming from the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized, so long as we have the curiosity to learn.

Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is a research scientist, author, speaker, and educator who specializes in the biodiversity of fungi, ecology, and exploring how scientific disciplines are informed by our sociopolitical landscape. She is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum, as well as teaching faculty with the Bard Prison Initiative. She is a co-founder of the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists. She has been featured in the documentary Queer Planet and her publication, The science underground: mycology as a queer discipline, appears in the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory & Technoscience.

Taha Ebrahimi is the author and illustrator of Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide (Sasquatch Books, 2024). She serves as a member of the council for Historic Seattle and has been named “Seattle’s Coolest Street Tree Expert” by The Stranger.

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Explaining how and why our world works the way it does touches on so many fields of science: biology, chemistry, physics, and, of course, technology. However, according to researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas, computation should also be part of the understanding of life on all levels – and going back further than one might think.

In What Is Life? Evolution as Computation, Agüera y Arcas uses computation as a means of examining the complexities of our own universe. Inspired by the work of quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger, he revisits the question that has showcased the divide between biology and physics: what is life? How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time? What Is Life? aims to provide surprising answers, reframing core concepts of self-reproduction, complex growth, and symbiotic relationships as inherently computational.

Agüera y Arcas draws on decades of theory and existing literature from figures like Alan Turing and John von Neumann, as well as recent endeavors in the field of artificial life. From evolution and symbiogenesis to thermodynamics and climate models, What Is Life? explores computation as a tool beyond raw calculation to understand intricate phenomena. This volume serves as a first installment of an ongoing body of work, with his larger book What Is Intelligence? further developing this perspective on intelligence from simple organisms to brains and from societies to AI. What Is Life? is richly illustrated and studded with examples, recontextualizing computational concepts and applications for a general audience curious about diving deeper into the machinations of our living world.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a researcher and author focused on artificial intelligence, sociality, evolution, and software development. He is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). He is a frequent speaker at TED and has been featured in the Economist and Noēma, and has previously published the books Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt.

Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is the Senior Staff writer of the Stranger, a lecturer at Cornish College of the Arts, and has collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one of which, Zoo, screened at Cannes, and the most recent of which, Suburban Fury, premiered at New York Film Festival. (Police Beat is now part of MOMA’s permanent collection.) Mudede, whose essays regularly appear in e-Flux and Tank Magazine, is also the director of Thin Skin (2023).

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From Silent Spring to Erin Brockovich, people have been captivated — and devastated — by stories of harmful chemicals and the many ways that they have altered and even ended human lives. From investigative journalist Mariah Blake comes a new book that recounts a small town being poisoned, a corporate cover up, and a grassroots movement to fight back.

In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, suspected that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of “forever chemicals” (synthetic chemicals that are resistant to breaking down and can lead to adverse health and environmental effects). This set off a chain of events that revealed at least 100 million Americans’ drinking water was tainted. The discovery of bad water was a shock to some, but perhaps more shocking was the discovery that the United States government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals — used in everything from cookware to lipstick to children’s clothing — had known about these hazards for decades but had hidden them from the public.

In her new book They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake tells this story, tracing its roots all the way back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar America.

Drawing on years of reporting and tens of thousands of documents, Blake weaves the history of forever chemicals with the story of how a lone village took on the chemical giants all the way to the nation’s capital — and won.

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University.

Mónica Guzmán is author of I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times; founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity; Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels; and host of A Braver Way podcast. Mónica serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Multipartisan Education. She received an honorary doctorate degree from Wheaton College, and completed study and research fellowships at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, and the University of Florida. A Mexican immigrant, Latina, and dual US/Mexico citizen, she lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids and is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents.

Buy the Book They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals (Hardcover) Third Place Books

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Overnight, Dori became her parents’ caregiver – a labor of love that lasted for seven years. Her mom was suddenly a partially paralyzed wheelchair-bound amputee and her dad was declining due to increasing dementia. She wasn’t ready.

This event is to help prepare anyone – those who have been, are now, or will be a caregiver – in other words, all of us! Whether it is navigating the health care system, working with dementia, speaking about dying, or considering how to accept care if and when you need it, you will learn from Dori’s experiences.

Dori Gillam is a speaker and writer, inspiring people to age creatively and intentionally. She was born and raised in Seattle and has a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington. She has worked for the Bayview Retirement Community, AARP, and Sound Generations. She writes for 3rd Act Magazine and the UW Website. Currently, she is the Board Chair of the Northwest Center for Creative Aging and helped found the King County Coalition on Aging.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping our world – but what does that mean for healthcare, scientific discovery, and human potential?In Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, co-authors Craig Mundie, Henry Kissinger, and Eric Schmidt explore the profound implications of AI on society.

In this collaborative event between Town Hall Seattle and the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), Craig Mundie joins Dr. Jim Heath, President of ISB, for a thought-provoking conversation about the future of AI. They will discuss insights from the book, the opportunities and challenges AI presents, and what it means for the way we live, work, and care for our health.

Co-author, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, Craig Mundie is a leading technology executive and former Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft. Over his decades-long career, he has played a pivotal role in advancing artificial intelligence, computing, and national security initiatives. Alongside Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, he co-authored Genesis, a deep exploration of AI’s impact on society and the future of humanity. Mundie has served as an advisor to the U.S. government on technology policy and was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

President and Professor, Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) Dr. Jim Heath is a pioneering scientist in systems biology, cancer research, and precision medicine. Since 2018, he has led ISB, driving interdisciplinary research in cancer and immune system dynamics while advancing innovative approaches to complex diseases. An internationally recognized scientist, Heath has received numerous honors, including the Irving Weinstein Award from the American Association for Cancer Research and the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences. Before ISB, he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech and a Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Institute for Systems Biology.

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Sand Symes, a psychedelic guide who has spent over 40 years working with women in transformational spaces and 20+ years immersed in her committed work with psychedelics, in discussion with April Pride at Town Hall Seattle.

With decades of experience guiding women in transformational work, Sand brings a perspective that blends spiritual and practical insights. Rather than focusing on theory alone, she shares her experiences of how these medicines are understood and integrated in different contexts.

This gathering invited participants to engage with stories, reflections, and perspectives on the experiential aspects of psychedelics—elements that may not always be captured in research but are deeply felt by those who explore them.

April Pride is a serial creative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience developing brands and products across interiors, fashion, lifestyle, cannabis, psychedelics, audio, and more. In 2015, she launched Van der Pop, an industry-defining, female-focused cannabis lifestyle brand. Van der Pop published the pioneering Women & Weed Survey exploring North American women’s perspectives on cannabis. After exiting Canopy Growth, one of world’s largest cannabis companies, April continued her advocacy for cannabis normalization through her popular podcasts, How to Do the Pot and The High Guide. Currently, April is the CEO and Founder of SetSet, an accessible psychedelic education and integration platform offering clinician-created educational guides and programs.

With over 40 years of experience, Sand Symes mentors visionary leaders, pioneers, and C-suite executives, blending ancient wisdom and modern science. She integrates Sacred Medicine practices, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and trauma research to unlock potential and foster leadership alignment. Specializing in women’s transformation, Sand helps clients align with their core values, break limiting patterns, and expand their impact. Her approach combines personalized mentoring and psychedelic integration, supporting profound breakthroughs and leadership growth. Sand has empowered women leaders for over four decades, creating ripple effects transforming industries and communities.

About Psychedelic Salon with April Pride

A Monthly Series Exploring Novel Therapeutics for Well-Being

Seattle-based cannabis and psychedelics educator & podcast host April Pride hosts a collaborative series with Town Hall Seattle focused on the emerging science of psychedelic medicine. This women-forward series highlights the potential of novel therapeutics for mental health, reproductive health, chronic pain, trauma, and overall optimization. Through engaging panel discussions, expert talks, and community conversations, April offers an accessible platform for researchers, clinicians, and advocates to share insights on psychedelics for improved human health. The series would also explore the historical context of women’s roles in plant medicine and the growing movement to incorporate psychedelics into mainstream treatment options, particularly for conditions that disproportionately affect women, such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

About SetSet

Seattle-based SetSet supports individuals seeking optimal experiences with psychedelic medicine. Through clincian-created DIY educational downloads and community events, SetSet makes psychedelic integration accessible for individuals and healthcare professionals. Visit getsetset.com for more information.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

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Despite grief being one of the most universal of human experiences, there is still much that we do not know about it. Can we die of a broken heart? What happens in our bodies as we grieve; how do our coping behaviors affect our physical health, immunity, and even cognition? While we may be more familiar with psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies.

In The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing,the follow-up to its successful predecessor The Grieving Brain (2022), grief expert, neuroscientist, and psychologist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor focuses on how the painful ordeal of grief impacts the body.

O’Connor shares scientific research, charts, and graphs coupled with personal stories, revealing new insights on grief’s physiological impact and helping illuminate the toll that loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being. The Grieving Body is for anyone who has experienced loss and who may want to learn more about what they are going through and how to support them.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body. Her book The Grieving Brain was included on Oprah’s list of Best Books to Comfort a Grieving Friend. O’Connor holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

Dr. Anthony Back, Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington, is a pioneer in patient-oncologist communication and co-founder of the nonprofit VitalTalk. Educated at Stanford and Harvard, with training at UW and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, his research spans physician-assisted dying, communication pedagogy, and psilocybin therapy for healthcare providers and patients with cancer-related anxiety. He is also an ordained Zen priest in Roshi Joan Halifax’s lineage.

Buy the Book The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing Elliott Bay Book Company

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The routines of modern life can often cause us to fall out of touch with our surroundings. But reconnecting with our world can go much further than just stopping to smell the roses – and without having to travel very far at all. In his newest book Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door, conservation biologist Thor Hanson encourages readers to see just how many exciting natural discoveries can be made in our most familiar environments.

Close to Home takes a magnifying glass to the yards, gardens, and parks we already know and shows the hidden wonders that lie in plain sight – if you know how to look for them. With a skilled and enthusiastic eye, Hanson shows the range of natural features and systems that thrive all around us. From migrating monarch butterflies casually moving through Kansas City to the language of neighborhood birds to the complexity of life in an overgrown lawn in New England — digging into the secrets of our local soil can help satisfy our sense of curiosity without leaving our backyards.

Close to Home is a hands-on natural history for any patch of Earth, combining story, science, and suggestions into one ultimate neighborhood field guide. Whether compelled by the urge to understand the health of our planet, by wanting tools to contribute to our local ecosystems, or just by simple critter curiosity — the opportunity to explore and learn lives right next door.

Thor Hanson is an award-winning author, speaker, and conservation biologist who often focuses on the interface between natural and human systems. His previous works include the books Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid and Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, as well as features in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, BioScience, and Audubon. He co-hosted the PBS series American Spring LIVE and has guested on programs including The Splendid Table and NPR’s Fresh Air and On Point.

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Have you wondered how psychedelics are being intentionally used by artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives to push the boundaries of their craft? This session kicks off our new series, Psychedelic Salon, with a panel of esteemed Seattle artists who will discuss the role of psychedelics in Seattle’s countercultural movements and how they influence artistic expression. Expect a candid conversation on the relationship between altered states and creativity, with insights from prominent Seattle creatives known for their experimentation. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how psychedelics can be used as a tool for creative flow and self-expression.

April Pride is a serial creative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience developing brands and products across interiors, fashion, lifestyle, cannabis, psychedelics, audio, and more. In 2015, she launched Van der Pop, an industry defining, female-focused cannabis lifestyle brand. Van der Pop published the pioneering Women & Weed Survey exploring North American women’s perspectives on cannabis. After exiting to Canopy Growth, one of world’s largest cannabis companies, April continued her advocacy for cannabis normalization through her popular podcasts, How to Do the Pot and The High Guide. Currently, April is the CEO and Founder of SetSet, an accessible psychedelic education and integration platform offering clinician-created educational guides and programs.

Rachel Demy is a fine art photographer, writer, and educator in Seattle, Washington. She employs a non-linear approach to her work, which covers themes of trauma, addiction, and all manner of human experiences considered difficult to look at directly. Her upcoming solo gallery exhibition, Revocable Living, is a collection of photographs made while (unknowingly) in active addiction and runs from February 27 – April 12, 2025, at Spectrum Fine Art (Seattle, WA). Her first photography book, Between, Everywhere—about touring with Death Cab for Cutie—was published through Minor Matters Books in 2022.

Tim Keck co-founded The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper, known for its bold, irreverent take on local news, culture, and politics. Before founding The Stranger, Keck co-founded The Onion, the satirical newspaper that has since become a cultural institution. At The Onion, Keck helped set the foundation for the publication’s signature comedic style, influencing generations of satirists and journalists. Throughout his career, Keck has been a key figure in shaping the landscape of alternative media and journalism. His work has challenged conventional boundaries of news reporting and entertainment, blending the two in a way that continues to resonate with readers across the country. Keck’s print and digital media contributions reflect his deep commitment to innovative, independent journalism.

About Psychedelic Salon: A Monthly Series Exploring Novel Therapeutics for Well-Being

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

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Artificial intelligence is an actively surging field in today’s digital landscape, and as each new AI interface reaches the public it throws into sharper resolution that all the big tech players are getting involved. And quickly. But where are the roots of this rapidly expanding industry’s interests? How does AI impact individuals, established industries, and the future of our society if it continues to grow faster than it is critically examined? In his newest book Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works For Us, author and scientist Gary F. Marcus uses his expertise in the field to help readers understand the realities, risks, and responsibilities the public faces as AI gains widespread traction.

Taming Silicon Valley aims to compare and critique the potential futures that AI– alongside Big Tech strategies and governmental involvement– could present to our world. Marcus asserts that if used and regulated properly, there are openings for huge advancements in science, medicine, technology, and public prosperity. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there lie vulnerabilities to abuses of power, a lack of effective policy, and dwindling protections for intellectual property and fair democracy. Marcus emphasizes that AI is meant to be a tool, not an unchecked entity and that it is up to the public to choose how it is allowed to shape the paths ahead. His work sets out to provide context to how AI has gotten to its current state, guidance towards understanding what coherent AI policy should look like in the future, and a call to action in pushing for what is needed in real-time. In the tradition of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Taming Silicon Valley urges readers towards awareness, analysis, and activism in this pivotal time of new AI integration.

Gary F. Marcus is an author, psychologist, scientist, and prominent voice in the field of artificial intelligence. He is Professor Emeritus of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and was the founder and original CEO of Geometric.AI. His previous publications include Guitar Zero, Kluge, and Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.

Ted Chiang is an award-winning science fiction author. His publications include Tower of Babylon, Exhalation: Stories, and Stories of Your Life and Others, which has been translated into twenty-one languages. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, particularly of non-fiction related to the intersections of art and technology.

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The ocean has proven endlessly mysterious and fascinating to all manner of people across the globe, but for centuries true knowledge of the depths was simply out of reach. As modern technologies advance, science has debunked much once held to be true – including the idea of the “silent world” of the ocean. What was once thought to be a muffled marine landscape with little to no perceptible sounds has now been revealed to be a complex interplay of aquatic acoustics. In her debut book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water, science journalist Amorina Kingdon turns up the volume on groundbreaking discoveries in ocean soundscapes, why this research is important to our ecosystems, and how human impact is playing more of a role than science realized.

Sing Like Fish explores how the complexity of oceanic noise goes far deeper than the familiar hits like whale song and crashing currents. Sound travels four times faster in water than in air and its reach in environmental impact is as expansive as the seas themselves. Kingdon educates readers on a plethora of natural sonic relationships that have been recorded under the surface – from individual snapping shrimp and communicating fish to rumbling seismic activity bouncing off the seafloor in regions light cannot reach and the biodiversity concerts that live as coral reefs. These revelations also cast into sharp relief the repercussions of humanity’s presence in our seas. Marine noise pollution takes the form of everything from recreational boating and cruise tourism to the global shipping industry to military forces and oil exploration. As science continues to uncover the splendor and nuance of the ocean as an audible entity, Sing Like Fish reinforces the importance of understanding, protecting, and reveling in the symphony of our seas.

Amorina Kingdon is an award-winning writer and science journalist with a focused fascination in marine biology and coastal environments. She previously served as staff writer and contributor to Hakai Magazine. Her science writing has been anthologized in Best Canadian Essays 2020 (Biblioasis), and her fiction works have been included in PRISM Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Speculative North.

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Whether it’s staying up late in front of the screens or waking up before dawn for that early morning flight – it’s easy to tell when something big has thrown off our routines. But what about the little things that add up over the course of a day, a week, or our lives overall? How do small adjustments to our daily practices affect our long-term relationship with the balance between our bodies and the busy technology-driven world we live in? In her new book, author and science journalist Lynne Peeples explores how our often hectic habits can impact our physical, mental, and social health. The Inner Clock: Living In Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms peeks behind the blackout curtains to consider how learning more about our internal systems could help provide an extra boost to ourselves, our performance, and our planet.

Drawing from emerging new fields of research and exciting first-hand experiments, Peeples seeks to understand how the science of circadian rhythms could potentially be applied to a wide range of areas. How could taking a walk in the morning and going to bed at the same time each night keep your body in sync? Why are some doctors prescribing treatments at specific times of day? And how might a better understanding of our circadian rhythms improve educational outcomes, optimize sports performance, and support the longevity of our planet? From jet lag and time zones to artificial light and underground bunkers to new perspectives on mental illness treatment and more, The Inner Clock encourages readers to hone their senses toward what really makes our internal clocks tick and how we may be able to reset them for the better.

Lynne Peeples is an author and journalist exploring the fields of science, health, and the environment. Peeples has appeared on platforms including MSNBC, HuffPost Live, BBC News, Nature Podcast, and more. Her writing has been featured in publications including The Guardian, Scientific American, Nature, TIME, and The Huffington Post, where she previously served as the Environment and Public Health Reporter on staff.

Bill Radke is a journalist, public radio host and humorist. He hosts “Week In Review” on KUOW, 94.9 FM and all the podcast apps.

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With tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle will be instrumental in the future of data and its effects on society. What are the long-term consequences of humanity’s recent rush toward digitizing, storing, and analyzing every piece of data about ourselves and the world we live in? How will data surveillance, digital forensics, and AI pose new threats––and opportunities? In their new book, The Secret Life of Data, authors Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore what might happen with all the data that we collect.

They build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. They show how this data can be used, by other people in other times and places, and the profound implications for every aspect of our lives––everything from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.

Sinnreich and Gilbert have interviewed dozens of data experts to explore a broad range of scenarios and contexts. To manage these possibilities, the authors advocate for creating new laws and regulations, ethics and aesthetics, and models of production. In the face of technological uncertainty, Sinnreich and Gilbert invite us to play an active part in shaping how data influences our lives, both here in Seattle, and the world at large.

Aram Sinnreich is an author, professor, and musician. He is the Chair of Communication Studies at American University. His books include Mashed Up, The Piracy Crusade, The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property, and A Second Chance for Yesterday (published as R. A. Sinn).

Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design at his firm Dark Matter Media. He was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and he has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.

Daniela Rosner is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab, and co-director of the HCDE Masters Program. She holds adjunct appointments in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS), the Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXArts), and the Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Her work uses modes of design inquiry to examine sites of innovation practice and performance historically elided by technology cultures.

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One instance of grief can be difficult enough to cope with, but for Lawrence Ingrassia, losing multiple family members was not only devastating but perplexing. Typical discussions surrounding inheritance may include heirlooms or estates — not rare tumors in the cheeks of toddlers, as was the case for Ingrassia’s two-year-old nephew. After he lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to different types of cancer, Ingrassia was unsure whether his family’s generational heartbreak was merely misfortune or if there was some other cause.

In his book A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, Ingrassia weaves his own family history with a history of cancer research. Part memoir, part medical thriller, Ingrassia’s work begins in the 1960s with Dr. Frederick Pei Li and Dr. Joseph Fraumeni Jr., groundbreaking researchers and physicians who would later uncover links between genetics and cancer.

A Fatal Inheritance journeys from the early days of discovery to present-day developments decades later, as Ingrassia and others continue to build upon Li and Fraumeni’s initial investigations and discover what this means for themselves and their families. Ingrassia also looks toward the future, as gene sequencing, screening protocols, CRISPR gene editing, and other developing technologies aid in extending lifespans and possibly getting us closer to a cure.

Lawrence Ingrassia is a former business and economics editor and deputy managing editor at the New York Times, having previously spent twenty-five years at the Wall Street Journal, as Boston bureau chief, London bureau chief, money and investing editor, and assistant managing editor. He also served as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. The coverage he directed won five Pulitzer Prizes as well as Gerald Loeb Awards and George Polk Awards. His first book, Billion Dollar Brand Club, chronicles the rise of popular direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands and was shortlisted for several best business book awards for 2020. His latest book, A Fatal Inheritance, narrates the tale of a team of dedicated researchers who solved the medical mystery behind seemingly unrelated cancers devastating his and other families.

Robert W. Merry spent 45 years in Washington, D.C., as Wall Street Journal reporter and executive at Congressional Quarterly, including 12 years as CQ’s president and editor-in-chief. After CQ was sold to the Economist, he also served as editor of the polemical magazines The National Interest and The American Conservative. He is the author of six books on American history and foreign policy, including the forthcoming Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 (Simon & Schuster).

Buy the Book A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery Third Place Books

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Did you know that plants can hear sounds? And have a social life? Science writer Zoë Schlanger shares even more remarkable plant talents in her latest book, The Light Eaters, illustrating the tremendous biological creativity it takes to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. They communicate. They recognize their own kin. Schlanger immerses into the world of being a plant, into its drama and complexity.

Scientists have learned that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life, Schlanger argues, if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing, and make its way toward it?

Our understanding and definition of a plant is rapidly changing. So then what do we owe these life forms once we come to comprehend their rich and varied abilities? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, Schlanger challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.

Zoë Schlanger is a staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers climate change. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, The Nation, Quartz, and on NPR among other major outlets, and in the 2022 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. A recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers’ reporting award, she is often a guest speaker in schools and universities.

Brooke Jarvis is an award-winning journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Buy the Book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth The Elliott Bay Book Company

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Can you think of occasions where you wanted to say something, but couldn’t? Perhaps you stopped yourself out of fear, or due to outside pressures. Having a seat at the table doesn’t necessarily mean that your voice is welcome. A new book is aiming to examine the influence of silence and offer ways that we can begin to dismantle it to find our voices at home and work to shift the paradigm.

In Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully author Elaine Lin Hering explores the difficulty that can come with speaking up, especially when there may be incentives to stay silent to avoid unwanted consequences. Hering discusses how we as a society have learned to be silent, how we have benefited from silence, and how we have silenced other people. She also offers advice on how we can choose another way, creating new patterns, becoming more complete versions of ourselves, engaging more fully with our talents, and helping others do the same.

Elaine Lin Hering is a facilitator, speaker, and writer. She works with organizations and individuals to build skills in communication, collaboration, and conflict management. In her career, Elaine has worked on six continents and with a wide range of corporate, government, and nonprofit clients. She has trained mental health professionals, political officials, religious communities, and leaders at companies including American Express, Capital One, Google, Nike, Novartis, Shell, Pixar, and the Red Cross. Elaine is a former Managing Partner of Triad Consulting Group and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, specializing in dispute resolution, mediation, and negotiation.

Ruchika Tulshyanis the best-selling author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work. Ruchika is also the founder of Candour, an inclusion strategy practice. A former international business journalist, Ruchika is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Harvard Business Review and a recognized media expert on inclusive leadership and workplace culture. She is working on her next book,Uncompete: Dismantling a Competition Mindset to Unlock Liberation, Opportunity, and Peace.

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Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microbiota and is a critical health determinant, affecting your immune system, mood, energy level, and much more. As a scientific field, microbiome research is new to the scene, but the intricate relationship between our gut and our overall health is clear – and getting clearer. In April, Netflix started streaming Hack Your Health, an informative documentary about the gut microbiome, gut health, and the science of eating.

In this collaborative event between Town Hall Seattle and the Institute for Systems Biology, Hack Your Health Director Anjali Nayar will sit down with gut microbiome specialist Dr. Sean Gibbons, a scientific advisor on the film, to discuss the project, interesting developments in microbiome research, and much more.

Anjali Nayar is an Indian-Canadian director, former climate scientist, and tech founder. Anjali’s newest film, a Netflix Original called Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut is streaming on Netflix, and her fantasy short Closer has over 5 million views and won the 2022 Prism Prize Audience Award (Canada’s top music video awards). As of 2024, she is developing a slew of scripted projects and a series with the Golden State Warriors. Her prior films have been supported by Cinereach, Sundance, and Tribeca, won countless awards, jury prizes, gone theatrical, and been acquired by Netflix and Amazon.

Sean Gibbons, Ph.D., is associate professor at Institute for Systems Biology. He received his PhD in biophysical sciences from the University of Chicago in 2015, winning a prestigious EPA STAR Graduate Fellowship. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and The Broad Institute in 2018. He joined ISB as Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Investigator and assistant professor in 2018. His research on the human microbiome has been published in top scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and Cell.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and the Institute for Systems Biology.

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The very fact of being human makes us vulnerable to pandemics, but it also gives us the power to save ourselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic most likely won’t be our last—that is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of Sabrina Sholts’ new book, The Human Disease. Traveling through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making, Sholts draws on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about pandemic risks, to identify the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts’s account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in her book. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, is largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains.

Sabrina Sholts is the curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where she developed the major exhibit Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World. She has also served as a scientific commissioner for a related exhibition at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France.

Julianne Meisner, PhD, MS, BVM&S, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, focusing on One Health and pandemics. Her research explores the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health, with a focus on novel pathogen emergence and the impacts of livestock keeping. She holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh and UW, and her current projects include investigating the effects of land use change on disease emergence and refining models for human-animal contact networks.

Buy the Book The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs The Elliott Bay Book Company

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Can you find lifelong love with an AARP card in your wallet?

Dori (72) and Mack (69) did, and they’ve got a lot to say on the subject!

Join them for a candid chat where they dish on discovering love later in life. Balancing time for each other, family, friends, and furry companions? Yep. Talking about merging households? Yep. Starting a family? Probably not going to happen.

People in their third act of life tend to seek more than mere flesh and flash, instead craving depth and maturity. Ignorance of each other’s previous lives provides the bliss of having an abundance of stories, perspectives, and wisdom waiting to be discovered; an endless adventure!

Dori Gillam is a speaker and writer on aging creatively and ageism and is the Board Chair for the Northwest Center for Creative Aging. She is a native Seattle-ite and loves hiking. www.dorigillam.com

Mack McCoy is New York City born and raised and has been a real estate broker in Seattle for 30 years. His hobbies include playing pop music with friends and admiring Seattle theatre.

This event is presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

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Disinformation has been used throughout history as a tool to intentionally deceive or manipulate the enemy. In our present age of information, where fabricated news stories, photos, or posts of any kind can be spread in an instant, we find ourselves especially vulnerable to the potentially devasting effects of weaponized disinformation.

Lee McIntyre is an author and Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. McIntyre has penned multiple publications exploring the science behind strategic deception. In On Disinformation, the author guides readers through a seventy-year history of strategic political denials, dating back to Soviet intelligence operations in the 1920’s. With the added support of interviews from leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism, McIntyre lays out the path that has led to our current moment of polarization.

In response to the crisis McIntyre presents, he outlines steps that political leaders can take to push back against the spread of disinformation. He also makes a case for the power of collective action, encouraging ordinary citizens to place pressure on Congress to regulate social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.

Join Lee McIntyre in his return to Town Hall Seattle, where he will speak truth to the crisis of disinformation, and suggest how we can pursue a more hopeful future.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is the author of Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior, Post-Truth, and The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience, all published by the MIT Press.

Buy the Book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy Queen Anne Book Company

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Have you ever made coins float in water? Or created a geode from an egg? If not, Emmy-nominated science TV host Emily Calandrelli can show you how.

Calandrelli, MIT-trained engineer turned internet STEAM star, demonstrates science experiments you can do at home with common household products as the host of Netflix’s Emily’s Wonder Lab and through her popular social media channels.

Following the success of her first book, Calandrelli has developed 50 new science experiments for the whole family to do together in Stay Curious and Keep Exploring: Next Level. Calandrelli is passionate about exploring science with families. She is open about her own parents’ lack of science background and how that led her to hone her skill of explaining scientific concepts in ways that are understandable and accessible. By offering opportunities to explore STEAM in your everyday life, Calandrelli will invite you to get your hands in some real, fun science.

Emily Calandrelli is an MIT engineer turned science TV host. She’s the host of Emily’s Wonder Lab on Netflix, the Emmy-nominated host of Xploration Outer Space on FOX, and the author of the Ada Lace Adventures and Reach for the Stars. Emily has worked with Bill Nye, Will Smith, and Cardi B to promote STEAM and has been featured on The Today Show and The Drew Barrymore Show. She enjoys sharing her love of science with her followers at @TheSpaceGal on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and on her YouTube channel.

Zeta Strickland has over 20 years experience in formal and informal learning settings. Her teaching experience includes high school science, outreach with PacSci’s Science On Wheels program and as an onboard educator on the Around the Americas expedition sailing from Barrow, Alaska to Charleston, South Carolina. Her learning audiences span grades k-12 and adults, including conducting initial use trainings to teachers using the Astro Adventures instructional materials. She’s also created numerous inquiry-based activities related to geology, astronomy, physics, and engineering, as well as environmental science, climate literacy and ocean health. At Pacific Science Center Zeta has experience in staff management, budgets and grant planning and administration, and collaborations and partnership with area organizations; her current role is Education Director.

Buy the Book Stay Curious and Keep Exploring: Next Level Ada’s Technical Books

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We all get frustrated with our inability to remember people’s names, find our keys, or recover a lost computer password. Fortunately, these experiences are not reflections of our broken brains, but the fact that the brain didn’t evolve the complex mechanisms of memory so that we could remember that guy we met at that thing. In fact, human memory is so much more than a personal archive or database. It’s a powerful and pervasive force that runs through all human experience and to a shocking degree makes us who we are – not just a record of the past, but as a determinative force in the present.

Dr. Charan Ranganath, a leading memory researcher, unveils the surprising aspects of human memory in his new book Why We Remember revealing how memory shapes our lives, impacts our decisions, and holds the key to understanding our past and planning for the future. This science narrative explores the unseen influence of memory on emotions, choices, and well-being, offering valuable insights for a broad audience, including those interested in staying mentally sharp, individuals dealing with trauma, parents, educators, and anyone seeking to make more mindful decisions. Drawing on over two decades of research, Dr. Ranganath’s book challenges common misconceptions about memory, delivering a paradigm-shifting perspective that’s both informative and life-changing.

Charan Ranganath is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling, and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship.

Chantel Prat, author of The Neuroscience of You, is a Professor at the University of Washington with appointments in the Departments of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. Her interdisciplinary research investigates how variable brain designs combine with our lifetime of experiences to shape the unique way each person understands the world and operates in it.

Buy the Companion Book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters The Elliott Bay Book Company

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Join Judy Kinney, Executive Director of GenPride, and members of the LGBTQ+ community for a lively discussion about how to stay proud and engaged as they age. GenPride advocates for Seattle/King County older LGBTQIA+ adults’ unique needs through programs and services that cultivate well-being and belonging.

Judy Kinney (she/they) is an experienced non-profit leader and community builder who has devoted 20 years of her career to protecting, supporting, and advancing the well-being of older adults, including promoting the equality, safety, and health of older LGBTQIA+ people. Judy is deeply committed to centering the intersections of age, race, and LGBTQ+ identities in GenPride’s work.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

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Discover the unexpected diversity, beauty, and strangeness of life in ancient lakes — some millions of years old — and the remarkable insights they yield about the causes of biodiversity.

Most lakes are less than 10,000 years old and short-lived, but there is a much smaller number of ancient lakes, tectonic in origin and often millions of years old, that are scattered across every continent but Antarctica: Baikal, Tanganyika, Victoria, Titicaca, and Biwa, to name a few. Often these lakes are filled with a diversity of fish, crustaceans, snails, and other creatures found nowhere else in the world. In Our Ancient Lakes, biology professor Jeffrey McKinnon introduces the remarkable living diversity of these aquatic bodies to the general reader and explains the surprising, often controversial, findings that the study of their faunas yield about the formation and persistence of species.

Shining a light on a class of biodiversity hot spot equivalent to coral reefs in the ocean or tropical rainforests on land, Our Ancient Lakes chronicles the often singular wonders of these venerable water bodies.

Jeffrey McKinnon grew up reading Gerald Durrell and Farley Mowat, absorbing Jacques Cousteau and Marlin Perkins’ teachings from the TV, and watching animals in the ditches, farmyards, forests, and tidepools of Western Canada. He received his BSc from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. A Professor of Biology at East Carolina University, his research has taken him to every continent but Antarctica and has appeared in journals including Nature and the American Naturalist.

Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History Third Place Books

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Delve into the urgent and critical issue of cervical cancer prevention with Dr. Linda Eckert.

Cervical cancer claims the lives of almost 350,000 women each year, a staggering toll that is compounded by the fact that the disease is nearly 100% preventable. Dr. Linda Eckert, a leading expert in cervical cancer prevention, brings her wealth of experience to the forefront in her book, Enough. Dr. Eckert intertwines evidence-based information with the poignant narratives of women who have battled cervical cancer, using their experiences to advocate for change. The book provides a compelling exploration of the barriers — cultural, gender-related, and political — that hinder women’s access to healthcare and contribute to the devastating consequences of this preventable cancer.

Dr. Eckert addresses the issues with clarity and compassion, making for a talk that’s accessible to everyone from the general public to those passionate about global health, women’s stories, and the pressing need for health equity. Be part of a conversation that goes beyond statistics and aims to break down barriers, address systemic inequities in healthcare, and create meaningful change that could greatly reduce cervical cancer’s unnecessary death toll.

Linda O. Eckert is a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at the University of Washington and an internationally recognized expert in immunizations and cervical cancer prevention. For over thirty years, Dr. Eckert has worked at Seattle’s Harborview Hospital, treating people from all around the world. Frequently in the spotlight for her expertise in HPV vaccinations and cervical cancer screenings, Dr. Eckert is passionate in her drive to eliminate this deadly disease.

Former freelance journalist Diane Mapes writes about public health, scientific research and the cancer experience for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, she went from covering dating, lifestyle and singles issues to science, “cancer whispering” and patient advocacy. A former humor columnist for the Seattle P-I and the author of hundreds of essays and articles for NBC News, CNN, MSN, Seattle Times, etc., she also writes fiction (and music!) and is currently hawking a funny novel about the cancer industrial complex.

Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer Third Place Books

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Join Rebecca Crichton in conversation with Andrea Cohen, a long-time facilitator of Compassionate Listening practices. Andrea will share personal stories of how these practices have transformed conflicts – with families, friends, and within challenged communities – into relationships based on greater understanding, caring, and connection.

Andrea Cohen, MSW, is a certified Compassionate Listening facilitator. She is the author of Practicing the Art of Compassionate Listening and director of the Compassionate Listening film Children of Abraham. She also co-directed the Compassionate Listening-based Jewish-German Reconciliation Project for several years.

Rebecca Crichton started her “Encore Career” as Executive Director of NWCCA in 2012 after 21 years with The Boeing Company. She refashioned her skills and knowledge as a writer, curriculum designer, and leadership development coach to offer Creative Aging programs at many Seattle area venues. An active participant in the local aging community, she writes regularly for 3rd Act Magazine.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

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Delve into the insightful world of reproductive health with Dr. Jen Gunter.

In her latest book, Blood, Dr. Gunter dispells myths and misinformation about menstruation with a foundation of scientific facts and medical expertise. Known for her evidence-based approach, Dr. Gunter addresses questions you may have never thought to ask about menstrual bleeding and offers a clear and informative guide to reproductive anatomy.

Covering topics from the endometrium’s intriguing connection to the immune system, to discussions on period pain, endometriosis, and hormonal contraception, Blood provides a nuanced perspective that fosters understanding without judgment.

Join us for an event that encourages open conversations and promotes knowledge about a natural bodily process that has often been shrouded in mystery and societal taboos.

Dr. Jen Gunter, internationally bestselling author and expert gynecologist, known as “the world’s most famous gynecologist” (The Guardian), brings over three decades of expertise in vulvar and vaginal diseases. Her bestselling books, The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto, translated into 25 languages, have solidified her position as a leading voice in women’s health. With accolades including the 2020 NAMS Media Award and a TED Talk with 2M+ views, Dr. Gunter hosts the CBC/Amazon Prime series Jensplaining and shares insights on her popular podcast, Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter. Based in Northern California, she continues to impact the conversation on women’s health globally at DrJenGunter.com.

Amy Bhatt is a writer, museum curator, and former Associate Professor. She has a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, is the author of High-Tech Housewives, and is the co-author of Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. She has written for and appeared in news outlets such as NPR, Ms. Magazine, The Conversation, Indian Express, Quartz, and The Seattle Times. She founded The Brohatt Group in 2020 and consults as a ghostwriter and development editor.

Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation University Book Store Seattle T2P2 is our community partner for this event. Seattle T2P2 (Towers of Tampons & Pyramids of Pads) is a menstrual product donation collective committed to disrupting period poverty throughout Seattle and beyond. They believe that to create a more equitable society, we must make period products accessible to all. Period.

You can help! Town Hall is hosting a period product drive for T2P2 during this event. Bring your donations of packaged or individually wrapped pads, tampons, panty liners, wipes, and hand sanitizer to the event to contribute to Seattle T2P2’s mission.

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Have you ever wondered what your nurses’ lives are like outside of the hospital?

In a new memoir, Journal of a Black Queer Nurse, Nurse Britney Daniels divulges the details of her day-to-day life. From braving the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic to giving her own clothes to a patient who was unhoused to transporting bodies to overflowing morgues (and experiencing her own physical ailments as a result), to advocating for patients of color in the face of systemic racism and more, these unseen moments as a marginalized nurse inform her authorship while helping to illuminate just some of what goes on behind the scenes.

Nurse Daniels identifies as a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has worked as an emergency room nurse. What began as a personal diary also became an instrument of healing from perpetual trauma wrought not only by what she witnessed in her career but stemming from how much she dared to care. The book may make you feel sadness, humor, anger, a sense of injustice, or all of the above in this candid account that exposes some unflattering truths about health care in the United States.

Journal of a Black Queer Nurse strives to reveal how true care goes beyond treating the physical body. Daniels asserts that it involves listening to and understanding patients and it demands that nurses — especially nurses of color — also be warriors.

Britney Daniels, RN, MSN is a Black queer travel nurse and social advocate who has worked in hospital emergency rooms all over the US. Daniels holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in nursing with a concentration in nursing leadership. She is currently working on her Doctorate of Nursing Practice degree. Britney lives in Chicago with her wife, Saria, and their two dogs, Batman and Momo. Journal of a Black Queer Nurse is her first book.

Journal of a Black Queer Nurse Third Place Books

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Take a moment to appreciate the humble but essential set of muscles we call the pelvic floor.

When the pelvic floor is working well, our bladder, bowels, and sexual functioning are more likely to be trouble-free. If they aren’t working well, people can experience incontinence, constipation, pain, and a host of other troubles. Out of embarrassment or discomfort with the topic, people often turn to unreliable sources for information and help.

Dr. Peg Maas, DPT, is a Board Certified Pelvic and Women’s Health Physical Therapist who has worked and taught in the field for over 30 years. She works with people of all genders and ages, bringing useful pelvic health information to those who are ready to learn — no matter their comfort level with the topic. Dr. Maas’s down-to-earth approach and humor will provide attendees with practical health-changing information for people to begin implementing before they even leave the building!

Dr. Peg Maas, DPT, works at Swedish Medical Center and is a Clinical Faculty Member at the University of Washington, and a clinical lecturer at University of Puget Sound. In her clinical work, she treats patients of all ages and genders with a broad spectrum of pelvic floor diagnoses. She tries to set everyone she sees at ease so they feel comfortable asking the questions they hope to ask and can learn what they need to learn to reach their goals.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

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Why do women live longer than men? Why do women have menopause? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? And does the female brain really exist?

Considering the science and data collection methods we currently have, it is somewhat of a wonder that there is so little known about biology as it relates to sex, as well as our behavior. Author and Researcher, Cat Bohannon, argues that these questions should have been investigated decades ago, with a level of thoroughness and care that is still lacking in mainstream science. Bohannon points to the fact that societal attention has been on the male body for so long, that even natural occurrences like menopause, are considered a medical mystery.

In her debut publication, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Bohannon examines the evolution of the female sex. From the development of breastmilk, initially in mammals no larger than a field mouse, to the first placental mammals, to the way C-sections in the industrialized world are altering women’s pelvic shape, Bohannon brings hard science and a passionate curiosity to the subject of female biology.

Please join us as Town Hall as Cat Bohannan makes the case for a greater understanding of the female body.

Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.

Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine, and education. She’s an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two pretty amazing daughters. Born in California and most recently from Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution Third Place Books

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Today’s information (and misinformation) overload is difficult and confusing to navigate.

Post-truth politics and conspiracy theories abound. Science and scientists are under growing suspicion, causing even more confusion and unrest. At the same time, we need science to survive today’s biggest threats like pandemics and climate change. To bridge this gap, acclaimed physicist and New York Times bestselling author Jim Al-Khalili wants us all to start thinking like scientists.

Al-Khalili believes that the practice of science can offer us a way of thinking and understanding our complex world. He’s created a guide to leading a more rational life, inviting people to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. He defines the “how” and “why” behind science, as well as what science is (and what it’s not).

With today’s scrutiny over science, Al-Khalili admits that scientists need to do more to communicate how they work to build trust and credibility in the public eye. One way to do that is for everyone to adopt the scientific method in our daily lives. Science may not only solve today’s biggest problems, but it can be a way for everyone to make everyday decisions for themselves and their loved ones.

Jim Al-Khalili is an Iraqi-born theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey, where he holds a Distinguished Chair in physics as well as a university chair in public engagement in science. He has written 14 books on popular science and the history of science, between them translated into twenty-six languages. His latest books include The Joy of Science and The World According to Physics, which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. He is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries, such as the Bafta-nominated Chemistry: A Volatile History and he hosts the long-running weekly BBC Radio 4 program, The Life Scientific.

The Joy of Science Third Place Books

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In the Pacific Northwest, many of us delight in Olympic National Park, a UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, located right in Seattle’s backyard. Yet the famed park is just the center of a much larger ecosystem including rivers that encompass old-growth forests, coastal expanses, and alpine peaks, all rich with biodiversity. For tens of thousands of years, humans have thrived and strived alongside this area.

To tell the story of this place, award-winning poet and nature writer Tim McNulty and contributors such as Fawn Sharpe, president of the National Congress of American Indians, David Guterson, author of bestselling novel Snow Falling on Cedars, Wendy Sampson, and Seattle Times environmental reporter Lynda V. Mapes, collaborated with Braided River in a project called Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain.

Braided River, the same organization that created the award-winning book and multimedia exhibit We are Puget Sound, is bringing awareness to the Olympic Peninsula through art and stories––stories of development, conservation, restoration, and cultural heritage, while writers from the Lower Elwha Klallam, Jamestown S’Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Makah Tribe, and Quinault Indian Nation share some of their own history and perspectives. The project, in partnership with The Mountaineers, Olympic Parks Associates, National Parks Conservation Foundation, and many more, is a diverse exploration of Olympic National Park and its surrounding peninsula.

Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer and recipient of the Washington State Book Award and National Outdoor Book Award.

David Guterson is a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and journalist. He is best known for his award-winning debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, which won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. It has sold more than four million copies and was adapted as a major motion picture. He lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle with his wife Robin and five children.

Wendy Sampson is a member of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (LEKT); she lives on the reservation with her family. She has been a Klallam language teacher for twenty years. Wendy has provided cultural outreach in the schools, taught after-school programs and community adult classes, and worked under various grant projects with the goals of creating tribal history and language lessons and developing tools for language learning. She is now a teacher for the Port Angeles School District offering courses in the Klallam language as well as history classes from a tribal perspective.

Lynda V. Mapes is an award-winning journalist, author, and close observer of the natural world. She is the author of six books, including Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home; Witness Tree: Seasons of Change in a Century Old Oak; and Elwha: A River Reborn. Lynda lives in Seattle where she covers nature, the environment, and tribes as a staff reporter for The Seattle Times.

Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain: Washington's Olympic Peninsula The Elliott Bay Book Company

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Why does it seem like some people matter more than others? Why are some given higher status or more recognition? And how do we broaden the circle of those who belong in society?

Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont examines these questions and unpacks the power of recognition—how we perceive others as visible and valued. She draws from her new book, Seeing Others, and nearly forty years of research and interviews to show how we need new narratives for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity.

For decades now, more people have become marginalized and divided. Lamont believes this is related to the fact that we’ve prioritized material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. At the same time, Lamont points out, we’re living in a moment where many marginalized social groups, including workers, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minorities, want to be seen and heard––to fully belong in society. How do we heal such a deeply divided world?

Join us at Town Hall for a riveting evening as Lamont looks at the heart of our modern struggles and offers an inclusive path forward with new ways of understanding our world while recognizing the diverse ways one can live a life.

Michèle Lamont is a Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is also the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European studies. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association and her research has received numerous awards, including honorary doctorates from six countries. The author or co-author of over a dozen books, she can be found on MicheleLamont.org.

Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World Third Place Books

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The concept of finding joy has gone mainstream. Its benefits are well known: joy can improve overall well-being, strengthen relationships, and even extend lives. Yet for many, especially folks in marginalized communities, joy is elusive.

Seattle-based Integrative Medicine Physician and activist Tanmeet Sethi wants to prove that joy really can be for everyone. In her book, Joy Is My Justice, she claims that the nervous system can shift its biochemistry into joy at the cellular level. She believes that people can find joy as they reclaim their personal power, strength, and purpose — despite living in an unjust world, past personal traumas, and a whitewashed wellness world.

Sethi invites everyone who has felt like the wellness industry has left them behind to rediscover joy, not just the buzzword, but as a profound practice for healing. Even though joy has become a cultural mainstay, Sethi argues that it can also be a radical act of justice.

Tanmeet Sethi, M.D. is an Integrative Medicine physician who has devoted her career to caring for the most vulnerable and teaching physicians how to care for these communities in the most humane and skillful way possible. She has spent the last 25 years on the frontlines practicing primary care, global trauma, and community activism. Dr. Sethi lectures nationally and has spoken on three TEDx stages about using gratitude as medicine. She lives in Seattle with her family.

Rebekah “Bex” Borucki, founder of BexLife and Row House Publishing, is a mother of five, a meditation guide, a birth doula, a mentor for creative healers, and an author and publisher of books for big and little readers.

Joy is My Justice: Reclaim What Is Yours Third Place Books

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Join Denise Malm, Social Worker and Geriatric Mental Health specialist, as she dives into the fascinating world of Personal Safety Nets (PSN) and their role in combating the growing issue of loneliness and isolation in our society. Discover how this concept, born in 2007 thanks to Judy Pigott and Dr. John Gibson, offers creative ways to build meaningful relationships. Malm will uncover the potential of PSN to enhance connections and boost health and well-being as we age.

Denise Malm, LSWAIC, GMHS serves as a social worker at the Wallingford Community Center. As a geriatric mental health specialist, Denise is trained to holistically assess and incorporate the complex physical and behavioral health conditions faced by each individual in her care. She also works with the University of Washington Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences AIMS Center as a clinical researcher supporting a study evaluating older adult participants engaged in a short-term behavioral activities intervention. Denise provides a multitude of services in a non-profit community setting including assessing dementia and delirium, evidence-based interventions for depression, facilitating discussions of end-of-life wishes, and working with adult children to plan and create a safety net for their aging parents.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging

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Did you know that there are 40 million miles of roadways on earth?

While roads are practically invisible to humans, wild animals experience them entirely differently. Conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb has explored the environmental effects of this ubiquitous part of the modern world.

In his book, Crossings, Goldfarb explains how creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from their habitat. These effects on nature are everywhere, all because of human activity.

Yet there is human activity that is working to combat these effects as well. Goldfarb describes conservation work such as highway wildlife bridges, similar to the I-90 wildlife corridor in Washington state. He explains how tunnels for toads and deconstructing old logging roads can make a difference. These projects and other research in road ecology are working toward lessening the hazards of roadways. While they may take up millions of miles of the planet, roads can leave a smaller impact in the future.

Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist who covers wildlife conservation, marine science, and public lands management, as well as an accomplished fiction writer. His work has been featured in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, VICE, Audubon Magazine, Modern Farmer, Orion, World Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Yale Environment 360, and many other publications. He is the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.

Brooke Jarvis is an independent journalist based in Seattle. She’s a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and a winner of the Livingston Award and the Whiting Award.

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet Third Place Books

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As awareness of the current climate crisis grows, we can’t help but wonder how the decisions of the past will affect our future.

In Stephen M. Gardiner’s Dialogues on Climate Justice (co-written by Arthur R. Obst), we follow a cast of fictional characters as they experience the very real consequences of climate change. Spanning from the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until the 2060s, Gardiner’s protagonist, aptly named Hope, spurs conversations exploring the many aspects of the climate justice discussion. She engages with climate skepticism, explores her own climate responsibilities, and finally, as an older woman, to reflects with her granddaughter on what one generation owes another.

Gardiner’s book allows us to explore all aspects of the tricky topic through the eyes of a reliable and relatable narrator. Through Hope’s story, we can better understand the philosophy and science of the current climate crisis. Gardiner joins us at Town Hall to continue the conversation.

Stephen M. Gardiner is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. He is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (2011), and co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (2016). His edited books include The Ethics of “Geoengineering” the Global Climate (2020), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (2016), and The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics (2022).

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From the very creation of the planet to the present day, water has always been central to life on Earth. And while the amount of water on our planet has not changed, it has, in fact, changed the world. It has shaped our very existence.

Renowned scientist Peter Gleick sheds light on water’s long history in his book, The Three Ages of Water. Gleick recounts how water has developed civilizations and empires, and driven centuries of advances in science and technology — from agriculture to aqueducts, steam power to space exploration — and progress in health and medicine.

But the achievements that have propelled humanity forward also brought consequences like unsustainable water use, ecological destruction, and global climate change, that now threaten to send us into a new dark age. In Gleick’s research, he has found that billions of people today do not have access to clean water or sanitation. The scarcity of this fixed resource, Gleick believes, is directly linked to the growing violence and conflicts around the globe.

Gleick says that we must change our ways, and quickly, to usher in a new age of water for the benefit of everyone. Drawing from the lessons of our past, Gleick charts a path toward a sustainable future for water and the planet. While water may be a fixed resource, Gleick believes we have the power to change the trajectory of the planet’s future by understanding its role in today’s current climate.

Peter Gleick is perhaps the world’s most widely known and cited water expert. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he went on to cofound the Pacific Institute, the leading independent research group devoted to reimagining water for a changing world. He is a scientist by training, winner of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, and an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. He lives in Berkeley, California.

The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future
Third Place Books

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Taking us to the cutting edge of the new frontier of medicine, a visionary biotechnologist and a pathbreaking researcher show how we can optimize our health in ways that were previously unimaginable.

We are on the cusp of a major transformation in healthcare—yet few people know it. At top hospitals and a few innovative health-tech startups, scientists are working closely with patients to dramatically extend their “healthspan”—the number of healthy years before disease sets in. In The Age of Scientific Wellness, two visionary leaders of this revolution in health take us on a thrilling journey to this new frontier of medicine.

Today, most doctors wait for clinical symptoms to appear before they act, and the ten most commonly prescribed medications confer little or no benefit to most people taking them. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price argue that we must move beyond this reactive, hit-or-miss approach to usher in real precision health—a form of highly personalized care they call “scientific wellness.” Using information gleaned from our blood and genes and tapping into the data revolution made possible by AI, doctors can catch the onset of disease years before symptoms arise, revolutionizing prevention. Current applications have shown startling results: diabetes reversed, cancers eliminated, Alzheimer’s avoided, and autoimmune conditions kept at bay.

This is not a future fantasy: it is already happening, but only for a few patients and at a high cost. It’s time to make this gold standard of care more widely available. Inspiring in its possibilities, and radical in its conclusions, The Age of Scientific Wellness shares actionable insights to help you chart a course to a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life.

Dr. Leroy Hood is a world-renowned scientist and recipient of the National Medal of Science in 2011. Dr. Hood co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in 2000, served as its first President from 2000-2017 and is a Professor and Chief Strategy Officer. In 2022, Dr. Hood started Phenome Health, a non-profit dedicated to delivering value through health innovation.

Dr. Nathan Price is CEO of Onegevity, a division of Thorne HealthTech. He is also an (on leave) Professor at the Institute for Systems Biology, where he and Lee Hood co-direct the Hood-Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine. Additionally, Dr. Price is an affiliate faculty at the University of Washington in the Departments of Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, and Molecular & Cellular Biology. In 2019, he was selected by the National Academy of Medicine as one of their 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine.

Dr. Jim Heath is President and Professor at Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Heath also has the position of Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. Formerly, he directed the National Cancer Institute-funded NSB Cancer Center, was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, and served as co-director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at UCLA until 2017.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and the Institute of Systems Biology.

The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands
Third Place Books

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How did the psychedelic drug MDMA emerge from the shadows to the forefront of a medical revolution? What potential does it hold to help us?

What do you think of when you hear the abbreviation MDMA? Often seen as a party drug and vilified as a Schedule I substance that would supposedly eat holes in users’ brains, MDMA (also known as Molly or Ecstasy) has remained controversial. However, the substance is now being hailed as a therapeutic agent that could transform the field of mental health, becoming the first psychedelic approved for widespread clinical use.

In I Feel Love, science journalist Rachel Nuwer presents evidence from scientific trials which suggest that MDMA, when properly administered, may be effective at relieving the effects of trauma. Results from other studies point to its usefulness for treating depression, alcohol addiction, eating disorders, and more. It has also been shown to dismantle psychological defenses and induce feelings of empathy, self-compassion, and love. Yet even as more is revealed about MDMA, there is still much that remains unknown that scientists are diligently working to figure out; the drug may answer as many questions as it asks.

Nuwer guides readers through a cultural and scientific upheaval that separates fact and fiction, seeking to reshape our understanding of our brains, ourselves, and the space between.

Rachel Nuwer is an award-winning science journalist who regularly contributes to the New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and many other publications. Her reporting for the New York Times broke the news globally about the MDMA Phase III clinical trial and was highlighted by Michael Pollan, Ezra Klein, and Tim Ferriss, among other thought leaders. In 2022, Nuwer was among the inaugural recipients of the Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. She holds master’s degrees in applied ecology and in science journalism. Her first book, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, took her to a dozen countries to investigate the multibillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade. She lives in Brooklyn.

Dr. Sunil Kumar Aggarwal is a physician and medical geographer. He is a Board-Certified Fellow of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, where he was named a Top 20 Emerging Leader. He is the Past Chair of the Integrative Medicine Special Interest Group and an inaugural member of the Safe Use in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies Forum at the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. He has been qualified as an expert in cannabis and psilocybin medical and religious use, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and MAPS MDMA-Assisted Therapy. He is the co-founder and co-director of Seattle’s AIMS Institute.

I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World
Third Place Books

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We are all in relationships with people who have died. Whether they are our friends and family members, partners or teachers, we have all had to accept their absence from our lives.

How do we remember, memorialize, and communicate with them? We will share the many ways we continue to feel the presence of people significant to us.

Join Rebecca Crichton, Executive Director of Northwest Center for Creative Aging and Dr. Jennifer R Levin, licensed marriage and family therapist and recognized Fellow in Thanatology. Dr. Levin will share insights from her work with adolescents, adults, and families experiencing traumatic grief, sudden death, and post-traumatic growth.

Dr. Jennifer R. Levin specializes in working with adolescents, adults, and families experiencing traumatic grief, sudden death, and post-traumatic growth. In 2000 Jennifer received her doctorate from the UCLA School of Public Health and in 2014 she earned her master’s degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University. Jennifer is a licensed marriage and family therapist in CA and WA and is a recognized Fellow in Thanatology; the study of death, dying, and bereavement from the Association of Death Education and Counseling.

Professionally, Dr. Levin has served as the executive director of Hospice of Pasadena and taught at several California universities. Jennifer provides training, consultation, and crisis support to businesses, schools, and community-based organizations experiencing bereavement and loss. Jennifer is also the host of the podcast Untethered: Healing the Pain from a Sudden Death. To learn more about Dr. Levin visit www.therapyheals.com.

Rebecca Crichton started her “Encore Career” as ED of NWCCA in 2012 after 21 years with The Boeing Company. She refashioned her skills and knowledge as a writer, curriculum designer, and leadership development coach to offer programs related to Creative Aging at many venues in the Seattle area. An active participant in the local aging community, she writes regularly for 3rd Act Magazine.

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A conversation about nuclear energy, climate change, and inspiring young women to go into STEM fields.

On December 15, 2022, Grace Stanke, a senior at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, studying nuclear engineering, took home the Miss America crown along with the scholarship of the Miss America Organization. She additionally won in a talent category for her classical violin performance.

As Miss America 2023, Grace is embarking on a year of service taking her on a tour across the country and she is using her national platform to continue advocating for “Clean Energy – Cleaner Future.” She believes that America needs to convert to zero-carbon energy with a focus on nuclear power and breaking down misconceptions surrounding nuclear energy.

Through it all, her goal is to inspire the next generation of female scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

With increasing interest in, support for, and desire to become more informed about nuclear energy and how it can help mitigate climate change, combined with the wonderful goal of inspiring young women to enter the STEM fields, the evening promises to be interesting and inspiring. Scott Montgomery, University of Washington faculty from the Jackson School of International Studies, will be the interviewer for the event, and a Q&A will complete the evening. This special event is made possible by Friends of Fission Northwest and the generosity of the Anthropocene Institute, American Nuclear Society-Eastern Washington, Energy Northwest, Terrestrial Energy, and Town Hall Seattle.

Scott L. Montgomery is an author, geoscientist, and affiliate faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He writes and lectures on a wide variety of topics related to energy (geopolitics, technology, resources, climate change), American politics, intellectual history, language and communication, and the history of science.

About Friends of Fission Northwest

Friends of Fission Northwest is a grassroots non-profit that, for more than six years, has brought speakers to the Puget Sound region and beyond. We strive to educate the public about the importance of nuclear energy, its value in fighting climate change, and to dispel myths and misinformation about nuclear power.

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UW Engage Sciencesees a future where every graduate student has access to science communication training, and therefore good science communication becomes the norm. The outcome is an increased public trust and positive attitude toward science, ultimately strengthening the connection between the public and scientists. Join us for a look at the forefront of research in our region and meet the students who are leading the latest wave of scientific discovery.

Violet Sorrentino: How tiny worms can help us understand the human brain

The human brain is a complex structure populated with hundreds of billions of cells. When something goes wrong and the brain gets sick, how can we pinpoint which cells are having problems? That’s why some neuroscientists use tiny worms as a model. They have similar brain cells and molecules, but everything is on a much smaller scale, so we can take knowledge more easily gained from the worm brain and apply it to humans. Brain cells called glia eat small parts of other cells, but eating too much or too little can cause diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. If we use worms to better understand the eating process, maybe we can develop treatments for these diseases.

Violet Sorrentino is a cell biology graduate student at Fred Hutch, where she uses microscopic worms to study communication between two types of brain cells. The conversation between these cells helps maintain a happy and healthy brain, and she is working to define the molecular language these cells speak.

Tessa Code: The threat of artificial light to young salmon in Lake Washington

Juvenile sockeye salmon are not surviving their early growth phase in Lake Washington. Their main fish predator has heightened hunting efficiency due to the artificial light around the lake which brightens the water column. Artificial light at night is increasing at a rapid pace, brightening the sky more than ever before. Determining how salmon and their predators respond to the light levels in the lake would help Seattle and nearby cities to change lighting and help recover the salmon population.

Tessa Code is a graduate student at the University of Washington and she works as a technician for the US Geological Survey Western Fisheries Research Center. Her research uses hydro-acoustics and light sensors to study the effect of artificial light on fish predator-prey dynamics in waterbodies around Seattle.

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On a starry night, nothing inspires such deep wonder as staring into the vastness of space, imagining what curiosities might lie beyond our reach.

This year we have seen several space-related news stories that managed to break through the usual slew of politics and economics. In February, we were met with headlines that reported a piece of the sun had broken off its surface and formed a swirling vortex around its north pole. In January, we were told that the Earth’s perpetually spinning core may have stopped turning altogether. While these stories are certainly eye-catching and likely to excite the imagination upon reading them, you might feel that you are being left with more questions than answers.

Luckily, experts like Philip Plait make it their aim to present the universe and all of its oddities in a wonderfully creative, and deeply comprehensible style. In his new book, Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe, Plait acts as our tour guide through a variety of exotic worlds outside of our own. With vivid, inventive, and often humorous prose, he allows us to imagine ourselves stargazing from the rim of an ancient volcano, catching a glimpse of the frigid mountains and plains of Pluto, or glancing down to see the shadows cast by stars on a planet that is trillions of miles from Earth.

Plait paints each of these scenes with a uniquely imaginative description informed by real science and observations. For anyone who ponders what wondrous things might lie out there beyond our horizons, Plait is of the rare few that can offer a starkly real and captivating answer.

Dr. Philip Plait is an astronomer, science communicator, author, and all-around science nerd. After getting his Ph.D. using Hubble Space Telescope data, he started a career debunking bad science and promoting good science, creating the website and blog Bad Astronomy, now a popular newsletter with over 13,000 subscribers. He has written three books — Bad Astronomy, Death from the Skies!, and his most recent, Under Alien Skies — and currently writes for Scientific American. He wrote and hosted Crash Course Astronomy, a video series with 70+ million views, and has been a scientific technical consultant for numerous TV shows and movies.

The Seattle Astronomical Society is our community partner for this event.

Community Partner: Seattle Astronomical Society
Seattle Astronomical Society (SAS) promotes meaningful astronomical activities for its members and to provide outreach and astronomy education for the public. Stop by the SAS table in The Forum on the night of the event to learn more about their mission and ways to get involved!

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  **UW Engage Science sees a future where every graduate student has access to science communication training, and therefore good science communication becomes the norm. The outcome is an increased public trust and positive attitude toward science, ultimately strengthening the connection between the public and scientists. Join us for a look at the forefront of research in our region and meet the students who are leading the latest wave of scientific discovery.**

Rory Mcguire: Automating science by putting the lab on a chip

Computers used to be the size of rooms, and now they fit in our pockets. Biology, chemistry, and medical research on the other hand still require big, expensive lab spaces. But what if we could shrink the lab down to the size of a phone, or maybe even smaller? Putting a lab onto a chip could make research more accessible to underfunded institutions, cut the wait time between a doctor’s visit and getting a diagnosis, and reduce hazardous biological and chemical waste, among other benefits. Motivated by these possibilities, Rory McGuire is developing a “lab-on-a-chip” that uses electrical signals to manipulate liquids and molecules on a palm-sized platform that can all be controlled from your laptop.

Rory Mcguire does research at the intersection of computation and biology. Sometimes this means using DNA as a hard drive to store digital data, and sometimes this means using electronics to automate biological experiments. Rory has spent the last 2 years developing open-source hardware and software with the aim of making biology and chemistry research more accessible, efficient, and equitable.

Keenan Ganz: Predicting where the next wildfire will burn

Recent large forest fires in the American west have placed wildfire, and its consequences, in the public eye. For nearly a century, forest managers have suppressed fire in naturally burning forests and used public awareness campaigns to portray wildfire as a destructive and wasteful force. But, recent scientific work and recognition of Indigenous land practices point to the opposite interpretation: fire is crucial to keeping our forests healthy. Keenan’s work is about helping us live with fire. He studies how computer models can help us prepare for when the next fire will burn.

Keenan Ganz is a graduate student in Remote Sensing at the University of Washington. He uses specialized cameras on satellites and drones to study forest health and wildfire. One day, Keenan wants to build an improved forecasting system to understand when and where wildfire will burn next.

Rasika Venkataraman: How understanding the environment of cancer can help us treat it

Blood cells develop and mature in a spongy environment within our bones called the bone marrow. The bone marrow and blood cells are in constant communication with each other making sure the ‘blood headquarters’ is functioning smoothly, replenishing blood throughout life. A small population of humans is born with a mutation in a specific gene, which puts them at risk of developing blood cancer later in life. A mutation is a change in our genes, which are codes that tell our body to function a certain way. To understand how this mutation causes blood cancer, we need to study its function in blood cells as well the bone marrow environment. This will shed light on potential disruptions in the communication between the blood cells and the bone marrow, which could then be leveraged to improve blood cancer treatment in patients that have this specific mutation.

Rasika Venkataraman is a third-year graduate student at the University of Washington’s Department of Lab Medicine and Pathology. Her research focuses on studying a specific hereditary mutation in DNA that causes blood cancers. She aims to investigate how this mutation alters the environment in which the cancer cells develop and grow, to improve the treatment of blood cancer.

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UW Engage Science sees a future where every graduate student has access to science communication training, and therefore good science communication becomes the norm. The outcome is an increased public trust and positive attitude toward science, ultimately strengthening the connection between the public and scientists. Join us for a look at the forefront of research in our region and meet the students who are leading the latest wave of scientific discovery. Kaylin Ellioff: Understanding the makeup of marijuana to better treat chronic pain

Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 people in the US and currently opioids are the main treatment for severe cases. There is potential for individuals to become tolerant to opioids as well as misuse them. Therefore, alternative treatments are desperately needed. In Kaylin Ellioff’s research, she is working to understand if and how different chemical components found in Cannabis, otherwise known as marijuana, can be used to treat chronic pain. Cannabis has been used for centuries to treat pain, and by better understanding how each of the chemicals work in our body, new pain treatments can be developed so that patients do not have to rely on daily doses of opioids or get high to experience pain relief.

Kaylin Ellioff is a Pharmacology graduate student at the University of Washington, where she studies different chemicals found in cannabis and how they can be used to treat chronic pain.

Samantha Borje: Using designer DNA to detect diseases

When it comes to forming connections, molecules generally look for the same things that many people do: a sense of stability and a certain degree of freedom. Whether a molecule can provide these for another molecule is often a complicated question because most molecules consist of many parts. DNA, the central molecule of life, is remarkably simple in that it consists of only four parts: A, C, G, and T. The combination of these parts in a piece of DNA determines exactly whether, how quickly, and in what settings it can connect with another piece of DNA. We can take advantage of this predictability to design and carry out super-specific chain reactions made entirely of DNA pieces, in a process known as DNA computing.

Samantha Borje is a Molecular Engineering graduate student at the University of Washington, where she works at the Seelig Lab and Molecular Information Systems Lab. Her research focuses on designing massive networks of DNA pieces. She aims to use these networks as diagnostic platforms, where the DNA pieces would set off different chain reactions depending on whether or not a medical sample contains markers for disease.

Sonya Jampel: Public health prevention of air pollution exposure

Fine particulate matter – a primary contributor to air pollution – is so small that over twenty particles can fit across one human hair. When fine particulate matter is suspended in the atmosphere, it can penetrate deep into your lungs and bloodstream. These small, suspended particles including dust, dirt, or soot can lead to harmful health impacts such as heart attacks, stroke, respiratory illness, and death. In January, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed lowering standards to protect human health. Come learn about how science and policy work together to improve health!

Sonya Jampel (she/her) is a Master’s in Public Health Student in Epidemiology at the University of Washington. She uses large birth and death certificate datasets to analyze the relationship between air pollution and infant mortality in order to inform policy and prevention solutions.

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Did you know the Puget Sound region is known as a place where people with Dementia are respected, welcomed, and fully belong?

Sandy Sabersky, Co-Founder of Elderwise® and co-author of The Elderwise Way, A Different Approach to Life with Dementia, will share how Spirit-Centered Care® provides connection and meaning for people with dementia as well as a way for care partners to grow. Marigrace Becker, Program Manager of Community Education and Impact at the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center (MBWC) and the Director of the Memory Hub will highlight the Memory Hub as well as some of the many resources available for people in our region living with and engaged with dementia.

Sandy Sabersky is co-founder of Elderwise® and co-author with Ruth Neuwald Falcon, of The Elderwise Way: A Different Approach to Life with Dementia which explains the Elderwise Philosophy and practice of Spirit-Centered Care®. She practiced physical therapy for 25 years and is a Certified Sage-ing Leader with Sage-ing International.

Marigrace Becker, MSW, is the Program Manager of Community Education and Impact at the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center (MBWC) and the Director of the Memory Hub: A Place for Dementia-Friendly Community, Collaboration, and Impact.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

This event is sponsored by Dementia Friends Washington.

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UW Engage Science sees a future where every graduate student has access to science communication training, and therefore good science communication becomes the norm. The outcome is an increased public trust and positive attitude toward science, ultimately strengthening the connection between the public and scientists. Join us for a look at the forefront of research in our region and meet the students who are leading the latest wave of scientific discovery. Megan Gialluca: Using water to aid the search for life in the universe

At present, we are closer than ever to answering the age-old question: “Are we alone in the universe?” For the first time, new and upcoming telescopes will have the capability to search for the signs of alien life on planets in other solar systems (termed exoplanets). From plants to technology to oxygen, there are lots of things that could tell us alien life is living on a planet, but searching for these clues is challenging. During this talk, you will learn about the signs of alien life scientists search for, the methods they are using to do it, and the challenges they face along the way.

Megan Gialluca studies massive water loss on planets in other solar systems (termed exoplanets). This process can turn a potentially habitable planet, like Earth, into a burning hot, waterless environment, like Venus. Understanding whether or not a planet has undergone this process informs scientists on where to search for alien life in the universe, and what the clues we should look for are.

Abi Elerding: The science of motivation and the function of dopamine in the human brain

Dopamine is critical for many brain functions; it aids in our movement, motivates us to pursue our goals, and reinforces our inclination to pursue life’s many pleasures. Proper regulation of dopamine is essential since abnormalities in dopamine activity can contribute to the development of conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, ADHD, schizophrenia, and substance-use disorder. GABA is a brain chemical that acts as a natural brake on the activity of dopamine neurons, helping to regulate their function. Abi Elerding’s research focuses on understanding how GABA interacts with dopamine and its role in motivation and learning. These findings could pave the way for new treatment strategies for disorders associated with abnormal dopamine activity.

Abi Elerding is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington working to identify and isolate neuronal cell systems that guide behavior in health and disease.

Emma Scalisi: How fishermen’s local knowledge can be used to improve policy

Commercial fisheries are important to people around the world for many reasons, including jobs, food security, and culture. However, with pressures from both fishing and climate change stressors, many fish populations are currently declining. Fortunately, there are many people who care deeply about protecting these resources, including the fishermen who rely on them. This talk includes how and why knowledge from fishermen can help promote sustainable practices within fisheries, along with the difficulties of putting this into practice.

Emma Scalisi is a graduate student at the University of Washington’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, where her research examines the relationships between small-scale commercial fishers and fisheries management agencies in Alaska. She wants to know how fish and people can benefit from listening to both scientists and fishermen.

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Standing in an old-growth forest, you can instinctively sense the ways it is different from forests shaped by humans. These ancient, undisturbed ecosystems are increasingly rare and largely misunderstood, but American environmentalist Joan Maloof knows these forests intimately and has been studying and writing about them for decades. In the newly revised and expanded edition of her book, Nature’s Temples: A Natural History of Old-Growth Forests, she continues to deepen our understanding of these extraordinary ecosystems.

Maloof brings together the scientific data we have about old-growth forests, drawing on diverse fields of study to explain the ecological differences among forests of various ages. She describes the life forms and relationships that make old-growth forests unique — from salamanders and micro-snails to plants that communicate through fungi — and reveals why human attempts to manage forests can never replicate nature’s sublime handiwork. She also sheds new light on the special role forests play in removing carbon from the atmosphere and shares what we know about the interplay between wildfires and ancient forests.

Joan Maloof, Ph.D., is a powerful spokesperson for our nation’s forests — sharing information about their extent and condition and encouraging their preservation. Maloof is the author of Nature’s Temples: A Natural History of Old-Growth Forests. She also founded the Old-Growth Forest Network, an organization that is creating a network of protected forests across the U.S. Maloof is a professor emeritus at Salisbury University where she taught Biological Sciences and Environmental Studies. She is the author and four books in addition to Nature’s Temples: Treepedia; The Living Forest; Among the Ancients; and Teaching the Trees.

Nature's Temples: A Natural History of Old-Growth Forests Revised and Expanded Third Place Books

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There’s nothing we spend more time with, but understand less, than ourselves. You’ve been with yourself every waking moment of your life. But who — or, rather, what — are you?

In Selfless, Social psychologist and Stanford professor Brian Lowery argues for the radical idea that the “self” as we know it — that “voice in your head” — is a social construct, created in our relationships and social interactions. We are unique because our individual pattern of relationships is unique. We change because our relationships change. Your self isn’t just you, it’s all around you.

Lowery uses this research-driven perspective of selfhood to explore questions of inequity, race, gender, politics, and power structures, transforming our perceptions of how the world is and how it could be. His theory offers insight into how powerful people manage their environment in sophisticated, often unconscious, ways to maintain the status quo; explains our competing drives for deep social connection and personal freedom; and answers profound, personal questions such as: Why has my sense of self-evolved over time? Why do I sometimes stop short of changes that I want to make in life?

Brian Lowery is the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick professor of organizational behavior and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also the Co-Director of Stanford’s new Institute on Race, dedicated to finding real-world solutions to address racial injustice. A social psychologist by training, he studies how individuals perceive inequality and the steps they take, if any, to reduce it.

Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” Third Place Books

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For the past century, scientists and naturalists have been steadily unraveling the secrets of bird migration.

How and why birds navigate the skies, traveling from continent to continent — flying thousands of miles across the earth each fall and spring — has continually fascinated the human imagination, but only recently have we been able to fully understand these amazing journeys. Although we know much more than ever before, even the most enthusiastic birdwatcher may not know how we got here, the ways that the full breadth of scientific disciplines have come together to reveal these annual avian travels.

Flight Paths is the never-before-told story of how a group of migration-obsessed scientists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries engaged nearly every branch of science to understand bird migration. Uniting curious minds from across generations, continents, and disciplines, bird enthusiast, and science writer Rebecca Heisman traces the development of each technique used for tracking migratory birds, from the first attempts to mark individual birds to the cutting-edge technology that lets ornithologists trace where a bird has been, based on unique DNA markers. Along the way, she touches on the biggest technological breakthroughs of modern science and reveals the almost-forgotten stories of the scientists who harnessed these inventions in service of furthering our understanding of nature (and their personal obsession with birds).

Rebecca Heisman has written for several organizations including the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Wilson Ornithological Society, and the American Ornithological Society. Her first book, Flight Paths, tells the epic scientific story of how we know what we know about bird migration. When she’s not writing or birding, she can often be found knitting, playing with her son, or adding to her native plant garden.

Sally James is a writer and journalist who covers science and medical research. She has written for The Seattle Times, South Seattle Emerald, Seattle and UW Magazines, among others. For the Emerald, she has been focusing during the pandemic on stories about health and access for communities of color. In the past, she has been a leader and volunteer for the nonprofit Northwest Science Writers Association. For many years, she was a reviewer for Health News Review, fact-checking national press reporting for accuracy and fairness. She is most pithy on Twitter @jamesian.

Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration The Elliott Bay Book Company

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What comes to mind when you think of the Pacific Northwest? You might think of land forms like the Cascade Mountains, Olympic Peninsula, and the Willamette Valley, or of the Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples who lived here since time immemorial. Or perhaps you’d think of urban centers like Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland, and the city-dwellers who call them home. And don’t forget the iconic flora and fauna that live and grow here –– lush ferns and mosses, huckleberries, salmon, orcas, and the mountain beaver. These, and so much more, define our region as a unique and special place found nowhere else on earth. This is Cascadia, stretching from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide.

In a collection of art, poetry, and stories just as diverse as the region itself, the Cascadia Field Guide brings together scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate this unique corner of North America. Editors Derek Sheffield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Elizabeth Bradfield bring together dozens of authors and artists to describe 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from cryptobiotic soil to the giant Pacific octopus) that fill Cascadia with wonder.

Ranging from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, and narrative to postmodern, the Cascadia Field Guide offers any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting -– with heart and mind and body -– to place.

Derek Sheffield grew up in the Willamette Valley and on the shores of the Salish Sea. He is the author of four books, including Not for Luck, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and his poems have appeared in High Country News, Poetry, and Orion. For the past 20 years, he has taught nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College. The poetry editor of Terrain.org, he lives with his family near Leavenworth, Washington.

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam and her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies. Fuhrman is the Director of Poetry for Western Colorado University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program where she also teaches nature writing. She lives in West Central Idaho with her partner, Caleb, and their dogs, Carhartt and Cisco.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five books, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and elsewhere. A Stegner Fellow and Audre Lorde Prize winner, she is the founder of Broadsided Press, teaches at Brandeis University, and has worked as a naturalist in Cascadia and beyond for the past twenty-some years. Bradfield grew up in Tacoma and attended the University of Washington; she lives on Cape Cod.

The Cascadia Field Guide Mountaineers Books

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Children are encountering technology at younger and younger ages, which leads many parents to ask: how do children engage with technology at each stage of development and how can they best be supported?

From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment, to twentysomethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects human development. What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers when technology — ubiquitous in the world they inhabit — becomes a critical part of their lives? Katie Davis, Associate Professor at the UW Information School, brings much-needed clarity to what we know about technology’s role in child development, as well as guidance for how to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences.

In her new book Technology’s Child, Davis draws on her expertise in developmental science and design research to describe what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and social and cultural contexts. Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology — one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily — supports healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community support.

Children’s experiences with technology — their “screen time” and digital social relationships — have become an inescapable aspect of growing up. Davis identifies the distinctions between different ages and stages and how they engage with technology, offering invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technology designers charting the way.

Katie Davis is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School, where she is a founding member and Co-Director of the UW Digital Youth Lab. She is the co-author of The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, Imagination in a Digital World (with Howard Gardner) and Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring (with Cecilia Aragon).

Technology's Child Third Place Books

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Is Seattle having a “Mushroom Moment?’”

As research into the therapeutic use of psychedelics increases, we are learning about how the many findings benefit seniors. This lively and informative panel includes Dr. Nathan Sackett, an addiction psychiatrist, and focuses on the intersection between substance use and psychiatric disorders; Jane Adams, Ph.D., journalist, coach, and psychologist whose writing about psychedelics has been published in Psychology Today, Next Avenue, and Post Alley; and Mike Moon, who offers an in-depth and informed point of view on legalities, microdosing, macrodosing, and the spectrum of psychedelics and plant medicines.

Nathan Sackett, MD, MS, RN is trained as an addiction psychiatrist, focusing on the intersection between substance use and psychiatric disorders. Clinically, he works primarily outpatient seeing a range of patients with primary psychiatric issues and substance use disorders. His research focuses on the use of psychedelics to treat substance use disorders with a particular interest in how psychedelics can augment the psychotherapeutic process and facilitate behavioral change.

Jane Adams is a writer, coach, and psychologist who has been reporting on how people and families respond to social change in twelve books and countless columns, essays, and articles since the earliest days of the Seattle Weekly, where she was a founding editor. Her current writing about psychedelics has been published in Psychology Today, Next Avenue, and Post Alley.

Mike Moon is an enthusiastic supporter of the responsible and intentional use of psychedelics for healing and personal growth. He helped launch the Decriminalize Nature movement in Seattle which led to the passage of Council Resolution 32021 (and some measure of progress towards sane and compassionate drug laws). A serious student of the topic, Mike offers an in-depth and informed perspective on legalities, microdosing, macrodosing, underground guides/sitters, the spectrum of psychedelics and plant medicines, ethics, for-profit psychedelic services, and harm reduction.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging.

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The news about wildlife is dire — more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand?

Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, writer and professor Christopher Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Observing different landscapes — farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans — Preston offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery.

Tenacious Beasts touches on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices, and offers a road map — and a measure of hope — for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.

Christopher J. Preston is a writer and professor based in Missoula, MT. His work at the University of Montana centers on wildlife, technology, and climate change. His new book, Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals investigates a number of species back from the brink of extinction. He meets the scientists, indigenous leaders, and activists responsible for their return and uncovers what these tenacious species have to teach.

Christopher has written for The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Discover, The Conversation, Aeon, Slate.com, and the BBC. His award-winning book, The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World, has been translated into six languages. He also gives talks in state parks, libraries, and breweries across Montana to campers and other audiences interested in conservation and technology. In early 2023, he won an annual award from the International Society for Environmental Ethics for his work as a public philosopher.

Tenacious Beasts Third Place Books

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Are the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives – as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics – transforming life, society, culture, and politics?

David Auerbach’s exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar.

As we increasingly integrate our society, culture, and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.

Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own. Actively resisting attempts to control them, they can produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. Constantly modifying themselves in response to user behavior, which can result in collectively authored algorithms no one can control, these enormous invisible organisms seem to be the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.

David B. Auerbach is a writer, technologist, and software engineer who worked at Google and Microsoft after graduating from Yale University. His writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, MIT Technology Review, The Nation, n+1, Tablet, The Daily Beast, and Bookforum, among many other publications. He was Slate’s technology columnist from 2013 to 2016, and he was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his coverage of the HealthCare.gov hearings. He teaches the history of computation at the New Centre for Research and Practice and is a frequent guest at their events. He has lectured around the world on technology, literature, and philosophy and, in addition, has done scholarly research on James Joyce, William Shakespeare, and artificial intelligence. His first book, Bitwise: A Life in Code, was published by Pantheon in 2018.

Meganets Third Place Books

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For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next forty-four years, until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In I Know Who You Are, Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer — and how she became the nation’s leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

Rae-Venter, leads readers on a vivid journey through the many cases she tackled, often starting with little more than a DNA sample. From the first criminal case she ever solved— uncovering the long-lost identity of a child abductee — to the heartbreaking story of the Billboard Boy, whose skeletal remains were discovered along a highway, to the search for the Golden State Killer, Rae-Venter shares accounts of how she helped solve some of America’s most chilling cold cases in the span of just three years.

Rae-Venter’s story is one of relentless curiosity, of constant invention and reinvention, and of human beings striving to answer the most elemental questions about themselves: What defines identity? Where do we belong? And are we truly who we think we are?

Barbara Rae-Venter will be in conversation with Steve Broback for this event.

Barbara Rae-Venter is a New Zealand–born American investigative genetic genealogist, biochemist, and retired patent attorney best known for her work helping the FBI and other investigators identify Joseph James DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego and later a law degree at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. Rae-Venter is a founder and the president of Firebird Forensics Group, a not-for-profit corporation. Her investigative work earned her a place on the Time 100 list of most influential people in 2019, and she was recognized by the journal Nature as one of “10 People Who Mattered in Science in 2018.”

Steve Broback is the co-founder of Dent the Future an organization that produces events and experiences focused on science, innovation, and entrepreneurship. On various Dent stages, he has had the opportunity to interview Barbara and other noteworthy authors. These include Cady Coleman (NASA astronaut), LeVar Burton (actor and director), Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar), and Brian Boitano (Olympic gold medalist). Steve was born in Seattle and earned his degrees in economics and finance at the University of Washington.

I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever The Elliott Bay Book Company

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While many would think art and science are two vastly different disciplines, one common driver often motivates them both – curiosity.

Ginny Ruffner – who currently has a retrospective exhibition open at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art on the topic of “What if?” – has worked at the intersection of art and science for decades. Her curiosity around biological concepts has propelled her to invent answers to “what if?” questions about the nature of the world around us. The experimental works she creates often involve the use of technology and mixed media to create new and imaginative experiences. Her creations are fueled by collaboration and camaraderie with scientists such as ISB President Dr. Jim Heath.

Join us in person at Town Hall Seattle for a conversation with internationally renowned artist Ginny Ruffner and ISB President Dr. Jim Heath. Together, they will explore the opportunities and striking similarities that lie at the intersection of art and science.

Ginny Ruffner is a pioneering American glass artist based in Seattle. She is known for her use of the lampworking technique and for her use of borosilicate glass in her painted glass sculptures. Many of her ideas begin with drawings. Her works also include pop-up books, large-scale public art, and augmented reality. Ruffner was named a Master of the Medium by the James Renwick Alliance in 2007. She received The Glass Art Society’s Lifetime Award in 2019. Ruffner currently has a retrospective exhibition open at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art on the topic of “What if?”

Dr. Jim Heath is President and Professor at Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Heath also has the position of Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. Formerly, he directed the National Cancer Institute-funded NSB Cancer Center, was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, and served as co-director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at UCLA until 2017.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and the Institute of Systems Biology. Our community partner for this event is the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

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How much does the general public really trust tech? Despite increased scrutiny and critique of digital platforms, renowned tech policy scholar Orly Lobel defends digital technology, including AI, as a powerful tool we can harness to achieve equality and a better future.

Lobel recognizes the criticism of big data and automation, and she does not refute the many challenges that technology presents — but at the same time, Lobel encourages us to improve it. We cannot stop technological development, Lobel argues, but we can direct its course according to our most fundamental values.

In The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future, Lobel presents evidence that digital technology frequently has a comparative advantage over humans in detecting discrimination, correcting historical exclusions, subverting long-standing stereotypes, and addressing some of the world’s complex problems: climate, poverty, injustice, literacy, accessibility, speech, health, and safety.

Lobel offers insights in each chapter that tackle everything from labor markets to dating markets, revealing just how much of our lives can be changed — and in her view, improved — via technology. Through analysis and storytelling, The Equality Machine promises to add to the robust, ongoing debate about technology and serves as a call to restore human agency over our own values.

Orly Lobel is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of San Diego. She is the recipient of prestigious research grants, member of the American Law Institute, a former Israeli military data analyst and Supreme Court clerk, and regularly consults governments and industry on law and technology. An award-winning writer, she is the author of You Don’t Own Me and Talent Wants to Be Free.

Beverly Aarons is a writer, artist, and game developer. She works across disciplines exploring the intersections of history, hidden current realities, and imagined future worlds. She is the winner of the Guy A. Hanks & Marvin H. Miller Screenwriting Award, Community 4Culture Fellowship, Artist Trust GAP Award, 4Culture Creative Consultancies Award, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture smART Ventures grant. She’s currently publishing in-depth artist profiles at Artists Up Close on Substack.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future (Hardcover) Elliott Bay Books

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The brain has fascinated scientists and philosophers alike for thousands of years. What’s really going on up there? Just ask neuroscientist, Eric H. Chudler. As the executive director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Chudler is poised to help you get to know your brain. His latest book on the subject, Neuropedia: A Brief Compendium of Brain Phenomena, is less of a textbook and more of a beautifully illustrated, alphabetic meandering through all things brain.

Through his cataloging of concepts and the people working in neuroscience, Chudler journeys into the mysteries and marvels of the enigmatic three pounds of tissue between your ears. He’s developed a new kind of tour of the nervous system that explores the structure and function of the brain and covers topics such as the spinal cord and nerve cells, methods of neuroscientific research, and the visionary scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding what makes each of us who we are. Chudler also guides readers through a variety of rare and common neurological disorders such as alien hand disorder, Capgras syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and stroke, and discusses the latest brain-imaging methods used to diagnose them.

While we know a lot more about the brain than we did in centuries past, it still holds plenty of mystery. Chudler’s accessible approach helps put into context our current understanding of neuroscience, while also providing a glimpse into where it’s headed in the future. Chudler aims to stimulate your curiosity about your own brain and follow in the footsteps of the scientists and philosophers throughout the ages — by continuing to learn more.

Eric H. Chudler is executive director of the Center for Neurotechnology and a neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. His books include Brain Bytes: Quick Answers to Quirky Questions about the Brain and The Little Book of Neuroscience Haiku.

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Have you ever wished that animals or plants could talk to us? As it turns out, they can. The natural world is teeming with conversation, though many of it is beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these sounds, revealing vibrant communication in the Tree of Life.

In The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, Karen Bakker, Professor and director of the Program on Water Governance at the University of British Columbia, shares fascinating stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge: We learn how artificial intelligence can decode these sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. We explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. We are introduced to the innovative minds who are using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We are presented with shocking facts regarding the impact of noise pollution on both animals and plants.

At a time where the natural and tech worlds are often presented as mutually exclusive, Dr. Bakker’s book challenges that idea, calling upon interdisciplinary research that reveals more about the interconnectedness of it all and advising us to listen, not just look. After this talk, you may never see outdoor adventures the same way again.

Karen Bakker, an award-winning professor at the University of British Columbia, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. A tech entrepreneur and former Annenberg Fellow at Stanford University, she studies environmental governance and digital transformation. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. An avid gardener and the mother of two daughters, she lives in Vancouver.

Sally James is a writer and journalist who covers science and medical research. She has written for The Seattle Times, South Seattle Emerald, Seattle and UW Magazines, among others. For the Emerald, she has been focusing during the pandemic on stories about health and access for communities of color. In the past, she has been a leader and volunteer for the nonprofit Northwest Science Writers Association. For many years, she was a reviewer for Health News Review, fact-checking national press reporting for accuracy and fairness. She is most pithy on Twitter @jamesian.

The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Hardcover)
Third Place Books

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A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: These are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. In her latest book – The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness – renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.

O’Rourke is joined by ISB President Dr. Jim Heath, who has deeply studied long COVID and its similarities to other chronic illnesses, to discuss chronic diseases, how they’ve traditionally been understood and treated, and what the future holds.

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and The Long Goodbye, as well as the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and more. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she resides in New Haven where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and the Institute of Systems Biology.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Hardcover)
Third Place Books

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We all do it, but we hardly ever talk about it. After all, human feces isn’t exactly a popular topic of discussion. We’d simply like to flush it and forget about it. Researchers, however, want to change all that. That’s because our body’s natural byproduct may be the key to solving some of today’s biggest problems.

Local, award-winning journalist and microbiologist Bryn Nelson, Ph.D., is determined to shift our mentality around poop. In his book, Flush, Nelson shares how human waste holds potent medicine, sustainable power, and even natural fertilizer to restore the world’s depleted lands. New science shows that within this lowly, underused resource lies effective ways of measuring and improving human health, identifying early warnings of community outbreaks like COVID-19, and reversing environmental harm.

It turns out that poop is very much worthy of conversation; Nelson even argues that it could be the world’s most squandered natural resource. But unlocking poop’s enormous potential (poo-tential?) will require us to overcome our shame and disgust, embracing our roles as the producers and potential architects of a more circular economy. Could our lowly byproducts become our salvation? A dose of medicine, a glass of water, a gallon of rocket fuel, an acre of soil: sometimes hope arrives in surprising packages.

Bonus! In a pop-up science fair of sorts, nine local organizations will join us in The Forum to share more about biosolids, wastewater treatment, and everything you ever wanted to know about what happens after you flush. Joining us will be Sally Brown with the University of Washington, King County’s LOOP program, NW Biosolids, the Water Environmental Federation, the Institute for Systems Biology, the Bullitt Center, Stoup Brewing, RAIN Incubator, and The Nature Conservancy/Ocean Sewage Alliance.

Bryn Nelson, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer and former microbiologist who decided he’d much rather write about microbes than experiment on them. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, he shifted course and completed a graduate program in science writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Since then, he has accumulated more than two decades of journalism experience, including seven years at the Newsday science desk where he covered genetics, stem cell research, evolution, ecology, and conservation. Nelson has written for dozens of other outlets, from The New York Times, NBCNews.com, and The Daily Beast to Nature, Mosaic, and Science News for Students

Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure (Hardcover)
Elliott Bay Books

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How did we become so deeply divided? In 2019, hate crimes reached a ten-year high in the United States. In 2020, 40% of each political party deemed supporters of the opposing party “downright evil.” In addition to division across political lines, rampant discord is likewise rooted in other hot-button issues like race, religion, gender, and class. Despite one in five Americans suffering from chronic loneliness, it seems that we are collectively determined to distance ourselves from those who aren’t like us.

But what if there were a set of scientifically grounded techniques that could help us overcome our differences, create empathy, and forge lasting connections? That’s where Stanford University professor Geoffrey Cohen comes in. In his book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, Cohen examines the issues that poison our communal existence and undermine our sense of belonging, and offers solutions to help us establish connections using even the smallest of gestures. Even skeptics can appreciate these research-based practices, which have been shown to lessen political polarization, improve motivation and performance in school and work, combat racism, and enhance health and well-being.

Cohen’s work may be helpful for parents, educators, managers, or anyone else who wants to foster harmonious interpersonal relationships and healthier environments. Belonging reminds us that our personal need to belong is mirrored in other people.

Geoffrey L. Cohen is professor of psychology and the James G. March Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business at Stanford University. Prof. Cohen’s research examines processes that shape people’s sense of belonging and self and implications for social problems. He studies the big and small threats to belonging and self-integrity that people encounter in school, work, and health care settings, and strategies to create more inclusive spaces for people from all walks of life. He has long been inspired by Kurt Lewin’s quip, “The best way to try to understand something is to try to change it.” He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Ruchika Tulshyan is the founder of Candour, a global inclusion strategy firm. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Harvard Business Review. As a keynote speaker, Ruchika has addressed audiences at organizations like NASA, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and U.S. Congress. Ruchika is on the Thinkers50 Radar list and Hive Learning’s Most Influential D&I Professionals. She is a former business journalist who is now regularly quoted as a media expert in outlets like NPR, The New York Times, and Bloomberg. Ruchika is the author of The Diversity Advantage: Fixing Gender Inequality in the Workplace and Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work.

Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides
Phinney Books

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Building Policy Update: As of June 1, 2022, masks remain required at Town Hall Seattle. Read our current COVID-19 policies and in-building safety protocols. Thu 7/14, 2022, 7:30pm Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Melanie Mitchell with Lili Cheng How Close Are We to AI? BUY THE BOOKS

Ubi SuntBy Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking HumansBy Melanie Mitchell

Artificial Intelligence (AI), a term first coined at a Dartmouth workshop in 1956, has seen several boom and bust cycles over the last 66 years. Is the current boom different?

The most exciting advance in the field since 2017 has been the development of “Large Language Models,” giant neural networks trained on massive databases of text on the web. Still highly experimental, Large Language Models haven’t yet been deployed at scale in any consumer product — smart/voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or the Google Assistant are still based on earlier, more scripted approaches.

Large Language Models do far better at routine tasks involving language processing than their predecessors. Although not always reliable, they can give a strong impression of really understanding us and holding up their end of an open-ended dialog. Unlike previous forms of AI, which could only perform specific jobs involving rote perception, classification, or judgment, Large Language Models seem to be capable of a lot more — including possibly passing the Turing Test, named after computing pioneer Alan Turing’s thought experiment that posits when an AI in a chat can’t be distinguished reliably from a human, it will have achieved general intelligence.

But can Large Language Models really understand anything, or are they just mimicking the superficial “form” of language? What can we say about our progress toward creating real intelligence in a machine? What do “intelligence” and “understanding” even mean? Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Fellow at Google Research, and Melanie Mitchell, the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, take on these thorny questions in a wide-ranging presentation and discussion. The discussion will be moderated by Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft AI and Research division.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google Research, where he leads an organization working on basic research and new products in Artificial Intelligence. His team focuses on the intersection of machine learning and devices, developing AI that augments humanity while preserving privacy. One of the team’s technical contributions is Federated Learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sending user data off-device. Blaise also founded Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogs about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk. He has given TED talks on Seadragon and Photosynth (2007, 2012), Bing Maps (2010), and machine creativity (2016). In 2008, he was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize.

Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.

Lili Cheng is a Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft AI and Research division, responsible for the AI developer platform which includes Cognitive Services and Bot Framework. Prior to Microsoft, Lili worked in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group on the user interface research team where she focused on QuickTime Conferencing and QuickTime VR. Lili is also a registered architect, having worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles for Nihon Sekkei and Skidmore Owings and Merrill on commercial urban design and large-scale building projects. She has also taught at New York University and Harvard University.

Ubi SuntBy Blaise Agüera y Arcas

**Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans**By Melanie Mitchell Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here.

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Year after year, the quality of the world’s agricultural soil is degrading, which deeply impacts the quality and quantity of the food that we grow. Further, there’s a clear link between the health of our soil and the health of humans. What does that mean for us? Eventually we’ll face an existential crisis of the world’s food supply and our health. Fortunately, experts are studying how to improve our outlook, and two of them happen to live in Seattle.

David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé believe that the roots of good health start on farms. In their latest book, What Your Food Ate, this local pair provided evidence from recent and forgotten science to illustrate how the health of the soil ripples through to crops, livestock, and ultimately us.

They traced the links between crops and soil life that nourish one another, which in turn provide our bodies with the nutrients needed to protect us from pathogens and chronic ailments. Unfortunately, conventional agricultural practices hurt these vital partnerships and affect our well-being. Can farmers and ranchers produce enough nutrient-dense food to feed us all? Can we have quality and quantity?

Montgomery and Biklé say yes. They argue that regenerative farming practices – agricultural practices that rebuild organic matter in soil and restore soil biodiversity – hold the key to healing sick soil and improving human health. “We need everybody to be thinking about a more sustainable food system,” says Montgomery, “because, quite frankly, the future of humanity in many ways really depends on what we do with that.”

Agriculture and medicine emerged from our understanding of the natural world — and still depend on it. Through current scientific findings, Montgomery and Biklé showed us that what’s good for the land is good for us, too.

David R. Montgomery is a professor at the University of Washington, a MacArthur Fellow, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and an internationally recognized authority on geomorphology. His books have been translated into ten languages.

Anne Biklé is a biologist and environmental planner whose writing has appeared in Nautilus, Natural History, Smithsonian, Fine Gardening, and Best Health. She lives with her husband, David R. Montgomery, in Seattle. Their work includes a trilogy of books about soil health, microbiomes, and farming — Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, The Hidden Half of Nature, and Growing a Revolution.

Buy the Book: What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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Alzheimer’s is a global health problem with more than 6 million people living with the disease in the U.S. alone. Tremendous gains have been made in the understanding of the science and basic biology underlying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. These advances are leading to great strides in strategies for prevention, detection, diagnostics and therapeutic interventions. The Alzheimer’s Association is a global leader in research, mobilizing the field to advance the vision of a world without Alzheimer’s and all other dementia.

Join Dr. Maria Carrillo to learn more about:

● The landscape of Alzheimer’s and dementia science
● Risk factors for Alzheimer’s and all other dementia
● Highlights in early detection and diagnosis
● Latest advances in clinical trials, treatments and lifestyle intervention

Maria C. Carrillo, Ph.D., is the chief science officer for the Alzheimer’s Association where she sets the strategic vision for their global research program. Under her leadership, the Association is the world’s largest nonprofit funder of Alzheimer’s research — currently investing $167 million — and an internationally recognized pioneer in convening the dementia science community. Dr. Carrillo uses her platform as a noted public speaker to play an instrumental role in the Association’s efforts to lobby for increased funding for the disease. Dr. Carrillo earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s Institute for Neuroscience and completed a postdoctoral fellowship focused on Alzheimer’s brain imaging and risk factors at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

KOMO’s Denise Whitaker is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, seeking adventure in all areas of life. She keeps viewers up to date on all aspects of news but is especially drawn to health topics. Off camera, Denise enjoys creating healthy recipes, cooking, and working out, especially running. Now in her 17th year with Fred Hutch’s Climb to Fight Cancer, Denise has counted more than a dozen summits up Mounts Rainier, Baker, Adams, Hood, Shasta, Shuksan, and two volcanoes in Mexico. She chooses volunteer opportunities that let her promote health and physical fitness.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and the Alzheimer’s Association WA State Chapter.

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From the grasslands of the Columbia Plateau to the rich valleys west of the Cascade Mountains, There are over 70,000 miles of rivers in Washington state. Rivers are vital to our region’s ecosystems, hosting a wide diversity of living things in their waters and along their banks – our beautiful state would not be what it is without our waterways. How might we better understand rivers and ensure their vitality now, and in the future?

According to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, the key to our rivers’ futures requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. Wölfle Hazard’s new book, Underflow: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, meets at the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, and explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, Wölfle Hazard weaved narratives about innovative field research practices with a queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Wölfle Hazard framed the book with the concept of underflows — important, but unseen parts of a river’s flow that seep down through the soil or rise up from aquifers deep underground. Wölfle Hazard explained that there are underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics, too, where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers.

In discussion with UW associate professor Stephanie Clare, Wölfle Hazard described why rivers matter for queer and trans life and how science can disrupt settler colonialism.

Cleo Wölfle Hazard (he/him, ze/hir, they/them) is assistant professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, coauthor of Thirsty for Justice: A People’s Blueprint for California Water, and coeditor of Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground.

Stephanie Clare is an Associate Professor of English and the author of Earthly Encounters: Sensation, Feminist Theory, and the Anthropocene (SUNY Press 2019). Their writing in feminist and queer studies has appeared in GLQ, Signs, Social Text, and differences, and they are currently writing a second monograph: Non-Binary/Woman: An Auto-Theory.

Buy the Book: Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies And River Justice from University Book Store

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There’s a powerful movement happening in farming today, and it’s not a movement focused on flashy technology or producing food faster or at larger scales. Instead, it’s a movement that centers on farmers reconnecting with their roots, reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food, healing their communities, and ultimately fighting climate change.

In her new book, Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle shared the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health to feed their communities and revitalize cultural ties to the land. One woman learned her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. Another preserved forest that was purchased by her great-great-uncle, who was among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others have rejected monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Through techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system, they steadily stitch ecosystems back together and repair the natural carbon cycle. This is true regenerative agriculture, Carlisle explained – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in plants and people.

But this kind of regenerative farming doesn’t come easily – our nation’s agricultural history is marked by discrimination and displacement. Restoration, repair, and healing can only come from dismantling the power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth. Though the task is immense, it holds great promise and hope: that by coming together to restore farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.

Liz Carlisle is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. Born and raised in Montana, she got hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester, which led to a decade of research and writing collaborations with farmers in her home state. She has written three books about regenerative farming and agroecology: Lentil Underground (2015), Grain by Grain (2019, with co-author Bob Quinn), and most recently, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming (2022). Prior to her career as a writer and academic, she spent several years touring rural America as a country singer.

Latrice Tatsey (In-niisk-ka-mah-kii) is an ecologist and advocate for tribally-directed bison restoration who remains active in her family’s cattle ranching operation at Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana. Her research focuses on organic matter and carbon in soil, and specifically, the benefits to soil from the reintroduction of bison (iin-ni) to their traditional grazing landscapes on the Blackfeet Reservation. Latrice is currently completing her master’s degree in Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University and she serves as a research fellow with the Piikani Lodge Health Institute and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Hillel Echo-Hawk (she/her; Pawnee and Athabaskan) is an Indigenous chef, caterer, and speaker born and raised in the interior of Alaska around the Athabaskan village of Mentasta –– home to the matriarchal chief and subsistence rights activist, Katie John. Watching John and other Indigenous Peoples’ fight for food sovereignty, as well as seeing her mother strive to make healthy, home-cooked meals for her and her six siblings, gave Hillel a unique perspective on diet and wellness. Echo-Hawk is the owner of Birch Basket, her food and work has been featured in James Beard, Bon Appetit, Eater, Huffpost, National Geographic, PBS, Vogue, The Seattle Times, and many, many more.

Buy the Book: Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and sponsored by PCC Community Markets.

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As the threats of climate change become more urgent than ever, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure about what to do. The problems — and their solutions — seem unwieldy and complicated. But what if we embrace the complexity of the climate crisis and create solutions that are just as intertwined as the issues? That’s where intersectional environmentalism comes in.

Leah Thomas, a prominent voice in the field and the activist who coined the term “Intersectional Environmentalism,” offered us a call to action in her new book. The Intersectional Environmentalist serves as a guide to instigating change for all and a pledge to work toward personal empowerment and the healing of the planet. Thomas examined the inextricable link between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and argued that we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people –– especially those most often unheard. She shows how not only are Black, Indigenous, and people of color unequally and unfairly impacted by environmental injustices, but she argued that the fight for the planet goes hand in hand with the fight for civil rights — one cannot exist without the other. Solving these issues becomes clearer when we recognize these intersectionalities.

Thomas wrote that her goal “is to raise awareness of unsung heroes, look beneath the surface, and reflect on missteps in social and environmental movements so that future movements can improve. With complete knowledge of our past, we have a better shot at improving the outcomes of our future.”

The effects of climate change are intensifying, but so are the voices of those who are creating meaningful solutions. Intersectional environmental activists like Thomas acknowledge where we came from and how to move forward, helping us push past the overwhelm and into meaningful, inclusive, and sustainable change.

Leah Thomas is an intersectional environmental activist and eco-communicator based in Southern California. She’s passionate about advocating for and exploring the relationship between social justice and environmentalism and was the first to define the term “Intersectional Environmentalism.” She is the founder of @greengirlleah and The Intersectional Environmentalist Platform. Her articles on this topic have appeared in Vogue, Elle, The Good Trade, and Youth to the People and she has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, Fashionista, BuzzFeed, and numerous podcasts. She has a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University and worked for the National Park Service and Patagonia headquarters before pursuing activism full time. She lives in Carpinteria, California.

Hannah Wilson (they/them) is currently a Farm Manager at Yes Farm with the Black Farmers Collective and co-chair of the Environmental Justice Committee for the City of Seattle. In 2019, they graduated from the University of Washington with a BS in Environmental Science and Resource Management and a minor in Geography. As a queer, disabled, deaf, and Black non-binary person, their intersectional identity informs the way they walk through the world and the work they do. They have committed their life’s work centered around food sovereignty and Black liberation, continuing to organize around community building, growing food, healing, and our relationships to the land and each other.

Buy the Book: The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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Farmers and environmentalists haven’t always seen eye-to-eye about the best ways to manage agricultural landscapes, but America’s farms are vital to preserving ecosystems and a stable climate. How might the two come together to unite for the common good?

In No Farms, No Food, longtime farm, fisheries, and environmental policy advocate Don Stuart took readers inside the political and policy battles that determine the fate of our nation’s farmland. Stuart traced the history of agriculture conservation and the development of American Farmland Trust (AFT), from its small beginnings in 1980 to a formidable constituency of farmers and environmentalists.

With leadership from AFT, that constituency drove through Congress the first “Conservation Title” in the history of the U.S. Farm Bill; oversaw the development of agriculture conservation easement programs throughout the country; and continues to develop innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture.

Together with Addie Candib, the current Pacific Northwest Regional Director for American Farmland Trust, Stuart discussed tactics for bringing people together to work for healthy land and a healthy food system.

Don Stuart has worked in natural resources and the environment for over 40 years, half of which included intensive legislative lobbying on farm, fisheries, and environmental policy. From 2000-2011, he served as Pacific Northwest Regional Director for American Farmland Trust, a national environmental organization that protects agricultural lands and supports their environmentally responsible management. Previously, he was Executive Director for the Washington Association of Conservation Districts and Executive Director for Salmon for Washington. Don was also the campaign manager and public spokesperson in the successful defense of a Washington statewide anti-commercial fishing ballot initiative (I-640) in 1995 and he ran for the U.S. Congress in Washington’s First District in 1996. Don is also a former Alaska commercial salmon troll fisherman, a formerly practicing Seattle trial attorney, and was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps during the Vietnam War. His opinion column on fish politics appeared monthly in the Fishermen’s News from 1990-96. He is the author of several books, including Barnyards and Birkenstocks: Why Farmers and Environmentalists Need Each Other (2014).

Addie Candib serves as Pacific Northwest Regional Director for American Farmland Trust, overseeing the organization’s programs and policy efforts in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Addie has worked at the intersection of agriculture and the nonprofit sector for over 10 years. In addition to having direct experience working on farms, she is a seasoned grassroots advocate; she helped form the Washington Young Farmers Coalition in 2010 and served on the Board of Directors for Tilth Alliance from 2012-2017. Addie began her career in farmland protection at the Community Farm Land Trust in Olympia, Washington, and she has been passionate about farmland access and affordability ever since. Addie is also trained in mediation and conflict resolution, and volunteers at a community-based dispute resolution center. Addie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College and a Master of Public Administration from The Evergreen State College, where her capstone work explored financing strategies for farmland protection. She lives with her family in Bellingham, WA.

Buy the Book: No Farms, No Food: Uniting Farmers and Environmentalists to Transform American Agriculture (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and American Farmland Trust.

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In the 1940s, the insecticide DDT was widely used to combat insect-borne human diseases like malaria and control insects in agricultural applications, gardens, and inside homes. In the 1950s, it became evident that the pesticide was causing extensive health and environmental damage. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring alerted the public to the long-lasting dangers of pesticide use. And in 1972, the United States EPA issued an order for DDT’s cancellation due to adverse environmental effects and human health risks; in the years that followed, dozens of other countries followed suit. The process took decades, and continues to evolve as DDT remains in use for malaria control today.

Historian Elena Conis traced the history of DDT in How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT, following a trail of corporate manipulation and manufactured doubt in science geared to keep the profits flowing. Using the story of DDT as a cautionary tale, Conis argued that we need new ways to communicate about science before it’s too late — especially in our current era of public confusion about protecting our health and the rampant spread of misinformation. Science, she reminded us, is a constantly-evolving discipline and not just an immutable collection of facts — changing how we view it could help us make better decisions about health, both for ourselves and the environment.

Elena Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, public health, and the environment. She teaches at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Media Studies Program, and directs the graduate program in Public Journalism. Her current research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine, and the Science History Institute. Her first book, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization, received the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a Science Pick of the Week by the journal Nature.

Sally James is a writer and journalist who covers science and medical research. She has written for The Seattle Times, South Seattle Emerald, Seattle and UW Magazines, among others. For the Emerald, she has been focusing during the pandemic on stories about health and access for communities of color. In the past, she has been a leader and volunteer for the nonprofit Northwest Science Writers Association. For many years, she was a reviewer for Health News Review, fact-checking national press reporting for accuracy and fairness.

Buy the Book: How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT

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The COVID-19 pandemic — one of the most disruptive events in human history — has made it more challenging than ever to feel prepared, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? Humans aren’t particularly fond of uncertainty, but what if we had the tools to help us feel more secure and shape our futures?

Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal believes it’s possible to recover confidence and face uncertain futures with optimism. As a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games, she has an extensive background in designing tools to improve real lives and solve real problems through planetary-scale collaboration.

In her new book, Imaginable, McGonigal drew on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Through provocative thought experiments and future simulations, McGonigal offered strategies for envisioning our future lives, developing the courage to solve problems with creativity, and accessing the “urgent optimism” within each of us to take agency over our decisions.

Jane McGonigal, Ph.D., is a future forecaster and designer of games created to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter, and her TED talks on how gaming can make a better world have more than 15 million views. She was named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum; one of Fast Company’s “Top 100 Creative People in Business”; and one of the “Top 35 innovators changing the world through technology” by MIT Technology Review. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research group in Palo Alto, California.

Margaret Morris, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist focused on how technology can support wellbeing. She is an affiliate faculty member in the Information School at the University of Washington and a research consultant. Morris is the author of Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health and Focus.

Buy the Book: Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

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Humans have been stumbling upon the remains of ancient animals since prehistoric times, long before fossils were routinely dug up, named, and pieced together into “whole” prehistoric skeletons. The word dinosaur wasn’t established until the mid-19th century – practically yesterday, considering the massive span of the geologic time scale. From bits and bones from unknown creatures emerged tales of giant dogs, dragons, sea serpents, and myriad other creatures. Absurd as these legends might seem, they gave rise to the modern science of paleontology – a discipline that completely reshaped how humans viewed the world.

In his new book, Paleontology: An Illustrated History, comparative anatomist David Bainbridge took readers from ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, when paleontology started to coalesce into the scientific field we know today. Bainbridge explained how paleontology has always straddled the spheres of science and art, an idea evident in rich visuals that depict great fossil finds, life forms of all shapes and sizes, and prehistoric scenery.

Bainbridge also propelled the timeline of paleontology further into the future, considering the roles of DNA and other genetic material and how they might revolutionize our understanding of the origins and evolution of ancient life.

David Bainbridge is a comparative anatomist in the Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine’s College. His many books include How Zoologists Organize Things: The Art of Classification; Stripped Bare: The Art of Animal Anatomy; and Middle Age: A Natural History.

Buy the Book: Paleontology: An Illustrated History from Elliott Bay Books

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The majestic bald eagle can be spotted throughout most of North America at various points during the year. Here in Western Washington, we’re lucky to spot them all year-round — no doubt thanks to an abundance of tall trees for nesting and open bodies of water that provide a source of food. They are revered birds, sacred within Indigenous traditions, and associated with wisdom, bravery, and protection.

Only a few decades ago, the future of bald eagles was tenuous. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bald eagles were considered menaces by settler farmers, even falsely labeled as vicious, baby-snatching predators that might swoop away with an unsuspecting infant. In some areas, bounties were placed on the birds (folks could earn 50 cents to a dollar per bird killed), and their numbers declined by tens of thousands. The following years brought habitat destruction and deadly contamination of food sources by pesticides like DDT; by the 1960s, the population of nesting pairs dipped into the hundreds. After decades of concerted efforts, the bald eagle population recovered; today, it has soared to well over 300,000. What can we glean from the path of the bald eagle and the varying ways that different groups of humans have interacted with it?

In The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack E. Davis traced the cultural and natural history of the bald eagle from before the nation’s founding through resurgences of the enduring species. Contrasting the age when indigenous peoples lived beside it peacefully with eras when others pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction, Davis considered how the historical journey of the bald eagle might offer inspiration as we grapple with large-scale environmental peril today.

Jack E. Davis is the author of the award-winning book, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea and An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. A professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, he lives in Florida and New Hampshire.

Deborah Jensen is the Vice-President and Executive Director for Audubon Washington working to protect birds and the places they need now and in the future. Her career is dedicated to conservation, with decades of executive experience leading conservation, education, and scientific organizations. Deborah currently serves on the Puget Sound Leadership Council and the Board of Climate Solutions and is a past-chair of the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition.

Buy the Book: The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

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Our world constantly vibrates with sound, from the delicate flap of an insect’s wings to the thunderous roar of a rocket launching into space. There’s the spring chorus of frogs. The sputter of a creek and the whoosh of a sudden breeze. Songs, music, and speech. But the sounds of today aren’t necessarily the same sounds that our ancestors encountered. How have sounds changed? What might be missing from our present and future sonic experiences?

In his new book, Sounds Wild and Broken, biology professor David Haskell explored how the wonders of sound came to be on a journey through our planet’s history. Tracing a sonic path from animal song to modern concert halls, he illuminated how sounds emerged and evolved alongside all of Earth’s living things. But despite the explosive creation of sounds over time, Haskell pointed out that there is also erasure; threats to sonic diversity impact our forests, oceans, and experiences as human beings. Haskell considered how the loss of sounds can make the world less creative, just, and beautiful, prompting the question: How can reverence for sound help guide us in a rapidly-changing world?

David Haskell is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is the author of The Songs of Trees (2017), which won the John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing. His first book, The Forest Unseen (2012), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and was honored with the 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies, the National Outdoor Book Award, and the Reed Environmental Writing Award. You can listen to a collection of sounds fromhis most recent book, Sounds Wild and Broken, here.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt is an award-winning author, naturalist, ecophilosopher, and speaker whose writing is at the forefront of the movement to connect people with nature and wildness in their everyday lives. Her newest book is Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit (2021).

Buy the Book: Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

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In the dense rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Somass River (c̓uumaʕas) brings sockeye salmon (miʕaat) into the Nuu-chah-nulth community of Tseshaht. C̓uumaʕas and miʕaat are central to the sacred food practices that have been a crucial part of the Indigenous community’s efforts to enact food sovereignty, decolonize their diet, and preserve their ancestral knowledge.

In A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other, Charlotte Coté shared contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization in the context of broader efforts to re-Indigenize contemporary diets on the Northwest Coast. Coté offered evocative stories — rooted in her Tseshaht community and in her own work — to revitalize relationships to haʔum (traditional food) as a way to nurture health and wellness. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation, and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounded healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty: berry picking, salmon fishing, and building a community garden on reclaimed residential school grounds.

Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) is Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, and has been teaching in AIS since 2001. Dr. Coté holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and is Affiliated Faculty in the UW’s Jackson School Canadian Studies Center. Dr. Coté serves as co-editor for the UW Press’ Indigenous Confluences series and is the author of Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions (UW Press, 2010).

Dr. Coté is chair of the UW’s wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ (a Lushootseed word meaning “Intellectual House”) Advisory Committee. She is also co-founder and chair of the UW’s annual “The Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ” Indigenous Foods Symposium held in May at the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ. Dr. Coté serves on the Board of Directors for the UW’s Center for American Indian/Indigenous Studies (CAIIS), the Burke Museum’s Native American Advisory Board, the Na-ah Illahee Fund Board, and the NDN Collective (Northwest Coast Representative). She also served on the Potlatch Fund Board of Directors, and for seven years served as President.

Dana Arviso is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and grew up on the Bishop Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation in California. Dana proudly commits herself to improving the lives of youth, families, and communities through education and working for social improvements within the fields of education and philanthropy. She previously served as the Executive Director of Potlatch Fund, a Native American-led foundation. Dana has served on the boards of Social Justice Fund Northwest, Native Americans in Philanthropy, American Indian Graduate Center, and 501 Commons. She also serves on the planning committee for the Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ: Indigenous Foods Symposium alongside Dr. Coté. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the UW College of Education.

Buy the Book: A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (Indigenous Confluences) (Paperback) from University Book Store

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Tuberculosis might seem like a disease of the past in the West, but globally it remains a persistent and costly threat across all age groups. According to the World Health Organization, over 1.5 million people died from TB in 2020 — could it be on track to re-emerge as the next global public health crisis?

According to medical science journalist Vidya Krishnan, the disease could be mounting a “frightening comeback.” In her new book, Phantom Plague, Krishnan traced a century of TB’s history from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. She described how superstition and folk remedies made way for scientific understanding of TB, leading to its high rate of control and cure in the West. But, she argued, the cure was never available to Black and Brown nations. As recent as 2020, just eight countries accounted for two-thirds of new TB cases, with India leading the count, followed by China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and South Africa.

Through a social history of the disease and the stories of doctors and patients who have battled it, Krishnan painted a picture of urgency as weak links are exposed, and new drug-resistant strains of TB are becoming dominant.

Vidya Krishnan is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on medical science for the last 20 years. She has written for The Atlantic, The L.A. Times, The Hindu (as their health and science editor), and for the British Medical Journal.

Amber Payne is co-editor in chief of The Emancipator at Boston Globe Media. She was a 2021 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and formerly served as managing editor of BET.com and as executive producer of Teen Vogue and Them.

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The human immune system is nothing short of remarkable: it helps our bodies ward off bacteria and viruses, heals wounds, and maintains the balance needed to keep us alive. The good news? Our immune systems are no longer threatened by the plagues and common diseases of the past. The bad news? Our bodies face an array of distinctively modern challenges; threats like fatigue, stress, and exposure to toxins, which place undue pressure on a system that typically keeps us healthy. Could the results of such stressors be weakened immunity and an explosion of autoimmune disorders?

In his new book, An Elegant Defense, bestselling author Matt Richtel explored this very question through the stories of four people — a cancer patient, an HIV patient, and two women with autoimmune diseases. Combining these human accounts with anecdotes, insight from leading researchers, and the latest scientific findings, Richtel described how the body’s forces unite to ward off bacteria, parasites, and tumors. And on the flip side, he explained how sometimes the body’s defenses can become a threat and attack organs and other systems. Richtel investigated why: Is there a close connection between mental health and the immune system? What roles do diet and nutrition play in immunity? What might be weakening our immune systems? (Think antibacterial soaps, immune boosters, and other products marketed to “protect” us.)

With discussion about health and the immune system remaining in the spotlight as the COVID-19 pandemic rages onward, Richtel offered a particularly relevant look into the deepest riddles of human survival and suggests potential keys to improving wellness.

Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and bestselling nonfiction and mystery author. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Meredith, a neurologist, and their two children. In his spare time, he plays tennis and piano and writes (not very good) songs.

Buy the Book: An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives (Paperback) from Elliott Bay Books

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Is it possible for drug use to be part of a responsible, balanced, and happy life? Dr. Carl L. Hart, a prominent neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University, believes so; but he didn’t always see it that way.

Dr. Hart grew up in Miami at a time when drugs like crack cocaine were blamed for his city’s problems. Initially, his research aimed to prove that drug use led to bad outcomes. But what he found was unexpected: the facts didn’t support the ideology, the truth was dismissed and distorted to keep fear and outrage stoked, and more Black and brown bodies ended up behind bars.

In his new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Dr. Hart asserted that responsible drug use does more to enrich lives than to harm them. Based on personal experience and decades of research, he argued that criminalization and demonization of drug use — not the drugs themselves — are what caused negative outcomes and reinforced structural racism in America. Dr. Hart was joined in conversation with Professor Jennifer Oliva for a timely reflection on America’s war on drugs, the unjust stigmas that persist, and how we might develop a new vision of drug use.

Carl Hart is the Ziff Professor of Psychology in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is also a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Hart has published numerous scientific and popular articles in the area of neuropsychopharmacology and is co-author of the textbook Drugs, Society and Human Behavior. His book High Price was the 2014 winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Jennifer D. Oliva is the Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development and director of the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall Law, where she specializes in health law and policy, FDA law, privacy, evidence, and complex litigation. She also serves as a senior scholar with the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown Law and on the National Pain Advocacy Center’s science and policy advisory council. Oliva is the recipient of multiple scholarly and professional awards and has served as a peer reviewer for numerous law and health journals. Her scholarship has been published by or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and many others.

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Volcanoes have long fascinated curious humans of all ages. Here in the Seattle area, our beloved Tahoma (Mount Rainier) and the four other active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountain Range are beautiful but ever-present reminders of Washington’s location in the “Ring of Fire,” a 25,000-mile arc of volcanic activity that follows the rim of the Pacific Ocean. Volcanoes are quite literally our neighbors; how can we get to know them better and understand their role in shaping and reshaping our planet? Is there a way to safely live alongside them?

In his new book, Super Volcanoes, science journalist and volcanologist Robin George Andrews walked us through awe-inspiring eruptions of the past and present and the secrets that they reveal about our planet. We already know quite a bit about how volcanoes form, erupt, and change, but many mysteries and questions remain: Is Earth’s unique system of plate tectonics the best way to forge a planet capable of supporting life? How can we better predict eruptions and protect communities in the path of danger? Andrews took us from the ocean floor to Hawai’i, Yellowstone, Tanzania, and planets beyond ours to explore recent discoveries and lingering questions about the geologic wonders that captivate us.

Robin George Andrews is a science journalist with a Ph.D. in volcanology. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Scientific American, Atlas Obscura, and other publications. He lives in London, England.

Buy the Book: Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond from Elliott Bay Books

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It’s no secret that human health and the health of Earth’s systems — in particular, the air, water, biodiversity, and climate — are inextricably linked. It’s also no secret that Earth’s systems are changing in ways that can feel daunting and unwieldy. But with all great change comes great opportunity, and the emerging field of Planetary Health offers glimmers of hope rooted in actions, strategies, and a deepened understanding of our interconnectedness.

In Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, editor and University of Washington professor Howard Frumkin brought together a comprehensive collection of topics to guide our understanding of how a changing environment affects our health. With contributions by dozens of authors, the book covers a wide range of health impacts that include food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, mental health, and more. But the goal of the book isn’t to deliver a message of doom; it also offers optimistic strategies to combat the ill effects of environmental changes, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, and improving urban design, among others. Together, the two dichotomies illustrate how an interconnected approach to public health can benefit both people and the planet. In the Town Hall Forum, Frumkin talked about the field of Planetary Health, our changing environment, its impact on everyone from health professionals to students — and far beyond.

Howard Frumkin is Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health in Seattle, where he was dean from 2000 through 2006. He was previously head of the Wellcome Trust “Our Planet, Our Health” initiative, and director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is also the author of Planetary Health: Safeguarding Human Health and the Environment in the Anthropocene.

Joseph Winters is an early-career journalist covering climate as Grist’s News and Politics Fellow. He recently graduated from Harvard University, where he was involved in journalism and climate advocacy — including in his role as senior U.S. editor for the Harvard Political Review and as an organizer for Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard. He has previously interned at the Public Radio International show Living on Earth and at NPR’s Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Buy the Book: Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves from Island Press

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In July of 2018, Orca whale J35, also known as “Tahlequah,” gave birth to a calf off the coast of British Columbia. When the calf died shortly after birth, the world grieved alongside J35 as she carried the calf for 17 days across 1,000 miles before finally releasing it and rejoining her pod. Grief that transcends species is an extraordinary thing; it sparked a revival awareness of the critical need to preserve orcas, the chinook salmon they feed on, and their habitat — together, core elements of Pacific Northwest identity.

In her book, Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home, environmental journalist Lynda Mapes discussed one of the most urban whales in the world and why our efforts to protect them matter now, more than ever. The Southern Resident whales are a community of orcas that live in the Pacific waters spanning from Southeastern Alaska to central California. They are the only killer whale population listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act; as of September 2021, only 73 Southern Resident Whales remain and they are threatened by habitat degradation, lack of chinook salmon (their primary food source), relentless growth, and climate change. Walking through Orca, which is co-published with The Seattle Times and features photographs by photographer Steve Ringman as well as from other partner organizations, Mapes explores the natural history of the orca and their unique challenges for survival.

For more content about the orca, tune in to an interview with Lynda Mapes and Town Hall’s Fall 2021 Podcast Artist-in-Residence, Samantha Allen.

Lynda V. Mapes is a journalist, author, and close observer of the natural world, and covers natural history, environmental topics, and issues related to Pacific Northwest indigenous cultures for The Seattle Times. She is the recipient of a 2014-2015 Charles Bullard Fellowship in Forest Research and is the author of Witness Tree.

Buy the Book: Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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Bestselling author Neal Stephenson is known for delivering novels with poignant and incisive reflections on our present and future. He’s also no stranger to the Town Hall stage and has joined us in the past to discuss his novel Fall and collaborative work with Nicole Galland, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., among others.

Stephenson returned to the Town Hall stage to discuss his newest thriller, Termination Shock. In his speculative vision of the not-too-distant future, sea levels are rising, heatwaves and global flooding endure, and deadly pandemics threaten humanity. When the rest of the world continues to respond with inaction, a billionaire hatches a plan that will quickly throw climate change into reverse — but action at such a grand scale is anything but simple. There are consequences of global proportion, and some of them might even be worse than climate change itself.

Stephenson’s discussion invited audiences to consider questions that can extend far beyond fiction and resonate with us in the present day: Will the world ever be able to take urgent action on climate change? What is the role of technology in this fight? Is there a role for motivated billionaires? What if the answers to these questions are highly unconventional? Stephenson invited us to expand our minds, and ask.

Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line. He is also the coauthor, with Nicole Galland, of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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When you think of therapy in a traditional sense, what comes to mind? Television shows, movies, and comics love to paint a stereotypical scene: a bespectacled therapist asks poignant questions and jots down notes on a legal pad; meanwhile, the patient reclines on a sofa and spills their thoughts and emotions into the void of the room. It might be easy to assume that therapy has always involved a person-to-person conversation, but in her new book The Distance Cure, scholar and author Hannah Zeavin invited us to consider definitions of psychotherapy that extend far beyond people talking in a room.

In The Distance Cure, Zeavin described less conventional operations of therapy that include Freud’s treatments by mail, advice columns, radio shows, crisis hotlines, video, computers, and mobile phones. Across all formats, “therapists” vary widely in background and credentials; some may be professionally trained, while others are strangers or even chatbots. Is any method better than the other? Zeavin urged us to think beyond the traditional dyad of therapist and patient and consider the triad of therapist, patient, and communication technology. By tracing the history of teletherapy right up to its now-routine application in pandemic therapy sessions, Zeavin reminded us that as our world changes and advances in communication technology continue to expand, so will our definitions of what it means to connect.

In a virtual presentation, Psychologist Margaret Morris interviewed Hannah Zeavin about her new book and the intimacy that is possible in remote communication. They are joined by Dr. Orna Guralnik, a clinical psychologist featured on Showtime’s Couples Therapy, who shared insights about therapy and connection during the pandemic.

Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley, and is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. She is a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Social Difference and Editorial Associate at The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life Magazine, Slate, and elsewhere.

Dr. Margaret Morris is a clinical psychologist focused on how technology can support wellbeing. She is an affiliate faculty member in the Information School at the University of Washington, as well as a research consultant. Morris is the author ofLeft to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health and Focus.

Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing and teaching in New York City. Currently Dr. Guralnik lectures and publishes on the topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, and culture and psychoanalysis. She has completed the filming of several seasons of the Showtime documentary series, Couples Therapy.

Buy the Book: The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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On average, a person takes around 20,000 breaths each day; yet most of us never notice the rhythmic rush of air flowing in and out, keeping our bodies oxygenated and alive. And as many asthma or respiratory distress sufferers will attest, you don’t want to notice. But things are happening all around us that threaten our blissful ignorance of breathing — wildfire smoke, indoor and outdoor pollution, and Viruses like COVID-19, to name a few — and they will continue to impact us unless we take action.

In her new book, Breathing Lessons: A Doctor’s Guide to Lung Health, leading pulmonologist Dr. MeiLan K. Han broke down the wonders of breathing in an authoritative guide to how our lungs work and how to protect them. Dr. Han, a national spokesperson for the American Lung Association, shared some of the latest scientific thinking about the respiratory risks we currently face. As the threat of seasonal wildfire smoke grows, new diseases develop, and pollutants continue to be dispersed in the air, we still need to breathe. There’s no better time to learn more about how lungs work; and, Dr. Han argued, focus on social policy that prioritizes lung health nationwide.

MeiLan K. Han, MD, is a professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at the University of Michigan. She also serves on the scientific advisory committees for both the COPD Foundation and American Lung Association and serves as a spokesperson for the American Lung Association. She is currently an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and serves on the editorial boards for Thorax, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and Journal of the COPD Foundation.

Albert A. Rizzo, M.D., FACP, is Chief Medical Officer for the American Lung Association and is a member of Christiana Care Pulmonary Associates in Newark, Delaware. He has been featured in national news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, ABC News, The TODAY Show, and hundreds more. He serves as the host of the Lung Association’s LungCast™ podcast.

Buy the Book: Breathing Lessons: A Doctor's Guide to Lung Health (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

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Prebiotics and probiotics. Fecal microbiota transplants. Optimizing a diet personalized to you. These microbiome-themed topics are all around us in the media, but microbiome research remains a fairly nascent field of study and wasn’t on many people’s radars even 10 years ago.

UCSD Professor Dr. Jack Gilbert and Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) Assistant Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons came together to tackle this exciting area of research. What have we learned over the past few years? What has gone well, and what could we do better? The two discussed some exciting developments on the horizon and share when they think people might see microbiome-based technologies in their daily lives.

Dr. Jack A. Gilbert is a Professor of Microbial Oceanography in the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics in UCSD School of Medicine. Dr. Gilbert is also cofounder of the Earth Microbiome Project and American Gut Project, has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters on microbial ecology, and is the founding Editor in Chief of mSystems journal. He has been recognized on Crain’s Business Chicago’s “40 Under 40 List,” listed as one of the 50 most influential scientists by Business Insider, and was named as one of the “Brilliant Ten” by Popular Scientist. He is the co-author of Dirt is Good, a popular science guide to the microbiome and children’s health.

Dr. Sean Gibbons is Assistant Professor at ISB. He holds a Ph.D. in biophysical sciences from the University of Chicago; his graduate work focused on using microbial communities as empirical models for testing ecological theory. Gibbons completed his postdoctoral training in Eric Alm’s laboratory in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, where his work focused on developing techniques to quantify individual-specific eco-evolutionary dynamics within the human gut microbiome. He is particularly interested in learning how organisms in the human gut change and adapt to individual people over their lifespans, and how those changes impact health.

Presented by the Institute for Systems Biology and Town Hall Seattle.

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Human beings are extraordinary meddlers. We’ve been shaping the world around us since the last ice age, and the longer we’re around, the better we become at resetting the course of evolution. From domesticating animals to CRISPR, a revolutionary new gene-editing tool that garnered a Nobel Prize in 2020, humans haven’t stopped tinkering and probably never will.

There’s an understandable nervousness around human interference; what are we potentially destroying, or at least mucking up, when we tamper with nature? In her new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined — and Redefined — Nature, Biologist Beth Shapiro argued that meddling is the essence of what humans do to survive and thrive. Hunting, hybridizing plants, domesticating animals, and conserving the living things around us are all forms of intervention, none of which are new to us. With that in mind, Shapiro made the case to free ourselves from fear of obtrusion and instead become better meddlers. In turn, we may find opportunities to maintain and improve biodiversity — and our own livelihoods.

Beth Shapiro is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. She has appeared on National Geographic, Discovery, and the BBC, and has written for the Financial Times and Observer. She is the author of the award-winning book, How to Clone a Mammoth.

Carl Zimmer is the science columnist for the New York Times and a frequent contributor to magazines including The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. His award-winning books include Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversion, and Potentials of Heredity.

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We know we have to do something about climate change, and we know we need to move immediately. The mere thought of it tends to make people freeze in their tracks from sheer overwhelm. Thousands of ideas exist, but there’s no clear, collective plan. Try as some people might, jumping on a rocket to the next planet isn’t the answer. But what if we don’t need groundbreaking new inventions to move the needle on climate change? What if most of the innovations already exist? Could we build a better, cleaner future (and maybe even generate millions of new jobs while we’re at it)?

Engineer and inventor Saul Griffith shared a detailed plan of action in his new book, Electrify: The Optimist’s Playbook for our Clean Energy Future. Take note of two important words in the book’s title, electrify and optimist. Griffith’s strategy circles around the transformation of our infrastructure to electrify everything, update our grid, and adapt homes to make it possible. And then there’s optimism: if we’re to build the future we dream of, a realistic yet optimistic outlook is necessary. After all, desperation and doom haven’t successfully elicited the unified global response needed to shift our trajectory; but we can change. Griffith shared the blueprints for exactly how.

Saul Griffith is an inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer. He is the founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007.

David Roberts writes for his newsletter, Volts, and previously wrote for Vox and Grist. Over the past 15+ years, he’s written for several other publications and appeared on a variety of TV shows, radio programs, and podcasts.

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The year 2050 once felt like a far-off speck on a distant horizon. But with less than three decades left before we reach the halfway point of the 21st century, that faraway mote doesn’t feel quite so distant. Is it possible to avoid the worst effects of climate change by then? What efforts can we focus on to truly make an impact?

In The Decarbonization Imperative, Professor Michael Lenox and Rebecca Duff described the urgent situation we’re in and why the year 2050 is so significant. They clearly and methodically broke down 5 key sectors— Energy, Transportation, Industrial, Building, and Agricultural— to look at which technologies stand the best chance of decarbonizing each sector. They also considered areas where investments and policy actions are needed to quicken the pace of adopting new technologies. The good news? In some sectors, clean technology is emerging or already exists; we only need a plan to transition in time.

Lenox and Duff reminded us that climate change isn’t just looming; it’s here. And while there’s no shortage of work to do, there’s a pathway to get there through innovation and disruption of the status quo. The Decarbonization Imperative shows us how.

Michael Lenox is the Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and co-author of Can Business Save the Earth? and The Decarbonization Imperative. His work has been cited by the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Economist. He has been recognized as a Faculty Pioneer by the Aspen Institute, as the top strategy professor under 40 by the Strategic Management Society, and one of the top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants.

Rebecca Duff is Senior Research Associate at the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She also serves as the managing director for the Institute’s Business Innovation and Climate Change Initiative. She has more than 20 years of experience conducting industry and technology research, with a particular focus on product development, emerging technologies, and policy and market interventions.

Nick Licata was elected to five terms on the Seattle City Council before leaving office at the end of 2015 to pursue helping citizens influence government policies. His new book, Becoming a Citizen Activist: Stories, Strategies and Advice on How to Change Our World, recaps his and others strategies and how they can be applied to current issues.

Buy the Book: The Decarbonization Imperative: Transforming the Global Economy by 2050

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Escaping infectious disease and managing its spread has long been at the forefront of the human mind; it’s certainly taken front and center in the minds of today’s humans as the globe continues to wade through the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an especially timely and fascinating look at the story of disease past and present, historian Kyle Harper explained the evolutionary past of humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool in Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Disease, he argued, is accelerated by technological progress and entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. And while triumph over disease helps our lives progress, it’s actually destabilizing the environment and fostering new diseases. Gulp. But all is not lost. Harper pointed out what we can learn by looking at history while simultaneously looking forward, examining patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality, paired with insights from cutting-edge genetic research. And, he reminded us, that human health is intrinsically connected to the health of the planet itself.

Dr. Kyle Harper is Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost Emeritus at The University of Oklahoma. Dr. Harper is a historian of the ancient world whose work has spanned economic, environmental, and social history. His book, Plagues Upon the Earth, is a New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021. His other books include The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity.

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Whether we can see it or not, the impacts of Monsanto— the agrochemical giant best known for creating the herbicide Roundup and the genetically engineered seeds that resist it— are everywhere. Monsanto has shaped and reshaped the farms that provide food to people worldwide; and while we might not be able to see the breadth of the company’s impacts, we’re most certainly eating them.

In Seed Money, Bartow J. Elmore investigated how the future of food remains tethered to Monsanto, despite a toxic and troubling past that extends far beyond Roundup. Through extensive fieldwork, previously-unseen records, and countless interviews with farmers, lawyers, chemists, and past employees, he traced Monsanto’s rise and eventual domination of an agricultural empire. While it’s easy to imagine a cadre of evil corporate villains at the helm, plotting the demise of the world, Elmore found something more subtle. His research revealed a cautionary tale of what happens when a series of seemingly small decisions have a cascading effect on an entire global system.

Bartow J. Elmore teaches environmental and business history at The Ohio State University. For this project he received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and a New America fellowship. He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.

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When it comes to human reproduction, particularly from a Western perspective, there’s no shortage of physical things involved. Pregnancy tests. Maternity clothing. Pacifiers. Baby carriers. Reproduction and parenting involve a plethora of objects, each designed with a purpose in mind and each contributing to the reproductive experience, for better or for worse.

Historians and authors Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick explored the stuff of reproduction in their new book, Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births. Their highly visual, design-driven book explores over 80 objects that have shaped the world of people and babies during the past century, revealing designs that range from iconic to just plain strange. Together, Fisher and Winick considered how design impacted everything from the clothing that pregnant people wear to how the home pregnancy test was once a “threat” to male gynecologists—and beyond.

Michelle Millar Fisher, a curator and architecture and design historian, is Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lectures frequently on design, people, and the politics of things.

Amber Winick is a writer, design historian, and recipient of two Fulbright Awards. She has lived, researched, and written about family and child-related designs, policies, and practices around the world.

Zoë Greggs is a queer, Black, disabled Philadelphia-based artist and nonprofit administrator who serves as the Community Outreach Coordinator at Maternity Care Coalition (MCC). Greggs is also the Curatorial Assistant for Designing Motherhood, where she brings her expertise of community engagement, project management, and art history.

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We’ve pondered the puzzles of the human body for millennia, questioning the function of both the visible parts and the parts hidden away behind layers of skin, muscle, and bones. When it comes to the human body— and the bodies of many other living creatures— the heart is an organ that’s long been central to our understanding of life. How did humans get from mummifying the heart separately from the body in order to weigh the soul inside it, as ancient Egyptians once did, to the modern ability to save and extend lives by transplanting a heart from one human into another?

In Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, zoologist Bill Schutt explored the mind-boggling history of the heart in both human and non-human life forms. He covered everything from clear-blooded Antarctic icefish to the origin of the stethoscope, weaving in fascinating myths, hypotheses gone wrong, and scientific breakthroughs along the way. You’ll never consider that rhythmic thumping in your chest the same way again.

Bill Schutt is a vertebrate zoologist and author of six nonfiction and fiction books, including the New York Times Editor’s Choice, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Recently retired from his post as professor of biology at LIU Post, he is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has studied bats all over the world. His research has been featured in Natural History magazine as well as in the New York Times, Newsday, the Economist, and Discover.

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All human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup. All our differences are found in the remaining .1 percent. Our DNA makes us different in our personalities and in our health, and both matter when it comes to educational and economic success in our current society.

In The Genetic Lottery, clinical psychology professor Paige Harden aimed to reclaim genetic science from the legacy of eugenics and dismantle dangerous ideas about racial superiority. She argued that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society. Genetically associated inequalities, Harden brought forth, can be viewed through a lens of “luck egalitarianism.” This philosophical perspective on fair versus unfair inequality is already manifest in current research and policy. She proposed that genetic research can be used to advance equity goals. Regardless of the .1 percent, we can all be equal.

Paige Harden, Ph.D. is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is the director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project.

Buy the Book: The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

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Plastic is everywhere, and it lasts forever. But humans have a hard time grasping “forever”— the scope is far greater than our comprehension. That’s precisely the problem that Allison Cobb explored in her new book, Plastic: An Autobiography. Cobb aimed to give shape to behemoths like climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism, using plastic waste as the thread that connects them all. She insisted that the current design of manufacturing and retail, which relies on a cycle of consuming and discarding, obstructs our view of the humans who actually create objects. It’s a design that’s intentional; because if consumers truly knew how things were made and who was making them, could we continue living the way that we do on this planet?

Allison Cobb is the author of four books: Plastic: an Autobiography, Green-Wood, After We All Died, and Born2. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and National Poetry Series; has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa; and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Allison works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Clayton Aldern is a writer and data scientist interested in science and society. His writing has been published by The Atlantic, The Economist, Scientific American, Logic, and Grist, among others. Based in the Pacific Northwest, he is currently working on a book about the effects of climate change and environmental degradation on neurochemistry, behavior, decision-making, and mental and emotional health.

Buy the Book: Plastic: An Autobiography (Paperback) from Elliott Bay Books

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The Sahara desert, once upon a time, wasn’t a desert at all. It was green. It was a pleasant place, fed by rivers and lakes. It was home to crocodiles, hippos, turtles, and fish of all stripes. Prehistoric hunters and gatherers came to the lush land, as well, to partake of its rich bounty. It’s now the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to the United States. Temperatures can reach upward of 130 degrees and sand dunes can climb to nearly 600 feet in height. All this begs the question: What happened?

Martin Williams, in When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be, helped answer this question, and asks many more. A time-traveler, of a sort, Williams went back millions of years to showcase the rich history of earth’s greatest desert. Why did its climate change? Did it really have forests roamed through by dinosaurs? How has all this impacted human populations? Will the desert ever return to that verdant Eden? And what will climate change do to the desert? He also brought to the fore the science and scientists who have come to the desert to ask more questions and find more answers in the arid heat and the deep sand. Answers, and the knowledge that even in the harshest of environments, life finds a way.

Martin Williams is professor emeritus and adjunct professor of earth sciences at the University of Adelaide. His many books include Climate Change in Deserts; Nile Waters, Saharan Sands; and The Nile Basin.

Buy the Book: When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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The web of life is sometimes freezing. Take, for instance, what’s happening in the Alaska Arctic. In one of the largest remaining wilderness ecosystems on the planet, the frigid place is home to the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, and is also a hotspot to study the effects of climate change. What becomes of the caribou if climate change continues unabated? Further, what becomes of those that live, and depend, on the caribou, like the indigenous Iñupiat people, if the caribou disappear? The interconnectedness of us all is hanging by a thread.

Seth Kantner was born and raised in northern Alaska and has worked as a trapper, wilderness guide, wildlife photographer, gardening teacher, and adjunct professor. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, and Smithsonian. Kantner is the author of the award-winning novel Ordinary Wolves, memoir Shopping for Porcupine, and collection of essays Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. He has been a commercial fisherman in Kotzebue Sound for more than four decades and lives in the Northwest Arctic.

Bellamy Pailthorp covers the environment beat from the Seattle offices of KNKX Public Radio News, where she has worked since 1999. She also has a deep interest in indigenous affairs and the Salish Sea.

Buy the Book: A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou [Hardcover] from Mountaineers Books

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What’s a little lizard to do when another ferocious hurricane comes tearing through its homelands? Grow larger toe pads to grip more tightly. Where are the long-spined urchins going? South, to find cooler homes. How come the aggressive butterflyfish isn’t fighting anymore? The coral they loved is no longer worth fighting for.

Thor Hanson, who last appeared at Town Hall to talk about bees, is back with a story, ultimately, of hope. Climate change is a disaster and is wreaking havoc the world over. However, the natural world is doing what it can to cope with the new problems and trying to come up with solutions of its own. Plants and animals are responding to climate change in a variety of ways: adjusting, evolving, or dying out. Hanson has visited grizzly bears in Alaska, Walden Pond (that’s grown 4 degrees warmer since Thoreau’s time), and brown pelicans looming over the sea. Fraught with peril, it is. But there’s also hope: if a little lizard can adapt, humans can too.

Thor Hanson is an author and biologist. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Switzer Environmental Fellow, and winner of the John Burroughs Medal, Hanson has written such books as Buzz, The Triumph of Seeds, Feathers, and others.

Buy the Book: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change from Phinney Books

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Methuselah lived to 969 years old, according to the Bible. In our recent age, Jeanne Calmet holds the title of the oldest person who ever lived. She lived to be 122 years and 164 days old. There’s a woman in Japan, Kane Tanaka, who is currently 118. Jiroemon Kimuri, also from Japan, is the oldest man of all time, living to 116 years and 54 days. How did they do it? How do some people avoid the deterioration and weakness that plagues many of their peers decades early? Is it luck, or something else? Is it possible to grow older without getting sicker? Could a 90-year-old not look a day over 50?

In Age Later, Dr. Nir Barzilai, a pioneer in aging research, looked both at the four age-related diseases that take most of us (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s) and at SuperAgers (people who have maintained active lives well into their 90s who’ve never experienced any of those diseases). What can we learn from these subjects, who have not only reached a ripe old age but have further ripened the older they get? Dr. Barzilai revealed the secrets of these SuperAgers and the scientific discoveries so that we can mimic some of their natural resistance to the aging process. This isn’t to say we’ll live to 969, but there’s still plenty of life yet to live for all of us.

Dr. Nir Barzilai is the founding Director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and is Director of the Nathan Shock Center for Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Einstein Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging. He is also the Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR).

Lee Hood, MD, PhD is a world-renowned scientist who co-founded Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in 2000 and served as its first President from 2000-2017. When ISB affiliated with Providence in 2016, Dr. Hood became Providence’s Senior Vice President and Chief Science Officer. He is also Chief Strategy Officer and Professor at ISB.

Buy the Book: Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the New Science of Longevity (Hardcover) Third Place Books

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Want to have a tooth pulled? There’s a risk in doing so. Need to have an X-ray because you broke your femur? There’s a risk in doing that, too. Chemotherapy? Having your appendix removed? Getting the COVID-19 vaccine? There’s risk in all of it.

From risk, however, can come innovation and solutions. In You Bet Your Life, Dr. Paul Offit gave a long-ranging peek into how medical treatments come to be. It’s made, in part, through risk. From the first blood transfusions 400 years ago to the hunt for the COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential. It’s fraught with danger though with many relationships at play. Between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles, the path is a rocky one, but, from it, we can reach new plateaus of medical understanding and healthier lives.

Dr. Paul Offit is the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Author of nine books, he is also professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Dr. Larry Corey is an internationally renowned expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development, and the former president and director of Fred Hutch.

Buy the Book: You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation (Hardcover) Third Place Books

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Barney is a friendly purple Tyrannosaurus rex. Dino, everyone’s favorite pet from The Flintstones, is a “Snorkosaurus.” Godzilla is a “Godzillasaurus.” Dinosaurs have fascinated us all for as long as we first discovered dinosaurs. From Jurassic Park to the sitcom The Dinosaurs, we’ve been enthralled by Stegastauruses, Velociraptors, Brontosauruses, and all the other long-long reptiles of millennia ago. But what do we actually know of these ancient creatures? And what can we still learn? Plenty. Luckily, Darren Naish is here to help answer some of those questions.

With Dinopedia: A Brief Compendium of Dinosaur Lore, Naish gave an entertaining and informative account of dinosaurs in all their immensity. All we know about them have changed in recent decades. Since the late 1960s a scientific revolution has taken place in the study of them. New ideas have been explored, showing how the extinct creatures were marvels of evolution that surpassed modern reptiles and mammals in size, athletic abilities, and more. Naish shed light on our most recent understanding of dinosaur diversity and evolutionary history.

Darren Naish is an author, illustrator, and zoologist affiliated with the University of Southampton. His books include Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality behind the Myths and Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved.

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Love isn’t the only thing that hurts. Leigh Cowart knows. Eating the world’s hottest pepper hurts. Ballerinas dancing on broken bones hurts. A sideshow performer electrocuting themself hurts. Ultramarathon running, jumping into an icy lake, and tattooing all hurt. Why are we doing all of this to ourselves on purpose?

This question, and many others, are answered in Leigh Cowart’s scintillating new book, Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. Masochism, Cowart’s learned, is a part of who we are. But why? What are the benefits? And at what cost? What does giving ourselves pain say about the human experience? Cowart dives into the neuroscience behind it, through conversations with psychologists, scientists, and those who seek pain for pleasure. Cowart, by the way, is a self-proclaimed masochist, seeking out the thrill of it. They participate in painful activities to find some greater understanding of how our minds and bodies find meaning in pain, and the relief after.

Sideshow performer Dan Block, who is featured in the book, joined Cowart for the event to perform stunts and discuss the line between pain for fun and for self-harm.

Leigh Cowart is a researcher and journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed News, Hazlitt, Vice, and other outlets.

Dan “The Amazing Face” Block is the founder and director of the Three Legged Dog Sideshow, which has been performing across the country for a decade and producing events in Texas for 5 years.

Buy the Book: Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

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Quarantining during COVID certainly wasn’t the first time we’ve had to restrict our movements to prevent the spread of disease. Far from it. Take, for instance, that time in the 14th century when the Black Death decimated populations (killing off, some suggest, 60% of the entire European population). And take some other alarming maladies like yellow fever, tuberculosis, Ebola, and cholera.

With Until Proven Safe, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley offered a survey of the uses and abuses of quarantines, from the days of the Black Death to the lockdowns of Covid-19. With a quarantine there is an interplay of forces – biological, political, and technological – that is powerful and effective but also dangerous. When quarantined, it means we are waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It also operates under an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. Whatever challenges being in quarantine has, such as the tedium of isolation and the physical spaces built to contain, Manaugh and Twilley provided suggestions to surmount those challenges. They also highlighted those on the frontlines of quarantine today, all eager for a better tomorrow. Because maybe it won’t be tomorrow, but one day soon, another hazard will befall us.

Geoff Manaugh is the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City, as well as the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG.

Nicola Twilley is co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of history and science.

Buy the Book: Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

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We’re not to blame for climate change. It’s a part of the natural cycle. The earth is flat. The round Earth conspiracy is orchestrated by NASA and other government agencies. No one should get the coronavirus vaccine. Bill Gates wants to use it to implant microchips in people. This is, of course, all bunk. But how can we change the minds of people who believe it to be true?

Lee McIntyre offered thoughts and suggestions to try and reach, communicate, and change the minds of science deniers in How to Talk to a Science Denier. And, he warned, it’s best not to just dismiss them and ignore them. Why? Science denial can kill. From attending a flat earth conference to chats with anti-vaxxers, McIntire presented the five factors involved in science denial: cherry-picking evidence, belief in conspiracy theories, reliance on fake experts, logical errors, and setting impossible expectations on what science can achieve. Can we achieve understanding with the irrational? Not through belittling them or through anger, McIntyre said, but through calm, respectful rationality.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is the author of Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior, Post-Truth, and The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience.

Buy the Book: How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason (Hardcover) Third Place Books

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There aren’t many in this world who can be called a real-life Lorax. In fact, there’s just one: Dr. Meg Lowman. Lowman was nicknamed that by National Geographic for her enthusiasm and knowledge of all things trees. A true tree hugger, Lowman, executive director of the TREE Foundation, has been up in the branches and crowns for decades, learning and sharing that enthusiasm and knowledge about the arboreal world all around and above us.

With her new book, Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us, Lowman shares her incredible story. From the first seeds of wanting to explore the Australian rainforests in her graduate school days, to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States; from climbing up the enormous redwoods on the Pacific, to saving Ethiopia’s last forests with the help of local priests, Lowman’s adventures become our own. Part memoir, part fieldwork account, The Arbornaut highlights her rise, one of only a few women in the scientific world of dendrology (the study of trees) and offers ways in which everyone can help conserve trees and make a positive impact against climate change. The Lorax would be proud.

Dr. Meg Lowman is an American biologist, educator, ecologist, writer, editor, and public speaker. She is the executive director of the TREE Foundation and a professor at the National University of Singapore, Arizona State University, and Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Buy the Book: The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us (Hardcover) Third Place Books

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Why do Black people have a higher death rate than white people from COVID-19? Why do the working class have higher instances of respiratory diseases? If someone is saddled with debt, what does that do to their bodies?

Inflamed illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the injustices of our political, social, and economic systems. Dr. Marya and Patel took us on a tour through the human body – our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. From there, they discussed the ways in which those systems break down due to the society we live in. Systemic racism affects the body, they argue. Doctors themselves, by the way, are not immune. For example, Black newborn babies die at more than twice the rate as white newborns. Research suggests this mortality rate is halved when Black infants are cared for by Black physicians.

There is a cure to all of this. They suggested that it’s the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided and reestablishes relationships, to the Earth and to each other. We can heal not only our bodies, they offer, but the world.

Dr. Rupa Marya is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Franciscio, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She is cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change.

Raj Patel is a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the university’s department of nutrition, and a research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa.

Brady Piñero Walkinshaw is the CEO of Grist.org, the leading national environmental media nonprofit dedicated to climate, justice, and solutions.

Buy the Book: Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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“If there is magic on this planet,” anthropologist Loren Eiseley said, “it is contained in water.” Humans have been trying to contain that magic for millennia. Giulio Boccaletti knows this more than most anyone. With Water: A Biography, Boccaletti showcased the revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization.

We all need water to survive. It is essential to every plant and animal on this earth. Boccaletti offered up a wide-ranging environmental and social history, beginning from the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. Those early civilizations’ farming techniques forever changed the world. Their irrigation systems led to multiple cropping which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.

The development of humankind flows with the development of water infrastructure. Irrigation’s early structure informed social structure. The invention of the calendar, for example, sprung from agricultural necessity. In ancient Greece, a community’s water well laid the groundwork for democracy. During the Roman Empire, water security led to systems of taxation. The control of water continues today, and is becoming increasingly important, as societies far and wide are dealing with water, and the lack thereof, with increasing regularity because of human-induced climate change. There’s no better time to understand our relationship to the most elemental substance on earth than now.

Giulio Boccaletti is a physicist and climate scientist, holding a doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow. He is an honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Buy the Book: Water: A Biography (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books

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There are bird nests that you can eat. Some birds go “anting,” a behavior in which they rub ants all over their feathers and skin. A mockingbird can emit up to 200 distinct noises. These facts, and many more, are encapsulated in Christopher Leahy’s new book, Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore.

Leahy highlights his A to Z treasury of bird facts with captivating stories and illuminating insights on most all things bird related. From revealing why birds are named the way they are, to describing what “twitching” is; from discussing the importance of pioneering ornithologists like John James Audubon and Florence Bailey (who wrote what is considered the first bird field guide), to hawkwatching; the evening will give backyard birders and enthusiasts of the natural world something to crow about. Leahy’s bird knowledge is as wide-ranging as the migratory patterns of an Arctic tern, discussing, as well, birds as they’ve appeared in literature, art, religion, folklore, and more. Fun and inspiring, it gives a renewed appreciation for our feathered friends.

Christopher Leahy holds the Gerald A. Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Buy the Book—Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore (Hardcover)Third Place Books

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Protecting wild animals and preserving the environment are two ideals so seemingly compatible as to be almost inseparable. But in reality, between animal welfare and conservation science there exists a space of underexamined and unresolved tension: wildness itself. When is it right to capture or feed wild animals for the good of their species? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? Can hunting be ecological? Are any animals truly wild on a planet that humans have so thoroughly changed? Acclaimed environmental writer Emma Marris explained that there’s no clear guidelines to help us resolve such questions yet, but joined us endeavoring to start the conversation. With stories contained in her book Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World, she transported us into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges. Marris told us about animals around the globe—from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbie, rare Hawai’ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. In conversation with local journalist Jane C. Hu, she revealed just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, and provided a framework that may change the way we think about nature—and our place in it.

Emma Marris is an award-winning journalist whose writing on science and the environment has appeared in The New York Times, the Atlantic, National Geographic, Wired, and many other publications, including Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her previous book Rambunctious Garden was the subject of her TED Talk. She was also featured on the TED Radio Hour and the series Adam Ruins Everything.

Jane C. Hu is an independent journalist living in Seattle. Her work focuses on the intersection of science, culture, and technology, and has appeared in publications like Slate, High Country News, Undark, Outside, WIRED, Smithsonian, National Geographic, the Atlantic, Science, and others. Buy the Book: Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (Hardcover)
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American cities are currently faced with a two-pronged challenge: dealing with our climate crisis, and managing the lack of housing that is affordable and healthy. Our housing is not only unhealthy for the planet, green affordable housing expert Dana Bourland believes, but is also putting the physical and financial health of residents at risk, with full time minimum wage workers unable to afford a two-bedroom apartment in any US county. She argued that we need to move away from a so-called gray housing model to a green model, and she joined us to introduce a primer on what that would look like.

In conversation with Grist’s Clayton Aldern, Bourland endeavored to demonstrate that we do not have to choose between protecting our planet and providing affordable housing to all. Supported by her book Gray to Green Communities: A Call to Action on the Housing and Climate Crisis, she drew from her experience leading the Green Communities Program with a national development organization. With examples from green living communities across the country, she layed out the problems that green housing solves, the challenges in the approach, and recommendations for the future of green affordable housing. Don’t miss this exhilarating discussion that will empower and inspire anyone interested in the future of housing and our planet.

Dana Bourland (she/her/hers) works at the intersection of issues related to health, poverty and the environment. She led the creation of the Environment Program at The JPB Foundation. Formerly, Bourland was Vice President of Green Initiatives for Enterprise Community Partners, where she oversaw all aspects of Enterprise’s award-winning Green Communities program including the creation of the Green Communities Criteria and Enterprise’s Multifamily Retrofit Program. She is featured in and has contributed to numerous publications including the book Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy; Greening Our Built World: Costs, Benefits, and Strategies; Women in Green; Growing Greener Cities; Becoming an Urban Planner, and is included as faculty in Fast Company’s 30-second MBA program.

Clayton Aldern is a data reporter at Grist. A Rhodes scholar and Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, his writing and data visualization have appeared in The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, Vox, and many other publications. Previously, he led the data analysis and program evaluation team for homelessness programs at Pierce County, Washington. Aldern is also a research affiliate of the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and with Gregg Colburn, he is the author of the forthcoming book Homelessness is a Housing Problem.

Buy the Book: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9781642831283

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In the hundreds of walks that you’ve taken this past year, to get out of the house and flee from screens, have you noticed things around you that you have questions about but don’t have the tools to answer? Maybe you’ve wondered how exactly that mushroom got there or thought again about the mysterious migratory patterns of birds. Join New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned scientist and autism spokesperson Dr. Temple Grandin to hear about her newest book The Outdoor Scientist: The Wonder of Observing the Natural World. Indulging our curiosity about the natural systems at work around us, Dr. Grandin introduced us to scientists from fields of study such as geology, astrophysics, and oceanography to explain how they research their own curiosities and what tools we can use to discover more ourselves. Bring the whole family and learn many ways you can conduct scientific research together!

Following her presentation, Dr. Grandin will join ISB President Dr. Jim Heath for a conversation and will answer questions from the audience.

Dr. Temple Grandin is one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. She has a PhD in animal science from the University of Illinois and is a professor at Colorado State University. She is the author of twelve books on autism and animal behavior, including the national bestsellers Calling All Minds, Thinking in Pictures, and Animals in Translation. Dr.Grandin was inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2018 she was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She lectures to parents and teachers throughout the U.S. on her experiences with autism, and her work has been covered in the New York Times, People, National Public Radio, and 20/20. The 2010 HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards.

Dr. Jim Heath is a chemist and the president and professor of Institute of Systems Biology. He also has the position of Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA, and he has directed the National Cancer Institute-funded NSB Cancer Center since 2005.

Buy the Book: https://www.elliottbaybook.com/book/9780593115558

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As the world’s scientists declare a “climate emergency,” the fight to protect our planet’s ecological resources and the people that depend on them is more urgent than ever, argues journalist Audrea Lim. But she believes that the real battles for our future are taking place far from the headlines and international conferences, in mostly forgotten American communities where the brutal realities of industrial pollution and environmental degradation have long been playing out.

She joined us, in conversation with writer and contributor to the collection Elizabeth Alvarado, to share from The World We Need: Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung Environmental Movement, a collection she edited. With it, Lim provided a vivid introduction to the largely uncelebrated grassroots environmental groups—often led by activists of color and the poor—who are valiantly fighting back in America’s so-called sacrifice zones. She related what the journalists and writers who contributed discovered—these activist groups are devising creative new tactics, building sustainable projects to transform local economies, and organizing people long overlooked by the environmental movement. Join Lim and Alvarado for riveting stories and hard-won strategies that offer a powerful new model for the larger environmental movement and inspiration for concerned citizens everywhere.

Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, and The Nation.

Elizabeth Alvarado is a multimedia freelance journalist with a passion for exploring social issues within communities of color. Based in Washington State, she has covered the Latinx community around Seattle and has worked abroad in Mexico City reporting on women’s issues. Through her writing, she aspires to give a voice to those who feel they aren’t being heard.

Buy the Book: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9781620975152

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Have you ever asked someone, “How are you?” while not really caring about their actual response? And why would you need to, when we are conditioned to rarely respond to this question honestly? This is an example of deception and self-deception, and it happens in little and big ways around the world every single day. While this example may seem innocuous, self-deception has caused harm—to us, to our communities, to the planet. But if it is so bad for us, why is it so ubiquitous? The Hidden Brain’s Shankar Vedantam argues that, paradoxically, self-deception can also play a vital role in our success and well-being.

Vedantam joined us in conversation with KUOW’s Ross Reynolds to explore how the lies we tell ourselves sustain our daily interactions with friends, lovers, and coworkers. On the Hidden Brain podcast, Vedantam peels back the layers of lies that keep us from seeing reality clearly and from becoming our best selves, which led to him uncovering and exploring this dichotomous impact of self-deception specifically. Drawing on powerful personal stories contained in his book Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain, he presented a correlation from self-deception to why some people live longer than others, why some couples remain in love and others don’t, why some nations hold together while others splinter. But how do we find the line between those lies we tell ourselves that are helpful and those that are harmful? Coupled with new insights in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, Vedantam offered a fascinating tour of what it really means to be human.

Shankar Vedantam is host of the Hidden Brain podcast and public radio show and the author of The Hidden Brain, a New York Times national bestseller. He lives in Washington, DC.

Ross Reynolds is KUOW’s Executive Producer for Community Engagement. Before that he was a KUOW program host for 16 years and has also been KUOW’s News Director, Program Director, and hosted the weekly KCTS-TV interview program Upon Reflection. Reynolds was previously news director at KBOO Radio in Portland, Oregon and News/Public Affairs Director at WCUW Radio in Worcester, Massachusetts.

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Many believe that COVID-19 has exposed everything that’s wrong with decades of the world’s governments betting on militarism, competition, and wealth creation. But is a better world really possible after this crisis?

Author John Feffer collected insight from dozens of the world’s leading thinkers and activists to answer this question, and he joined us to discuss the opportunity for transformative change. Offering an analysis of our current moment, collected in his book The Pandemic Pivot, Feffer shared the global issues through eight in-depth discussions with a brain trust: Green recovery, the global economy, migrants and refugees, budget priorities, and more. Feffer’s analysis offered an actionable framework that endeavors to demonstrate how equity and cooperation aren’t just nice principles—they’re survival strategies for the future of humanity. As vaccines introduce a light at the end of this pandemic tunnel, and the world imagines what we can look like after this and prevent the next crisis, this conversation is more urgent than ever before.

John Feffer is director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Pandemic Pivot: A Report from the Institute for Policy Studies, The Transnational Institute, and Focus on the Global South, and Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams. He is the author of several other books, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, USAToday, Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications.

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Is aging a disease? How old does your body say it is? How can we live longer, healthier lives? Dr. David Sinclair, Harvard professor of genetics and bestselling author, joins ISB co-founder and genomics pioneer Dr. Lee Hood for a conversation about the very latest in aging research.

David A. Sinclair, Ph.D., A.O. is a Professor in the Department of Genetics, Blavatnik Insitute, and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on understanding why we age and how to slow its effects. He has published over 200 scientific papers, is a co-inventor on over 50 patents, and is the New York Times bestselling author of Lifespan. He serves as co-chief editor of the scientific journal Aging. In 2018, he became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).

Lee Hood, MD, PhD is a world-renowned scientist. Dr. Lee Hood co-founded Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in 2000 and served as its first President from 2000-2017. In 2016, ISB affiliated with Providence, and Dr. Hood became Providence’s Senior Vice President and Chief Science Officer. He is also Chief Strategy Officer and Professor at ISB. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine.

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In 2015, the United Nations gathered for the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference. What resulted is arguably the most significant global agreement on the reduction of climate change: The Paris Agreement. On Earth Day 2016, 174 countries signed the agreement, including the United States (which withdrew in 2020 but officially rejoined in February). But what exactly does the Paris Agreement do? And what are the consequences if those ambitious goals are not attained?

Two leaders on climate change who led the negotiations, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac joined us in conversation with Grist’s Brady Walkinshaw to answer those questions, and more. Asserting that climate change is the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced, they shared from their book The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis about how the choices we make in the next 30 years will determine the kind of word we will live in for generations to come. With cautious optimism, they outlined two possible scenarios for our planet: one that describes Earth in 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets, and the other where we live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They advocated for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. Beyond imagining three decades into the future, they presented actionable calls for what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.

Christina Figueres is an internationally recognized leader on climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010-2016.She successfully directed the international negotiations from 2010, culminating in the historic Paris Agreement of 2015, signed unanimously by 195 countries. Together with Tom Rivett-Carnac she is a founding partner of Global Optimism, a purpose driven enterprise focused on social and environmental change and host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism!.

Tom Rivett-Carnac is a leader in the fields of international diplomacy, energy policy, and climate change. From 2013 to 2016, Rivett-Carnac was Senior Strategy Advisor to the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, a position he held up to and during the successful negotiations in Lima (COP 20) and Paris (COP 21), which resulted in the unanimous signing of the Paris Agreement. Together with Christiana Figueres, he is a Founding Partner at Global Optimism, a purpose driven enterprise focused on social and environmental change and co-host of the podcast, Outrage + Optimism!

Brady Piñero Walkinshaw is the CEO of Grist, a leading national environmental media nonprofit dedicated to climate, justice, and solutions. Grist reaches an audience of millions with vital journalism and Fix, Grist’s Solutions Lab, lifts up the leaders and the ideas to solve the climate crisis. Before joining Grist in 2017, Walkinshaw represented central Seattle in the Washington State Legislature and spent several years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of the leading physicists of her generation. She is also one of fewer than 100 Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions.

The star theoretical physicist joined us in conversation with STEM educator and PhD student Jaleesa Trapp to take us on a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos–and present a call for a more just practice of science. Sharing from her book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein introduced us to her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of Dark Matter–all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek. While love of Star Trek is universal, Prescod-Weinstein and Trapp brought physics into the personal realm, seriously urging us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. Join Dr. Prescod-Weinstein as she layed out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky, dreaming into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neuron stars, and dark matter. She also does research in Black feminist science, techonlogy, and sociology studies.

Jaleesa Trapp is an educator, community organizer, and researcher from Tacoma, WA. She is currently a second year PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, where her current research focus is exploring the different ways Black youth interact with computers and technology, in an effort to design playful technologies with and for them. She is also an educator at the school of Industrial Design Engineering and Art and a community organizer with Tacoma Action Collective.

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Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police–throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Efforts have ranged from being burned for attempting to translate the Bible, to dictionaries and encyclopedias being forbidden, to works of literature and science and history being trashed and pulped, and beyond. With this long tradition that still persists to this day, how do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone?

This is a question that teacher and film producer Peter Kaufman has been grappling with. In his book The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, he examined the history of attempts to stifle information, including what we see in present day. Although they can feel less outwardly insidious, Kaufman looked at what he considers the enemies of free thought in the 21st century, who have taken on new and different guises: giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. They work to surveil and control, and Kaufman argued they are no less nefarious than their predecessors. But far from leaving us in the gloomy realities, Kaufman invited us to consider the opportunities to mobilize, drafting a new social contract for our networked video age. Drawing upon the tactics of those fighting against earlier incarnations of knowledge restrictors, he presented a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. He asked us to consider: what does it mean to be a citizen in the 21st century?

A writer, teacher, and documentary film producer, Peter Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning and MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group. He previously served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. He has served as president and executive producer of Intelligent Television, founder of the Audio-Visual Think Thank at Sound & Vision in the Netherlands, and in a number of other prestigious roles with organizations that center on media and broadcasting. He is the author of numerous articles on media and education.

Dr. Cable Green is the Director of Open Education at Creative Commons, where he works with the global open education community to leverage open licensing, content, practices, and policies to significantly improve access to effective open education and research resources. He’s a leading advocate for open licensing and procurement policies that ensure publicly funded education materials are freely and openly available to the public that paid for them.

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In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. But user behavior suggests that these platforms are also powering deep social divisions online. What is the truth? What can we do to find a balance?

Sociologist Christopher Bail joined us to challenge common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, with support from his book Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. He explained that, rather than using social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Backed by innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, Bail examined how stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized. He took us inside the minds of online extremists, and gleans fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. And what might the virtual public square look like with a total reset and redesign from scratch? Join him for data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, combating online polarization without deleting our accounts.

Christopher Bail is professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. He is the author of Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream.

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We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The old distinctions—between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact—have blurred, losing all meaning. So author Nathaniel Rich argues in his book Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade.

With intimate stories from ordinary people making desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien, Rich joined us to share from this deeply reported book. In conversation with fellow author Claire Vaye Watkins, he presented a beautifully told exploration of our post-natural world, one that helps us understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known. Together, they wondered what it means to live in an era of terrible ecological responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we’ve lost?, they express, but rather What world do we want to create in its place?

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History and the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the novel Gold Fame Citrusand the short story collection Battleborn. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California Irvine.

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What exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? What is the relationship between Paleolithic art and cheese?

Ecology professor Rob Dunn joined us to offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. In Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human, co-written with Monica Sanchez, Dunn argued that deliciousness is an overlooked feature of the story of animal evolution. He shared stories from the book: stories about the pleasures of chimpanzees, the taste of mastodons, the mysteries of avocados, and more. He endeavored to show how a consideration of flavor and deliciousness changes the way we think about and make sense of the natural world: they shape the behavior of cats and dogs, they shape the use of tools by chimpanzees—they may even account for some of the major transitions in human evolution. Don’t miss these toothsome tales that are likely to change the way you think about flavor.

Rob Dunn is a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Never Home Alone.

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From the outside, the Galvin family seemed to be living the American Dream: a happy family with twelve children who perfectly spanned the baby boom, and a trajectory of upward mobility. Behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

Award-winning author Robert Kolker joined us in conversation with neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman to share this heartrending story, the subject of his book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family. With clarity and compassion, he presented the extraordinary history of the Galvins, one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Exploring how their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia and how their stolen DNA has informed decades of genetic research, he uncovered one family’s unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O Magazine, and Men’s Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Dr. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and internationally best-selling author. He teaches brain plasticity at Stanford University, is the creator and host of the Emmy-nominated television series The Brain, and is the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds the next generation of neuroscience hardware. He is the author of eight books—including Livewired: The Inside Story of the Human Brain, out in May 2021.

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In 2017, a scientist and her team of researchers completed a major study. They found that over the past four decades, sperm levels among men in Western countries have dropped by more than 50 percent. The result sent shockwaves around the globe—but the story didn’t end there. It turns out our sexual development is changing in broader ways, for both men and women and even other species, and that the modern world is on pace to become an infertile one. How and why could this happen? What is hijacking our fertility and our health?

The scientist who led that research team, Dr. Shanna Swan, joined us with her coauthor Stacey Colino in a conversation facilitated by Town Hall Senior Correspondent Steve Scher to unpack these startling discoveries. As contained in her book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, Dr. Swan and her team examined 185 studies involving close to 45,000 healthy men. She and Colino shared what they discerned about how both lifestyle and chemical exposures are affecting our fertility, sexual development, and general health as a species. With accessible explanations of the threats and repercussions, they presents an urgent wake-up call to action in protecting our future.

Shanna H. Swan, PhD, is an award-winning scientist based at Mt. Sinai and one of the leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists in the world. Dr. Swan has published more than 200 scientific papers and has been featured in extensive media coverage around the world. Her appearances include ABC News, NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, CBS News, PBS, BBC, and NPR, as well as in leading magazines and newspapers, including Newsweek, The Washington Post, Time, and many more.

Stacey Colino is an award-winning writer specializing in health and environmental issues and a regular contributor to US News & World Report. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post Health section and in dozens of national magazines, including Newsweek, Parade, Woman’s Day, Sports Illustrated, and Good Housekeeping. She is the coauthor with David Katz of Disease-Proof: The Remarkable Truth About What Makes Us Well; Strong is the New Skinny with Jennifer Cohen; Good Food Fast! with Jason Roberts; and Taking Back the Month with Diana Taylor.

Steve Scher is a podcaster, interviewer, and teacher. He worked in Seattle public radio for almost 30 years. He has taught at the University of Washington since 2009. He is Senior Correspondent for Town Hall Seattle’s In The Moment podcast.

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In the non-stop pace of the modern world, it might be a surprise to learn that a 400-year-old story is more relevant today than ever before. But that’s exactly what astrophysicist Mario Livio believes about the life story of Galileo, and he joined us with a fresh interpretation of one of history’s greatest and most fascinating scientists.

Drawing on his own scientific expertise, as well as his book Galileo and the Science Deniers, Livio provided captivating insights into how Galileo reached his bold new conclusions about the cosmos and the laws of nature. Livio explored how current crises—such as the minimization of the dangers of climate change—mirror the problems that Galileo experienced with discoveries being erroneously questioned or ignored. He shared how Galileo was not only a revolutionary because of his conclusions, but also because of his belief in the democratization of scientific knowledge, that every educated person should know science as well as literature. Livio reminded us that we can continue to take inspiration from heroes of the past—especially as the tenets they held dear four centuries ago remain threatened even today.

Mario Livio is an internationally known astrophysicist, a bestselling author, and a popular speaker who has appeared on The Daily Show, 60 Minutes, and NOVA. He is the author of the bestsellers The Golden Ratio, Brilliant Blunders, and Galileo.

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Even before a global pandemic introduced us to terms like “social distancing,” loneliness was a defining condition of the twenty-first century, academic Noreena Hertz posits. She argues that the fabric of community was unraveling, and our personal relationships were under threat.

Combining a decade of research with firsthand reporting, Hertz joined us to discuss her findings, collected in her book The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World that’s Pulling Apart. She shares how technology is not the sole culprit, but equally to blame are the dismantling of civic institutions, the reorganization of the workplace, the mass migration to cities, and decades of policies that have placed self-interest above the collective good. This loneliness is not merely a mental and physical health crisis, Hertz contends, but an economic and political one as well. But she believes it’s a crisis we have the power to solve, and she offers bold solutions for healing our fractured communities and restoring connection in our lives.

Noreena Hertz is a renowned thought leader, academic, and broadcaster. She is the author of The Silent Takeover, The Debt Threat, and Eyes Wide Open. Her opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Financial Times. She is currently based at University College London, where she holds an honorary professorship.

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Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulidae worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. And, scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith asserted, as fellow members of the animal kingdom, they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies but also our minds.

In this presentation, Godfrey-Smith joined us with findings from his book Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. Following his acclaimed book Other Minds about the mind of the octopus, he expanded his inquiry to animals at large. He delved into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land, the world of insects, birds, and primates, Godfrey-Smith gathered their stories to address one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award.

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The climate emergency is intensifying while international responses continue to falter. With every day that passes, another day of action is lost, and a day closer we are to unsustainability. But professor Anatol Lieven believes he has a revolutionary solution: he advocates for redefining climate change as a threat to nation-states, and leveraging nationalism to create action.

Drawing on his book Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World, he outlined his understanding that nationalism is the most important force in motivating people to care about the wellbeing of future generations. He shared how leaning into this would allow us to mobilize our national defense forces in support of climate change action, and expressed his frustration with environmentalists who cling to ideological purity at the loss of fostering dominant national consensus. Lieven presented an essential contribution to the debate on how to deal with a climatic crisis that if unchecked will threaten the survival of Western democracies and every organized human society.

Anatol Lievenis a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and a fellow of the New America Foundation. He worked as a British journalist in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the former USSR, and Eastern Europe. He has commented on current affairs for leading journals including The New York Times. His books include Pakistan: A Hard Country; America Right or Wrong; Ethical Realism; Ukraine and Russia; and The Baltic Revolution, which won the 1994 Orwell Prize.

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In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. That begs the question: what exactly was that object?

Harvard’s top astronomer Avi Loeb joined us to share his theory: that the object was the first confirmed interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. With insight from his book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, he explained all of the reasons the object couldn’t have been an asteroid, and why he believes it was a piece of advance technology created by a distant alien civilization. He further outlined his controversial theory, and explored the implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. Join us as we aim for the stars with this thrilling discussion, where Loeb asks us to think big and to expect the unexpected.

Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University, chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He also chairs the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, serves as the science theory director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, as well as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. Author of four books and over 700 scientific papers, Loeb is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics.

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Many experts find that Howard Gardner’s book Frames of Mind was a rare publishing phenomenon—a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as educators, it laid out Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences: the idea that rather than seeing human intelligence as dominated by a single general ability, it could actually be differentiated into modalities.

Now, nearly four decades after Frames of Mind was first published, Gardner joined us to share thoughts from his book A Synthesizing Mind, reflecting on his own intellectual development, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor. Having spent his career focused on human minds in general, now he considers his own mind, and concludes that his is a “synthesizing mind,” with the ability to survey experiences and data across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. Gardner invited us to an insightful discussion about different types of intelligences—including and especially his own—and how a synthesizing mind could be particularly valuable at this time.

Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of thirty books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed; and The App Generation (with Katie Davis).

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Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is a collaborative cross-disciplinary nonprofit biomedical research organization based in Seattle. ISB and Town Hall proudly present ISB President Jim Heath in conversation with Rod Hochman, President and CEO of Providence. Join them for a discussion exploring what the future of healthcare might look like in a post-pandemic world.

Dr. Rod Hochman is the president and CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health, a Catholic not-for-profit health system. He is the chair elect designate for the American Hospital Association (AHA), chair of AHA’s Regional Policy Board 9, and past chair of the board of trustees for the Catholic Health Association.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle & Institute for Systems Biology.

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If exercise is healthy, why do many people dislike or avoid it? Is sitting really the new smoking? Can you lose weight by walking? Does running ruin your knees? Should we do weights, cardio, or high-intensity training?

Professor of human evolutionary biology Dan Lieberman joined us to answer these questions and bust some common myths about exercising with insight from his book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, he told the story of how and why humans evolved to walk, run, dig, and more while avoiding needless exertion but did not evolve to exercise. He argued that rather than shaming and blaming people for avoiding exercise, we should be making exercise more enjoyable. Join Lieberman as he revolutionizes the way we think about exercising, and explains why exercise can reduce our vulnerability to the diseases most likely to make us sick and kill us.

Dan Lieberman is Edwin M. Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He is the author of the national bestseller The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease.

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We’ve all seen charts come through our social media feeds or on the news. More than ever, in a time when conversations are increasingly driven by numbers—for example, in relation to the COVID pandemic—charts are ostensibly used to communicate essential information. But how much can we trust those charts? And how do they influence our perception of truth?

Leading data visualization expert Alberto Cairo joined us in this livestreamed primer, introducing a core competency on analyzing charts, diagrams, and infographics. He argued that, to be informed citizens, we must all be able to decode and use the visual information that politicians, journalists, and even our employers present us with every day. Considering the decoding of charts an essential new literacy in our data-driven world, he examines contemporary examples ranging from election result infographics to global GDP maps, box office record charts—and even COVID graphics—to share the positives and negatives of relaying data visually.

Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He has consulted with companies and institutions such as Google and the Congressional Budget Office on visualizations.

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Reference Alberto Cairo's presentation: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jk4ginxyai6ylqu/AABvqdyT1hJtyFN9nKNHyX9Ba?dl=0

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Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big grey blob between your ears.

Barrett joined us for a presentation with revelations of mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research, with support from her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. She shared where brains come from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. She also tackled popular myths such as the idea of a “lizard brain” and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or event between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior. Join us for an evening full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is a professor of psychology.She is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She has received numerous scientific awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and is the author of How Emotions are Made.

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A high-sodium diet is deadly, many scientists believe. Studies have linked it to high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks. It’s been estimated that excess sodium in the American diet causes as many as 100,000 deaths and many billions of dollars in avoidable healthcare costs each year. And yet salt is everywhere in our diets. Why hasn’t salt received the sort of public attention and regulatory action that sugar and fat have?

In this presentation with scientist and nutrition advocate Michael Jacobson, he investigated why salt seems to have slipped under the regulatory radar, with support from his book Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet. Joined in conversation by founding Executive Director of Healthy Food America Dr. Jim Krieger, Jacobson recounted the battles between public health advocates, food industries, and right-wing politicians. He examined how, despite an abundance of research going back more than half a century showing a multitude of high-sodium diet related ills, a few scientists argue the opposite is true, and have successfully fought government efforts to reduce what could be dangerous levels of sodium in our food. He advised us on how to reduce salt and calls on us to suit up for the next battle in the salt wars.

Michael F. Jacobson is Cofounder and Senior Scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. He is the author or co-author of Restaurant Confidential, Salt: The Forgotten Killer, Six Arguments for a Greener Diet, and other books and pamphlets.

Jim Krieger, MD, MPH is founding Executive Director of Healthy Food America (HFA) and Clinical Professor at University of Washington Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He is a nationally recognized expert in developing policy, systems and environment change methods to prevent obesity and chronic diseases.

Buy the Book: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9780262044448

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