Speakers Forum: Recent Episodes
KUOW News and Information
Readings, debates, lectures from around Seattle, and so much more. Hear fascinating talks by authors, intellectuals, officials and regular folks with important stories recorded live.
‘I got an email being called the N-word just last week as a matter of fact for some of our coverage. I think at the end of the day what we can do is just truly speak the truth.’ -Marcus Harrison Green
‘All anybody wanted to talk about was the pandemic, which I resisted for about a week, and then I realized we all need to talk about the pandemic. It's not even like it was the elephant in the room. It's like it was the room. It was unavoidable.’
‘It took her some time to find her voice, but when she did she said three careful words, it’s so beautiful.’
‘In the equation of institutional sexual abuse, the constant is the abuser. There's always going to be a certain percentage of child sex abusers in the population.’
‘If black children belong to us, and we need not be mothers or fathers or even black for black children to belong to us, a part of us is always vigilant, and always exhausted.’
‘When I talk about public safety, when I talk about I need more officers, I always lead with, but not in a racialized or militarized fashion.’
One poet asks, ‘Will you not open this door for me? My hand is exhausted from knocking at your door.’
‘It’s not going to happen in my lifetime. We are working to a future that we will not live to see. That’s what this work is about, and the healing is knowing that we’re doing it together.’
‘It's a different kind of approach and different kind of exchange that I know that we can do because I've seen it, and it's growing. It begins with a different definition of listening. Listening is about showing people they matter.’
'This, I argue, is the beginning of the Age of Exploration, the Age of Discovery, and thereby, the start of the modern world.’
‘Black women have been deeply engaged in trying to figure out how to get this country to accept, to understand, to learn about human rights.’
‘That's why we lose a lot of our own community members who are not interested in western sciences because they don't see themselves being reflected. I think with Indigenous science we have to reflect ourselves because, otherwise, we are ignoring part of our kinships and also teachings that we have been passed down.’
‘Free speech has been perhaps one of the most powerful engines of human equality that we've ever stumbled upon as a species.’
‘We are having exponential growth in our understanding of the immune system. There’s just so much to learn, and our baseline has just been established.’
‘We had been married over five years before he decided that he would even mention to me what had happened. I just knew he was having trouble sleeping. And this is the kind of torture that followed him until he died.’
'Crane is now in the hands of the specialists, while the invisible army of so-called general readers, the same people who still take pleasure in reading old standbys such as Melville and Whitman, are no longer reading Crane.’
What it will take to share this region with Qw'e lh'ol mechen, ‘the people that live under the sea’
‘We know it’s a cultural problem. We know it’s a behavioral problem. But it’s not a problem of a few bad apples.’ – Professor Anita Hill
‘The indifference is impenetrable and reliable and distributed across centuries, and I am stupidly hurt when my friends can’t see that.’
‘We’re pumping millions of tons of warming pollutants into the atmosphere every day. The trick is, you don’t need very much of the population to doubt it to stop action.’
‘I think sometimes that we are a little bit like ghosts. We’re haunting the world because it’s not entirely ours and we scare people.’
‘I had my son attacked by one of these people and thought, what in the holy hell? How did we get here? It’s this weird mix of strange machismo patriotism, wrapped in a flag, sort of near a bible.’
‘Most people got to know me over the last four years and have one impression of me as this ardent partisan. Prior to Trump, most of the criticism I got was for working too much across the aisle, and I don’t consider myself a partisan.’
‘Every building is a philosophy in a way. I see all buildings as attempts to try to figure out and express what it means to dwell as a human being on Earth.’
‘A Little Book of Self-Care for Those Who Grieve began as notes scratched out over many midnights; thoughts formed as I lay sleepless, or in the aftermath of painful dreams.’
‘The agents say they’ll put themselves between a bullet and the president. They’ll take a bullet for the president. Well, they felt like more and more they were just dodging a bullet.’
‘If people hear something that’s false, and they’re immediately told it’s false, then they will remember it in some sense or in some part of their mind as true for the long-term. That’s insidious!’
As a teen, Chinese American author Anna Qu was forced by her mother to work in their family's garment factory in Queens, New York. At home she was the family’s maid, and faced punishment for doing things like schoolwork. Qu contacted Child Protective Services to report her mother, but due to bureaucratic bumbling she was left her to fend for herself. Now as an adult, Qu reckons with life, family, and not so easy answers to past trauma in her memoir.
Social Distancing may be drawing to a close, but that doesn’t mean folks are eager to come together just yet. The potential unity among Americans, involving civil civic discourse, continues to prove a bumpy road, to say the least. But according to the speakers in this talk, it’s a journey still worth committing to, having ‘faith’ in, and suffering through, together.
It has been just over six years since the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. In his new, exhaustively researched book The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage, author Sasha Issenberg shares many of the stories and successful strategies that led to marriage equality.
In his new book After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made, author Ben Rhodes grapples with the dissolving notion of American exceptionalism in a post-Covid world. Using a global lens, Rhodes presents a glimpse of a highly possible democracy-free future, presently modeled by countries like Hungary, Russia, and China.
Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop says the future of pornography is "social sex" and the end of fetishizing women of color.
Author Grace M. Cho breaks bread with the numerous voices haunting her ‘pained spirit’ in her new novel.
White Freedom: ‘The belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.’
Godin’s new book sheds an intriguing light on the tropes surrounding those on the spectrum of blindness.
‘Most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom, but surely that is one of them.’
‘Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self, telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in.’
"In any given moment the human eye takes in about a billion bits of information. The brain discards the vast majority of that information, and processes about 40 bits of information."
Chinese American photographer Andrew Kung is reclaiming representation of the all-American man one portrait at a time.
‘And as she walked by, she said ‘In America, we say excuse me!’ She just looked angry, and I looked around. I was stunned.’
The surge of hate crimes committed against Asian Americans has swelled since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. It's a sad but known truth that racial hatred against Asians (or racial hatred, in general) isn't just a new phenomenon in the US. But neither is standing up to and confronting that hatred...
From adult films to a portrait series on Asian men, stereotypes of Asian identity are being disrupted in surprising and creative ways.
Brian Komei Dempster’s ‘poetry of remembering, and the reverberations of our ancestors.’
‘I want him to be able to have those qualities that I saw men wanting, but not being able to have. Like being able to cry.’
‘Class blindness is the tendency for people with social class privilege to be unaware or blind to their advantages.’ -Professor Jennifer Sherman
‘I think both of us realize that you don’t get anywhere by staying in your corners and being completely polarized. We just know that the more we communicate and talk about things the better it will be, even if we’re not on the same page.’
‘Some speak of the nobility of the law. Stern has not always found that to be true. Too much of the grubby bone shop, the odor of the abattoir, emanates from every criminal courtroom.’
“How far are we willing to go? Are we prepared to sacrifice tradition and convention for genuine transformation?”
If you’ve ever found yourself wishing you could better understand how the human brain works, then this talk is just for you.
'These men are going out to build a machine to understand how humans think and feel and would behave, and they don’t understand their wives and they don’t understand their children.'
‘Peak oil, at this point, it looks like it’s around 2030, which used to sound far away, but it isn’t anymore.’
‘Seattle is not silent. Seattle is not submissive. Seattle is not unthinking. Seattle will not be exploited, and Seattle is not obedient.’
‘We’re in an extremely polarized moment as a country, and we have to find ways to talk about these things.’
‘Kids need to feel safe, they need to feel secure, they need to be seen, and they need to be soothed. Talk to them about what make them feel safer, or what makes them feel soothed.’
As we approach a spooky time of the year (No, I’m not referring to the US election season) we may be finding ourselves slowly drawn towards unnerving but entertaining cautionary tales. One of those stories just may be the award-winning TV show The Handmaid’s tale based on the best-selling novel by author Margaret Atwood.
Stephanie Kelton is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University. She served as a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Her most recent book is The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy. She gave this talk, presented by Town Hall Seattle, on June 15.
When Seattle based reporter Erica Barnett took her first sip of alcohol as a young teen, she had no idea just how impactful that moment would later become. Nor did she realize how inadequate rehabilitation centers, inspirational self-help mottos, and truisms about a “rock bottom” (something Barnett never truly felt) would be for her.
Author Eve Ensler was the victim of prolonged sexual, physical and mental abuse at the hands of her father.
Dr. Ezekiel (Zeke) Emanuel is an oncologist, a medical ethicist, and the author of Which Country Has the World's Best Healthcare? One simple answer to the question his book poses is, not the world’s two superpowers.
In this conversation, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses how reporters and editors of color are underrepresented in newsrooms. She addresses the idea of objectivity in journalism, which she refers to as the “objectivity fallacy,” and how it impacts journalists of color. The question of reparations for descendants of enslaved people is also explored, with reference to Hannah-Jones’ recent essay What Is Owed.
Representative Pramila Jayapalread from her new book and was interviewed by Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka on July 1. Town Hall Seattle presented the livestreamed event.
Sonia Shah’s latest book is The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. She talked about her book in this Town Hall Seattle live streaming event on June 29.
Dr. Jennifer Atkinson shares strategies for handling existential distress caused by environmental change
Before you delete that friend or family member off your social media, you might want to consider your health.
“I’m a member of the intelligence community… I have an explosive story about a threat to democracy."