Issue No. 4

  • September 9, 2010
  • |
  • Herbst Theater
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  • San Francisco

Contributors

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times best-sellers Packing for Mars, Stiff, Spook, and Bonk. She is an occasional blogger on Boing Boing, the guest editor of the 2011 Best American Science and Nature Writing, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.

Steven Leckart is a frequent contributor to WIRED, where he most recently wrote about iconic gadget prototypes. His work has also appeared in GOOD, Maxim, Boing Boing and Longshot Magazine. For even shorter doses, you can follow @stevenleckart on Twitter. Photos accompanying tonight's piece were shot by Jonathan Snyder.

Titania Kumeh, Maddie Oatman, Eric Sullivan, and Zoë Slutzky make up 57% of Mother Jones magazine's crack San Francisco fact-checking team. The other 43% are probably still at the office.

Tim Dickinson (@7im) is a National Affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone.

Sandip Roy is host of New America Now on KALW 91.7 FM and an editor with New America Media. He is also a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition and blogs on Huffington Post. His writing has appeared in a variety of local and international outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle, India Abroad, the Times of India and Salon.com. He lives in San Francisco with a blind Chihuahua and a fat tomcat.

Jason Polan's drawings have been exhibited all over the United States, Europe and Asia. He is currently drawing every person in New York, and is a member of that city's 53rd Street Biological Society and Taco Bell Drawing Club. Polan's work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and ARTnews.

Novella Carpenter is the author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Her education continues on her "farmlette" in Oakland where she keeps goats, rabbits, ducks, bees and chickens. Carpenter is working on a new memoir about her mountain-man dad, goat breeding, and elk habitat restoration.

Eli Horowitz is the coauthor of Everything You Know Is Pong (coming this November), as well as The Clock Without a Face, a Gus Twintig mystery. He edits and designs books for McSweeney's.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists' Fellowship, and the artistic director of the HBO documentary Brave New Voices. His performance piece 'red black and GREEN: a blues' about the eco-equity movement in Black neighborhoods opens at the Yerba Buena Center next Fall. He is at work on a libretto for the Atlanta Ballet, and is co-writing a narrative score with Amiri Baraka for the Chicago Jazz Ensemble.

Dwight Eschliman is an obsessive compulsive San Francisco-based artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and WIRED as well as campaigns for Absolut, Apple, Audi, and other companies whose names do not begin with the letter "A." Recently Dwight has been focusing on the Twinkie.
See: eschlimanphoto.com/twinkie.

Adam Starr is a freelance writer and editor living in San Francisco. He's written food reviews for the ONION Bay Area and contributes regularly to GOOD Magazine.

Vero Majano was born and raised in San Francisco's Mission district. She was a resident at the Djerassi Resident Artist program and has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship, the Puffin Foundation, and the Free History Project. Majano is a cofounder of Mission Media Archives, which collects and preserves audio and films shot in the Mission during the 1970s and 80s.

Yiyun Li was recently named one of the top 20 fiction writers under 40 by The New Yorker. She is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and the upcoming Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.

Amanda Micheli is an Oscar-nominated director and a celebrated cinematographer. Her first film "Just for the Ride" won a student Oscar and IDA Award. Her film "La Corona" premiered at Sundance and won an Oscar nod before airing on HBO. Micheli's other credits include "Double Dare," "Cat Dancers," "Brave New Voices," and "30 Days."

John Konrad is a maritime expert and licensed ship captain. A graduate of SUNY Maritime College, he has sailed the world on various ships including supertankers in Valdez, Alaska and large oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. As founder of the leading maritime blog, gCaptain.com, he has written numerous articles on the exploration, production and transportation of oil. John is currently writing Fire On The Horizon, a book about the BP oil spill.

Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New American Foundation and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank. She has written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post, WIRED, and Discover, among others.

Nishat Kurwa is a senior producer at Youth Radio, and a co-developer of its digital and social enterprise strategies, including the online music hub AllDayPlay.fm. Her past reporting has looked at art and technology innovations in the U.S., and youth culture in India, Afghanistan, and South Africa. Hang around her for awhile, and you're bound to hear her trying to harmonize to "Make Me Say It Again, Girl" out loud and off-key.

Debbie Lum is in post-production on her feature-length documentary debut: "Seeking Asian Female." An award-winning San Francisco-based independent filmmaker, Lum's previous films are humorous and intimate character-driven stories about love and the Asian American experience. As an editor, she worked with Wayne Wang, Deann Borshay, Philip Kaufman, S. Leo Chiang and Spencer Nakasako, on films such as "Kelly Loves Tony," which she also co-produced.

Jim Goldberg is a Professor of Art at the California College of Arts and a member of Magnum Photos. His award-winning photographs, often displayed with text and other multimedia elements, have been exhibited internationally for over 30 years and are featured in numerous collections including the SFMOMA, the Whitney, the Getty, and the Library of Congress. Goldberg's editorial and advertising work has appeared in many publications including W, GQ, Rebel, and The New Yorker.

Singeli Agnew's work has appeared in productions for PBS, HBO and National Geographic, as well as numerous independent films. Her short documentary "Pollen Nation" was the first film to look at the phenomena of industrialized pollination, and she was the Associate Producer for Steven Okazaki's Academy-Award nominated film "The Conscience of Nhem En."

The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) are producers of the duPont-Columbia Award-winning NPR series Hidden Kitchens, and two Peabody Award-winning NPR collaborations, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project. They are dedicated to creating intimate, sound-rich documentaries that bring seldom-heard voices to the air, mentoring young producers, and building community through storytelling. Their current NPR series, The Hidden World of Girls, explores the lives of girls and the women they become.

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. He is currently working on a book about people and wild animals in America.