Moises Kaufman is founder of “Tectonic Theater Project” and is also creator of The Laramie Project which is about the reaction to the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming gay student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Hear Tony Taccone, artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theater, in conversation with this groundbreaking playwright and director.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:24 — 25.8MB)

Former California State Historian Kevin Starr talks to KGO Radio’s John Rothmann about the final volume of his magnum opus on the Golden State.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:46 — 25.5MB)

Canin is an American educator, author, and physician. He pursued both medicine and writing for years, leaving medicine in 1998 to join the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he still teaches and is a co-founder of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:15 — 25.3MB)

A prominent Kabbalah scholar, Moshe Idel discusses the role of magic in Jewish mysticism, the use of amulets and incantations, and the persistence of the Jewish magical tradition in contemporary Israeli society. In conversation with Nathaniel Deutsch of UC Santa Cruz.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:43 — 26.0MB)

Part of the pleasure of reading Jonathan Lethem lies in charting the author’s cultural obsessions. His early books were born under the sign of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick, and later works sealed his reputation as the consummate young novelist with dense cross-weaves of Brooklyn, 1970′s art rock, and Italo Calvino.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:00 — 25.6MB)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres has written eleven novels. An outspoken anti-Bush blogger, Smiley speaks her mind on subjects ranging from horse training to marriage, Barbie, and impulse buying. Her new novel Ten Days in the Hills is about Hollywood and sex.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:26 — 26.7MB)

The man Bill Clinton called “the real Slick Willie” shares his political calculation in this election year. Listen as the former San Francisco mayor and speaker of the California Assembly continues to tell it like it is.

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Thirty-something feminist activist Jennifer Baumgardner argues that the women’s movement didn’t necessarily provide her generation with a road map to the equal, fulfilling relationships that they expected. It is the insurgent voices of bisexual women, she says, that are furthering the aims of the feminist dream for a better world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:54 — 21.9MB)

World-renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo tells us how good people sometimes turn evil, a phenomenon he calls The Lucifer Effect Zimbardo’s classic work is The Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students took on roles of captor and captive with startling results.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:59 — 26.1MB)

Meet the man behind the books and controversy, Turkish novelist and Nobel-prize winner Orhan Pamuk, whose works include The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow and Istanbul.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:00 — 27.0MB)