Commonwealth Club of California Archives

Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America

For the first time, a story about the specialized teams of forensic psychologists, FBI agents, and other experts who are successfully stopping mass shootings—a hopeful, myth-busting narrative built on new details of infamous attacks, never-before-told accounts from perpetrators and survivors, and real-time immersion in confidential threat cases, casting a whole new light on how to solve an ongoing national crisis. […Learn More]

Bitch: On the Female of the Species

Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. […Learn More]

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century’s most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day-in cities and states throughout the country. […Learn More]

Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom

A dramatic true story about Sigmund Freud’s last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria and the group of friends who made it possible. […Learn More]

Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

RISE is a love letter to and for Asian Americans–a vivid scrapbook of voices, emotions, and memories from an era in which our culture was forged and transformed, and a way to preserve both the headlines and the intimate conversations that have shaped our community into who we are today. […Learn More]

This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You

This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it’s also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince’s chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits ,including Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week,” as one of the most successful female record producers of all time. […Learn More]

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How to Survive Them

Renowned economist Nouriel Roubini was nicknamed “Dr. Doom,” until his prediction of the 2008 housing crisis and Great Recession came true–when it was too late. Now he is back with a much scarier prediction, one that we ignore at our peril. There are no fewer than ten overlapping, interconnected threats that are so serious, he calls them Megathreats. […Learn More]

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination

The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy—by a leading tech journalist

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. […Learn More]

The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places are Building the New American Dream

Steve Case, cofounder of America Online and Revolution and New York Times bestselling author of The Third Wave, shows how entrepreneurs across the country are building groundbreaking companies, renewing communities, and creating new jobs—in the process reimagining the American landscape and bringing people together around a shared future. […Learn More]

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy

Astrophysicist and folklorist Dr. Moiya McTier channels The Milky Way in this approachable and utterly fascinating autobiography of the titular galaxy, detailing what humans have discovered about everything from its formation to its eventual death, and what more there is to learn about this galaxy we call home. […Learn More]