Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan met as doctoral students in UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric department. The friends became writing partners, collaborating on stories as they lived through the pandemic. The collaboration culminated in the publication of their 2025 memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once.

Television writer and creator Sanjay Shah '99 discusses the realities of entertainment writing, from breaking into the industry to running a writers' room, offering advice to students.

Prominent Russian writer Victor Erofeev offers a provocative exploration of the “new barbarism” of the 21st century, in which power eclipses justice.

Visionary computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier is known for his critical perspective on the digital world. He discusses the impact of A.I. on writing and the intellectual skills that inform it.

Sonali Deraniyagala lost her entire family, including two sons, in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She discusses Wave, her bestselling memoir on the experience, which won the PEN Ackerley Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the magazine’s TV critic. She talks with author and New Yorker critic Hilton Als.

Katrina Dodson, winner of the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, reflects on why there is no such thing as a perfect translation, and why the work of translating requires inhabiting other worlds.

Writer, journalist, and scholar Carlo Rotella is joined in conversation by UC Berkeley professor of English Scott Saul.

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, Moneyball, and other bestselling books, discusses his career and practice as a writer.