Alexis Madrigal Will Forever Change the Way You See Oakland

Our favorite morning radio personality is returning to Arts & Culture! Of course, Alexis Madrigal needs almost no introduction. He spoke to an overflow crowd at the club last year about the making of his 9 a.m. segment of KQED’s Forum. This year, he will discuss his brand new book about Oakland: .

On Tuesday, April 1 at 7 p.m., Alexis will talk about how the book evolved from nearly a decade of his reporting on Oakland, the technology industry, and the global economy. He describes Pacific Circuit as both a local story about “a fiery, hilarious community leader” in West Oakland named Margaret Gordon and a global story about how her slice of the city became “the origin point for a new way of organizing the economy.”

Tickets for this program are $5 for club members and students and $10 for non-members. Please register early so we can be sure to accommodate everyone comfortably. (Note that this program is the first Tuesday, not the usual first Wednesday.)

A resident of Oakland himself, Alexis believes it sits squarely at “the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century” and is emblematic of the changes in many American cities. As he explains, “The questions that power this book are not only at play in Oakland. What are cities becoming when the big money is made inside a screen or manufactured somewhere in Asia? What is a city, and this city, for? And what does Oakland owe to its residents, whether or not they own property?”

Pacific Circuit is a “dazzlingly imaginative (and surprisingly hopeful) telling of how everything ― our cities, our globalized economy, our planet ― ended up this way and how it all started in Oakland,” writes Pulitzer-Prize winning author Hua Hsu. “[This book] is a marvel of real-life storytelling, making the world around us feel vast and magical, full of casual treachery as well as spaces of hope."

Before he became a familiar voice on KQED four years ago, Alexis was a He co-founded that magazine’s COVID Tracking Project, which filled the surprisingly large gaps in the government’s ability to monitor the pandemic. He also was the editor-in-chief of Fusion TV, a pay channel of news and satire; a ; and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Information School.

Alexis also is the author of and publishes an eclectic Substack newsletter called

If you came to Alexis’s talk last year or have heard him on Forum, you know what an engaging, thoughtful speaker he is. Register early for this chance to hear him in person again ― or for the first time.

Host or Publisher Berkeley City Club