Hello internet friends,

We’re trapped at home and you are also probably most likely trapped at home as well. So let's all get together, from the comfort of our own bunkers, and talk about something else for an hour. We invite an author in to talk about their work and answer questions from you, the audience.

About the author: Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated writer, activist, and comedian who has worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show, advised the Obama White House, and cleaned bathrooms to pay for his Harvard education. He hosts the iHeartMedia podcast Spit, wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black, and serves on the boards of BUILD and the Brooklyn Public Library. Baratunde makes media, delivers keynotes, and promotes action with his unique blend of criticism, humor, and optimism. He’s most invested in topics of race, technology, democracy, and climate because the hard stuff has already been solved.

Baratunde has an uncanny ability to crack the shell of any uncomfortable topic through a personal, accessible, and intelligent point of view.

With an ancestry that includes a great-grandfather who taught himself to read, a grandmother who was the first black employee at the U.S. Supreme Court building, a computer-programming mother who took over radio stations in the name of the black liberation struggle, and an older sister who teaches yoga at her donation-based studio in Lansing, Michigan, Baratunde has long been taught to question authority and forge his own path. It helps that he was raised in Washington, D.C. under crackhead Mayor Marion Barry.

His creative and inquisitive mind, forged by his mother’s lessons and polished by a philosophy degree from Harvard, have found expression in the pages of Fast Company, the screens of HBO, Comedy Central, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, the sound waves of NPR and roughly one bajillion podcasts, including Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race, which he co-founded. He has hosted shows and stories on NatGeo, Discovery's Science Channel, Yahoo, AOL, YouTube, and Pivot TV. In 2016 he hosted a special three-part PBS series of TED Talks and earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for the Spotify/Mic series, Clarify.

Far from simply appearing in media, Baratunde is also helping define its future. In 2006 he co-founded Jack & Jill Politics, a black political blog whose coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention has been archived by the Library of Congress. From 2007 to 2012, he helped bring one of America's finest journalistic institutions into the future, serving as Director of Digital for The Onion then did something similar as Supervising Producer for digital expansion at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. He has been a judge for the Knight Foundation News Challenge, an affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab. His book, How To Be Black, was published by Harper Collins in February 2012 and is a New York Times best-seller.

In 2012, he co-founded Cultivated Wit, a comedic digital company on a quest to merge comedy and technology into a new genre of creative expression, with Brian Janosch and Craig Cannon. The company produced Comedy Hack Day during which developers and comedians collaborated to make intentionally funny tech projects that humanize technology while offering social commentary on the world at large.

The ACLU of Michigan honored Baratunde “for changing the political and social landscape one laugh at a time.” He was nominated for the Bill Hicks Award for Thought Provoking Comedy. The Root named him to its list of 100 most influential African Americans, and Fast Company listed him as one of the 100 Most Creative People In Business. He has advised the Obama White House and serves on the National Board of BUILD, an organization that uses entrepreneurship-based experiential learning to propel underserved youth through high school on to college and career success. He also serves as a mayoral appointee to the Brooklyn Public Library board of trustees.

About the book: In February 2012, How To Be Black became Baratunde’s first book published by someone not named Baratunde. Released by Harper in digital, audio, and print formats, the book became a New York Times best-seller. NPR’s Terry Gross talked with Baratunde about the book, recorded that conversation, and distributed it to the world.

The book is a comedic memoir, chronicling Baratunde’s coming-of-blackness from his early childhood raised by an Afrocentric single mother in Washington, D.C. through his education at The Sidwell Friends School and Harvard and into his first job making PowerPoint presentations in a field known as “consulting.”

The biographical story is periodically punctuated by satirical “lessons learned” chapters such as “How To Be The Black Friend,” “How To Speak For All Black People,” and “How To Be The (Next) Black President.” Finally, the book includes interviews with a panel of black experts, which is to say, black people (plus one white Canadian male as a scientific control group).

The book is written for anyone who can read, possesses intelligence, loves to laugh, and has ever felt a distance between who they know themselves to be and what the world expects.

BUY THE BOOK!

Ticket price: $5. Cheap. And the guest gets a cut. We used to do events in person that required all of us to get in a car or plane. Now the planet is better off and you can participate from wherever you are. We guarantee you'll get more than $5 value out of it, and charging admission makes it more likely that the people who sign up plan to show up. We know these are uncertain times to say the least, so no one is turned away! Use code: ALLAREWELCOME for a free ticket if you need to.

How does it work? We use the conferencing system Zoom. After you sign up you'll get an email with the Zoom access code. You don’t have to join with video, but it’s nice to see faces.

What if it totally sucks? You'll get your $5 back and we'll all have learned something.