The Long Now Foundation presents a talk series in 2025 and 2026 in the Cowell Theater, Pier 2 at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture.

For Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.), Lynn Rothschild discusses “Nature’s Hardware Store: Building The Future With Biology” in the Cowell Theater. Rothschild is a research scientist at NASA Ames and Adjunct Professor at Brown University and Stanford University working in astrobiology, evolutionary biology, and synthetic biology. Tickets are available at EventBrite.com.

AI scholar and award-winning artist Kate Crawford leads the discussion “Mapping Empires” on Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.) in the Cowell. Crawford is a professor at the University of Southern California in LA, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Labs New York, Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She founded multiple research centers around the world, and currently leads the interdisciplinary lab called Knowing Machines. Crawford is the author of Atlas Of AI: Power, Politics, And The Planetary Costs Of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021). Tickets are available at EventBrite.com.

A special screening of Gary Hustwit’s innovative film ENO takes place in the Cowell Theater on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 8:30 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. ENO Is a generative documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno. The film uses software to screen sequences with music that are different every time it screens. Tickets are available at EventBee. Watch a trailer on YouTube.

On Tuesday, January 27, 2026, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.), Indy Johar speaks in the Cowell Theater. Johar is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture 00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open-source housing) and Open Desk (open-source furniture company). Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. Johar is currently a professor at RMIT University. Tickets are on sale soon.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister addresses “Finally, Something Good” on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.), in the Cowell Theater. Sagmeister designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, and the Guggenheim Museum. He’s a two-time Grammy winner and also earned practically every important international design award. Stefan talks about the large subjects of our lives like happiness or beauty, how they connect to design and what that actually means to our everyday lives. Tickets are on sale soon.

On Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.), Melody Jue is on stage in the Cowell Theater. She is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and writings focus on ocean humanities, science fiction, media studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. Professor Jue is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Prize, and the co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke University Press, 2021) with Rafico Ruiz. Forthcoming books include Coralations (Minnesota Press, 2025) and the edited collection Informatics of Domination (Duke Press, 2025) with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee. Her photo essay book with Maya Weeks, Holding Sway: Seaweeds And The Politics Of Form (University Of California Humanities Research Unit, 2023), examines the media of seaweeds across transpacific contexts. Tickets are on sale soon.

Artist Katie Paterson appears live at the Cowell Theater on Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.). Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic, and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Tickets are on sale soon.

On Tuesday, May 5, 2026, Báyò Akómoláfé speaks in the Cowell Theater, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (check-in begins at 6:00 p.m.). He is a philosopher, writer, activist, professor of psychology, and executive director of The Emergence Network. Rooted with the Yoruba people, Akómoláfé works as an essayist, poet, and is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters To My Daughter On Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017) and c0-author of We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions Of Africa Speak (Universal Write Publications, 2017). Tickets are on sale soon.