Emeriti/ae Lunch Discussions

• Wednesday, April 15, 2026 | Leader: Michael Kaplan | Iran: what next—implications of possible leadership change…pragmatic, splintering, worse?
  • How might Iran evolve? Might Mojtaba Khamenei pursue a more moderate course, focusing on economy rather than their prior failed approach? Is Ali Lirajani likely the most important leader (with Mojtaba deferring to him)? If Iran caters to preserving IRGC economic interests (including safely shipping oil) and yields on nuclear, proxies, and ballistics would hard line clerics/IRGC be more accepting than if a more moderate person (like grandson) had been appointed? Are non-Persians (40% of Iran’s 95M people: Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs) capable of rebellion given their lack of arms c/w Basij? How will US act? If Iran develops favorably how likely is Israel, hoping to normalize relations with the Arab world, to declare willingness to work with a Palestinian moderate new leader toward evolving to some version of a Palestinian state if that leader recognizes Israel and denounces terrorism and Hamas?
• Monday, May 4, 2026 | Leader: Peter Moskowitz | An Experiential Retirement Planning Mini-Workshop
  • You’ve Retired or are about to Retire from your Academic Career: What in the world are you going to do next? What do you want your next Life Chapter to look like?
• Thursday, May 14, 2026 | Leader: Michael Kaplan | AI in Medicine
  • AI in Medicine is more than asking Chat GPT 5.2 questions; though curated AI indeed does this accurately and with patience and empathy…but LLMs are not “intelligent” per se nor do they possess “judgment.” AI can in real time listen to a doctor-patient interaction (with permission) and make suggestions to the physician. It can review imaging (MRI, CT, retinal images), not just reports, and be as accurate as most physicians. Is this widespread and accelerating use of AI wise and safe; does it risk over-reliance by physicians in training? Should AI play a different role in medically underserved areas both worldwide and in rural US? These and other aspects of the impact of AI in Medicine are discussed.
• Thursday, May 28, 2026 | Leader: Eugene Carragee | The Hype and Misuse of LLMs in Clinical Medicine and Electronic Medical Records
  • We will discuss the new data and reports on the relatively poor performance or LLM in clinical encounter monitoring, imaging reading and EMR summary products that can and have negatively impacted patient care and management decisions. The implications of bizarre hype and exaggerated claims made by the industry supporting the aggressive use of these modalities will be countersued against the real world cost of widely disseminated use.

To attend a lunch discussion, please sign up here.

You do not need to read the book to participate in the lunch — the author will tell you a bit about the book and then look forward to your questions and to the group’s conversation.

• Monday, April 13, 2026 | Author: Albert Camarillo | Book: Compton in my Soul
  • When Al Camarillo grew up in Compton, California, racial segregation was the rule. His relatives were among the first Mexican immigrants to settle there—in the only neighborhood where Mexicans were allowed to live. The city's majority was then White, and Compton would shift to a predominantly Black community over Al's youth. Compton in My Soul weaves Al's personal story with histories of this now-infamous place, and illuminates a changing US society—the progress and backslides over half a century for racial equality and educational opportunity. Entering UCLA in the mid 1960s, Camarillo was among the first students of color, one of only forty-four Mexican Americans on a campus of thousands. He became the first Mexican American in the country to earn a PhD in Chicano/Mexican American history, and established himself as a preeminent US historian with a prestigious appointment at Stanford University. In this candid and warm-hearted memoir, Camarillo offers his career as a vehicle for tracing the evolution of ethnic studies, reflecting on intergenerational struggles to achieve racial equality from the perspective at once of a participant and an historian. Camarillo's story is a quintessential American chronicle and speaks to the best and worst of who we are as a people and as a nation. He unmasks fundamental contradictions in American life—racial injustice and interracial cooperation, inequality and equal opportunity, racial strife and racial harmony. Even as legacies of inequality still haunt American society, Camarillo writes with a message of hope for a better, more inclusive America—and the aspiration that his life's journey can inspire others as they start down their own path.
• Wednesday, May 6, 2026 | Leader: Shelley Fisher Fishkin | Book: Jim: The Lives and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade
  • Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he is viewed as an emblem both of Twain’s alleged racism and of his opposition to racism; a diminished character inflected by minstrelsy and a powerful challenge to minstrel stereotypes; a reason for banning Huckleberry Finn and a reason for teaching it; an embarrassment and a source of pride for Black readers. Eminent Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin probes these controversies, exploring who Jim was, how Twain portrayed him, and how the world has responded to him. Fishkin also follows Jim’s many afterlives: in film, from Hollywood to the Soviet Union; in translation around the world; and in American high school classrooms today. The result is Jim as we have never seen him before—a fresh and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable Black characters in American fiction.
• Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | Author: Steven Zipperstein | Book: Philip Roth
  • In this groundbreaking literary biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures the complex life and astonishing work of Philip Roth (1933–2018), one of America’s most celebrated writers. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and books were often set—Roth wrote with ambition and awareness of what was required to produce great literature. No writer was more dedicated to his craft, even as he was rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances. And yet, as much as Roth wrote about sex and self, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words). Zipperstein explores the unprecedented range of Roth’s work—from “Goodbye, Columbus” and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Drawing on extensive archival materials and over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth about his life and work, Zipperstein provides an intimate and insightful look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, placing his work in the context of his obsessions, as well as American Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality.
• Friday, May 15, 2026 | Author: Thomas Mullaney | Book: The Chinese Computer
  • A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device? In The Chinese Computer, Thomas S. Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls ‘hypography.’ Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II up through to its many iterations in the present day.
• Wednesday, May 20, 2026 | Leader: Deborah Gordon | Book: The Ecology of Collective Behavior
  • Collective behavior is everywhere in nature, from gene transcription and cancer cells to ant colonies and human societies. It operates without central control, using local interactions among participants to allow groups to adjust to changing conditions. The Ecology of Collective Behavior brings together ideas from evolutionary biology, network science, and dynamical systems to present an ecological approach to understanding how the interactions of individuals generate collective outcomes.
• Tuesday, June 2, 2026 | Leader: Gordon Chang | Book: War, Race and Culture
  • Writing history, the systematic effort to understand the human past, is a demanding intellectual endeavor. For historian Gordon H. Chang, it has also been a personal and moral enterprise intimately connected to his commitment to realizing a better world. This career-spanning anthology brings together significant essays, developing conversations across his broad-ranging research interests and personal history and engaging a range of topics, from diplomatic history and Asian American history to art history.

To attend a lunch discussion with a Stanford author, please sign up here.

This quarter, lunches will be held in private rooms, offering a more intimate setting for thoughtful dialogue. If you are interested in serving as a discussion leader, please email stanfordemeriticouncil@stanford.edu with your preferred date(s) and proposed topic(s).