The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth). Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.

In PALO ALTO: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the “tragedy of the commons,” racial genetics, and “broken windows” theory. The Internet and computers, too. It’s a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century.

Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Harris about his urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, and his radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

Read PALO ALTO, named One of the Year’s Best Books by Vulture, The New Republic, Dazed, Wired, Bloomberg, Esquire, Salon, and The Next Big Idea Club.

A History of California, Capitalism, and the World: Malcolm Harris on New Book “Palo Alto”

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About the Guest

Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials (2017), Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History (2020), and most recently, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023). He is a journalist, critic, and editor at The New Inquiry. Harris’ materialist analysis frames and re-casts prevailing narratives surrounding the development of the United States within a global economic context, offering an incisive Marxist reading of the contemporary history of California.

About the Moderator

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.

About The Forum

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors, and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  More about Grace Forum Online.

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