Book Clubs San Francisco
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Habermas and the Instruments of Domination
Thu, Oct 22, 1:00 AMScience and technology are often celebrated as engines of human progress, promising greater freedom, prosperity, and control over our environment. But what if technological progress also serves to reinforce existing structures of power? What happens when political and moral questions are increasingly treated as technical problems to be solved by experts? In his influential 1968 essay *Technology and Science as "Ideology,"* Jürgen Habermas builds on the work of Max Weber and Herbert Marcuse to examine how scientific and technological rationality can become instruments of political and economic domination. He distinguishes between instrumental action, concerned with efficiency and control, and communicative interaction, through which people establish shared norms and determine how society ought to be organized. We'll discuss whether science and technology are inherently political, whether technological progress necessarily produces human progress, and whether Habermas's critique remains relevant in an age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance. **Are we becoming more rational as a society, or simply more efficient at pursuing goals we've never collectively chosen?** The reading can be found [here](https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/technology_and_science_as_ideology.pdf)
October 2026 Book Discussion: The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Sun, Oct 25, 7:00 PM**Our October Book Has Been Chosen! 📚** **Thanks to everyone who voted! Our next Books & Brew read is:** **🌿 The Vegetarian — Han Kang** **Grab a copy, start reading, and join us for a great conversation!** **About the Book** **After a series of disturbing dreams, Yeong-hye makes the seemingly simple decision to stop eating meat. But as her family reacts with increasing confusion, anger, and attempts to control her, that decision becomes the beginning of a much more profound transformation.** **Told through the perspectives of those around Yeong-hye, The Vegetarian explores autonomy, desire, conformity, violence, and the ways we understand—or fail to understand—the people closest to us.** **Originally published in Korean and translated by Deborah Smith, Han Kang’s unsettling novel won the 2016 International Booker Prize and invites plenty of questions about identity, choice, and what happens when someone refuses to live according to the expectations placed upon them.** **──────────** **📸 Follow us on Instagram @booksandbrew_oakland for meetup photos, book announcements, and future events.**
Book Club: "Cat's People" by Tanya Guerrero
Fri, Oct 23, 1:30 AMHalloween is coming up but instead of reading a scary horror story, let's read an uplifting tale where a black cat is a main character! We'll discuss "Cat's People" by Tanya Guerrero. There are several copies available at the library so it should be easy to get! The location is TBD but will be in the Burlingame/San Mateo/Foster City area. We'll decide after the September meeting! Everyone will be waitlisted initially. Priority will be given to previous attendees of book club and regular attendees of the group. For details on attendance & waitlist, please see the "About us" description for the group. **Book Summary - "Cat's People" by Tanya Guerrero** Publication Year: 2025 Page Count: 300 Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a resentment for the "crazy cat lady" label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On one of her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-It notes from a secret admirer at the spot where her favorite stray lives—a black cat named Cat. Like most cats, he is rather curious and sly, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless. Are the notes from Collin, a bestselling author and self-professed hermit with a weakness for good coffee? Are they from Lily, a fresh-out-of-high school Georgia native searching for her long-lost half-sister? Are they from Omar, the beloved neighborhood mailman going through an early mid-life crisis? Or are they from Bong, the grieving widower who owns her favorite bodega? When Cat suddenly falls ill, these five strangers find themselves connected in their desire to care for him and discover that chance encounters can lead to the meaningful connections they've been searching for.
Profs & Pints San Francisco: The Rise of Vampires
Tue, Oct 13, 1:30 AM[Profs and Pints San Francisco](https://www.profsandpints.com/sfbayarea) presents: **“The Rise of Vampires,”** on the folkloric origins and literary evolution of today’s fanged fiends, with Sara Hackenberg, professor of English at San Francisco State University and scholar of Victorian literature and literature’s vampire tradition. [Tickets must be purchased online, at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-rise-of-vampires](https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-rise-of-vampires) .] Did you know that vampires sprang from literature nearly a whole century before Bram Stoker wrote *Dracula*, and that they prowled in folklore for centuries before that? You’d have to visit a lot of gravesites to witness the unearthing of as many vampires as will be raised at the October 12th debut of Profs and Pints at The Dairy community space at San Francisco’s Presidio Sports Basement. The excavation will be carried out by Professor Sara Hackenberg, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on vampires and Christmas ghost stories. She’ll show you the vampire beneath the vampire beneath the vampire, tracing their evolution in old European folklore and the English literature of the nineteenth-century. You’ll get to know the seductive, snaky Lamia in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 poem “Christabel” and the sapphic seductress at the center of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. You’ll spend time with the mad, bad, and dangerous Byronic vampire that originated in John Polidori’s 1819 gothic horror story “The Vampyre,” found his way into theatrical adaptations such as James Planché’s 1820 “The Bride of the Isles,” and then stalked through cheap popular publications–known as “penny bloods” or later as “penny dreadfuls”—such as James Malcolm Rymer’s mid-1800s serial *Varney, The Vampire.* We’ll consider how Bram Stoker was influenced by all of these texts and folded a variety of characteristics of their fearsome femmes and hommes fatales into Count Dracula, the most famous literary vampire of all. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Door price: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: “The Premature Burial,” an 1854 painting by Antoine Wiertz (Wiertz Museum / Wikimedia).
CONSCIOUS GIRL LIT CLUB: Communion
Thu, Nov 5, 3:00 AMCommunion by bell hooks Inspired by: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWonXNrjW8j/
SF CogSci #33: Behave, by Robert Sapolsky
Wed, Oct 21, 2:00 AMWe're continuing Behave, by Robert Sapolsky - moving on from chapters 1-6, which we discussed last time, and doing the rest of the book. If you're attending in person, please be sure to register [here](https://luma.com/san-francisco-cognitive-science-reading--5c00) as well, so you can get into the building. Thank you! Tom
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