Meet Your Host

David Talbot is a progressive author, journalist and media entrepreneur. Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Devil’s Chessboard and Brothers, as well as the national bestseller Season of the Witch. His most recent book, the memoir Between Heaven and Hell, was published in 2020 by Chronicle Books. He recently coauthored a history book with his sister Margaret Talbot (a staff writer at The New Yorker), By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution. The book, which will be published by HarperCollins in June, focuses on compelling turning points in the lives of radical heroes in the 1960s and ‘70s and what we can learn from them today.

Before becoming a best-selling historian, Talbot founded Salon, the pioneering online magazine, which he oversaw for its first ten years, from 1995 to 2005. He also worked as a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine and a features editor at the San Francisco Examiner when it was a Hearst publication. Talbot’s articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and elsewhere and he was featured as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Talbot lives in San Francisco with his wife, Camille Peri, who is writing a dual biography of novelist Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny for Viking-Penguin. David and Camille’s son, Joe Talbot, directed The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the widely praised film which won Joe the Best Director Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Their younger son, Nat, is a college student and activist in San Francisco.