December 2020

Happy Holidays from all of us at CPS Lectures and The diaTribe Foundation!

It has really been a remarkable year, in every sense, and we wanted to thank you all for your continued support of our CPS series. With the year coming to an end, we want to take a moment to reflect and look to 2021.
 
1. Top five recommendations to order (or pre-order) for you as well as for incredible gifts.

 

2. What an incredible 14 stirring CPS lecturers from 2020 – we started with CPS Lectures #131, the El Susto Bay Area screening in January 2020, and a massive crowd for Recode’s Kara Swisher on February 27, 2020. We are not sure if we’ll ever see such a crowd again unmasked. Our next gathering happened April 23, 2020, and you went fully virtual with us and Prof. Catherine Sanderson of Amherst College, reading and talking long into the night on Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels. Our last discussion was last week with IDEO’s former senior partner Fred Dust – a tour de force conversation. We are so grateful that you continued to join us virtually and we loved welcoming old friends from all over the globe – watch the recordings at cpslectures.org! And, please urge friends outside the Bay Area to join our mailing list – there’s so much to play for.

We can’t begin to thank these authors, scholars, thinkers, and writers enough for sharing their wisdom and answering our questions as well as so many of you for tuning in. In all, nearly 750 of us came together in community, in groups between 15 and 60 in size, on Zoom, in person, all of us curious, open, kind, loving, and ready to learn.



3. Do you have connections to these writers/public figures? If so, please urge them to come to CPS Lectures! We have invited some of them in the past, and the invite is always open. If you could put in a good word, we would be so grateful. We have exactly zero of these leaders lined up to speak in 2021, but we’ve asked all of them at least once, many of them multiple times …. Let us know what you can do!

 

4. In addition to those noted above, here are four very special additional authors who have already (!) agreed to speak with us in 2021 – please buy or pre-order their books now!

 

5. And, check out these incredible volumes from past and future (we hope) speakers!

We love that this series has been free since its inception - your gifts to The diaTribe Foundation to help offset the costs of CPS Lectures have been extremely generous. Your support allows us to continue to bring top-tier speakers to the Bay Area, and we thank you immensely. 

 

BIG REQUEST! We’ve raised $3,232 for diaTribe this year from CPS Lectures guests and helped defray our expenses immensely! We’re looking, in anticipation of hybrid gatherings by late 2021, for multiple hybrid gatherings. Do you have anything (wine, a stay in a hotel or home, gift certificates to deserving restaurants) to share as a silent auction item?  

LAST, we are always looking to add people to our mailing list! Please ask your friends and family to consider signing up, and if you have any speaker suggestions, we would LOVE to hear them! You can also email us directly at cps@diatribe.org.

Happy reading! We wish you all a beautiful holiday season, and I am hoping to have everyone back at home with John and Coco and Lola and Valentino and me in 2021.



yours truly,

Kelly L. Close