Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

• 394. Shannon Watts with Brooke Baldwin: Fired Up

  As founder of Moms Demand Action — the nation’s largest grassroots movement against gun violence — author Shannon Watts has helped thousands of women find their voice and take action. In her new book, Fired Up, Watts outlines a practical and inspiring framework for reigniting purpose, confidence, and ambition. With real-life stories from women across generations and backgrounds, Fired Up offers tools to help readers identify what sparks them and live with greater intention and impact. Watts seeks to challenge the negative narrative that many women hold, asserting that empowerment begins where expectations end. In a world that often pressures women to shrink themselves, choosing to embrace desire and step outside prescribed roles becomes a powerful, even radical, act. Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots group fighting against gun violence. Known as the ‘summoner of women’s audacity,’ she spent more than a decade leading one of the world’s largest field experiments for mobilizing women. She has been named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, a Forbes 50 over 50 Changemaker, and a Glamour Woman of the Year. She is an active board member of Emerge America, one of the nation’s leading organizations for recruiting and training women to run for office. She is the author of the 2019 book Fight Like a Mother, and she writes regularly for Substack and outlets like The Washington Post, Elle, TIME, and more. Brooke Baldwin is a TV host, award-winning journalist and bestselling author. She writes a weekly Substack entitled “Unraveling, with Brooke Baldwin.” It’s inspired by her bombshell first person essay published in Vanity Fair entitled: “Leaving CNN Was How I Found My Voice.” For more than a decade, Brooke anchored her own live daily news show on CNN and was renowned for her versatility, authenticity, and humanity at the news desk. After CNN, Brooke hosted a popular social experiment show on Netflix called The Trust. Brooke is the author of the bestselling book Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power, redefining the word ‘huddle’ to explore how women lean on one another to provide support, empowerment, inspiration, and the strength to enact meaningful change. Brooke now lives in Los Angeles after a ten-year run-in New York City. She is a proud graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Buy the Book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age (Hardcover) Elliott Bay Book Company

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• 393. Megan Greenwell with Jay Willis: Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

  Did you know that private equity firms have a hand in many U.S. industries, including hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, local newspapers, and prison service providers? They also manage highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and a growing swath of real estate. In her new book, Bad Company, journalist Megan Greenwell illuminates how ingrained private equity is, and how it’s preying on the most vulnerable people in our society, controlling congress, and causing destruction in communities around the country. Private equity is a system of finance that pools money from outside investors and huge bank loans to acquire companies that hold a lot of debt. The company retains their debt, which makes it difficult for the company to recover and protects the investors from those debts. This might sound like a lot of finance jargon, but Greenwell wants to show how this industry is affecting all of our lives. Entire communities are ruined as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins, Greenwell argues. Greenwell shares personal experiences of four workers and how private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Throughout these stories, Greenwell highlights how private equity executives are among the wealthiest people in the United States and are reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream. Megan Greenwell is a journalist who has written or edited for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, WIRED, and ESPN. She is also the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, a workshop and college access initiative for students from low-income backgrounds. A California native, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their pug. Jay Willis is a writer who covers courts, politics, and democracy. He is the editor-in-chief at Balls & Strikes, and was previously a staff writer at GQ magazine and a senior contributor to The Appeal. Before his journalism career, he practiced law at large firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle. Buy the Book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream (Hardcover) Elliott Bay Book Company

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• 392. Anna Malaika Tubbs with Florangela Davila: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us

  One guiding principle for resisting the patriarchy in the United States is to demand equal rights for men and women. Yet, author and multidisciplinary expert Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs argues that fighting patriarchal culture is more complicated than that. Tubbs believes that this fabricated hierarchy became so deeply ingrained over time that it now goes unnoticed. She outlines the history of patriarchy in the United States along with everything it intentionally conceals. Pulling from her latest book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us, Tubbs highlights how the United States has its own unique gendered hierarchy. From the founding fathers to the current Supreme Court justices, from enslaved women to maternal health crises, from the exclusion of women in the Constitution to the continued lack of an Equal Rights Amendment, Tubbs brings together academic research, the stories of freedom fighters, and her own experiences to reveal what is erased. She goes further, showing a patriarchal system that has survived by hiding the tools that are necessary to dismantle it. Resisting a patriarchal system, Tubbs believes, is more complicated than once thought. She argues that humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed binary that is also always tied to whiteness. The first step to dismantling patriarchy is to understand how deeply ingrained it is. The next step, Tubbs says, is telling a different story that highlights everything the patriarchy shrouds, and bringing it back into the narrative. Anna Malaika Tubbs is a New York Times bestselling author and multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity. With a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Masters in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelors in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University, Anna translates her academic knowledge into stories that are clear and engaging. Her articles have been published by TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, CNN, Motherly, the Huffington Post, For Harriet, The Guardian, Darling Magazine, and Blavity. Anna’s storytelling also takes form in her talks, including her TED Talk that has been viewed 2 million times, as well as the scripted and unscripted screen projects she has in development. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids. Florangela Davila is a newsroom leader and journalist who has been working in Seattle media for more than two decades. She’s earned regional and national awards for her own work as the former race and immigration reporter for The Seattle Times, and has led teams at Crosscut/Cascade PBS and at KNKX Public Radio to accolades, including the 2024 national Edward R. Murrow award for Overall Excellence in the large market radio category. In February, she joined the BIPOC-led and focused online journalism outlet The South Seattle Emerald as executive director. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, the child of immigrants from Colombia and Peru. Buy the Book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us Elliott Bay Book Company

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• 391. Building a Bikeable Seattle: A Bike Everywhere Day Bash!

  Is Seattle on the cusp of a biking Renaissance? From Beacon Hill to SODO to the Waterfront and Downtown, the next few years will bring major improvements to Seattle’s growing network of connected and separated bike lanes and bike paths. That’s good news for people who want a safer, healthier, more equitable and climate-friendly city. Join Cascade Bicycle Club on Bike Everywhere Day for a conversation with climate journalist and bike advocate Paul Tolme, Biking Uphill in the Rain author and Seattle Bike Blog founder Tom Fucoloro, and Cascade Bicycle Club Policy Manager Tyler Vasquez. Learn about the history of Seattle’s bike advocacy movement, how the passage of Proposition 1 last November is a gamechanger for biking, and how building a Bikeable Seattle is an act of love and compassion. Paul Tolmé is an award winning environmental journalist, former Associated Press staff reporter, and winner of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, Audubon, National Wildlife, Salon, Ski, High Country News, and more publications than he can remember over a 30-year career. In 2020, following his move to Seattle, he switched careers to engage in direct advocacy on climate, transportation safety, and transportation equity as the spokesperson and content strategist for Cascade Bicycle Club, the statewide nonprofit that helped defeat the effort to repeal Washington’s Climate Commitment Act. He lives with his wife on a tiny houseboat on Lake Union and bikes, walks, and uses mass transit to reach nearly all of his Seattle destinations. Tom Fucoloro is the Founder of SeattleBikeBlog.com and author of Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from behind the Handlebars (2023, UW Press). An independent journalist originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Tom has been reporting about bicycling in Seattle since 2010. He is a car-free parent and received Cascade Bicycle Club’s 2023 Doug Walker Award “for outstanding leadership in improving lives through bicycling.” He was a finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award. Tyler Vasquez is a dedicated transportation advocate with experience in policy development, public engagement, and project management. Growing up in a frontline community impacted by inequitable infrastructure decisions, he is committed to ensuring that transportation investments are transparent, accountable, and prioritize historically underserved communities. As an advocate with Cascade Bicycle Club, he works to improve bike infrastructure and safety, ensuring that no one’s right to mobility comes at the cost of their safety. Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Cascade Bicycle Club. Buy the Book Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars Third Place Books

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• 390. Alec Karakatsanis with Erin Papworth: Copaganda—How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

  What if everything you thought you knew about crime and punishment was shaped by those who profit from it? Join us for a discussion with civil rights attorney and author Alec Karakatsanis as he examines “copaganda”—the deliberate manipulation of public perception by police, prosecutors, and the media. Despite historically low crime rates, the United States imprisons far more people than it did just decades ago, driven by a sprawling and profitable punishment industry. Karakatsanis will explore how media narratives fuel fear, distort public policy, and divert attention from systemic harms, challenging us to reconsider who truly benefits from these widespread misrepresentations. Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on the criminal legal system and a featured guest on shows like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and The Breakfast Club, Karakatsanis brings his legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous personal storytelling to delve into one of the most critical topics in our society today. After beginning his career representing people accused of crimes who could not afford an attorney, Alec Karakatsanis founded the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that challenges systemic injustices in the U.S. legal system. In the last decade, the organization’s work has freed hundreds of thousands of people from illegal confinement in jail cells, reunited hundreds of thousands of families, returned tens of millions of dollars to marginalized communities, and advanced inspiring alternatives to punishment as a means of preventing and addressing social harm. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for designing and litigating landmark constitutional challenges to cash bail and modern debtors’ prison practices across the United States. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System and Copaganda (both from The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC, with a community of wonderful friends, family, weird paintings, a garden, and his rock collection. Erin Papworth, MPH, is a serial entrepreneur, executive, and ex-fintech founder, with a robust background in healthcare, finance, and technology. After leading multi-million dollar health programs in West and Central Africa, Erin co-founded Nav.it, a U.S.-based AI-driven financial wellness app. Nav.it was acquired by The Fintex Group (TFG) in Q1 2025. She is now the CEO of luupo, Inc, a subsidiary of TFG, bringing the mission of more inclusive consumer banking to TFG’s global banking and payments network. Erin is an avid traveler, startup advisor, and maintains connections to research institutes, primarily documenting the outcomes of investing in diverse entrepreneurs and social enterprise. Buy the Book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News Elliott Bay Book Company

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