About us > Past productions > 2010/11 > Let Me Down Easy
post-show panel discussion
A Symphony of Ideas:
A Conversation About the Body and the Body Politic
- Moderated by Anna Deavere Smith and Paul Costello
- Wednesday, August 17 / 8:45pm
- Featuring—Dr. Judith Butler, Dr. Arnold Milstein, Janice Mirikitani and Lance Williams *
Paul Costello
Chief Communications Officer
Stanford School of Medicine
Paul Costello is the chief communications officer for the Stanford University School of Medicine. Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, he was vice president of external affairs for the University of Hawaii System. In Hawaii, he hosted a weekly public affairs program on PBS Hawaii.
In government and politics he served as a press spokesman to First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Ohio Governor Richard Celeste, Washington, D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly and Kitty Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. In the private sector, he was vice president of public affairs at the cable television company Home Box Office and at the Chicago retail company, Marshall Field. He was the managing director of the New York office of the global public relations company, Weber Shandwick.
Now at Stanford, he leads the medical school’s communication efforts, overseeing media relations, publications, social and new media platforms.
Judith Butler, PhD, Yale
Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel.
Judith Butler is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004), Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) and Is Critique Secular? (co-written in 2009). She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics and Jewish Voice for Peace. She is presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.
Arnold Milstein, MD, MPH
Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, UCSF
Professor of Medicine and Director Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford University
Medical Director, Pacific Business Group on Health
Dr. Milstein is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford and directs the Stanford Clinical Excellence Research Center. The Center is a collaboration of the Schools of Medicine, Engineering and Business to design and test new health care delivery models that both lower per capita health care spending and improve clinical outcomes.
His work and publications have focused on acceleration of innovations to improve the societal value of health care.
He serves as the Medical Director of the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), the largest regional health care improvement coalition in the U.S. He also chairs the IHA Steering Committee that directs the largest physician pay-for-performance program in the U.S. Previously he co-founded the Leapfrog Group and Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project, and served as a Congressionally-appointed MedPAC Commissioner.
Citing his nationally distinguished innovation in health care cost reduction and quality gains, he was selected for the highest annual award of both the National Business Group on Health (NBGH) and of the American College of Medical Quality. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences. He chaired the planning committee of the IOM’s 2009–2010 series on best methods to lower per capita health care spending and improve clinical outcomes.
He was educated at Harvard (BA-Economics), Tufts (MD) and UC-Berkeley (MPH-Health Services Evaluation and Planning).
Janice Mirikitani
Founding President, Glide Foundation
Janice Mirikitani is the Founding President of the Glide Foundation where she in partnership with her husband, Reverend Cecil Williams, have achieved worldwide recognition for their groundbreaking organization which empowers San Francisco’s poor and marginalized communities to make meaningful changes in their lives to break the cycle of poverty and dependence. She is San Francisco’s second Poet Laureate of San Francisco, appointed in 2000. She has authored four books of poetry and is the editor of nine landmark anthologies which provide platforms for writers of color, women, youth and children.
Lance Williams
Senior Reporter
Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch
Lance Williams is senior reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch project. With Mark Fainaru-Wada, he wrote the best-seller Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports. Their reporting on the BALCO steroids scandal for the San Francisco Chronicle won the George Polk Award and other prizes.
In 2006, Williams and Fainaru-Wada were held in contempt of court and threatened with 18 months in federal prison for refusing to testify about their confidential sources on BALCO. After litigation and Congressional intervention, the subpoenas were withdrawn.
Williams has reported on subjects including the California cocaine trade, Oakland’s Black Panther Party and the career of San Francisco mayor and political power-broker Willie Brown. His journalism has been honored with the Edgar A. Poe Award of the White House Correspondents’ Association; the PEN-USA First Amendment Award; the Gerald Loeb Award for financial writing; the California Associated Press’ Fairbanks Award for public service; and, on three occasions, the Center for California Studies’ California Journalism Award for political reporting. He was the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California Journalist of the Year in 1999 and 2006 and, with his California Watch colleagues, in 2010.
* Panelists subject to change.
