Profs and Pints San Francisco Bay Area

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “The Arctic in Transition,” a look at the political, environmental, and technological forces reshaping Earth’s northernmost region, with Mia Bennett, associate professor of geography at the University of Washington-Seattle and co-author of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic.

[Tickets available only online, available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-arctic-transition .]

In the Arctic, reliably frozen sea ice and thirty years of post-Cold War regional cooperation are ceding to the intertwined pressures of climate change and geopolitical competition. Melting ice, raging wildfires, and permafrost thaw are drastically reshaping the environment, while tensions between nations and peoples with a stake in the region’s future are heating up.

Come gain a deep understanding of the change underway at the Arctic and of the various forces reshaping it with Mia Bennett, a scholar of the Arctic who has done years of fieldwork there.

Situating the contemporary Arctic within a longer history of human habitation and migration and ecological change, she will show how the region is an arena of constant political, environmental, and technological transformation. What is happening there portends the future of global politics, resource competition, climate governance, and Earth as a whole.

Dr. Bennett will set the stage by offering background on the Arctic’s 32,000 years of human habitation and its ecological transformations marked by the expansion and retreat of ice cover. She’ll trace how the region evolved from a sparsely connected frozen periphery into a central arena of global strategic interest. You’ll learn how the Arctic has been the site of twenty-first-century political experimentation producing governance mechanisms that incorporate Indigenous Peoples and giving rise to a farsighted superpower accord over fisheries.

We’ll look at how today’s growing global attention to the Arctic reflects the region’s transition from a reliably frozen desert into an increasingly navigable ocean as it warms four times faster than the Earth as a whole. Such environmental change has intensified competition among manifold stakeholders seeking to intervene in the region’s governance and defense and having interests in shipping and resource extraction there. They include the eight nations with territory north of the Arctic Circle, Indigenous Peoples’ organizations, and non-Arctic nations such as China, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

At the same time, efforts to maintain international cooperation over the region are being tested by growing tensions between Russia and the West, intensifying great power competition, and the Trump administration’s fixation with acquiring Greenland. Adding to the uncertainty there are technological transformations, including emerging geoengineering innovations, some of which seek to refreeze the Arctic ice cap.

You’ll gain an appreciation of how what is happening in the Arctic affects all of us. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis S. St-Laurent approaches the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy during a 2009 Arctic survey (U.S. Coast Guard Photo / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Napa presents: “Our Lifelines Across Counters,” an exploration of the unsung social and psychological benefits of routine interactions with retail and service-industry employees, with Mara Adelman, former professor of communications at Seattle University and Northwestern University, co-author of Communicating Social Support, and longtime scholar of superficial relationships.

[Tickets available only online, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/napa-lifelines-across-counters .]

When a store clerk asks “How may I help you?” the real answer is a complicated one. There’s a reason why the theme song of the bar-based sitcom Cheers, “Where everybody knows your name,” resonated with the American public. While we might not have given the matter much thought, most of us socially and psychologically depend a lot on the superficial relationships in our lives.

Profs and Pints is bringing you an opportunity to appreciate and improve routine interactions with baristas, beauticians, salesclerks, and other retail and service employees by exploring just how much brief encounters with them mean to our sense of community and well-being.

The speaker, Mara Adelman, developed a lifelong interest in taking superficial relationships seriously early in life, while working as a bartender and a waiter. In embarking on a scholarly career in interpersonal communication, she encountered what she calls “the tyranny of intimacy,” the focus on close relationships with family, friends, and lovers that dominated popular culture’s depictions of human interactions and drove most of the major research in her field.

Dr. Adelman sought to direct her energies elsewhere and explore weaker ties that, while pervasive, often are slighted in terms of recognition of their unique contributions to our lives. She studied our encounters with people in the service and retail professions, unpacking questions related to the context, role expectations, and the networks of contacts involved.

She’ll discuss her findings in a talk that will combine research, theory, film clips, poetry, and audience engagement to call attention to the complex and subtle ways in which our superficial encounters provide social support. We’ll consider the vital role such encounters play in the lives of people unable to obtain needed professional support for reasons related to cost, accessibility, and social stigma, as well as for people who for whatever reason have found people with whom they have close relationships less supportive than hoped.

We’ll look at how our encounters with retail and service industry workers embed us in the community, diversify our social networks, and provide us with new information. We’ll consider how we sometimes feel especially free to share personal information with such people precisely because they are outside our primary social circle. We’ll look at how our interactions with such workers can carry costs for them, especially if they’re untrained in dealing with whatever serious issues we bring up.

Dr. Adelman’s talk will leave you with a richer understanding of even the most fleeting encounters and a deeper appreciation of the unsung heroes in our lives. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Eugenics and Reproductive Biotech,” on the false promises and real perils of efforts to genetically predetermine children’s intelligence, with Emily Klancher Merchant, associate professor of science and technology studies at the University of California Davis, historian of the quantitative human sciences, and author of Building the Population Bomb and co-editor of DNA, Race, and Reproduction.

[Tickets available only online, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-eugenics .]

In the fall of 2025, a splashy advertising campaign on the New York City subway informed riders that “IQ is 50 percent genetic” and invited them to “have your best baby” by visiting “pickyourbaby.com” The company behind the ads, Nucleus Genomics, was the first to openly market polygenic embryo screening for intelligence, a practice characterized by proponents and critics alike as “self-chosen, self-directed eugenics.”

Today several companies offer polygenic embryo screening, and they have been joined by other companies in researching technologies that remain beyond the horizon such as in vitro gametogenesis (creating sperm and egg cells from somatic cells), the DNA editing of embryos, and artificial wombs. Together, these technologies promise a fully integrated “Gattaca Stack”—named for the 1997 eugenic sci fi film—that, in theory, could produce super-intelligent humans at scale.

Learn how we got to this place, as well as where all of this seems headed, with Dr. Emily Klancher Merchant, a historian of science, technology, and medicine who has extensively researched the field of sociogenomics.

She’ll discuss the history, science, and ideology behind these technologies, from the eugenics of the early twentieth century to today’s reproductive biotechnology.

We’ll explore how the heritability concept at the center of Nucleus’s ads—claims that x trait is y percent genetic—emerged in animal breeding and was borrowed by eugenics and mobilized in the backlash against the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. It provided intellectual legitimacy to twenty-first century efforts to identify so-called “intelligence genes,” even though geneticists have long pointed out that heritability is not a meaningful metric in humans.

We’ll consider how, so far, the search for genes that determine intelligence has proven unfruitful. Though many genes contribute to cognitive functioning, scientists have yet to find any that make a substantial difference. Even when all genes are taken together, scientists’ ability to predict the intelligence of individuals is weak in white people and nonexistent in people of color.

Yet proponents of a high-tech version of eugenics known as transhumanism—particularly popular among those in the Silicon Valley nexus of company founders and venture capitalists—have seized on this research. It serves as the basis for the technologies in the Gattaca Stack, or at least as the basis for startups promising these technologies.

At a time when eugenics has returned to the public view, this talk discusses why polygenic embryo screening for intelligence and other Gattaca Stack technologies are unlikely to work as advertised yet nonetheless represent dangerous ideological and political economic trends. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.