Tag: trending

Join Naomi Klein, Angela Duckworth, Wajahat Ali, and many more of the world’s top thinkers at What’s the Future @ Lavin Live—a free virtual event diving into the enormous challenges we’re all facing as a result of COVID-19. 

The longer we stay under lockdown, the less likely we are to return to a world that feels familiar. From the devastation of the economy, to the newfound apprehension we experience every time we leave the house, it’s clear that there will be significant—and lasting—changes to our lives.

 

What’s the Future @ Lavin Live is a free virtual event designed to ease some of that uncertainty. No one knows for sure what tomorrow will bring, but we’ve gathered some of the world’s brightest thinkers to help us envision the legacy the pandemic will leave in its wake. Join host Misha Glouberman as he talks to the world’s leading scientists, journalists, economists, and public intellectuals on April 27th—29th, from 3PM to 5PM EST every day.

 

Check out our full line-up below and make sure to register so that we know you’re coming!

Event Breakdown

April 27th: Personal

How do we cope with the new “normal” of self-isolation—and the fear, anxiety, and loneliness that comes with it? Offering hope and compassion, the Lavin speakers on Day 1 will help us navigate the ups and downs of our mental health.

 

Angela Duckworth—#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Grit
 
Dan Lerner—Professor of NYU’s Most Popular Elective, The Science of Happiness
 
Steven Pinker—New York Times Bestselling Author of Enlightenment Now
 
Eric Klinenberg—New York Times Bestselling Author of Palaces for the People and Co-Author of the #1 NYT Bestseller Modern Romance
 
Lori Gottlieb—New York Times Bestselling Author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone and The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” Columnist

April 28th: Business
The novel coronavirus is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced, and its impact on business will be felt for years to come. The Lavin speakers on Day 2 show us how we can adapt to uncertainty, foster resiliency, and innovate our way through to the other side.

 

Nicholas Thompson—Editor-in-Chief of WIRED
 
Chris Clearfield—Co-Author of Meltdown, Winner of the Thinkers50 Strategy Award
 
Jeremy Gutsche—New York Times Bestselling Author of Create the Future
 
Stephanie Mehta—Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company
 
April 29th: Society
How we respond to the pandemic now will influence the society we will have in the future. What kind of world do we want to live in? The choice is ours. The Lavin speakers on Day 3 help us understand this disruption through the lens of our political and economic institutions.

 

Naomi Klein—Bestselling Author of The Shock Doctrine in conversation with Shoshana Zuboff—Bestselling Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
 
Jelani Cobb—Staff Writer at The New Yorker in conversation with Wajahat Ali—New York Times and CNN Contributor
 
Daron Acemoglu—MIT Economist and Co-Author of The Narrow Corridor
 
Margaret Atwood—Booker Prize-Winning Author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

 

To book one of these talented speakers for your next virtual event, contact The Lavin Agency today and connect with a member of our sales team.

Manjit Minhas is well-known for her role as a judge on the critically acclaimed program Dragons’ Den. She also runs one the world’s largest breweries—worth a whopping $187 million dollars. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Minhas shows us how it’s possible to repurpose your business and respond to the crucial needs of our communities.  

There is no real substitute for in-person contact. That’s true. But it doesn’t mean that our video conferencing and telework has to be completely alienating, either. In his latest article, futurist and author Douglas Rushkoff offers practical tips for making our work-from-home feel engaging.  

How did a former Intelligence Officer for the United States of America become an insider at Facebook? As crazy as it sounds, this is the story of new Lavin speaker Yaël Eisenstat. In talks, she reveals why she joined the tech giant, the reason it’s so difficult for them to get elections right, and why the breakdown of civil discourse is the biggest threat our democracy has ever faced.  

To book speaker Yaël Eisenstat for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency, her exclusive speakers bureau.

Among Entertainment Weekly’s top 10 non-fiction books of the decade is Patti Smith’s beloved memoir Just Kids and George Packer’s historical juggernaut The Unwinding.

 Selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review, The 100 Notable Books of 2019 feature the year’s most memorable reads. The latest list include works by Lavin speakers Shoshana Zuboff, David Wallace-Wells, Margaret Atwood, George Packer, Andrew Marantz, and Karen Armstrong. 

Congratulations to Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Jayson Greene, Lori Gottlieb, David Wallace-Wells and Shoshana Zuboff for penning stirring, thought-provoking works that have captured the world’s attention.  

Yancey Strickler is best known for being the mind behind Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform that’s brought countless great ideas to life. Now, he’s looking beyond money to consider how we can maximize our values. In his new book This Could Be Our Future—now available for pre-order—Strickler outlines how we can build a generous, fair, and equitable society. 

We live in a world of financial maximization, says Yancey Strickler. Meaning, we live in a world in which accumulating more money is always the end goal; always the right goal. But what if the point of life was not to maximize our self-interest and wealth? What if we could expand our definition of value to include things like community, purpose, and sustainability? This is the central argument of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, Strickler’s new book out this October. In it, he explains how we got to this dizzying point of late-stage capitalism, how we can refocus our energies, and how to create a global shift from scarcity to abundance.

 

You can preorder the book, here.

 

To book speaker Yancey Strickler for your next speaking engagement, contact The Lavin Agency for more information.

Pacific Standard has rounded up twenty-five must-read books being released in Fall of 2019. Among them are Lavin Speakers Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, Megan Phelps-Roper, and Patti Smith. 

Sixteen titles are competing for this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Book of the Year Award. Among them are Lavin speakers Shohana Zuboff and Safi Bahcall, for their groundbreaking books The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Loonshots, respectively. 

Beginning as an alternative to job listing databases, LinkedIn has grown into a professional platform boasting 645 million users and earning 5.3 billion in revenue. Despite its size and success, LinkedIn has not been marred by scandal and divisiveness. Nicholas Thompson—WIRED editor and LinkedIn Influencer—talks about the Internet’s last neutral social platform. 

“It’s much harder to be a dissident on LinkedIn, or to spread awareness about autocracy,” Nicholas Thompson explained to The New York Times, noting that business stories out-perform the political ones on the platform, especially those that follow sensationalist media narratives. “People respond badly,” he admits.
 
Thompson shares a daily video on LinkedIn, where he has 1.3 million followers, but he saves controversial or politically inclined material for Twitter, where users tend to lean to the left. He estimates that his LinkedIn followers, in contast, are more evenly distributed across the political spectrum. The platform itself does little to encourage political conversation, having banned political ads. Its intention has always been to connect business professionals—for the sake of business.
 
“The risk on Facebook is becoming too toxic,” Thompson said. “The risk on LinkedIn is becoming too cheesy.”

You can read the full article here.

To book speaker Nicholas Thompson, contact The Lavin Agency, his exclusive speakers bureau.  

Randall Lane, the Chief Content Officer of Forbes, announced the magazine would be continuing its editorial expansion with the hire of 10 new journalists worldwide. The appointments—which take place in New York, London, and San Francisco—span across nearly all the Forbes coverage areas, including the iconic Under 30 franchise.  

In One Giant Leap, Charles Fishman lifts the curtain on America’s near-impossible journey to the moon. As the nation prepares to celebrate the lunar landing’s 50th anniversary, One Giant Leap debuts on The New York Times Bestseller List.

Everyone knows the 1969 moon landing, but few truly understand the tremendous effort that went into making it a reality. In America’s collective memory, the journey has been crystallized into the single, perfect moment of Neil Armstrong descending onto the moon’s surface. Charles Fishman, author of One Giant Leap, writes, “it’s as if on a summer day in 1969, three men climbed into a rocket, flew to the Moon, pulled on their spacesuits, took one small step, planted the American flag, and then came home.” In actuality, a quarter million Americans put in 2.8 billion hours of labour—from weaving the computer memory by hand to performing complex mathematical calculations—to get us to the moon. One Giant Leap is not merely a recounting; it is a painstaking and in-depth exploration of the set-backs and triumphs leading to humankind’s greatest achievement.

 

But what was it all for? Fifty years later and the anticipated Space Age hasn’t come to fruition. But perhaps something even more important did: the digital revolution.“It's hard to appreciate now, but in 1961, 1962, 1963, computers had the opposite reputation of the reputation they have now,” explains Fishman to NPR. “Most computers couldn't go more than a few hours without breaking down. Even on John Glenn's famous orbital flight—the first U.S. orbital flight—the computers in mission control stopped working for three minutes [out] of four hours.”
 

The space race dramatically accelerated the rate of technological advancement. NASA became the first organization to use computer chips over transistors. At the time, computer chips were considered unreliable and expensive. Today, they power the world, starting with our smartphones. NASA took every precaution ensuring the computer chips functioned perfectly for space—where even the slightest malfunction could spell disaster: “What NASA did for semiconductor companies was to teach them to make chips of near-perfect quality, to make them fast, in huge volumes and to make them cheaper, faster, and better with each year,” he writes.“That's the world we've all been benefitting from for the 50 years since.”

 

One Giant Leap is captivating, razor-sharp, and scrupulously researched. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a fresh, enthusiastic history of the moon mission.” Publisher’s Weekly  dubbed it a “fascinating portrait of a technological heroic age.” It is a must-read to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the nation’s most impressive feat.

 

Interested in booking Charles Fishman for an event? Contact The Lavin Agency for more information.

“To confront the threats we face, we must recognize that the Trump presidency is a symptom, not the malady.” Eric Klinenberg’s latest co-edited project Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power, and the Republic at Risk seeks to uncover the fundamental problems rooted inside America’s institutions—problems that existed long before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Antidemocracy in America, which was edited and assembled by sociologist Eric Klinenberg alongside Public Books editors Caitlin Zaloom and Sharon Marcus, is a collection of essays from leading experts and scholars. The topics range from race and gender politics to climate change and national security, all which align to offer a striking portrait of America’s history, present day, and future. If we are to protect America’s democracy from the authoritarian forces that hope to destroy it, we must first understand how truly fragile it is.

 

Interested in booking Eric Klinenberg or another Civic Engagement Speaker? Contact The Lavin Agency today.

James Ellroy is the canonized writer behind some of America’s most famous crime novels, such as The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. With his highly-anticipated This Storm, Ellroy takes us back in time to examine power and corruption in WWII.

A celebrated crime author,  James Ellroy is equally fascinated by the dark side of America’s history. This Storm—the latest book in his Second LA Quartet series, and the prequel to his celebrated LA Quartet—offers a reflection of the power, greed, and corruption that occured in the background of the America’s wartime trauma. Highly-anticipated, it was selected amongst the 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2019 by Entertainment Weekly, and the Top 10 Mysteries and Thrillers by Publishers Weekly, who say this “obsessive, wholly satisfying probing of 20th-century American history deserves a wide readership”. 

 

This Storm is no small feat. It is ambitious like all of Ellroy’s other novels; sprawling, intense, intricate. The book picks up shortly after the events of 2014’s Perfidia, which kicked off with the ritual murder of a Japanese-American family hours before Pearl Harbour. Now in 1941, the book documents the mounting anti-Japanese hysteria, culminating with President Roosevelt’s order for the deportation of Japanese Americans to internment camps.

“Since my early childhood, I have always lived in the past,” Ellroy explains to The Guardian. “Most often the recent past of America, this historical past, it’s what I love, it’s what I am, it’s what I do. My intent with readers is to uproot them from their daily lives and force-feed large swathes of American history and more specifically Los Angeles history. It’s a love of size and scope and density and big emotion, big police investigations, big conspiracies. Everything big.”

Populism is on the rise around the world—and it’s having an unprecedented disruptive impact on political disourse. Author Eric Klinenberg sat down with The Economist to discuss how a surprising space—public libaries—may hold the key to fighting back.

A sociologist at New York University, Eric Klinenberg authored last year’s Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. He uses the term ‘social infrastructure’ to refer to public, communal spaces that bring people together and shape their interactions. “The most democratic and accessible social infrastructure are classic public goods, such as libraries, schools, parks and playgrounds,” Klinenberg explained to The Economist.

 

Increasing and strengthening spaces that can be categorized under the umbrella of “public good” will have a healing effect on the frayed discourse happening in America’s political system today, according to the author. “Shared spaces give us a chance to recognise our commonalities and establish mutual respect.”

 

Libraries in particular have an anti-authoritarian stance built into their programming, making them especially important when it comes to reversing the rise of post-truth populism. Radically inclusive, non-judgmental, and in the pursuit of knowledge, libraries are pushing back against the “fake news” era—yet they are still horrifically under-funded, suffering budget cuts across the globe. “Every time a library closes its doors our society becomes a little less open, our democracy a little more vulnerable,” Klinenberg says.

 

While many look to the Internet to uphold democratic values in our society, it must be acknowledged that online platforms have also been a source of division and rampant hate. Despite living in a digital age, looking at tech companies for social infrastructure won’t be our saving grace. Klinenberg refuses to give up, looking to nations such as The Netherlands, Japan, and Canada as examples of social infrastructure optimized for the 21st century.

 

Curious to learn more about topics like social infrastructure? Visit our dedicated Civic Engagement page. 

Touted for being funny, smart, and delightfully weird, Chuck Klosterman’s latest book (out July 16th) is a must-read of the season according toWIRED. 

Cultural critic and renowned author Chuck Klosterman has a knack for condensing the current cultural moment to its most essential elements. This Summer the Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs author is back with a book of “fictional non-fiction.” The upcoming Raised In Captivity is a story collection filled with Klosterman’s wit, wisdom, and appetite for the strange and unusual. 

WIRED chose Klosterman’s latest as much for its timely subject matter—the book touches on class, race, gender, and the anxieties that come with talking about them in a Trump-era—as for it’s ability to be “delightfully unsettling.”  Senior editor Angela Watercutter describes it as “funny, thoughtful, and unhinged” in a way that best describes the discomfort of the current pop culture moment. 

To book speaker Chuck Klosterman for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency, his exclusive speakers bureau. 

In 2019, the world can feel uncertain at best, and catastrophic at worst. As a result, TIME’s non-fiction round-up this year highlights books with a vigorous call-to-action for both readers and society at large. Featured Lavin speakers Emily Bazelon and David Wallace-Wells have penned books that tackle some of humanity’s most pressing issues; namely, the devastation of mass incarceration, and the grim future that awaits us if we don’t reverse our current climate disaster. 

 In Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, journalist and legal expert Emily Bazelon follows two young defendants ensnared in America’s predatory criminal justice system. With her trademark investigative reporting and powerful storytelling, Bazelon reveals how all too often criminal prosecutions go horribly wrong, destroying countless lives in the process. Charged outlines the dangers of the current system—starting with overzealous prosecutors—and offers the steps we can take to reform it. 

 

Meanwhile, New York Magazine editor David Wallace-Wells focuses his attenion on the climate crisis in The Uninhabitable Earth. Both critically acclaimed and a national bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth promises that complacency will be the death of us. Wallace-Wells spells out the harrowing future we can expect if we continue treading on our current path. It’s a scary verging on apocalyptic vision—filled with fires and floods of Biblical proportions. Time may not be on our side, but Wallace-Wells outlines the steps we can take to ensure a better tomorrow. 

To book Emily Bazelon or David Wallace-Wells, contact The Lavin Agency today.