The Lavin Weekly is a round-up of our favourite speaker stories of the week. Sometimes our Lavin Speakers are the writers, sometimes they’re the subjects, but always they’re making the world a smarter place.
This week Rich Benjamin weighs in on Charlottesville; Emily Bazelon exposes a disturbing ethical apathy in American prosecutors; Teju Cole talks about his much-lauded book Blind Spot; Scott Barry Kaufman makes a moving plea for a new theory of human intelligence; and Susan Pinker asks whether loneliness is the public health risk of our time in her newly released TED2017 talk.
How can the Charlottesville protesters be a “fringe” group of “radicals” when their policies to dismantle affirmative action and restrict immigration are backed by the most powerful man in the country? Rich Benjamin asks in Esquire this week.
Noura Jackson spent nine years in prison for killing her mother, despite the fact that the prosecution had evidence that would have exonerated her. In her latest New York Times feature, Emily Bazelon uses this story to examine the long history of prosecutorial misconduct in the U.S.
“The invention of the camera was the invention of a kind of time travel,” says novelist, photographer and critic for The New York Times Teju Cole. In this Signature Reads interview he discusses his latest book Blind Spot, a hybrid of his singular photographs and lyrical prose that’s already been named one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of 2017 so far.
Why aren’t there more women in STEM disciplines? Because they feel like they don’t belong. The way Scott Barry Kaufman breaks down the psychology of belonging in last week’s Scientific American is so persuasive it becomes undeniable, not unlike the moving TEDx talk he delivered this week calling for a new theory of human intelligence.
Is isolation the public health risk of our time? Susan Pinker, psychologist and longevity expert examines a remote Italian island on which there are ten times as many centenarians as there are in North America in her newly released TED talk.
To find out more about Rich Benjamin, Emily Bazelon, Teju Cole, Scott Barry Kaufman, or Susan Pinker contact The Lavin Agency today.
