Journalist & Author
Build Bridges, Not Walls · Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration & Homeland Security
In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report titled something like An Abrupt Climate Scenario. They asked some independent researchers to look at what would happen in a worse case scenario. They found that the United States and Australia. They said that they would have to put up defensive fortresses ‘to stop unwanted starving immigrants’…
Journalist & Author
Build Bridges, Not Walls · Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration & Homeland Security
In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report titled something like An Abrupt Climate Scenario. They asked some independent researchers to look at what would happen in a worse case scenario. They found that the United States and Australia. They said that they would have to put up defensive fortresses ‘to stop unwanted starving immigrants’…
Journalist & PEN Literary Award-Winning Author of Windfall
As a parent and especially through all this reporting, what I’ve tried to do is think through these solutions and these fixes we have for everything and make sure that we’re not forgetting…that we’re thinking about other people. Capitalism won’t do it. Self-interest isn’t going to do this for us. As silly as it is to think that empathy will do or caring about your fellow humans will do it, I don’t know what else there is to hope for. I don’t believe that people do stuff purely out of rational self-interest, this libertarian idea that I was quietly pushing against the entire time in Windfall. That we do things just for ourselves or just to make money–that’s not been the reality of my lifetime.
Journalist & PEN Literary Award-Winning Author of Windfall
As a parent and especially through all this reporting, what I’ve tried to do is think through these solutions and these fixes we have for everything and make sure that we’re not forgetting…that we’re thinking about other people. Capitalism won’t do it. Self-interest isn’t going to do this for us. As silly as it is to think that empathy will do or caring about your fellow humans will do it, I don’t know what else there is to hope for. I don’t believe that people do stuff purely out of rational self-interest, this libertarian idea that I was quietly pushing against the entire time in Windfall. That we do things just for ourselves or just to make money–that’s not been the reality of my lifetime.
Author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary
Professor of Italian & Comparative Literature, Cornell University
For many years I wrote, taught, and published about climate change from a more philosophical, existential point of view, especially thinking about deep time, but I did come back to fuels with my Fuel book in part for the fact that so much of the press and so much of public discourse confuses fuel and energy, and it’s still happening today. I thought about this so long and the same themes, the same tropes are still being recycled.
Author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary
Professor of Italian & Comparative Literature, Cornell University
For many years I wrote, taught, and published about climate change from a more philosophical, existential point of view, especially thinking about deep time, but I did come back to fuels with my Fuel book in part for the fact that so much of the press and so much of public discourse confuses fuel and energy, and it’s still happening today. I thought about this so long and the same themes, the same tropes are still being recycled.
Historian of Alternative Spirituality & PEN Award-Winning Author
I’ve always considered myself a believing historian and, in fact, most historians of religion are actually believing historians. Very frequently they emerge from the congregations that they’re writing about, whether new religious movements or traditional religions, this is true of Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem, it’s true of people who have written probably the most important biographies of more recent religious figures like Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith, a Mormon prophet. Although, historians don’t frequently acknowledge being believing historians because they feel that it might seem to compromise their capacity for critical judgement, but my impression is different. My impression is that being in very direct proximity to the nature of the philosophical, religious, ethical, therapeutic movements that you’re writing about can heighten your critical acumen.
Historian of Alternative Spirituality & PEN Award-Winning Author
I’ve always considered myself a believing historian and, in fact, most historians of religion are actually believing historians. Very frequently they emerge from the congregations that they’re writing about, whether new religious movements or traditional religions, this is true of Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem, it’s true of people who have written probably the most important biographies of more recent religious figures like Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith, a Mormon prophet. Although, historians don’t frequently acknowledge being believing historians because they feel that it might seem to compromise their capacity for critical judgement, but my impression is different. My impression is that being in very direct proximity to the nature of the philosophical, religious, ethical, therapeutic movements that you’re writing about can heighten your critical acumen.
Novelist, Poet & Activist
People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…
Novelist, Poet & Activist
People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…
Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree
Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.
Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree
Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.
Interview Highlights
Days are filled with things that happen. And you have to sort of determine whether you're going to make choices for things to happen or just react to things that are happening around you. And why not choose to go do things. You're not going to see art unless you go to the museum.
Actor · Comedian · Filmmaker · Magician · Singer · Writer
And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small-town New Mexico in this big city of Los Angeles…I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African-American man in Pittsburgh and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at 13, 14 years old…And it was so moving. And I did think even back then, I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.
Pushcart Award-Winning Poet
When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.
Pushcart Award-Winning Poet
When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.
President & Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors
For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 to 85% underemployment rate. So you can see the unemployment rates whether you go to college or not are astronomical, but they’re even higher if you go to college, which is sort of counterintuitive.
President & Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors
For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 to 85% underemployment rate. So you can see the unemployment rates whether you go to college or not are astronomical, but they’re even higher if you go to college, which is sort of counterintuitive.
Novelist, Playwright & Author of Most Widely Used Creative Writing Text in America
There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic because all the arts basically say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at it this way.’ And they allow us to see from some other vantage point than our extremely self-interested selves.
Novelist, Playwright & Author of Most Widely Used Creative Writing Text in America
There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic because all the arts basically say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at it this way.’ And they allow us to see from some other vantage point than our extremely self-interested selves.
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
