A Conversation with Author JAMES STURZ

Underjungle is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. Sometimes I’ll joke it’s War and Peace, but 3,000 feet deeper. And shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. But it’s also about our deep connection to the ocean. I wrote most of it in Hawaii during the pandemic, researching it off the coast. I knew that to write it I needed to say what it was like to be underwater. Not just to dive down, but to live there and be there, and for everything you know, whether it’s food, minerals, oxygen, ideas, or mates to come to you in the currents, through this thick and intensely rich medium that covers 70 percent of the planet. So I’d go to the coast to scuba dive or free dive. Not to chase after fish, but simply to sink and to take this different world in—one I was particularly happy to spend time in, not just because I love the water, but because so much of the rest of the world was closed off, and I feel free when I’m submerged it. And then I’d come home and try to figure out what everything I saw and felt meant, because I intended the book as a love song.

A Conversation with Poet MAJA LUKIC

I was born in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. We left that country when the civil war broke out, and I grew up in Canada, mostly, with a lot of subsequent moves from place to place. So very early in childhood, I was confronted with complex feelings I couldn’t describe yet, and I felt a deep inchoate sense of loss. I was coming from a country that no longer existed and speaking a language that, politically, no longer existed. It made me more solitary—I had a rich inner life and retreated to my imagination as a safe place, which is fantastic training ground for a writer’s life. At the same time, living in the immigrant community in Canada and meeting kids from other cultures and other languages, I understood something about the universality of human experience. Yes, it was painful to leave home because of a war, but others abandoned their homes, too.

A Conversation with Poet · Composer · Editor · Educator MALIK AMEER CRUMPLER

My creative process always starts with automatic writing or recorded improvisations. I listen back, read over, and then craft those into final projects. By “craft,” I mean revise and find more unique, effective ways of showing details or elaborating stories—building complexity through addition and subtraction. In the case of my current AI collaborations, there’s very little revision. We want to maintain a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. I set time limits for each interaction, prompting the AI until I feel it can begin prompting itself. Then I just conduct the direction of the focal points, encouraging them to go further.

For human collaborations, like my recent project with Bastien Keb, he sent me rough drafts. I wrote poems to them, sometimes recorded improvisations, and then revised my performance to coalesce with the music. If his rough draft didn’t fully express what I imagined, I’d listen to Ravel or Gil Evans & Miles Davis to influence my word choice and delivery. After writing to something like Sketches of Spain or Boléro, I’d return to his drafts and adjust my delivery to sync better with his work. It became a time-traveling process, with all four of those voices—mine, his, Ravel’s, Gil’s—contributing to the generation of words.

A Conversation with Author MATTHEW JAMES JONES

I was the kid who hid in books. Nestled on a window sill, the sun made the red curtain glow pink - no one could find me. Only the yelling would cut through, or my brother's hand would find my ankle for more lessons of the fist. I skipped a grade and discovered loneliness, escaped deeper into stories of dragons and wizards and dragon-wizards. One night, Mom woke me up and pushed a book in my hands. "Read so loud your Dad can hear you," she said. He waited with bloody knuckles in the hall, so my little voice went up. I'm not sure if I fell in love with reading that day, but we needed a shield.

Author CHRISTINA BERKE on Memory and Imagination

It was important to my father that I learned to type. After school, I looked forward to clacking out short stories and reading them aloud, sometimes acting them out. He was always teaching me about the world; an atlas by his bedside, a world map in the kitchen, the news radio on all the time. It gave me an expansive outlook on the world; that writing could be a way to reach far corners. It also planted seeds about time travel and the infinite universe and astrophysics, parallel universes, what happens when a body dies, memory, and time.

A Conversation with Author KAREN POWELL

Fifteen Wild Decembers is a reimagining of the life of Emily Brontë, so my first step was to return to Emily’s one extraordinary novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and to become more familiar with her poetry. The latter was particularly useful when it came to finding Emily’s voice. I also reread the novels written by her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, and then immersed myself in all the work that has been carried over the years by various biographers and historians. When researching any famous person, a lot of the hard work has already been done for you. Still, it’s important to approach that work with a rigorous eye, and in the knowledge that even the most consciously objective history can only ever be one person’s interpretation of events. As a novelist, there also comes a time when your imagination wants to work its way into the intriguing spaces between the facts, seeking the stories as yet untold.

A Conversation with Author CHRISTINA COOKE

I was born on the island of Jamaica. My early upbringing there was foundational to my creative obsessions and narrative imagination. Jamaican characters and language and cultural inflections are ever-present in my work—even if I don’t intend them to, even if they never take center stage. “Jamaican” is the first among the many hyphenations that make up my geopolitical identity. This is intentional. “Jamaican” is the bedrock of all that I am. Historical research and critical inquiry are two key tenets of how I approach writing. I am primarily a writer of realist, literary fiction—a genre that often finds greater resonance and meaning through expansive research. Engaging with historical collections helps me identify all the poignant details that will make the story’s setting and circumstances seem recognizably “real”, whereas critical inquiry helps me in adding nuance to the themes and ideas the story explores. Basically, research is the scaffolding that gives shape to my stories, ensuring forward movement, cohesion, and relevance.

A Conversation with Author KAT TANG

I was born in Hangzhou, China, moved to Sendai, Japan when I was young, and then settled (though I use the word settled lightly because we moved 3 more times) in the Bay Area. The constant moving meant that I had to learn how to navigate different cultures and languages from a young age. Maybe this is why I've never really been interested in taking part in the predominant culture, because to me it has always shifted. The humanities are how we hold a mirror up to ourselves and examine the best and worst that we have to offer. How we sort through all that to create the art worth sharing is fascinating.

A Conversation with Author MICHAEL IDOV

The Collaborators started with the main character, Ari Falk, and with identifying my own wants as a reader. I remember watching some iteration of Jack Ryan when something struck me here’s an iconic character who’s been played by some of the most iconic actors in Hollywood, and I don’t know what his favorite band or movie is. And I thought of this as a challenge. I wanted to create a spy character in his thirties, with relatable millennial interests, perspectives, and a healthy skepticism about what his organization does. I also wanted the book to be exciting but authentic in its settings. Since I myself am not a spy, this meant tapping into my own peripatetic life: my time in Latvia, Portugal, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Thailand. As a result, my first "genre" novel ended up being my most autobiographical.

The Radical Poetics of NOAH DAVID ROBERTS

In the modern political landscape, I think art is the most powerful mechanism. How else to explore living? How else to conceptualize alternatives to the systems that oppress so many? How else to experience other perspectives, some that might possibly be diametric to those of the viewer / reader? I believe, as corny as it sounds, that good art changes minds. Good art evokes a feeling, a relation, a recoil. Poetry, I think, is extremely important right now. I believe fully that the syntax of our day-to-day language perpetuates these systems of oppression. We must break through. Thoughts burst at the seams of our communication tools. It is impossible to relate a true, full queer experience through a poem without breaking some rules to burst from that box a hopeful individual self-created; impossible to relate a queer story with heteronormative language & language structures. I think about this a lot. In a world overcome with fascism, to express queerness through art is to create one's own singular way of expression. This is a revolutionary act. Queerness is hyperpersonal. Poetry is hyperpersonal, as is all writing. It's vulnerable & cannot be taken away from us.

A Conversation with Author OLUFUNKE GRACE BANKOLE

The movement between worlds—Nigeria and the US, Ifa and Christianity, inner longing and cultural constraint—is the dynamic upon which I have based my storytelling in The Edge of Water, and the one with which I have always been familiar. Three weeks after I was born in Maryland, my parents took me to Ibadan, our ancestral home, where I lived for eight years, before returning again to the US. Throughout my childhood, I was Nigerian at home—steeped in traditional Yoruba culture; American and spiritually wandering outside of it. I wanted to be a doctor to make my African mother proud, though somewhere in my core, I was lured by the transformational power of words. Fluidity between clashing desires has been foundational to my work.

A Conversation with Poet · Translator · Editor MIRIAM CALLEJA

I was born and spent 40 years on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. I grew up bilingual and am now trilingual, speaking Maltese, English, and Italian. Malta is steeped in history, surrounded by the sea - an entity which is beautiful and scary in equal measures. My dreamscapes, even after living in the US for more than 3 years, often involve the sea and underground spaces.

as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky
A Conversation with Author NANA EKUA BREW-HAMMOND

I was born in Plattsburgh, NY, and raised mostly in Queens, NY, until, at twelve years old, my parents sent me to live and school in Ghana. That changed everything for me. Abruptly, my world expanded--exploded, really. Not in the sense that it was destroyed--though, it kinda was--but it got SO big so fast that I had to become new, and so I did. In Ghana, I lived with my maternal grandmother, a born-again Christian. Our days started with Morning Devotion, and were woven throughout with prayer. Through worship songs, she taught me the Twi and Fante I had willfully eschewed in America, plus Ga, translating lyrics for me line by line. When my great-grandmother came to live with us, I learned the little Ewe I still have now, both of us determined to decode the sounds that came out of our mouths.

A Conversation with Author FABIENNE JOSAPHAT

I was born and raised in Haiti and it has shaped my identity greatly. I write works that seek to challenge the current perceptions of Haiti, but I also explore themes of migration, identity, consciousness, which means everything I write leans toward opening my readers' eyes. I always think of the world in its entirety, so I'm interested in sharing stories that take us deeper into the human experience beyond borders. Growing up in Haiti, I read a lot of Haitian literature, but also European and African writings in addition to American writing. I think this has colored my perspective in ways that are exciting and I want to keep sharing these experiences in my work.

A Conversation with Author CHRISTIAN TERESI

It was generous and talented teachers who introduced me to Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. It was teachers who made me read Hamlet and King Lear. So, when I consider how Albany, New York influenced my thinking about the world, I think about how important well-funded public schools are to creating an informed populace. I think how K-12 teachers are not paid nearly enough and how they make real sacrifices to do that virtuous work. I wonder why the significant benefits of a quality K-12 public education are not available to everyone in the United States.

A Conversation with Author ALISHA DIETZMAN

I think of myself as Southern-adjacent and Czech-adjacent. I don’t really feel American in the truest sense. In terms of influence, this is a multifaceted question for me, but certainly one I’ve considered; the harder it is to answer the question “where are you from?” the more you tend to consider the subject/self formed in that confusion. I think the loneliness of existing comfortably in neither culture—or uncomfortably in both—has impacted my writing more than closeness, or intimacy with either culture, though I love both deeply. (And maybe its easiest to see them clearly from a slight distance, and this might be true, generally.) I definitely sense an undercurrent of alienation in my writing, but I don’t mind that, and increasingly, I heighten and interrogate this alienation, subtly. The strangeness of being outside isn’t always a bad strangeness.

A Conversation with Poet TIM RICH

A poem may have begun sub-consciously years back, but it can emerge at any time of day. I stop whatever I’m doing and get down as much of that first shape as possible—words, phrases, anything that’s arrived. It’s like stopping mid-walk to photograph a butterfly. A poem often begins for me with a phrase that opens up into an idea, atmosphere, or story. I revisit my rough notes soon after, adding depth and form, shaping lines. Usually, by the next evening, I’ll sit with those lines and push at their structure, trying to figure out what I’m really saying. I’m a better editor than writer, so a draft generally takes off once I start to work and work and work and work it. It’s rare that I do fewer than 50 edits of a poem.

JOAQUÍN ZIHUATANEJO on Language, Lineage & Resistance

My tío Tino, used to tell me when I was a mocoso, “Mi’jo, if you ever make something of yourself, make sure you tell them you were born on the mean streets of East Dallas, because your mom was in the back seat and we were flying up Gaston Ave toward Baylor Hospital and you we’re…happening back there.” A story…and I understand what the word story implies, but I love that story. So much. I’m from East Dallas. I’m from the streets of my city. My first poems sound like the streets of my city. My early poems sound like el jardín de mi abuelo…my grandfather’s garden. They sound like stories bouncing off the walls of Roy Hernandez’s Barbershop over off Henderson Ave. They sound like laughter in the produce aisle of Jerry’s Super Mercado. When I heard Jonathan GNO White’s poem, “Street Poet,” and the opening line…”I am a street poet / and I write about bad things,” I knew that’s what kind of poet I am…I am a street poet.

A Conversation with Author MICHAEL FARRIS SMITH

I work without a net, discovering as I go. My typical day is go into my studio around nine in the morning and go right to it. When I'm going good on something, I have a goal of 1,000 words a day. Sometimes that comes in a lightning bolt and sometimes it comes in a grind, but when I get there, I stop. No matter if I know what's next. I like to keep the fire lit for the next day. I'll make myself a couple of notes for where to start tomorrow, and that's pretty much it. I'll reread what I wrote the day before (not the entire manuscript) to get the words flowing and then I'll begin. It's a process that has gotten me through eight novels and I can't see a reason to change. There is an impulse to it, a notion of discovery to it. Sometimes it causes some desperation, but that fuels itself into the story (hopefully). I just believe that if I'm feeling that sense of discovery along the way, that the reader will also feel it when the time comes.

Poet SAÚL HERNÁNDEZ ON Lineage, Language & Power

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process allows me to connect deeply with others. I believe our stories—no matter how different—carry the potential to resonate across boundaries. For me, storytelling is not just personal; it’s communal. Sharing my experiences is essential, especially because I rarely saw myself reflected in the narratives I encountered growing up. It wasn’t until my undergraduate studies that I finally read stories that spoke to my own identity and upbringing. This absence raises a critical question: if we grow up in a world where only certain stories are told, are we truly being inclusive, or are we simply reinforcing the narratives society has deemed worthy? As both an educator and a writer, I am committed to challenging that imbalance. I work to ensure that all voices—especially those often overlooked—are heard, valued, and given space to thrive.

A Conversation with Author ROB MCLENNAN

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to empathy, experience and deeper human comprehension. It connects me to better thinking. I was born in Ottawa, but raised on a dairy farm in Eastern Ontario. Growing up on a farm provided an example of community thinking everyone helped each other, whether assisting with harvest, plowing driveways in the winter or repairing machinery. Everyone helps each other, and this is how I've always approached literary activity, whether writing, organizing events or publishing, working hard to participate in an ecosystem far more expansive than purely my own, individual work.

A Conversation with Author · Lawyer KRISTIN KOVAL

I had a long-standing desire to write about forgiveness because I’ve had powerful experiences with forgiveness, both being forgiven and forgiving others. I used to think of forgiveness as a gift a wronged person gave to wrongdoer, but I’ve realized that when I’m able to forgive someone, it’s a gift that’s given to me, not from me. There’s an old saying—sometimes attributed to Buddha, sometimes to Nelson Mandela—that holding onto anger or resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, and I think it’s accurate. Forgiving a wrongdoer, while complicated, can have an incredible and lasting impact on the person doing the forgiving, and I wanted to write about that experience—essentially, the gift the wronged person receives—in a way that might inspire others to re-think forgiveness. I struggled with how to do so until I realized the story of a family in crisis after a fratricide would enable me to highlight how complicated forgiveness can be, yet how rewarding, because a fratricide put the parents in both the hardest and the easiest position possible to forgive.

Author · Poet · Screenwriter ROCHELLE POTKAR

I have a small-town heart that always aspired for the city of Mumbai. This slow small town of the 90's gave me my earliest impressions of people from my large joint family, community, school, and society - many of whom became characters in my stories, in refracted ways as if they were endless reservoirs of humanity. I soaked in this microcosm before attempting to understand macrocosms. Even before I was a storybook reader, I read people like books, curious of where they had come from, where were they going to, why they did what they did, and the difference between their preaching and their practice. Even now in the present, my newly released first novel The D'Costa Family, has the wayward cock-and-bull concoction of those yesteryears and yesterpeople, written in a slapstick style.

A Conversation with Author · Editor · Teach­ing Artist LARA MIMOSA MONTES

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to the elemental experience of creation. My writing tends to blur the boundaries between life and art. It is so easy to feel cynical and hardened. So much of our everyday lived experience is becoming flattened via our reliance on social media and screens. We know these technologies are harming us and not only are they affecting our abilities to think, but to perceive. Art restores our dignity as perceiving-beings.

A Conversation with Author AIDEN HUNT

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to the literary community. As a disabled person, it’s important for me to feel like my life has some purpose to it other than quotidian inanity. The arts and humanities are that purpose for me. After years of being unable to work and being unhappy, I decided to read my way to a literary education, even though I never graduated high school. It isn’t exactly like I imagined as a child, but I’m living my dream of contributing to the artistic landscape with my writing.

A Conversation with Writer · Illustrator · Literary Journalist · Educator BRIAN GRESKO

My parents grew up working class in Philadelphia and raised me the same in the suburbs just outside the city. They admired my creativity, but didn’t encourage me to pursue writing or art making with any seriousness. On the contrary, they told me to get my head out of the books and learn a trade, or, when younger, play sports. You know, “normal” pursuits, especially for a boy. I refused. I attended Catholic school till ninth grade, an oppressive environment where I was picked on by students and teachers alike for my nonconformist attitudes and genderqueer weirdness. I never fit in, and in my family, that was literal – around the age of eight or nine my parents revealed that my dad wasn’t my biological dad, though we didn’t talk about it after that, and for more than ten years I carried on pretending I was my dad’s son. Pretending to be what I was not was one way I learned how to survive. All of this led to a distrust of authority in general, an attitude I found reflected in the literature and art I loved. In many ways, the world of books, comics, music, movies, and video games provided more of a home to me than the embodied house where I lived. Art has always played a powerful, central role in my life.

A Conversation with Author JASMIN ATTIA

When I decide to write a story, I will spend a lot of time researching before I plot because I need to understand the possibilities. I research through reading, watching film, interviews, old news reals, radio from the era, music, literature, whatever I can get my hands on.

The next step is plotting, and I buy partitioned notebooks like the ones our English teachers used to make us buy, and then I write out my detailed plot broken into sections. This is what I will use when I start writing. Next come the sticky notes on which I write out the questions to myself or other options for where the story can go. I have a column where I list all the world events that were taking place when my characters are in certain stages of their lives.

A Conversation with SHARON LAWRENCE

That transformation was key to my next step as an artist, to knowing that's what acting is. It isn't just posing; it isn't just being a version of yourself in a way that was free. Performing wasn't just performing; it was transforming. I think that artists find that in many different ways, and as actors, there are many ways into that.

A Conversation with MEGAN ABBOTT
Author of Beware the Woman · You Will Know Me · Give Me Your Hand · The Turnout · Co-creator of Netflix’s Dare Me

I always say to young writers, you need to put your heart on the page. Don't worry about being like anyone else. I would say that foremost, in any of the arts, it is self-expression at its core… I think that it all goes back to childhood. I’ve always really been writing about family. I suppose we always are. I do think that it is the original wound, and it's where we are kind of wired and built from those early years. So I think every other relationship just replicates that. It's very natural for me to go there, I suppose because the feelings are most intense there. We just keep recycling these relationships and dynamics over and over again—until maybe someday we can catch ourselves and try to break the bad patterns. It feels the most visceral and real to me, always. You're always looking for that in writing. You want everything to be at this peak intensity, or at least I do. That seems the most natural place to start.

A Conversation with Writer & Musician EIREN CAFFALL

We are in a complex and delicately balanced relationship of connection to everything else on the planet. We begin to recognize, write into, and speak into the complex interdependence and interconnection of every gesture that we make on the planet. Most storytelling that I really respond to, whether it's from my own culture or from previous civilizations, acknowledges that we are in this complex relationship where every gesture we make is connected to the lives of every other creature on the planet. The more narratives we allow to be complex in that way and interconnected, the more we begin to change our brain chemistry around how we protect ourselves and everything that is in relation to us. The more that you have that evolving relationship with it, that's dynamic and alive to the moment you're in, and that's not afraid of the feelings of fear, hopelessness, grief, or pain that attend paying close attention to the world as it is evolving around you, the better we are able to be flexible in the relationship we need to form with fixing what we can and holding onto what we have.

A Conversation with Author IRVIN WEATHERSBY JR.

One of the biggest symbols of America is Mount Rushmore. This monument, right? But I think most people fail to realize where it's located and why it's located there. Even more importantly, who did it? It's on a sacred Native American mountain, a place that was central to their creation stories. But then you think about who did it, and it was a Klansman. The guy who sculpted Mount Rushmore was a Klansman. People were like, "Wait, really?" Like, how is that a thing? But it seeps into our understanding and our embrace of white supremacy. This whole notion of us using Mount Rushmore as a metric of excellence is really sad. We are honoring slave owners and people who viciously killed natives, and those who pillage other lands in the name of capitalism. That's what America is, I guess.

I think there's such a disinterest in education in America that it is sickening. We can't even agree on facts. It's up to states' rights to decide. Really? States can say that this is true in one state, but it's not true in another? Although these states are united, it's very bizarre. I'm hopeful for revolution. I'm optimistic. I want radical change. I think we are repeating history. We are going through a cycle of fascism and greed, and I think we're going to see a lot of states collapse. As a result of that, I think people are going to be forced back to their primal needs and concerns, but I think they're going to be forced to think about what makes us human. How do we become more human? Because we've lost that. We've given it up to technology. How can we figure out what makes us a really powerful species again?

Novelist · Poet · Psychologist HALA ALYAN
Author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir

I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.

I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I am scared for people that I love. I am scared for people who are quite vulnerable. I worry for my students. I am concerned for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that will be such a heavy legacy to endure later on, how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this. They will be remembered. There will always be people who remember it.

Author LIZ MOORE on Long Bright River starring AMANDA SEYFRIED

I've lived in Philadelphia for about 16 years.  The book itself was inspired by my time spent in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia interviewing a lot of the people that I met there, both longtime residents of the neighborhood and also people who were transient,  a lot of people struggling with addiction and a lot of women doing sex work to fund their  physical addiction to opioids. You find out about their past,  their road into addiction, their aspirations, their fears.  I began to lead free writing workshops at an organization named St. Francis Inn, which is a longstanding food service organization in the community. They had a women's day shelter where I taught.  I was really able to connect with people within the community on a quite personal level and loved my experiences in Kensington. And I still go, I'm still quite close with a number of the community workers, people who run free healthcare clinics. All of it ultimately informed the writing of Long Bright River.

Booker Prize-winning Novelist PAUL LYNCH
Author of Prophet Song · Beyond the Sea · Red Sky in the Morning

We narrate the story of our lives to ourselves. We narrate it in linear fashion. And I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we're storytellers. This is what we do. And if you give the brain a story, a prepackaged story, you're giving a cheesecake. That's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. That's why our society is just built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything you do in the evenings – we sit down, we're watching Netflix – just stories. We consume them all the time. We are just machines for belief.

Environmentalists, Artists, Scientists & Earth Defenders Share their Stories

We are privileged to present the voices of individuals dedicated to effecting change and mitigating the harm inflicted upon our precious planet. These are individuals deeply committed to the core values that drive positive transformation: Max Richter, Ingrid Newkirk, Julian Lennon, Bertrand Piccard, Carl Safina, Nan Hauser, Claire Potter, Ada Limón, David Farrier, Cynthia Daniels, Oded Galor, Kathleen Rogers, Joelle Gergis, Sir Geoff Mulgan, Alain Robert, Noah Wilson-Rich, Chris Funk, Suzanne Simard, Peter Singer, and Jennifer Morgan.

RICHARD SENNETT Centennial Professor of Sociology · London School of Economics · Fmr. Humanities Professor · NYU
Author of The Performer · The Fall of Public Man · The Culture of the New Capitalism · The Craftsman

We look at creative work as though the very creative process itself is something good. These are tools of expression, and like any tool, you can use them to damage something or to make something. They can be turned to very malign purposes, for instance, in the operas of Wagner. So I wanted to do this set of books, I want to show what is kind of the basic DNA that people use for good or for ill. What are the tools they use, if you like, of expression that they use in the creative process?

with Neurologist · DR. GUY LESCHZINER
Professor of Neurology & Sleep Medicine · King's College London
Author of Seven Deadly Sins · The Nocturnal Brain · The Man Who Tasted Words

 I'm fascinated by the extremes of the human experience, partly because it is so far removed from our own experience of life. In another way, when you look at people who have neurological disorders or diseases, these are really nature's experiments. They are ways of trying to understand how the brain works for all of us. By extrapolation from looking at these extremes, we can learn about the workings of our own brains. That's very much the case across all the areas of my work, whether it be sleep disorders, neurology, or epilepsy—how we regulate our emotions, how we move, how we experience the world.

ADAM MOSS
Author · Artist · Fmr. Editor of New York magazine · The New York Times Magazine

 I was very interested in the state of mind of an artist as he or she goes about making. I think one of the things that artists have is not just an interest in their own subconscious, but also an ability to find ways, tricks, and hacks to access their subconscious. Over time, they understand how to make productive use of what they find there. We all have subconsciousness; we all dream and daydream. We all have disassociated thoughts that float through our head, but we don't generally know what to do with them. One of the traits that successful artists seem to have is this ability to cross borders into recesses of their own minds.

with KATIE KITAMURA · Author of Audition
Intimacies · A Separation

I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people, and in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.

VR Pioneer · Musician · Author JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future? · Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality & Virtual Reality · Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

AI is obviously the dominant topic in tech lately, and I think occasionally there's AI that's nonsense, and occasionally there's AI that's great. I love finding new proteins for medicine and so on. I don't think we serve ourselves well when we put our own technology up as if it were a new God that we created. I think we're really getting a little too full of ourselves to think that.

When we do that, I think we confuse ourselves too easily. This goes back to Alan Turing, the main founder of computer science, who had this idea of the Turing test. In the test, you can't tell whether the computer has gotten more human-like or the human has gotten more computer-like. People are very prone to becoming more computer-like. When we're on social media, we let ourselves be guided by the algorithms, so we start to become dumb in the way the algorithms want us to. You see that all the time. It's really degraded our psychologies and our society.

Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab
Author of Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?

Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world. The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?

When Solutions Become Problems with BAYO AKOMOLAFE
Philosopher · Psychologist Public Intellectual · Author · Founder of the Emergence Network

I learn more than anything else from my children. My son, he's seven, he's autistic, and I call him my prophet for a reason. He teaches me to meet myself in ways that are usually very stunning. I can get information from other people; I can read a book here and there, but it's very rare to come across such an embodiment of grace, possibility, and futurity, all wrapped up in a tiny seven-year-old boy's body. My son has given me lots of gifts.

with PAUL HAWKEN
Environmentalist · Entrepreneur
Founder of Project Regeneration & Project Drawdown

We have 1.2 trillion carbon molecules in every cell. We have around 30 trillion cells, and that’s us. So carbon is really a flow that animates everything we love, enjoy, eat, and all plant life, all sea life—everything that's alive on this planet—is animated by the flow of carbon. We want to see the situation we're in as that, as a flow. Where are the flows coming from, and why are we interfering with them? Why are we crushing them? Why are we killing them? For sure. But also, we need to see the wonder, the awe, the astonishment of life itself and to have that sensibility as the overriding narrative of how we act in the world, how we live, and how we talk to each other. Unless we change the conversation about climate into something that's a conversation about more life—better conditions for people in terms of social justice, restoring so much of what we've lost—then we won’t get anywhere.

with Actor, Art Historian, Director, Musician, Author PETER WELLER

Art transcends time and culture—the beauty of it. People worry about the world now. I remind them to go live in 1968, a time of preparing to go to the moon while people died for their beliefs. This is a difficult time in a republic that’s supposed to be free, but music was leading the way. Whether it was Miles, Coltrane, Aretha, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, the music was extraordinarily influential and cutting-edge… Leon Battista Alberti is an interesting figure because he was a poet, painter, architect, and particularly an architect, writer, and humanist. He wrote this amazing book on painting that everyone has to read.

Famous Rock & Urban Climber ALAIN ROBERT
Known for Free Solo Climbing 200+ of the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers using no Climbing Equipment

You are fighting to stay alive. You are fully in the present moment; you don't have time to think about being afraid. You are focused on what you are doing. You struggle to pass another window, then another, and you don't have time to think about your problems. The only thing you are concerned about deep down in the back of your mind is that you need to stay alive, and for that, you need to remain calm and focused.

JULIE ANDREWS · PAUL SCHRADER · JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY · ETGAR KERET · JOY GORMAN WETTELS · CHAYSE IRVIN · MANUEL BILLETER
Share their Stories

Novelist · Short Story Writer

What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.

w/ Economist RICHARD D. WOLFF
Co-founder of Democracy at Work
Author · Host of Economic Update

The position of the United States in the world, economically and politically, is the weakest it has been in my lifetime. I was born in the middle of the 20th century, so I have watched the rise of the American empire and the success of American capitalism in the second half of the 20th century. However, over the last 20 years, I have watched that turn into its opposite—a decline. The decline is visible everywhere. Unless you live in the United States and consume mainstream media, there is a level of denial that will be recorded historically as one of the great examples, not just of a declining empire, which typically has people who cannot face it and who refuse to see it. You can go to Great Britain today and find quite a few people who think we still have the British Empire, even though everyone who isn't crazy knows that is silly. But we are earlier in the decline phase than the British are; they have had to endure it for a century while we have just had to do it for a couple of decades. It is fresh.

UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders MICHEL FORST on Protecting Environmental Activists

My mandate focuses on the protection of those trying to protect the planet. Protection of defenders is my main topic. When I'm speaking to states or companies, it's always related to cases of defenders facing threats, attacks, or penalization by companies or governments, like the recent case of Paul Watson (founder of Sea Shepherd) in Denmark… When I travel to places like Peru, Colombia, or Honduras and meet Indigenous people, I realize they have a relationship with nature that we don't have anymore. They express that the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe goes beyond just air and food; it represents what they call Pachamama or Mother Earth. This is a cosmovision shared across various communities, not only in Latin America but globally.

Conversation with DEAN SPADE about How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together

This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.

Conversation with Showrunner · Creator · Head Writer
DEBORA CAHN

I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.

Singer-songwriter · Documentary Filmmaker · Founder of The White Feather Foundation
Photographer/Author of Life’s Fragile Moments

I think a lot of joy comes from helping others. One of the things that I've been really focusing on is finding that balance in life, what’s real and what’s true and what makes you happy. How can you help other people feel the same and have a happier life? I think whatever that takes. So if that's charity, if that's photography, if that's documentary, if that's music, and I can do it, then I'm going to do it.

Originator of the 15-Minute City Concept · Author of The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time & Our Planet

It all starts at home. As a university professor, I have observed the process of transformation of different generations. We need to find a sense of life. We need to find a sense of belonging to our humanity, but to have this sense of life, we need to find a sense in our local communities.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist · NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Author of Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life · Coauthor of Half the Sky · Tightrope · A Path Appears

I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

Oscar & Emmy-winning Director
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge · A Girl in the River
Forthcoming Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley

As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman.

Stories of Impact · People’s TV

Q: Who is David Byrne?
David Byrne: …I have no idea.

Most people know me through music, but when I was in high school I saw science and the arts as being equally creative fields. More recently, I just started taking an interest in how the brain works, and there's been this explosion of literature. As much as I love reading about neuroscience, I realize that experiencing some of the phenomena is just on a different level. I wanted to create an experience that shows us we're not who we think we are. Theater of the Mind is an immersive Science Theater project. With this show, I've tried to marry a narrative to the experience of different scientific phenomena that reveal how malleable our perception memory and identity really are.

Award-winning Composer & Pianist
His album Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time
Film & TV scores for Ad Astra · Black Mirror · Shutter Island · The Leftovers · Arrival · Taboo

For me, the creative process is a sort of a continuous thing in the sense that I'm writing kind of all the time, at some level. And that doesn't mean I'm sitting at my desk all the time, but it does mean that I've got a continuous thought process, a continuous engagement with the material I'm trying to shape. And it's many different kinds of processes. First of all, obviously an intention. You need to have an intention. What is it I'm trying to do? But then you get a process of making things, and then you get into a process of dialogue with the things you've made where they start to take on properties and it feels like the material has intentions of its own. So then you are trying to - it's like herding cats, you know? - sort of corralling this material into some kind of structure, some kind of formed object. Then it becomes like a sculptural process on the large scale.

A Conversation with Neuroscientist DR. FERNANDO GARCÍA-MORENO

I think creative thinking is rooted in different parts of the brain. I believe that creativity is mostly a cultural expression of how our brains react to the world. It is our culture and our lives that make our brains creative in different manners. Even though you and I have very similar brains containing exactly the same cell types, we have evolved alongside each other for 300 million years. We share a lot of features, yet we express our ideas through creative thinking differently. In my opinion, this is cultural evolution—an expression of how our brains have evolved throughout our lives, how we learn, and what experiences we have over time: what we read, the movies we see, and the people we talk to.

We are working in the lab to understand this moment in development, which is called phenotypic. This is something that has been known for over a hundred years. When you see many vertebrate embryos at this early embryonic time point, all embryos look very, very similar. We are extrapolating these ideas to the brain. We have seen that at this time point, the phenotypic period, all brains of these species are very simple but very closely related. We share the same features with a fish or with a gecko or with any other mammalian species at this early time point. We have the same brain with the same genes active and the same cell types involved in it.

Personal Stories of Healing, Social Justice & Activism

How do our personal relationships affect political movements and activism? What can we learn from Native American tradition to restore ecological balance? How can transforming capitalism help address global inequality and the environmental crisis? Dean Spade, Jericho Brown, Alexi Hawley, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, and Paul Shrivastava share their stories.

Artist

What are you trying to do with a portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. You're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.

Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Executive Director of Venice Biennale (Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture)

When I started and I had to decide what to do in life - because I was working with museums, in exhibition design, and on the restoration of buildings - and then at some point, I had the chance to arrive at the Venice Biennale and my whole perspective changed. And it changed because I was working with living artists and architects. Until that moment, I was working around Old Masters, works in museums, and things that were there with the aura of history. And all of a sudden I was dealing with living architects and artists, and this was, for me, the most incredible experience. So I decided to leave all the rest, because I was doing quite a lot at the same time, and to concentrate on the Biennale.

ATHLETE · ACTOR · AMERICAN · ACTIVIST
DIAN HANSON discusses photographic homage to ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.
– ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there.

Founder · Host · Exec. Director of First Voices Radio
Founder of Akantu Intelligence · Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute

We have not adapted to Earth. She needs us to do that. Instead, we've tried to adapt Earth to our needs. Which is always an extraction, take away. Earth doesn't exist because of technology. Earth will always be here. So when it comes to animacy, I think it's a Western term also, and so we get away from the Western terms. We start seeing that, oh, we are becoming Earth as we're born into this physical dimension. We are becoming Earth. And then as we are living during this time, we're alive. We are becoming Earth. And when we are finished with this body, we are becoming Earth. 

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.

Vice President · Head of the Paris Office
UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

The SDSN was set up to mobilize research and science for the Sustainable Development Goals. The development goals were adopted in 2015 by all UN member states, marking the first time in human history that we have a common goal for the entire world. Out of all the targets that we track, only 16 percent are estimated to be on track. Currently, none of the SDGs are on track to be achieved at the global level.

Emmy-nominated Producer, Writer, Playwright LAURA EASON on THREE WOMEN

I think the show conveys to the women watching that their lives matter. They don't have to be some gorgeous aspirational person, although Sloane absolutely fits that mold. But for others living in the Midwest, struggling and feeling unseen, hopefully, the mirrors of Lina and Maggie will help them not feel so alone and remind them that their stories are important and matter.

Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from. 

& The Limits to Growth with Co-President PAUL SHRIVASTAVA

Less than two weeks into the new year and the world’s wealthiest 1% have already used their fair share of the global carbon budget allocated for 2025. Climate change is here. It's already causing devastation to the most vulnerable populations. We are living with an extractive mindset, where we are extracting one way out of the life system of the Earth. We need to change from that extractive mindset to a regenerative mindset. And we need to change from the North Star of economic growth to a vision of eco civilizations. Those are the two main principles that I want to propose and that the Club of Rome suggests that we try to transform our current organization towards regenerative living and eco civilization.

Biologist · Author
The Science Delusion · The Presence of the Past · Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work

The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural.

How We Can Fight Poverty & Climate Chaos
with Environmental Journalist & Author AUDREA LIM

When I first started writing this book, it really foregrounded the problems within our land ownership system, which treats land as a commodity. The way we talk about land and issues like racial and food justice reflects this. We tend to focus on the problems, attaching big concepts to them, such as racial justice or environmental justice. I realized that my job primarily consists of going around and talking to activists and community groups about their work. I’m interested not just in the very big problems we face as a society, economy, and political system, but also in how people are trying to think through solutions or approaches to those problems.

Environmental Credit Solutions with BILL FLEDERBACH
President & CEO of ClimeCo

You'll hear ClimeCo speak a lot about market-based solutions because oftentimes, to really drive change in the market when a company is looking at ways to decarbonize, the first thing they typically do is look within their own operations. How can they get decarbonized? What's the cost of decarbonization? We call it the marginal abatement. Can they decarbonize with the technologies that exist? Oftentimes, those technologies exist outside of their operations. The benefit of the environmental markets allows companies to invest in projects that have a reasonable marginal cost.

Artists, Writers, Filmmakers Share their Stories

Marilyn Minter ·  Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy ·  Dean Spade ·  Laura Eason ·  Intan Paramaditha ·  Tey Meadow ·  Sara Ahmed ·  Ellen Rapoport ·  Dian Hanson ·  Kate Mueth on the importance of agency, owning the narrative, and the joy of creation.

Academy Award-nominated Cinematographer
HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster · Kali Reis · Fiona Shaw

I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.

Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center

It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

with KAREN G. LLOYD · Author of Intraterrestrials · Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies · Professor of Earth Sciences · University of Southern California

It's really changed my view of what life is. So many of the things that we attribute to the trappings of life look like requirements, like oxygen and sunlight. All the things that humans would absolutely die without — they’re not really necessary for life. Studying these things sort of breaks down what is necessary; what are the things that life has to have?

with Fmr. Vice President of Innovation & Creativity at Disney DUNCAN WARDLE
Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation

I think for most of us, time to think is the biggest barrier to innovation. I would argue it's our own river of thinking. Well, what's a river of thinking? I think it's our own expertise and our own experience. The more we have, the faster, wider, and deeper our river is, allowing us to make quick and informed decisions. But we don't get to think the way we've always thought. In the last four years, we've had global pandemics. We've had global climate change. We've got Generation Z entering the workforce, and now we have AI. So basically, the tools of the toolkit, which are brought to you by Nova, are actually designed to stop you from thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently.

Sculptor · Environmentalist · Creator of Underwater Museums

The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the "museums" expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight.

Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet

A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.

with TAO LEIGH GOFFE · Author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

We manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet. How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is.  Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.

Writer · Philosopher · Independent Scholar

You have all the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I always found very interesting. It was literally like a radio that was kept on all day in the kitchen.

You would come in and out, and you would hear certain things, and you'd have to work out the context and the conversation and the speakers. In some way, one of the big personalities in the book is just a radio that’s playing, and some of these conversations are not actually taking place between characters in real-time. They're just snippets that have been overheard on radios.

A Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance

The fact that technologies are being used and combined to capture our attention is concerning. This is currently being done with no limitations and no regulations. That's the main problem. Attention is a very private resource. No one should be allowed to extract it from us by exploiting what we know about the human mind and how it functions, including its weaknesses. We wrote this paper as a call to regulate the attention market and prevent algorithmic emotional governance.

Showrunner · Writer · Creator
The Rookie · The Recruit

There used to be a time when leading men were okay with falling down as a character. Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones is a prime example of that. Even going back to the fifties, they understood that failure and falling down, but getting back up, is an endearing quality. It's a universal human quality. We have gotten to a point in the last 10 or 15 years, or maybe longer, where leading men often want to win every fight. It’s in their contract: "I have to win every fight" or "I can't fail" or "I can't fall down." It's just such a mistake because the audience roots for you more if they see you fail and then get back up again. Noah is totally comfortable playing that character who's just trying to figure it out on the fly. Sometimes, he gets it wrong, but he's never going to give up. You can really feel that coming off the screen.

Award-winning Climate Activist
Author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future

There's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe…

Filmmakers, Writers & Artists Share their Stories

How do the arts help us understand the world? How do our personal lives influence the art we make? Benoît Delhomme, John Patrick Shanley, Jim Shepard, Anthony White, Laura Eason, Mark Gottlieb & Michael Begler explore their creative process.

Founder of Island Records, which launched the careers of Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…
Author of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond
Winner of the Polar Music Prize · A&R Icon Award

I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was because most of my music was bass and drum. And most of their music was vocal, so it wasn't a certain kind of music that I like all the time. I like music from all different kinds of levels…I absolutely felt for Bob Marley to really make it worldwide as it were, he needed to change something a little bit. I didn't want him to change what he was doing, not his lyrics and everything else like that. It was more the instrumentation of it. I felt for Bob to be able to reach a wider audience that he needed to move away a little bit from that and focus more and more on his lyrics. When I finally met Cat Stevens, and we just sort of sat down and then when he played the song ‘Father and Son,’ then suddenly the lyrics of the song and what it meant and everything, I suddenly felt this guy is fantastic.

24th U.S. Poet Laureate · National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Poet

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
with Hoa Xuande · Robert Downey Jr.

I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying, to Americans at least, put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.

Award-winning Cinematographer
Blonde starring Ana de Armas · Beyonce: Lemonade · Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman

That's all I can do on a movie. I can't really make a movie good or not because that's decided by the spectator. That's not in my control. All I can do is give it everything that I have. Like that's just the love I have to give. So why bring in all these other things? Just set it up so you can give it everything that you've got each time. In those theoretical considerations about how a scene can function or be rendered or shot or executed or all these things, just think of it as, "Oh, this is the challenge." I want authenticity. How do we create an environment where that's more likely to happen? Because it's never going to be something that I can enforce, and the more I try to enforce it, the less likely it'll happen. For me, the more risky things, the more things that defied expectations are really important to me. I guess it even goes down to just novelty. How do you create a need or a yearning? And the spectator, you create a particular rhythm and then you change that rhythm, and then it's almost like you try to sensitize your spectator to these ideas by defining a particular rhythm that you've set for them.

Award-winning Cinematographer of At Eternity’s Gate starring Willem Dafoe
The Theory of Everything starring Eddie Redmayne · The Scent of Green Papaya · Minamata
Artist Painter · Director

If you want to do your art well, you need to have some pleasure. If talking is not a pleasure, it's horrible. And when filming on a set is a bad experience, it's one of the worst things in life. As a cinematographer, if you can't make what you do personal to you, there is no soul. You need to make it personal. I certainly like a handheld camera, It's a bit like playing a saxophone. It's like the pace of walking or how I stop or I decide to go closer to the actor or to take more distance is so free. No one is telling me to go one step forward or one step back. I have to decide on the spot. So there certainly a freedom like a painter with a brush. It's nice because you have even the vibrations, your rhythms, the actor's rhythms. It's this dance.

Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical

We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.

Writer, Director SOPHIE BROOKS on her new film OH, HI!

In reality, we're all complex people with feelings and our own sets of baggage. I do think we are very good at self-sabotage, all of us. It's a very easy road to go down. It's safe because it's comfortable, and we know it. When you can find the ways you self-sabotage and try to stop that, it will hopefully lead to a happier life and things that are meaningful. When I was in my late twenties, I got out of a serious relationship and kind of reentered the dating scene. I was shocked by the simplification of a lot of complicated feelings around dating and how women are so easily labeled crazy, and men are so easily labeled assholes.

Musicians, Writers, Filmmakers & Actors Share Their Stories

How do the arts help us find purpose and meaning? What role do stories play in helping us preserve memories, connect us to each other, and answer life’s big questions? Max Richter, Etgar Keret, Athony Joseph, Claudia Forestieri, Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz Johnjoe McFadden, Sheehan Karunatilaka, Catherine Curtin, Kate Mueth explore the importance of creativity and the arts.

Scientists, Writers & Activists Share Solutions

What can we learn from whales, the ways they communicate, and how their life cycle affects whole ecosystems, absorbing carbon and helping cool the planet? How have we contributed to the ecological degradation of the environment? How does language influence perception and our relationship to the more than human world?

Writers, Philosophers & Thought Leaders Speak Out

How can we be more engaged global citizens? How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? What influence do billionaires have on politics, journalism, and the technology that shapes our lives? Deborah Cahn, Daniel Susskind, Carlos Moreno, Lee McIntyre, Julian Lennon, Darryl Cunningham, and Arash Abizadeh on the future of democracy.

The Lives of Billionaires Comic Artist & Author DARRYL CUNNINGHAM on Making Complex Subjects Simple

No one should be a billionaire because it's damaging. There's a certain level of wealth that's damaging to a country. Billionaires have so much wealth that they have enormous political power, which is undemocratic. There should be a ceiling on wealth. I have nothing against people becoming millionaires or even multi-millionaires. But multi-billionaires are incredibly bad for all of us. If you have so much money that you can buy an entire political party, that's a thing that shouldn't exist.

Filmmakers, Musicians & Artists discuss their Creative Process

Where does our intuition come from? How are lifelong creative partnerships formed and what role do friendship and personal connection play? How do our personal lives influence the art we make?

Scientists, Activists, Farmers & Filmmakers Speak Out

PETA Founder Ingrid Newkirk, Cave Diver Jill Heinerth, IPCC Lead Author Joëlle Gergis, Director of the European Commission’s DG for Energy Paula Pinho, Co-Founder of The Best Bees Company Noah Wilson-Rich, Ecologist Carl Safina, Founder of The Ocean Agency Richard Vevers, Founding Father of the Circular Economy Walter Stahel, Founder of Advocacy Group F Minus, CEO of Legacy Agripartners Colin Steen, President of Source Global Neil Grimmer

Neuroscientist · Fmr. Dancer
Author of The Pathway to Flow: The New Science of Harnessing Creativity to Heal and Unwind the Body & Mind

The state of being in flow and seeking out that state, sort of disappearing from the here and now... it must have been something that has been part of human cultures for many millennia. We know that, for example, dancing can bring you into these states. And we know from many anthropological works that people dance themselves into trance, a type of flow. So, there is that flow in this scientific sense of a state of well-being. And we will speak about what that does to our brain and our broader wellbeing, but also the flow in what cues enter into our senses. So that would be a scientific field that looks at brain synchrony, physiology synchrony, these waves that we see that sort of connect with us.

Filmmakers, Writers & Artists on Connecting through Creativity

How does art change the way we see and experience the world? Art has the power to offer transformative experiences, but what about the lives of artists who give so much of themselves? How can we balance creativity and personal well-being while still making work that is true and meaningful?

This episode explores the enduring power of storytelling to shape our world and illuminate the human experience. Writers Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy, and Max Stossel discuss creativity, resilience, and the power of words to heal and bring people together.

How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How have wetlands become both crucial carbon sinks and colossal methane emitters in a warming world? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature?

Artists, Philosophers, Economists & Scientists discuss the Future

How can we shape technology’s impact on society? How do social media algorithms influence our democratic processes and personal well-being? Can AI truly emulate human creativity? And how will its pursuit of perfection change the art we create?

Artists, Writers, Visionaries & Educators Share their Stories

How can the arts help us learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What is the power of mentorship for forging character and creative vision? How can we hold onto our cultural heritage and traditions, while preparing students for the needs of the 21st century?

Have we entered what Earth scientists call a “termination event,” and what can we do to avoid the worst outcomes? How can we look beyond GDP and develop new metrics that balance growth with human flourishing and environmental well-being? How can the 15-minute city model revolutionize urban living, enhance health, and reduce our carbon footprint?

Professor of Political Science · McGill University
Author of Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics · Assoc. Editor · Free & Equal

There is a tremendous tension between healthy democracy and deep economic inequalities. I don't think that, in the long run, democracies can survive in a healthy way unless we address the problem of economic inequalities. If we have individuals who are living day to day, on the one hand, and we have other individuals who are billionaires in our societies, on the other hand, it will be very difficult for us to have a genuine democracy.

Economist · Oxford & King’s College London
Author of Growth: A Reckoning · A World Without Work

We have a choice to change the nature of growth. How we can have growth that is more respectful of place, doesn’t cause as much damage to the environment, doesn't lead to as large inequalities in society, doesn’t disrupt politics, doesn't undermine the availability of good work? We ought to pursue this morally enriched GDP measure which better reflects what we really value and care about as a society.

Academy Award · Tony · Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer/Director
Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Moonstruck · Wild Mountain Thyme · Danny and the Deep Blue Sea · Joe Versus the Volcano

I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard. They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, 'You just want everybody to like you.' So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that.

President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences 2019-2022
Casting Director & Producer

What an academy was meant to be, going back to their founding, really is a group of people with a certain degree of passion and expertise and knowledge that want to get together and share. That's what I think academies are all about. So the fact that I've been helpful in spurring the Academy onto becoming a more international and global enterprise is a source of great satisfaction to me

Famous Rock & Urban Climber
"The French Spider-Man”
Known for Free Solo Climbing 200+ of the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers using no Climbing Equipment

First of all, yes, I need to know what I will be climbing, whether it's on rocks or whether it's on buildings. And then there is physical preparation. And regarding the mindset, it's more something that became a bit automatic over the years because I have been free soloing for almost 50 years. So it is pretty much my whole life. So that means that for me, being mentally ready, it's kind of simple. It's almost always the same mental process, meaning, I can be afraid before an ascent, but I know myself actually very well. And I know that once I am starting to climb, I feel fine. I put my fear aside, and I'm just climbing.

Functional Neurosurgeon · Professor · University of Utah

When you think about the evolution of the human brain–just like other animals that have specialized in speed or keeping warm or gathering food–I feel our brain sort of specialized being creative and flexible and being able to generate different solutions to a given problem. To me, this is probably the most fascinating thought process that happens in the human brain. And what I do in neurosurgery–and my subspecialty is called functional neurosurgery–we don't deal with disorders in which there's an anatomical abnormality inside the brain. We deal with disorders in which there is an abnormal connection or abnormal circuitry inside the brain when there's an issue with the way the brain functions. There's no tumor. There are no abnormal blood vessels or anything like that. And that gives us an amazing opportunity to really investigate how different circuits and different areas inside the brain work.

Creative & Academic Director · Stanford d.school
Co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine-­ learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another.

To be a maker in this moment—­ to be a human today—­ is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You—­ yes, you!—­ might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

Founding Director · Remuseum
Fmr. Director · Speed Museum · Attorney · Co-Founder & CEO · IMC Licensing
The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. This is the opportunity to say, if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.

A Conversation with Lecturers & Students

Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with two of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show this was not at all necessary.  Expediency for senior faculty trumped the survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative writers.

Professor of Neuroscience & Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute

I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.

Screenwriter · Exec. Producer · Showrunner
Creator of Hulu's Tell Me Lies · Queen America

Often when people write or make movies about romances with young adults, I think they are very flippant about it and don't take it seriously. But I think that those friendships and romantic relationships are some of the most important ones because they really set the stage for the rest of our lives. If your first relationship is incredibly toxic and damaging, it can take you years to  figure out that that's not normal, and that that's not actually how relationships are meant to be.

Earth Systems Scientist · Royal Holloway University of London

I am a Christian and I have strong Muslim and Jewish friends as well as great respect for Hindu beliefs. I grew up in Southern Africa and I am well aware of the depth of some Indigenous beliefs. I think that having belief systems does give you a very different perspective sometimes. Now, in Christianity, the concept of the shepherd, human beings are here and this is our garden, our garden of Eden, but we have a responsibility. And if we choose to kick ourselves out of the garden, there are consequences. And that's precisely what we are doing. The garden is there, it's lovely, and we can manage it, and it's our job to manage it. We can manage it properly. We can respect it. It's for all creation, and it's very explicit that it involves all Creation. And that's a very fundamental biblical law that you have to respect all Creation. And if you don't do that, then the consequences—you’re basically throwing yourself out of the garden of Eden.

Literary Critic · Historian of Science · Educator
Author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science

There is a stronger connection between Dickinson and Darwin than the proximity of history. Or the universality of literature. They both understood natural science and the natural world in ways that seem strange and somewhat surprising in the 21st century. Their 19th century attitudes to nature and the study of it are so different from ours that when we trace their stories, a vanished world begins to emerge. The more I consider these figures together, the more I feel their world and my world. come alive. Darwin and Dickinson illuminate each other. By reading them together, we can start to understand the interconnected relationships that animated 19th century poetry and science.

Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London · Author of Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022

The environmental crisis, Gaza, the war in Ukraine—all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. History and the humanities have come under huge pressure. We've seen falling student numbers, and that's a real shame because history continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that not only makes us wiser and more reflective but also creates the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. I hope that among the young generations, there will be people inspired by history, people that have the ambition to research and write about the past.

Actress · Artist · Director · Producer · Writer
House M.D. · Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce · Little Bird · The West Wing · The Kominsky Method

I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things, because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view. I think part of the beauty of being in a long-running television show is that, in season one, you're playing the role they wrote. By season two, they're writing the person you're playing. You start to build your voice, and they start to merge, and so by the time you get to season three, you're much more like full human beings having this dialogue.

Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board

I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.

Singer-songwriter · Photographer · Documentary Filmmaker
Founder of The White Feather Foundation
Executive Producer of Common Ground

I thought, wow, how are they going to bring this across in a way that isn't shoving things down people's throats? It's presenting information in a way that is creative, but also in a way that drives your curiosity into understanding, number one, why are we in the position that we're in? And number two, how can we fix this? What can we do to change all of this? And so, I initially got involved as an executive producer on Kiss the Ground, and I was blown away by how that film came out at the end. How well rounded it was, the flow of the film, the storytelling, and really feeding me information that I didn't even know previously. And so also watching that become a platform around the world was jaw-dropping. I mean, the fact that the belief and the understanding and the wisdom that came out of that project has touched so many hearts, minds, and souls around the world, that people are really single-handedly almost making change for the better around the world. Now, when Common Ground was presented, I did love that concept because Kiss the Ground had been very much a broad approach and about America, for the majority, really, and Common Ground was a much more...I mean, we're still dealing with the same subject matter obviously, but I think it felt great to come from a more personal aspect."