JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of "The Tradition", "The New Testament"

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament

I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

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U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast

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.

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

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Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

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Author of The Stoic Challenge & A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...'

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

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Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles

When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.

Roy Scranton - Author of “We're Doomed. Now What?” - "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"

Roy Scranton - Author of “We're Doomed. Now What?” - "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"

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Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene & We’re Doomed, Now What?
Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative

It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life.

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

Ellen Rapoport · Creator, Exec. Producer & Showrunner of “Minx” for HBO Max

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Creator, Executive Producer & Showrunner of Minx
starring Ophelia Lovibond & Jake Johnson

What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady, all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing Minx, what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our time. It seems like the magazines were covering all the same issues that we're now talking about. Obviously, we all saw with the leaked decision in Roe vs. Wade just how close we are to that time period and how far we haven't come.

Anthony Gardner · Prof. Contemporary Art History, Oxford · Fmr. Head, Ruskin School of Art

Anthony Gardner · Prof. Contemporary Art History, Oxford · Fmr. Head, Ruskin School of Art

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Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Oxford
Fmr. Head, Ruskin School of Art · Co-author of Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art

I think art can engage with the body, the mind, and the imagination in so many different ways that can compliment modes of thinking, other modes of creating and thinking through and working through and devising.
I was thinking about this in relation to the last 18 months and how the sciences have rightly been heralded as the great way of getting ourselves out of this pandemic, but culture is the way and art is the way that we've been getting through the pandemic.

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

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Global Leader in the Study of Present-Day Extinctions & Biodiversity
Founder & Director of Saving Nature

It's a complicated issue. I think a lot of those bird disappearances come from the fact that we have massively intensified our agriculture. Large areas of North America and Europe are now under intense agriculture. They are sprayed with a whole variety of pesticides, which I think is also responsible for the fact that many insects have disappeared, so species that depend on farmland have clearly declined dramatically, but it isn't all birds and there is a piece of this complicated story that involves water birds. Herons and egrets and ducks. Those species both in North America and Europe, are now much more common than they were 30, or 40 years ago. That comes from active conservation of protecting wetlands, making sure we don't shoot our wetland birds. So it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some success stories. There are many things we can do. I think 50 years ago, there were only something like 300 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Bald eagles are now nesting in every state apart from Hawaii. Our conservation efforts have done a great job.

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

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YA Writer & Poet
Author of Pillow Thoughts & I Hope You Stay

I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.

Candace Fujikane · Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”

Candace Fujikane · Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”

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Author of Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future
Professor of English at the University of the Hawaiʻi at Manoa

The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for our work against climate change, one based on what I refer to as Indigenous economies of abundance—as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. Rather than seeing climate change as apocalyptic, we can see that climate change is bringing about the demise of capital, making way for Indigenous lifeways that center familial relationships with the earth and elemental forms. Kānaka Maoli are restoring the worlds where their attunement to climatic change and their capacity for kilo adaptation, regeneration, and tranforma- tion will enable them to survive what capital cannot.


Dolen Perkins-Valdez · NYTimes Best-selling Author of “Take My Hand”


Dolen Perkins-Valdez · NYTimes Best-selling Author of “Take My Hand”

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NYTimes Best-selling Author of the books Take My Hand · Balm, & Wench
Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation

My dad graduated from Tuskegee, and he often told me about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He really wanted me to understand the history, not only of medical experimentation but more specifically, medical experimentation in the state of Alabama. So my feeling about medical experimentation is that there's a long history in this country of medical experimentation on black bodies, particularly based behind this racist notion that black people don't feel pain in the same way. And so I've always sort of known that, but once I started to research this book, I began to really understand more specifically what it has meant for black women.

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

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Award-Winning Photographer & Filmmaker
Executive Director of Vital Impacts

When are we all going to start to care about one another? Because all of our individual choices do have impacts. And I just think the demands that we place on this planet, on the ecosystems, are what are driving conflict and human suffering. In some cases, it's really the scarcity of resources, just like water. In others, it's the changing climate and the loss of fertile lands to be able to grow food. But in the end, it's always the people living in these places that really suffer the most. All of my work today, it’s not really about wildlife, and it's not just about people either. It's about how deeply interconnected all of those things are. People and the human condition are the backdrop of every one of the stories on this planet.

Mario Alberto Zambrano · Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Dir. of Dance, The Juilliard School

Mario Alberto Zambrano · Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Dir. of Dance, The Juilliard School

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Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC

In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?

STEVE BIDDULPH

STEVE BIDDULPH

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Parent Educator & Bestselling Author of The Secret of Happy Children
Raising Boys, The New Manhood, and 10 Things Girls Need Most

We drastically misuse our mind and have neglected a very important part of the way our mind works in the modern world. I think preindustrial people and our ancestors used this very well. And that is that we have a whole right hemisphere of our brain which doesn't think in words, which takes in the holistic picture of everything around us. Anyone who is listening to this podcast will be aware that sometimes you have got feelings about things. They are signals that are sent from the right hemisphere of the brain, picking up things that we can't consciously interpret or read. It goes through our amygdala, which is our alarm system, and straight down the vagus nerve, and we feel it down in the middle of our body. What the books argue, if you want to be able to parent effectively, and live your life effectively, is to stay in touch with that. Include those signals as part of your mental checking out. Expand your awareness because you can read that every few seconds all the time. And your life will be very different. There are feelings below your feelings. They are not always right, but they're always worth listening to.

NATALIE HODGES

NATALIE HODGES

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Author of Uncommon Measure A Journey Through Music, Performance, and
the Science of Time · Fmr. Classical Violinist

There's a real decrease in functional connectivity between regions of the brain that modulate the ego and a sense of self for Gabriela Montero when she's improvising. That's not a region of the brain in particular, it’s the connections between a lot of them and that together as well and also our sense of self and also our conscious memory and our ability to anticipate and plan for the future. So our knowledge of ourselves in these different spheres of time, the light of that activity is dimmed during improvisation. There really is a biological reason behind her feeling that she gets out of the way and something else comes to the fore. The study asks why are her improvisations still so coherent, why did they hold together in time. They refer to it as this form of embodied creativity or embodied cognition, where it’s a deeper kind of memory. a more physical memory in her fingers in her body that know how to play and kind of takes over and allows for ego to kind of dissolve in that moment as she performs.

IAIN McGILCHRIST

IAIN McGILCHRIST

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Author of The Matter with Things · The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World Psychiatrist, Neuroscience Researcher, Philosopher & Literary Scholar

The heart also reports to the brain and receives from the brain. So our bodies are in dialogue with the brain. And we don't really know where consciousness is, we sort of imagine it's somewhere in the head. We have no real reason to suppose that it's just we identify it with our sight and we, therefore, think it must be somewhere up there behind the eyes, but it's something that takes in the whole of us and to which the whole of us contributes.

WILLIAM McDONOUGH

WILLIAM McDONOUGH

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Leader in Sustainable Design & Development
Architect, Co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

I think believing in something is also part of the responsibility of the believer to sift through these things. So there are a lot of people saying I'm green because they do something less badly. So for me, it’s not green yet, it's just less bad. It's not really good yet. It's not really fabulous, but that just means there's an opportunity to keep going to share information and help each other because in the end, I think what we're dealing with now is the recognition that the world has a very serious issue with climate, that's very clear now. So how can we help each other? The question is no longer what is wrong with the way you're doing it. The real question now is how can I help you?

DAVID SIMON

DAVID SIMON

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Editor of Rethinking Sustainable Cities · Professor of Development Geography & Director for External Engagement, School of Life Sciences & Environment, Royal Holloway, University of London

That principle, what is now called by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and being popularized more widely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Network and others as the 15 or 20 Minute City. The idea underpinning it is that a higher proportion of the goods and services, the activities, the social interactions that we need are obtainable within a 1 1/2 to 2 km radius of one's home, which means a far higher proportion of one's individual trips or multiple purpose journeys can be done on foot and by bicycle, therefore, you use your vehicle if you have one more sparingly. You use the bus or minibusses to reach slightly more distant places, and then you have transport interchanges is where you connect with the metro system or the best rapid transit or the railway to reach other parts of large cities or indeed for inner-city journeys. And that is what is now becoming the new best practice in terms of urban planning redesign.