HENRY SHUE - Author of “The Pivotal Generation” - Snr. Research Fellow, Centre for International Studies, Oxford

HENRY SHUE - Author of “The Pivotal Generation” - Snr. Research Fellow, Centre for International Studies, Oxford

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Author of The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now · Basic Rights
Senior Research Fellow · Centre for International Studies · University of Oxford

We can tell from the science that we have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. And common sense tells you that bringing them down for the second 50% is going to be harder than the first 50%. So we have to take care of the first 50% by about 2030, and it's 2023 already. We literally must - if we're going to keep climate change from becoming even more dangerous than it is - is to do a very great deal in the next seven or eight years. And a huge amount between now and 2050. So it's not that this problem is the most important of all possible problems. There are other problems like preventing nuclear war, but this is a problem that either we get a grip on it now, or there's a real possibility that it will escape from our control. 

ARTHUR KLEBANOFF - President of Scott Meredith Literary Agency - Founder of Rodin Books & RosettaBooks

ARTHUR KLEBANOFF - President of Scott Meredith Literary Agency - Founder of Rodin Books & RosettaBooks

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President of Scott Meredith Literary Agency
Founder of Rodin Books & RosettaBooks

As President of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Arthur has represented J.D. Salinger, Arthur C. Clark, several U.S. Presidents, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Bradley, Paul Krugman, among others, and has handled books with over $1 billion in sales. In 2001, Klebanoff founded RosettaBooks, an independent eBook publisher which for twenty years disrupted the publishing business. Klebanoff has published, represented or packaged over 75 thought leadership titles. He founded RodinBooks to publish books by impactful leaders.

Highlights - MICHAEL BEGLER - Showrunner of PERRY MASON starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance - THE KNICK starring Clive Owen, dir. Steven Soderbergh

Highlights - MICHAEL BEGLER - Showrunner of PERRY MASON starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance - THE KNICK starring Clive Owen, dir. Steven Soderbergh

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Showrunner · Writer & Executive Producer
Perry Mason starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Shea Whigham, Hope Davis
The Knick starring Clive Owen · directed by Steven Soderbergh

Storytelling is our oldest art form. We can't silence the arts and those voices because if we do, we lose something that is so crucial to who we are just as human beings. We want to tell stories. We want to express things. For example, I cannot draw. And one day the teacher wanted us to do negative space drawings. And I said, "What is that?" And they explained that it's looking at what's around the object and not the object. And it clicked, and it made me look at things from a whole different perspective. And you know, what? That became where I was most successful. And so for me, there's are an infinite number of ways to tell a story that you never run out of ideas, that you can always find another road, another way to look at something. That's probably one of the key elements to my career.

MICHAEL BEGLER - Showrunner of PERRY MASON starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Shea Whigham, Hope Davis

MICHAEL BEGLER - Showrunner of PERRY MASON starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Shea Whigham, Hope Davis

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Showrunner · Writer & Executive Producer
Perry Mason starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Shea Whigham, Hope Davis
The Knick starring Clive Owen · directed by Steven Soderbergh

Storytelling is our oldest art form. We can't silence the arts and those voices because if we do, we lose something that is so crucial to who we are just as human beings. We want to tell stories. We want to express things. For example, I cannot draw. And one day the teacher wanted us to do negative space drawings. And I said, "What is that?" And they explained that it's looking at what's around the object and not the object. And it clicked, and it made me look at things from a whole different perspective. And you know, what? That became where I was most successful. And so for me, there's are an infinite number of ways to tell a story that you never run out of ideas, that you can always find another road, another way to look at something. That's probably one of the key elements to my career.

Highlights - Amanda E. Machado - Writer, Public Speaker - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

Highlights - Amanda E. Machado - Writer, Public Speaker - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

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Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.

AMANDA E. MACHADO - Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing (Copy)

AMANDA E. MACHADO - Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing (Copy)

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Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.

Highlights - JOY GORMAN WETTELS - Exec. Producer “UnPrisoned”, “13 Reasons Why”, "Home Before Dark”, “Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground”

Highlights - JOY GORMAN WETTELS - Exec. Producer “UnPrisoned”, “13 Reasons Why”, "Home Before Dark”, “Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground”

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Award-winning Executive Producer of UnPrisoned starring Kerry Washington & Delroy Lindo
13 Reasons Why · Home Before Dark · Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground
Founder of Joy Coalition

With UnPrisoned and with really my whole body of work as a producer, I'm really drawn to stories that make people feel seen that take issues that have stigma and shame attached to them, and making those issues just more palatable and more human. And few people realize that 50% of American families are touched by incarceration. And when you meet someone like Tracy McMillan, who really is a miracle, this is a woman who's now in her fifties who grew up in 22 different foster homes because her father was incarcerated when she was so little. And yet for all of his mistakes, the fact that he was a career criminal, he still, when he could change her diapers, he was present when he could be there. He braided her hair, and there was real love there. But they were separated not only by his mistakes, but by a system that is really unforgiving and really unfair, especially to black and brown men. So, the idea that we could tell a story where a young woman who was raised that way and by that person turns out to be Kerry Washington. You know, turns out to be somebody who you want to be, turns out to be "Olivia Pope", this woman that we all see as so beautiful and such a hero and so strong and so powerful, I felt was just an incredible opportunity. And when we first put Tracy and Kerry in the same room, Kerry said to Tracy, "You know you're a miracle, right?"

JOY GORMAN WETTELS - Exec. Producer “UnPrisoned” starring Kerry Washington, “13 Reasons Why”, Founder of Joy Coalition

JOY GORMAN WETTELS - Exec. Producer “UnPrisoned” starring Kerry Washington, “13 Reasons Why”, Founder of Joy Coalition

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Award-winning Executive Producer of UnPrisoned starring Kerry Washington & Delroy Lindo
13 Reasons Why · Home Before Dark · Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground
Founder of Joy Coalition

With UnPrisoned and with really my whole body of work as a producer, I'm really drawn to stories that make people feel seen that take issues that have stigma and shame attached to them, and making those issues just more palatable and more human. And few people realize that 50% of American families are touched by incarceration. And when you meet someone like Tracy McMillan, who really is a miracle, this is a woman who's now in her fifties who grew up in 22 different foster homes because her father was incarcerated when she was so little. And yet for all of his mistakes, the fact that he was a career criminal, he still, when he could change her diapers, he was present when he could be there. He braided her hair, and there was real love there. But they were separated not only by his mistakes, but by a system that is really unforgiving and really unfair, especially to black and brown men. So, the idea that we could tell a story where a young woman who was raised that way and by that person turns out to be Kerry Washington. You know, turns out to be somebody who you want to be, turns out to be "Olivia Pope", this woman that we all see as so beautiful and such a hero and so strong and so powerful, I felt was just an incredible opportunity. And when we first put Tracy and Kerry in the same room, Kerry said to Tracy, "You know you're a miracle, right?"

Highlights - TANSY E. HOSKINS - Author of "The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion”, “Foot Work”, “Stitched Up”

Highlights - TANSY E. HOSKINS - Author of "The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion”, “Foot Work”, “Stitched Up”

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Author of The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion · Foot Work · Stitched Up
Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award Winner

I definitely believe at the moment that fashion brands, big fashion in particular, they just exist to exploit people. It's an excuse to exploit the poor, basically. I see fashion as part of this very extractive global economic society where 100, 150 years ago, that extraction was very obvious. You had the enslavement of people. You had taxation. You had literally armies turning up and occupying the land that they wanted and just taking resources or land. These days it's more subtle, but the brands are still following those colonial pathways.

TANSY E. HOSKINS - Author of "The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion” - Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award Winner

TANSY E. HOSKINS - Author of "The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion” - Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award Winner

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Author of The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion · Foot Work · Stitched Up
Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award Winner

I definitely believe at the moment that fashion brands, big fashion in particular, they just exist to exploit people. It's an excuse to exploit the poor, basically. I see fashion as part of this very extractive global economic society where 100, 150 years ago, that extraction was very obvious. You had the enslavement of people. You had taxation. You had literally armies turning up and occupying the land that they wanted and just taking resources or land. These days it's more subtle, but the brands are still following those colonial pathways.

Highlights - MARK BURGMAN - Author of “Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts”

Highlights - MARK BURGMAN - Author of “Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts”

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Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London · Editor-in-Chief of Conservation Biology

Author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts

The idea of expertise and expert judgment has been around and has been something that society depends upon for a long time, but there have been no serious empirical explorations of who's an expert, what a domain of expertise is, and what sort of frailties are experts susceptible to. Those things haven't been addressed in an empirical way until the last 30 years. Some of this work began in the fifties with Kahneman and Tversky. They began to explore the things that make people misjudge risky situations, and that led to a body of research on who makes good judgments and under what circumstances for things that might affect us in various ways.

MARK BURGMAN - Director, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London - Editor-in-Chief, Conservation Biology

MARK BURGMAN - Director, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London - Editor-in-Chief, Conservation Biology

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Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London · Editor-in-Chief of Conservation Biology

Author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts

The idea of expertise and expert judgment has been around and has been something that society depends upon for a long time, but there have been no serious empirical explorations of who's an expert, what a domain of expertise is, and what sort of frailties are experts susceptible to. Those things haven't been addressed in an empirical way until the last 30 years. Some of this work began in the fifties with Kahneman and Tversky. They began to explore the things that make people misjudge risky situations, and that led to a body of research on who makes good judgments and under what circumstances for things that might affect us in various ways.

Highlights - NICHOLAS ROYLE - "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory"

Highlights - NICHOLAS ROYLE - "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory"

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Co-author of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Author of Mother: A Memoir · Managing Editor of Oxford Literary Review

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.

NICHOLAS ROYLE - Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory" - Author of “Mother: A Memoir”

NICHOLAS ROYLE - Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory" - Author of “Mother: A Memoir”

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Co-author of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Author of Mother: A Memoir · Managing Editor of Oxford Literary Review

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.

Highlights - BRUCE EVAN BARNHART - Author of “Jazz in the Time of the Novel”, “Temporal Experiments”

Highlights - BRUCE EVAN BARNHART - Author of “Jazz in the Time of the Novel”, “Temporal Experiments”

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Author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature
Co-director of University of Oslo’s Literature, Rights & Imagined Communities

I really admire how James Baldwin always talks about jazz as a kind of model for his writing style. But music has certainly had a profound influence on the way I see the world, especially in terms of the social world. One of the big problems we have in all sorts of different places around the world is the question of how to coordinate difference. All sorts of people have different modes of living, different cultural rhythms, and different ideas about the future. Jazz is brilliant at a lot of things, but it notably brings together different people and allows them to retain their own sense of time and rhythm while playing together. It's a really profound model of social coordination. Now, of course, it says something particularly pressing about the United States, but I think as a model for how differences go together, jazz is perhaps unparalleled.

BRUCE EVAN BARNHART - Author of “Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture”

BRUCE EVAN BARNHART - Author of “Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture”

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Author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature
Co-director of University of Oslo’s Literature, Rights & Imagined Communities

I really admire how James Baldwin always talks about jazz as a kind of model for his writing style. But music has certainly had a profound influence on the way I see the world, especially in terms of the social world. One of the big problems we have in all sorts of different places around the world is the question of how to coordinate difference. All sorts of people have different modes of living, different cultural rhythms, and different ideas about the future. Jazz is brilliant at a lot of things, but it notably brings together different people and allows them to retain their own sense of time and rhythm while playing together. It's a really profound model of social coordination. Now, of course, it says something particularly pressing about the United States, but I think as a model for how differences go together, jazz is perhaps unparalleled.

Highlights - ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity

Highlights - ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity

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Author of The Neuroscience of Creativity
Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development, University of Georgia

I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.

ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

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Author of The Neuroscience of Creativity
Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development, University of Georgia

I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.

Highlights - JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

Highlights - JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

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Explorer · Presenter · Author of Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

If I die, it will be in the most glorious place that nobody has ever seen. I can no longer feel the fingers in my left hand. The glacial Antarctic water to see through a tiny puncture in my formerly waterproof glove. If this water were one-tenth of a degree colder, the ocean will become solid. Finding the knife-edged freeze is depleting my strength, my blood vessels throbbing in a futile attempt to deliver warmth to my extremities. The archway of ice above our heads is furrowed like the surface of a golf ball, carved by the hand of the sea. Iridescent blue, Wedgewood, azure, cerulean, cobalt, and pastel robin’s egg meld with chalk and silvery alabaster. The ice is vibrant, right, and at the same time ghostly. The beauty contradicts the danger. We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story.

JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

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Explorer · Presenter · Author of Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

If I die, it will be in the most glorious place that nobody has ever seen. I can no longer feel the fingers in my left hand. The glacial Antarctic water to see through a tiny puncture in my formerly waterproof glove. If this water were one-tenth of a degree colder, the ocean will become solid. Finding the knife-edged freeze is depleting my strength, my blood vessels throbbing in a futile attempt to deliver warmth to my extremities. The archway of ice above our heads is furrowed like the surface of a golf ball, carved by the hand of the sea. Iridescent blue, Wedgewood, azure, cerulean, cobalt, and pastel robin’s egg meld with chalk and silvery alabaster. The ice is vibrant, right, and at the same time ghostly. The beauty contradicts the danger. We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story.