John Brockman | |
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 John Brockman in 2009 | |
| Born | February 16, 1941 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | literary agent |
John Brockman (born February 16, 1941) is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.
Brockman was born to immigrants of Polish-Jewish descent in a poor Irish Catholic enclave of Boston, Massachusetts. [1] Expanding on C.P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture" [2] consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."
While working as a banker at the time, Brockman had a chance encounter in Central Park where he met avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. This meeting marked the beginning of Brockman's involvement in the arts, leading him to manage performances and film programs.
Brockman had a notable connection to Andy Warhol during the 1960s. Brockman was part of the New York art scene, where he engaged with various avant-garde and underground cinema activities. During this period, Brockman was known as a "Warhol groupie" and was part of the circle that Warhol frequented, which included other artists and musicians like Bob Dylan.
Brockman's involvement in the art scene included managing the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, a hub for underground cinema, where he worked with various artists, including Warhol. This connection is further evidenced by photographs of Brockman with Warhol, which he often shares with profile writers. His immersion in the arts eventually led him to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences, becoming a key figure in promoting scientific and intellectual discourse.
The Harvard-MIT Art/Science Meeting was an innovative event that brought together artists and scientists for a collaborative seminar. It was initiated by Brockman after receiving a call from Arthur K. Solomon, a biophysics professor at Harvard Medical School, and Walter A. Rosenblith, a communications biophysics professor at MIT. Both were close associates of Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in cybernetics, who had recently passed away. They were inspired by articles in The New Yorker and The Nation about the expanded cinema festival, which highlighted the intersection of art and Wiener's work on cybernetics. Solomon asked Brockman to organize a group of avant-garde artists to meet with scientists from Harvard and MIT for a two-day seminar in Cambridge. Notable scientists included Anthony Oettinger, an AI pioneer from Harvard, and Doc Edgerton from MIT, known for inventing ultra-high-speed photography. The artists included Ken Dewey and Terry Riley from Theatre X, as well as Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan from USCO.
He led a scientific salon for 20 years, asking an annual question to a host of renowned scientists and publishing their answers in book form, [3] which he decided to symbolically close down in 2018. [4]
In an interview with Prince Andrew dated November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking. [7]
Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking. [8]
Brockman's famous literary dinners—held during the TED Conference—were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings. [9] This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires. [10] [11]
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Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution is a 1995 book by John Brockman which discusses the work of several well-known scientists who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public. John Brockman has continued the themes of 'The Third Culture' in the website of the Edge Foundation, where leading scientists and thinkers contribute their thoughts in plain English.
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art, and design. As of 2014, Media lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.
David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is a professor of computer science at Yale University.
Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the President of Chiba Institute of Technology. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. Ito is general partner of Neoteny Labs, and former board member of Creative Commons, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation. Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project in 2008 to investigate fundamental questions about the universe and served as the project's director.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum,Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.
Stephen Michael Kosslyn is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. Kosslyn is the president of Active Learning Sciences Inc., which helps institutions design, deliver, and assess active-learning based courses and educational programs. He is also the founder and chief academic officer of Foundry College, an online two-year college.
Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science. Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable is a book edited by John Brockman, which deals with "dangerous" ideas, or ideas that some people would react to in ways that suggest a disruption of morality and ethics. Scientists, philosophers, artists, and various other groups of people have written in to the online salon called the Edge, where thinkers in several areas post and discuss their ideas. This collection of responses forms the entirety of the book. The basic concept behind the book is "to gather a hundred of the most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves".
What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty is a non-fiction book published by Harper Perennial and edited by literary agent John Brockman that includes an introduction by novelist Ian McEwan. The book consists of responses to a question posed by the Edge Foundation, with answers as short as one sentence and as long as a few pages. Among the 107 published contributors are scientists and philosophers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, Sir Martin Rees, and Craig Venter; as well as convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Some contributions were not included in the print book, including those by Benoit Mandelbrot and computer scientist John McCarthy but are among 120 responses available online.
The Edge Foundation, Inc. is an association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Its main activities are reflected on the edge.org website, edited by publisher and businessman John Brockman. The site is a critically noted online magazine exploring scientific and intellectual ideas. In 2019, BuzzFeed News reviewed Edge’s IRS filings and reported that Jeffrey Epstein was "by far its largest financial donor", and that "his association with Edge gave him access to leading scientists and figures in the tech industry."
The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation was a private foundation established in 2000 by New York convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Officially registered as J. Epstein VI Foundation, the "VI" stands for Virgin Islands, where the foundation was based and Epstein owned a private island. The foundation's board included Cecile de Jongh, wife of the former governor of the United States Virgin Islands, John de Jongh.
Logology is the study of all things related to science and its practitioners—philosophical, biological, psychological, societal, historical, political, institutional, financial. The term "logology" is back-formed from the suffix "-logy", as in "geology", "anthropology", etc., in the sense of the "study of science". The word "logology" provides grammatical variants not available with the earlier terms "science of science" and "sociology of science", such as "logologist", "logologize", "logological", and "logologically". The emerging field of metascience is a subfield of logology.
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