Steven Johnson | |
|---|---|
 Johnson at South by Southwest in 2008 | |
| Born | Steven Berlin Johnson June 6, 1968 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Education | Brown University (BA) [1] Columbia University (MA) |
| Occupation(s) | Author, TV presenter |
| Spouse | Alexa Robinson |
| Children | 3 |
| Website | www |
Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist.
Steven grew up in Washington, D.C., [2] where he attended St. Albans School. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, [3] [4] a part of the school's modern culture and media department. [5] He also has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature.
Johnson is the author of thirteen books, largely on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience. He has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and the hyperlocal media site outside.in. [6] A contributing editor to Wired , he writes regularly for The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Financial Times , and many other periodicals. Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Medium, Atavist, Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Patch.com.
He is the author of the best-selling book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts such as television dramas and video games have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills.
His book Where Good Ideas Come From advances a notion to challenge the popular story of a lone genius experiencing an instantaneous moment of inspiration. Johnson instead argues that innovative thinking is a slow, gradual, and very networked process in which "slow hunches" are cultivated, and completed, by exposure to seemingly unrelated ideas and quandaries from other disciplines and thinkers. He lists the themes he has identified from studying which environments and conditions have been correlated, historically, with high innovation. He argues that they make theoretical sense because of their tendency to effectively explore the "adjacent possible", Stuart Kauffman's concept (which Johnson cites) of the space of innovations waiting to be made from combining immediately-available notions and solutions.
His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age was released in September 2012. [7]
In August 2013, PBS announced that Johnson would be the host and co-creator of a new six-part series on the history of innovation, How We Got to Now , scheduled to air on PBS and BBC Two in Fall 2014. [8]
Since May 2018, Johnson has hosted the podcast American Innovations, created by Wondery. [9] [10]
Johnson is a co-host (with David Olusoga) of the PBS/Nutopia 4-part series Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, that premiered on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. [11] Respective hour-long episodes include "Vaccines", "Data", "Medicine", and "Behavior". [11]
In 1997, Harvey Blume reviewed Johnson's first book, Interface Culture, and called it "a rewarding read—stimulating, iconoclastic, and strikingly original." [12]
The A.V. Club said in a review of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, "It's a good argument made in great detail, mapped out with lists and charts of decision-affecting contingencies and intricate narrative structures. But how necessary it is remains debatable, especially once Everything Bad settles into simply restating its already convincing premise." [13]
David Quammen reviewed The Ghost Map (2006) for The New York Times , writing, "There's a great story here, one of the signal episodes in the history of medical science, and Johnson recounts it well... His book is a formidable gathering of small facts and big ideas, and the narrative portions are particularly strong, informed by real empathy for both his named and his nameless characters, flawed only sporadically by portentousness and small stylistic lapses." He called the book, and Johnson, "intriguing" and "smart." [14]
Entertainment Weekly gave The Ghost Map an 'A' rating, saying, "The Ghost Map asks the reader to imagine a situation in which 'you could leave town for a weekend and come back to find 10 percent of your neighbors being wheeled down the street in death carts.' For inhabitants of mid-19th-century London, cholera rendered this apocalyptic vision a terrifying reality... Johnson traces the courageous and ultimately successful attempt by an anesthetist/scientist/sleuth named John Snow to discover how the disease was transmitted. And he does so in a way that brings to nightmarish, thought-provoking life a world in which a swift but very unpleasant death can be just a glass of water away." [15]
Author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, in The Los Angeles Times , called 2010's Where Good Ideas Come From "a vision of innovation and ideas that is resolutely social, dynamic and material" and "fluidly written, entertaining and smart without being arcane,"—"a Renaissance alchemical guide." [16] Bruce Ramsey described in The Seattle Times how, in Where Good Ideas Come From, "Johnson is looking for the new ideas in our civilization and seeking to explain why they arise where they do." [17]
Kirkus Reviews called Good Ideas a "robust volume that brings new perspective to an old subject" and said of Johnson, "Throughout, his infectious enthusiasm and unyielding insight inspire and entertain." [18] The Sunday Telegraph said, "Like all good ideas, this book is bigger than the sum of its parts... Johnson enlivens his argument with stories and examples that bring personality and depth to his ideas, and make for an engaging read..." [19]
Oliver Burkeman, in a review of Future Perfect, described the book as "a wide-ranging sketch of possibilities, not a detailed policy prescription, and read as such, it's frequently inspiring. Above all, it's exciting to reflect on the possibility that the many achievements of the Silicon Valley revolution might be compatible, rather than in tension, with a progressive focus on social justice and participatory democracy." [20]
Ethan Gilsdorf, also reviewing Future Perfect, called it "a buoyant and hopeful book" with "clear and engaging prose." [21]
Johnson's book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software was a finalist for the 2002 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. [22]
His Where Good Ideas Come From was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year's best books by The Economist .[ citation needed ] His book The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly , [23] and was runner up for the National Academies Communication Award in 2006.[ citation needed ] His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.[ citation needed ]
He was the 2009 Hearst new media professional-in-residence at Columbia Journalism School, and served for several years[ when? ] as a distinguished writer in residence at New York University's Journalism School.[ citation needed ] He won a Newhouse School Mirror Award for his 2009 TIME magazine cover article "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live". [24] He has appeared on television programs such as The Colbert Report , The Charlie Rose Show , The Daily Show with Jon Stewart , and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer .[ citation needed ]
After growing up in Washington, D.C., and graduating from St. Albans School in 1986, Johnson moved to New York City in 1990 and spent twenty-one years there, living in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, for seven years, then the West Village, where his first son was born. [2] Johnson writes that, on September 11, 2001, he and his wife "watched the Twin Towers fall from Greenwich Street on our son's first day home from the hospital. When our second son was on the way, we decamped for Brooklyn..." [2]
In 2010, interviewer Oliver Burkeman wrote that "Johnson, who lives with his wife Alexa Robinson and their three sons in Brooklyn... gives around 50 lectures a year, and writes plenty of high-profile opinion columns, all of which he has accomplished by the not-exactly-ancient age of 42. (While we're on the topic, he also has an enormous 1.4 million followers on Twitter...)" [25]
In a 2011 blog, he wrote that he and his family would be leaving New York "for a few years" as they would be "moving to Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge across the bay from San Francisco"—"a two-year move: an adventure, not a life-changer." [2]
Johnson talks about a near-death experience in his 2004 book Mind Wide Open. He and his wife lived in "an apartment in a renovated old warehouse on the far west edge of downtown Manhattan," a home with "a massive eight-foot-high window looking out over the Hudson River" where they often enjoyed the view. On a June afternoon, they watched "an especially severe storm" approaching. Within minutes, the storm smashed the window, of which they were not directly in front during the crisis. [26] : 47
He has written that he has some difficulty with visual encoding, "a trait that I seem to share with Aldous Huxley," whom Johnson quotes at greater length in Mind Wide Open than cited here: "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon..." [26] : 235
In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The term, "disruptive innovation" was popularized by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, but the concept had been previously described in Richard N. Foster's book "Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage" and in the paper Strategic Responses to Technological Threats.
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley,, is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He is known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics and has been a regular contributor to The Times newspaper. Ridley was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, during which period it experienced the first run on a British bank in 130 years. He resigned, and the bank was bailed out by the UK government; this led to its nationalisation.
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
Geoffrey Kloske is the vice president and publisher of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group. He served as vice president and executive editor of Simon & Schuster from 1998 to 2006. Previously, he was an editor at Little, Brown and Company from 1992 to 1996. Authors he has edited include David Sedaris, Dave Eggers, Bob Dylan, Sarah Vowell, Jon Ronson, Nick Hornby, James McBride (writer), and Mark Kurlansky.
Ghost Rider is a 2007 American superhero film written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson. Based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, it was produced by Columbia Pictures in association with Marvel Entertainment, Crystal Sky Pictures, and Relativity Media, and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film stars Nicolas Cage as the titular character, with Eva Mendes, Wes Bentley, Sam Elliott, Donal Logue, Matt Long, and Peter Fonda in supporting roles. Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle stuntman sells his soul and becomes a bounty hunter of evil demons: the Ghost Rider.
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
The 48 Laws of Power (1998) is a self-help book by American author Robert Greene. The book is a New York Times bestseller, selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a non-fiction book written by Steven Johnson. Published in 2005, it details Johnson's theory that popular culture – in particular television programs and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making society as a whole more intelligent, contrary to the perception that modern electronic media are harmful or unconstructive. The book's claims, especially related to the proposed benefits of television, drew media attention. It received mixed critical reviews.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World is a book by Steven Berlin Johnson in which he describes the most intense outbreak of cholera in Victorian London and centers on John Snow and Henry Whitehead.
David John Skal is an American historian, critic, writer, and on-camera commentator known for his research and analysis of horror films, horror history and horror culture.
Scott D. Anthony is an author and senior partner at growth strategy consulting firm Innosight.
Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Director of the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science which began in September 2014. Dolan conducts research on the measurement of happiness, its causes and consequences, and the implications for public policy, publishing in both scholarly and popular outlets. He has previously held academic posts at York, Newcastle, Sheffield and Imperial College London and he has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is the author of two popular press books: Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After and the creator and presenter of the Duck-Rabbit podcast.
How We Got to Now is a British-American factual television series that was broadcast on PBS in 2014 and BBC Two in 2015. The series was commissioned by the BBC in the United Kingdom and made by Nutopia, a British-American production company in the United States. The six-part series, presented by Steven Johnson, explores the legacy of great ideas.
Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (2012) is a non-fiction book published in 2012 by American best-selling author Steven Berlin Johnson. In this book, Johnson presents a new political worldview he names “peer progressivism.” This idea promotes collaboration amongst peers and the development of peer networks for the purpose of accomplishing large undertakings and ultimately helping society grow and change for the better.
How Google Works is a book co-written by Google's Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers and make the argument that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees, dubbed "smart creatives". The book is in English and was published on 23 September 2014 by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. The hardcover version is 304 pages in length. Covering various topics such as corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption, the authors illustrate management maxims with numerous insider anecdotes from Google's history. It became a New York Times bestseller.
Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference is a 2015 book by William MacAskill that serves as a primer on the effective altruism movement that seeks to do the most good. It is published by Random House and was released on July 28, 2015.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is a 2018 book by Michael Pollan. It became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller.
James Hollis is an American Jungian psychoanalyst, author, and public speaker. He is based in Washington, D.C.
What We Owe the Future is a 2022 book by the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. It argues for effective altruism and the philosophy of longtermism, which MacAskill defines as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time."
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is a 2021 non-fiction book written by British author Oliver Burkeman.
