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The Lavin Agency is a speakers bureau, based in New York City and Toronto. We exclusively represent leading thinkers, writers, and doers who inspire ideas and dialogue that make the world a better place. |
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Notes"How effective is violence? Political scientists have recently tried tallying the successes and failures of violent and nonviolent movements. The evidence is piling up that Gandhi was right—at least on average…Just think of the failed independence movements in Puerto Rico, Ulster, Quebec, Basque Country, Kurdistan, and Tamil Eelam. The success rate of terrorist movements is, at best, in the single digits."Lavin speaker Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, writing about why violence doesn’t work in The Atlantic.
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Notes"If music confers no survival advantage, where does it come from and why does it work? I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties."Steven Pinker, quoted in the New York Times article “Pinkerisms: Selections from Steven Pinker’s writings on language, evolution and the mind.”
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Steven Pinker’s latest, The Better Angels of Our Nature, has already received widespread acclaim and was named as one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year. In fact, it’s Nicholas Kristof’s pick to win the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
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Notes Steven Pinker to Discuss New Book at Intelligence Squared 2011
Steven Pinker is one of the world’s foremost cognitive scientists and a widely respected (and in-demand) speaker. Joining the likes of Jimmy Carter and Umberto Eco, Pinker will speak at an Intelligence Squared special event on November 1st, 2011, to discuss his upcoming book, The Better Angels of our Nature, which is due in October. The book is a provocative and counterintuitive look at why humanity is less violent today than perhaps we’ve ever been. Mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world, Better Angels continues Pinker’s groundbreaking work into the true nature of humanity.
