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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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In her recent TIME Magazine profile, astrophysicist and TED Fellow Lucianne Walcowicz explains how her and her team are looking for alien communication in the flickering of stars.
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Notes"I don’t write hatchet jobs. I used to. Then I grew up."Lev Grossman, in a highly personal essay about how he became a book reviewer, and how the practice has changed since Orwell wrote “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.”
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NotesDavid Eagleman’s study of human time perception has inspired a post on MSNBC around why people are so fascinated by slow motion video. One reason—Eagleman offers a total of three here—is that it unmasks things we’d never normally see. Just check out the video above for some good examples of what you’re missing.
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Notes"I support the Pulitzer board’s decision not to give out an award for fiction this year…I’m saying this because I care deeply about the state of American fiction, to which I have devoted my whole career."Lev Grossman, TIME’s Chief Book Critic, on the controversy surrounding the Pulitzer Prize jury’s decision not to award a fiction prize this year.
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Notes"Most adults were young adults at some point in their lives, and some of us are still processing that experience."Time’s book critic Lev Grossman, on the popularity of young adult novels among older readers, in the New York Times’ Room for Debate series.
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When it comes to novels, says TIME book critic and Lavin speaker Lev Grossman, endings are so overrated:
I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they’re actually not as important as they’re sometimes given credit for. According to conventional wisdom, the ending of a book is supposed to sum up the book’s meaning in one sublime moment of dramatic closure. But I often find that after a month or two I can’t remember the ends of novels at all, even novels I loved — even detective novels, where the whole (putative) point of the book is the big reveal at the end. Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.
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Notes"You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds."David Eagleman speaking at Setting Time Aright conference. Via Boing Boing.
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Nathan Wolfe’s mission is to stop the next deadly pandemic before it has a chance to jump from animals to humans. TIME Magazine’s story on the celebrated Virus Hunter is a compelling read.
Nathan Wolfe quoted in TIME on the threat of the next pandemic:
“We sit here dodging bullets left and right, assuming we have an invisible shield, but you can’t dodge bullets forever.”
