Current Affairs and Policy Issues
 | Mia Birk
Author │Urban Planner │Bicycling and Pedestrian Transportation Advocate
Mia Birk is Chief Executive Officer and Principal at the international firm Alta Planning and Design. She has 20 years experience in sustainable transportation focused on pedestrian, bicycle, trail, and greenway planning, design and implementation. Mia is also an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University, where she co-founded the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation in the College of Urban Studies.
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 | Dr. Brian Fagan
Author │ Archaeologist │ Climate Change Historian
Dr. Brian Fagan is a leading authority on the complex relationship between the environment, climate change and human society. Fagan is the author or editor of 46 books, including eight college textbooks familiar to two generations of archaeology students. For audiences ranging from business executives to high school students, Fagan places today’s highly publicized climate crisis in a crucial historical context and describes how humans have adapted to environmental changes over the eons.
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 | Jeff Goodell
Author │ Investigative Journalist │ Energy & Environment Expert
“The greatest danger we face is not technological hubris, but human apathy.”
—Jeff Goodell
Through years of research, acclaimed author and investigative journalist Jeff Goodell has established himself as an expert on the coal industry and now geoengineering--which offers the most ambitious solutions to our planet’s environmental crises. As the price of oil soars and energy independence and global warming become ever more urgent political and ecological priorities, Goodell offers a vital perspective on what the stakes are and how to stem the tide of environmental disaster.
Selected Books: Big Coal, How to Cool the Planet
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 | Robert Greene
Bestselling Author │ Cultural Theorist │ Strategist
Law 3—CONCEAL YOUR INTENTIONS
Law 14—POSE AS A FRIEND, WORK AS A SPY
Law 15—CRUSH YOUR ENEMY TOTALLY
Robert Greene is not a man who preaches random acts of kindness. In fact, the release of his book The 48 Laws of Power prompted New York Magazine to declare, “Machiavelli has a new rival. And Sun Tzu better watch his back.” Spending eleven weeks on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, The 48 Laws of Power sent shockwaves through the business world, Hollywood, Washington, and even the hip-hop music industry. Not only has Greene been called in to Robert Greenepersonally advise industry leaders such as famed film and TV producer Brian Grazer and American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, but he was also asked to collaborate on a business book with the multi-platinum rapper 50 Cent. Rap producer and filmmaker Quincy “QD3” Jones III has even begun working on a full-length documentary about The 48 Laws of Power and its influence on the music industry.
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 | Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon
Author │ Energy & Security Expert │ Political Scientist
Thomas Homer-Dixon helps his audiences understand how our world is changing. In clear, simple language, he shows how challenges such as global warming, energy scarcity, economic instability, and infoglut affect people, companies, and societies. And he explains what we can all do to adapt and prosper in a world of ever-greater complexity, speed, and surprise.
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 | Tracy Kidder
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Essayist
"A lot of the job of a person trying to write stories that are true is to make what’s true believable. It isn’t enough to say, well, it actually happened. You have to make it believable on the page; you have to bring people to life and scenes to life."
—Tracy Kidder
Over his long career, Kidder’s writing has been prolific and outstanding. The Soul of a New Machine—a book celebrated for its insight into the world of high-tech corporate America—earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1982. Other bestselling works include House (1985), Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993) and Home Town (1999).
Selected Books: Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Strength in What Remains, The Soul of a New Machine
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 | Alex Kotlowitz
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Race & Poverty Commentator
Alex Kotlowitz is an award-winning journalist whose bestselling book, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (Doubleday, 1991), garnered national recognition for its compassionate and unflinching portrait of Pharoah and Lafeyette Rivers and their lives growing up in a public housing project in inner city Chicago.
No other book, no movie, no TV show so powerfully portrays the children and families who are outside the American dream."
—New Leader
Selected Books: There are No Children Here, Never a City So Real
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 | Dr. Peter Kramer, MD
Bestselling Author │ Psychiatrist │ Novelist
"What if Van Gogh had taken antidepressants? Would we still have Starry Night?"
—Dr. Peter Kramer
More than a decade ago, Dr. Peter Kramer revolutionized the way we think about antidepressants with his enormously popular and influential bestseller Listening to Prozac (Viking, 1993). Thoughtful and provocative, Kramer’s work explored what it means to have medicines that alter the essence of personality and how this impacts our understanding of self.
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 front.jpg) | James Howard Kunstler
Novelist │Urban Planning Advocate │Journalist │Social Critic
James Howard Kunstler had written eight novels and countless articles and essays when the scene outside his window, on his street—on most of the cities and streets in America—caught his attention: "the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."
Selected Books: Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency
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 | Rebecca Skloot
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Educator
Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot spent over ten years doggedly
uncovering the truth about the life, death and ultimate "immortality" of
a poor black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. On a tumultuous
educational path until a community college biology instructor utter the
words "Henrietta Lacks," Skloot—with remarkable focus and tenacity—set
off on a trajectory that would shine the national spotlight on both and
become the phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
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 | Krista Tippett
Author │ Radio Show Host │ Journalist
“It’s always been very important to me to enlarge imaginations about how this part of life we call religious and spiritual actually works in real, far-flung, 21st-century lives.”
—Krista Tippett
Peabody Award winning broadcaster Krista Tippett grew up in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and spent most of the 1980’s in divided Germany. She was The New York Times stringer in Berlin and also reported for Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. Later she served as a special political assistant and chief Berlin aide to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.
Selected Books: Speaking of Faith, Einstein's God
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Dr.
 | Christopher Phillips
Bestselling Author │ Founder, Constitution & Socrates Cafés │ Social Entrepreneur
“To date, Phillips has orchestrated discussions on … Solomonic topics at nursing homes, maximum-security prisons, churches, homeless shelters, bookstores and coffeehouses across the country, gently prodding students, urban professionals, unreconstructed slackers, street people and others to share their worldviews and scrutinize their most basic assumptions.”
–Los Angeles Times
Christopher Phillips has a passion for inquiry. A foremost specialist in the Socratic Method, he reminds us that we ought to ask questions – “not about any chance question,” as Socrates put it in Plato’s Republic, “but about the way one should live.”
Selected Books: Constitution Café, Six Questions of Socrates, Socrates Café.
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 | David Oliver Relin
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Human Rights Advocate
"We Americans need to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the 'war-on-terror' after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we’ve failed to make our case to the moderate, peace-loving majority of people at the heart of the Muslim World. If we want to heal the wounded relationship between Islam and the West, we have to learn how to wage peace as aggressively as we wage war."
—David Oliver Relin
Selected Books: Three Cups of Tea, See How They Shine (Random House, forthcoming 2011)
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