SELECTED PRESS
June 14, 2010
Brockman has been asking an Edge Annual Question for the past 13 years. In this essay, he explains what makes a question a good one to ask and shares some responses to this year’s question: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?”
January 29, 2010
Has the Internet changed our way of thinking? Scientists, artists, and intellectuals from all over the world respond.
By Luca De Biase 1.21. 2010
The Internet transforms the cultural conditions that work in collective intelligence. But in what direction?
By Gabriele Beccaria 1.20.2010
His name is John Brockman. He queries the best scientists with challenging questions, bringing them together on his site edge.org and sometimes in the flesh, in California or Paris.
By Tommy Cappellini 1.20.2010
The site Edge.org invites intellectuals every year to answer a question crucial to our age. That of the 2010 is as follows: "How has the Internet changed the way you think?"About 200 personalities responded, including Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Brian Eno, Chris Anderson, Douglas Coupland and Jaron Lanier.
"An unusual figure of the cultural panorama..."
"Between Possible and Imaginary" is the theme of the Science Festival which opens in Rome next week. The American popularizer John Brockman collected the forecasts of the greatest living minds about ideas that will change everything during their lifetime. From DNA to education, the book illustrates surprising and provocative discoveries from the world that await us.
By Gaetano Prisciantelli 1.8.2010
By Herman Vianna 12.10.2010
I tracked the trajectory of John Brockman, the man who founded Edge before the Web existed. I bought the first book in his series "The Reality Club" at the time of its launch in 1990. I was impressed with such an interesting gathering of thinkers, coming from different areas such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the biologist Lynn Margulis, or psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
By Juana Libedinsky 3.30.2008
Writer, editor and architect of a great number of the recent years' scientific bestsellers, American John Brockman recounts how the project came about to summon a hundred brilliant minds, mostly scientists, and each year ask provocative questions to synthesize, in a way, contemporary thought. The answers are striking.
By Tim Adams 6.30.2007
Some people would suggest that Natalie Angier’s enlightenment utopia, in which everyone might one day agree on the fundamentals of the universe, the beautiful basics, is a false ideal; the mass has always believed in mumbo-jumbo. One of these people is John Brockman. Brockman has probably done more than anyone to break down CP Snow’s cultural divide. He is the PT Barnum of popular science, a great huckster of ideas.
"Brockman has probably done more than anyone to break down CP Snow's cultural divide. He is the PT Barnum of popular science, a great huckster of ideas."
By Jim Holt 1.21.2007
Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Put so starkly, the question has a fatuous ring. Unless you are in the grip of a bipolar disorder, you are probably optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others.
By Gabriele Beccaria 11.22.2006
The old intellectuals have become irrelevant. The only possible knowledge is that gained by research.
"He is the kind of thinker that does not exist in Europe."
"Intellectuals are not just people who know things, but people who shape the thoughts of their generations."
Volume 6, Issue 4 Summer 2006
What is one to make of a man whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet...
By Lluís Amiguet 1.9. 2006
What is a dangerous idea? One not assumed to be false, but possibly true? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? These are the questions of the last two years that the Edge Foundation asked of 120 free thinkers. The audacious and stimulating answers have been reproduced in hundreds of newspapers such as The New York Times or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
By Salvador Pániker 9.14.2005
Some call it the "third culture" in reference to a necessary path capable of integrating literary and scientific wisdom. And that renews the repertoire of classic humanism.
"Like a lot of successful salesmen, part of his secret is that he is interested in people for their own sake as well as for what they can do for him, and can study them with extraordinary concentration..."
By Andrew Brown 4.30.2005
The son of a Boston wholesale flower seller, he adapted his father's business methods in his work as a pop publicist and management consultant. He went on to become a successful literary agent, specialising in top science writers and — with an online 'intellectual salon' — building a reputation as a tireless promoter of influential ideas.
QUARK
By Riccardo Oldani 2.7.2005
Edge's website was created by one of the most volcanic characters of New York's cultural landscape, John Brockman.