John Brockman (literary agent)

John Brockman
John Brockman in 2009
Born	(1941-02-16) February 16, 1941 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation(s)	literary agent, editor, writer

John Brockman (born February 16, 1941) is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.

Early life

Brockman was born to immigrants of Polish-Jewish descent in a poor Irish Catholic enclave of Boston, Massachusetts. Expanding on C. P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture" consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

Career

While working as a banker at the time, Brockman had a chance encounter in Central Park where he met avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. This meeting marked the beginning of Brockman's involvement in the arts, leading him to manage performances and film programs.

Brockman had a notable connection to Andy Warhol during the 1960s. Brockman was part of the New York art scene, where he engaged with various avant-garde and underground cinema activities. During this period, Brockman was known as a "Warhol groupie" and was part of the circle that Warhol frequented, which included other artists and musicians like Bob Dylan.

Brockman's involvement in the art scene included managing the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, a hub for underground cinema, where he worked with various artists, including Warhol. This connection is further evidenced by photographs of Brockman with Warhol, which he often shares with profile writers. His immersion in the arts eventually led him to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences, becoming a key figure in promoting scientific and intellectual discourse.

The Harvard-MIT Art/Science Meeting was an innovative event that brought together artists and scientists for a collaborative seminar. It was initiated by Brockman after receiving a call from Arthur K. Solomon, a biophysics professor at Harvard Medical School, and Walter A. Rosenblith, a communications biophysics professor at MIT. Both were close associates of Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in cybernetics, who had recently passed away. They were inspired by articles in The New Yorker and The Nation about the expanded cinema festival, which highlighted the intersection of art and Wiener's work on cybernetics. Solomon asked Brockman to organize a group of avant-garde artists to meet with scientists from Harvard and MIT for a two-day seminar in Cambridge. Notable scientists included Anthony Oettinger, an AI pioneer from Harvard, and Doc Edgerton from MIT, known for inventing ultra-high-speed photography. The artists included Ken Dewey and Terry Riley from Theatre X, as well as Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan from USCO.

He led a scientific salon for 20 years, asking an annual question to a host of renowned scientists and publishing their answers in book form, which he decided to symbolically close down in 2018.

He is an editor of Edge.org.

Association with Jeffrey Epstein

In an interview with Prince Andrew dated November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking.

Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking.

Brockman's famous literary dinners—held during the TED Conference—were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings. This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires.

Quotes

• "Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time."
• "Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody."

Bibliography

Books as Author

• (1969) By the Late John Brockman ISBN 978-0062326782
• (1970) 37 ISBN 978-0030850523
• (1973) Afterwords: Explorations of the Mystical Limits of Contemporary Reality ISBN 978-0385015547
• (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution ISBN 978-0684803593

Books as Co-author

With Edwin Schlossberg

• (1975) The Pocket Calculator Game Book ISBN 0-688-02983-3
• (1977) The Philosopher's Game: Match Your Wits Against the 100 Greatest Thinkers of All Time ISBN 978-0241898277
• (1977) The Kids' Pocket Calculator Game Book ISBN 9780688082338
• (1977) The 1977-78 CB Guide ISBN 978-0553105070
• (1977) The Pocket Calculator Game Book 2 ISBN 978-0552980340
• (1977) The Home Computer Handbook (also with Lyn Horton) ISBN 978-0806930961
• (1985) The Kinks Kronikles (also with John Mendelssohn) ISBN 978-0688029838

With Edward Rosenfeld

• (1973) Real Time 1: A Catalog of Ideas and Information ISBN 978-0385083898
• (1973) Real Time 2: A Catalog of Ideas and Information ISBN 978-0385022248

Books as Editor

The Reality Club Series

• (1990) Speculations: The Reality Club ISBN 978-0138262150
• (1991) Doing Science: The Reality Club 2 ISBN 978-0137950973
• (1991) Ways of Knowing: The Reality Club 3 ISBN 978-0135172360
• (1993) Creativity: The Reality Club 4 ISBN 9780671789268

Edge Question Series

• (2005) What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty ISBN 978-1849832175
• (2006) What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable ISBN 978-0743295536
• (2007) What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better ISBN 978-0061870033
• (2009) This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future (with Patrick Bateson, Oliver Morton, Stephen Schneider, Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, K. Eric Drexler, and others) ISBN 978-0061899676
• (2009) What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything. 150 high-powered thinkers discuss their most telling missteps and reconsiderations with Alan Alda, Brian Eno, Ray Kurzweil, Irene Pepperberg, Steven Pinker, Lisa Randall etc. ISBN 978-0061686542
• (2011) Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future ISBN 978-0062020444
• (2012) This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking ISBN 978-0062109392
• (2013) This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works ISBN 978-0062230171
• (2014) What Should We Be Worried About?: The Hidden Threats Nobody Is Talking About ISBN 978-0062296238
• (2015) This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress ISBN 978-0062374349
• (2015) What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence ISBN 978-0062425652
• (2017) Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments ISBN 978-0062562067
• (2018) This Idea is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know ISBN 978-0062698216
• (2019) The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound, UNANANSWERED QUESTIONS About the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life ISBN 978-0062897947

Best of Edge Series

• (2011) The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness ISBN 978-0062025845
• (2011) Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology ISBN 978-0062023131
• (2013) Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction in Life and Markets ISBN 978-0062258540
• (2014) The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos ISBN 978-0062296085
• (2016) Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science ISBN 978-0062296054

Other books

• (1977) About Bateson ISBN 978-0525474692
• (1986) Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein & Frankenstein: Re-inventing the Universe ISBN 978-0670804801
• (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution ISBN 978-0684803593
• (1996) How Things Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind (with Katinka Matson), Harper Perennial ISBN 978-0688133566
• (1996) Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite ISBN 978-1888869040
• (2000) The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years ISBN 978-0684859989
• (2002) The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century ISBN 978-0375713422
• (2002) The New Humanists: Science at the Edge ISBN 978-0760745298
• (2004) Curious Minds: How a Child becomes a Scientist ISBN 978-0375422911
• (2006) My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy ISBN 978-0375423451
• (2006) Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement ISBN 978-0307277220
• (2019) Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI ISBN 978-0525557999

Further reading

• Cultural Studies versus the "Third Culture". Slavoj Žižek. The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol 101, No 1, pages 19–32 (2002). (article)
• Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now. Lee Worden. West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, Iain Boal, Janferie Stone, Michael Watts, Cal Winslow (eds.), pages 199–221. (Oakland, 2012).
• The "Third Culture Intellectuals" and Charles Darwin. Pascal Fischer. Anglistentag Konstanz 2013: Proceedings (XXXV), pages 71-80 (2014). (article) Archived 2018-10-08 at the Wayback Machine
• Neurohistory Is Bunk?: The Not-So-Deep History of the Postclassical Mind. Max Stadler. Isis, Vol 105, No 1, pages 133-144 (2014). (article)
• Network Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals. Fred Turner. Christine Larson. Public Culture, Vol 27, No 1, pages 53-84 (2015) (article)

External links

• John Brockman Archived 2019-07-02 at the Wayback Machine
• Brockman's taste for Science or how to entertain the smartest people Archived 2006-05-20 at the Wayback Machine
• Guardian Interview
• John Brockman at HuffPost
• "So What Happens After Happenings?", New York Times, September 4, 1966
• John Brockman: 40 years of "intermedia kinetic environments"
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• John Brockman by Jacqueline Marcus, July 8, 2012