John Brockman (literary agent)

John Brockman
John Brockman
	John Brockman in 2009
Born	February 16, 1941 (age 83); Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	literary agent

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.^[1] Expanding on C.P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture"^[2] 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,^[3] which he decided to symbolically close down in 2018.^[4]

He is an editor of Edge.org.^[5]^[6]

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.^[7]

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.^[8]

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.^[9] This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires.^[10]^[11]

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."^[12]
"Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody."^[12]

Bibliography

(1969) By the Late John Brockman
(1970) 37
(1973) "Afterwords: Explorations of the Mystical Limits of Contemporary Reality"
(1988) Doing Science: The Reality Club
(1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
(1996) Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite
(1996) How Things Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind (edited by John Brockman and Katinka Matson), Harper Perennial
(2002) The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century
(2003) The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
(2004) Curious Minds: How a Child becomes a Scientist (edited by John Brockman), New York: Pantheon Books
(2006) What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
(2006) Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
(2007) What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
(2007) What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better
(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.
(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)
(2011) Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology
(2011) "Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future"
(2012) "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking"
(2013) "This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works"
(2014) "What Should We Be Worried About?: The Hidden Threats Nobody Is Talking About"
(2015) "This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress"
(2015) "What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence"
(2016) "Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments"
(2017) "This Idea is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know"
(2019) The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound, UNANANSWERED QUESTIONS About the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life
(2019) Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI (edited by John Brockman)