Speakers

• Maria Popova

  Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born Brooklynite, writer, blogger, and critic. A self-professed “hunter-gatherer of interestingness,” Maria founded the highly influential online emporium of ideas Brain Pickings. Included in The Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials, Brain Pickings is “your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology,” according to Maria.She has written for The New York Times, Wired UK, and The Atlantic, among others. She is on Twitter at @brainpicker.

• Ahmed Shihab-Eldin

  Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an Emmy-nominated journalist and a correspondent/producer for VICE on HBO. In 2015, he was featured on the Arabian Business power list of the planet’s 100 most influential young Arabs, and in 2012 he was featured on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list of “young disruptors, innovators and media entrepreneurs impatient to change the world.” Shihab-Eldin joined VICE from HuffPost Live, an award-winning online network he helped launch in 2012. There, he produced and hosted World Brief, a 30-minute interactive global news show averaging one million views a day. In 2010, Ahmed created, produced, and cohosted Al Jazeera English’s The Stream, an award-winning interactive talk show that earned him an Emmy nomination for Most Innovative Program in 2012.

• Emily Parker

  Emily Parker is currently digital diplomacy advisor and Future Tense fellow at New America. She is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground, which tells the stories of Internet activists in China, Cuba, and Russia. Previously, Parker was a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning staff at the US Department of State, where she covered 21st-century statecraft, innovation, and technology. She was also a staff writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal and an editor at The New York Times.

• Paul Boghossian

  Paul Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study. He was also Chair of Philosophy at NYU from 1994 to 2004. His research interests are primarily in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He has written on a variety of topics, including color, rule following, eliminativism, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, relativism, the aesthetics of music, and the concept of genocide.

• Janna Levin

  Janna Levin, the Claire Tow Professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, Columbia University, has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of space-time. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works. She is the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, is the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of space-time ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago.