The Institute for Public Knowledge and Public Books invite you to join us for a discussion with Maria Popova, Clay Shirky, Sharon Marcus, and Caitlin Zaloom on how we choose what’s worth our attention in an age of limitless choice.
Maria Popova, the editor of Brain Pickings, refers to her selection of online material as “curating interestingness,” and says that her site is “bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in—until you are.” Our panelists are among the most interesting curators of contemporary culture, and our discussion will explore how and why they do their work.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, an inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, psychology, and more. She has written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism Lab, the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and Design Observer, among others, and is an MIT Fellow.
Clay Shirky is an Arts Professor in the Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, as well as an Associate Professor at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of two recent books on social media: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He has written extensively about the internet since 1996 and his columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and Wired.
Sharon Marcus is Editor in Chief at Public Books and Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999) and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: 2007). She is currently completing a book on theatrical celebrity in the nineteenth century and editing a forthcoming special issue of Public Culture on celebrities and publics in the Internet era.
Caitlin Zaloom is Editor in Chief at Public Books, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and a Fellow of the Russell Sage Foundation. She is the author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (2006). Her current research explores the material and cultural constitution of economic reason in two arenas: the new scientific field of neuroeconomics and the debt relations of American consumers.
To RSVP please visit the IPK website.