5x15 - 5 speakers, 15 minutes each - with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals and Here I Am. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah. Everything Is Illuminated won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

We Are the Weather is an extraordinarily powerful and deeply personal book that lays bare the battle to save the planet. Calling each one of us to action, he answers the most urgent question of all: what will it take for things to change?

John Micklethwait is the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, and was previously the editor in chief of The Economist from 2006 to 2015. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on globalisation — how it works and where it’s headed — and a leading proponent of its positive impact and potential. He has won a Wincott Award for financial journalism. He has appeared on NPR and the BBC, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. John is the co-author of several books including the newest, The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Hs Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It, an urgent and informed look at the challenges America and world governments will face in a post Covid-19 world. His previous books with Adrian Wooldridge are The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, and the bestselling The Witch Doctors.

JAMES O’BRIEN is an award-winning writer and broadcaster whose journalism has appeared everywhere from the TLS to the Daily Mirror. Best known for his daily current affairs programme on the radio station LBC, with over 1.2 million weekly listeners, he has also presented and appeared on a variety of TV shows including ‘Newsnight’ and ‘Have I Got News For You?’ His first book, How To Be Right, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Political Book by a non-politician after selling over 200,000 copies across all formats. He is often to be found on Twitter where he currently has over 710,000 followers.

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely in newspapers and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio. She lives in London.

Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned geologist, historian and public speaker, she is a leading voice on the role of science in society and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Oreskes is author or co-author of 7 books, and over 150 articles, essays and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014), Discerning Experts (University Chicago Press, 2019), Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change, (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name produced by participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics, and has been translated into nine languages. A new edition of Merchants of Doubt, with an introduction by Al Gore, was published in 2020.