PRESS
"I have three friends: confusion, contradiction, and awkwardness," Brockman says. "That’s how I try to meander through life. Make it strange."
Literary agent John Brockman flouts the boundaries between art and science.
By Bettina Korek, Portrait by Ogata
November 10, 2016
"The longer you talk to Brockman, the more the metaphor of the 'intellectual enzyme' begins to shine."
By Andrea Köhler 3.11.2017
For more than half a century John Brockman has been inspiring artists and scientists to ask innovative questions. His website Edge.org has established itself as a forum for forward-looking ideas.
"He is a key figure of the late 20th and early 21st century, the éminence grise and major source of inspiration for the globally dominant culture, which he himself named as the 'third culture.'"
By Georg Diez 11.17.2014
The book first appeared in 1969 under the ingenious title By the Late John Brockman and begins with the programmatic sentence: 'Man is dead.' ... It is a small masterpiece of clear-thinking ... aggressive, curious and prophetic and strips away the humanism of the literary mind with a Ludwig-Wittgenstein-like rigor... And now with the book published in German for the first time as Afterwords, you realize that you recognize or understand some revolutions only in retrospect 30 or 40 years later.
By John Naughton 1.8.2012
Since the mid-1960s, John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. Here, John Naughton introduces a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, whose website, Edge, is a salon for the world's finest minds.
"[Brockman is] one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call."
"John Brockman would be something like the Siegfried Unseld of the sciences, a man with an unerring sense for the important themes of his time who also has a tremendous business acumen."
By Andrian Kreye 2.16.2011
Brockman's seeds of a new intellectualism have bloomed in the culture of ideas that has become so popular in the past years in the pages of magazines such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker, in numerous nonfiction bestsellers or in the various incarnations of the TED conference
By Duncan Graham-Rowe 2.3.2011
Cultural impresario and literary and software agent John Brockman has spent the last half century merging art and science to create what he calls the Third Culture. Wired asked him what it's like to live life on the edge.
Humanities and sciences have traditionally been seen as "two cultures," though as early as 1959, in his book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, physicist and novelist C.P. Snow was calling for them to close the communication gap to answer the big questions facing human kind. Some 30 years later, literary agent John Brockman coined the term "the third culture." Over the past few years, his network of scientists and thinkers has been tackling questions that have traditionally been the preserve of religion and philosophy: the origins and meaning of life and what human nature—and human ethics—really are.
By Alain Elkann 7.22.2012
John Brockman, dressed in white and wearing a straw hat, is a literary agent, writer, producer and impresario, and his involvement in the arts and the sciences form the quintessence of his extraordinary business.
Foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist 9.16.2014
The artist Richard Hamilton once remarked that we only remember exhibitions that invent new rules of the game. This welcome new edition of Brockman's work is a thoroughly inspiring reminder of the fact that this observation can also be applied to books.
"...[A] consistent crusader for great ideas. . . [Brockman is] responsible for redefining the framework of how we see our world."
By Jacqueline Marcus
January 2012
Since the mid-60s, whether promoting pop culture happenings, Dada revolutionaries or the leading science writers of the day, John Brockman has been in the vanguard of intellectual fashion. Here he looks back over a life restlessly lived.
"For decades he has been a leading light behind the scenes in the city's intellectual life."
By Jordan Mejias 1.10.2014
Be imaginative, exciting, compelling, inspiring: That's what John Brockman expects of himself and others. Arguably, the planet's most important literary agent, Brockman brings its cyber elite together in his Internet salon "Edge."
John Brockman is one of the world's most sought-after and successful literary agents. Considered either a maverick in the field or a stroppy pain in the arse (depending on how traditional your expectations of such a figure might be), Brockman specialises in non-fiction, Science and technology-based publications (his clients include Richard Dawkins). Author of many books himself, his media activities have always been one step ahead of the game. He is also founder of The Edge Foundation, a collective which exists to promote and celebrate intellectual, out-of-the-box thinking