>> good afternoon. welcome to our panel called from the border: people in politics. i'm mary ellen fullerton, interim dean at brooklyn law school and for many years i have been a scholar of international refugee law and immigration law so you can imagine how much i looking forward to this panel on how much i enjoyed reading all three of the books that we're going to have a chance to talk about today. the authors come at the issues of people, borders, politics from multiple perspectives. we have photojournalists on our panel, we have a sociologist on our panel, a creative nonfiction writer and of course there are also many other things. i think the overwhelming experience i had while i was reading all of these books is how each of them uses arts in a profound way to send messages to us as individuals

about the borders within us. to us as members of communities about the borders in politics within our communities and to us as a country which i think is very much defining its soul right now. so the border. what do we mean by the border? immediately, for many people the us mexico border pops to mind . and of course we're going to talk about it. all three of our authors have studied and visited and are extremely knowledgeable about it but one of the wonderful things about these three books is that they look at other borders. stephanie alexander rice pointed to the us canada border. john moore recognizes the mexico guatemala border in very vivid photographs. manuel pastore acknowledges

the bordersbetween california and other states in the united states .they all talk about borders among us and the borders within us. so is that the context of this program i'd like to speak just a couple minutes more about some facts. that's what i do, as an immigration lawyer, try to get some concrete facts before us and try to explore them and their significance . am of these facts you probably know. othersmay surprise you . first fact. the us-mexico border is 1954 miles long. in contrast, our border with canada, the land border with canada is 3980 miles long so significantly more border of north. i think much more importantly, a fact that everybody should know and doesn't seem to get much

press although all our authors do touch on it in their books, the number of unauthorized injuries over the borders of the united states as plummeted in recent years, despite all the talk about the migration crisis andpeople , towards coming across the border and social dislocation, that may or may not cause it, the facts are that in 2000, there were 1.6 million unauthorized entries into the united states from mexico. by 2011, kind of in the middle of the obama administration, those numbers were down to325,000 . numbers that hadn't been that low since the early 1970s. through the rest of the obama administration and indeed the

beginning of the trump administration, the numbers have been around hundred 50,000, below 300,000. the most recent data says 2017 there were 310,000 unauthorized entries so what that means is the crisis we are talking about today is much smaller than what was normal 15 years ago, 20 years ago. another fact that may surprise you, the net outmigration from the united states to mexico house steadily increased since 2012 . what that means is there are more people every year leaving the united states to go to mexico and there are leaving mexico to come to the united states and the demographers this trend is going to continue. so the movements and the patterns are changing enormously , but the headlines in the news don't

seem to reflect that. last little bit of data. immigrants arriving in the united states since 2010, 41 percent come from asia compared to 39 percent coming from latin america. that's extremely different, again from what you see in the news. so with these major shifts in patterns, the stereotypes in the public consciousness needing to be changed, i want to turn to three authors who can begin to convey some of the reality as well as much of the complexity of people, migration and borders. were going to start farthest away from me, john moore. photojournalists from many years, he's worked on many continents and not understand he spent 10 years creating this beautiful book,

undocumented, immigration and the militarization of the us-mexico border . by the way, i was delighted to see that john is both in spanish and english. and i've asked john moore to introduce his book 1st cause he's going to show us vivid images which will help us set the context both geographically and otherwise about the discussions we're going to have. and as he gets ready to show the images, i'm going to ask him a couple questions to think about and in his 10 minutes i'm allotting each of the authors if he could address one, what was the origin ofthis book, what gave you the idea of writing this book . two, where their unexpected challenges in creating the book and three, how did you ever secure permission from the border patrol and from the smugglers and from the gang members to take their photograph?

>> that's a lot of territory. i'll start with the idea for the book. i had been covering border issues, not just border issues, immigration issues can including within the us and central america for really since 2008 when i moved back to the us. after living abroad in other parts of the world including latin america and i was immediately struck by the human drama along the border and over the years i've seen things change. back when i started it was primarily a men and women coming to look for work and we've seen since 2014 the numbers of families coming across and specifically as well unaccompanied minors which are the main group of youth which have been imprisoned. some of you may have seen this photo from the summer

and i was from one of my trips where i had proposed to the border patrol to go along for a ride along with them and family separations had been happening since april and i knew that i would never be able to see family separations because that always happened in the border patrol processing centers so what i did was go out with them while they took people into custody and as it turned out, there was a group that came in late one night and this image here and it up going viral. the way it's captioned is that a group, a girl cries after her mother set her down as she was being taken into custody and then taken to a border patrol center for possible separation which was the case as we know for thousands of kids. as pictures take a life of their own, after their release, the picture ended up being on the cover of time as a cutout and not as the original picture, the original image and there was a lot of discussion about that as well. photojournalists always want

to have a photograph used exactly how it is and authors want to as well so it was quite a big debate over whether pictures are honest or not. i think what we can do as photojournalists is photograph honestly, caption correctly and send them out into the world and the world we live in right now is one of imagery, imagery which can be used and misused. and what i'll do now is show you. this picture is not in the book, by the way. i took it three months after the book came out. and you'll see as i show you these pictureshere , i start , this is the beginning of the book. i edited it into six different chapters and the idea for putting together this in a book form came out on the eighth of november 2016.

like many people, i suspected that ellery clinton would be our next president and that immigration would probably be less in the news and of course, that was not the case. so my editors and i started to think about and edit in book form that would give a narrative to undocumented immigration. not just from latin america, primarily from latin america however . and as we know, a lot of people come from different parts of theworld and actually overstay their visa . they come from places other than the southern border. this particular work focuses on the reasons why people leave and what happens to them after they come here. and getting access was yes, a major issue. and in the case of these photographs from central america, these were from honduras.

and also the photographs of homicides. this picture is from a couple go which is now one of the homicide capitals of the world or cities and countries that aren't actively at work. the execution rates are absolutely incredible. the number of people who are leaving because of violence and as we've seen under the zero-tolerance policy currently, still in place, domestic violence and gang violence is no longer accepted by the us government as legitimate reasons to ask for asylum so that has changed the landscape dramatically. this boy here is at a memorial service for twoof his schoolmates . and so from central america and mexico as you can see, people are climbing aboard the beast. it's a network of freight trains that moves through mexico from the southern state of chiapas through

mexico city and to different parts of theus-mexico border . and i was able to work and had been living in mexico, based in mexico city for 5 and a half years early in my career so i know my way around but most of the time when i'm working in this environment i'm working with journalists. many of us know this already at the danger that mexican journalists face is far, far greater in any danger i would face going in to work on a story for a couple weeks, a couple months at a time. there's between 10 and 20 mexican journalists, both reporters, writers and photographers killed every year. and by and large with impunity. we've seen that all through different governments, different administrations and in mexico that has been consistent, that by and

large, the narcotraffickers have had in killing journalists. and so i follow people along their journeys. so the rio grande, and what we will do is we will move a little bit further along. the border of many of us know is very and it's treacherous and people have been pushed further and further out. as the border patrol and the homeland security in general has seen its budget swell in the next few yearsand after 2001, our budget started to climb . back in 2007, 2008, the border patrol reached to 20,000 members and many of them were hired in a very short time span so a lot of the background checks were

not as complete as they should have been. border patrol specifically had to face lots of issues with agents who were felons and were actually taken out of the academy and taken to jail. so there was a news story in the last two days of an agent who was accused of killing four women in the laredo area . and it continues, people ask me if agents, if they genuinely support the trump policies, they are law enforcement. they will typically support the policies they aretold to enforce and under the obama administration, the enforcement regime was in many ways the same but in some key areas different . so many of the pictures that appear in this book were taken during the obama administration. getting access to photographs, border patrol agents in the academy was especially difficult for me.

i was turned down to photograph in the economy numerous times and i went often times , this door stepping is how i've gotten access. i went to a speech by the border patrol chief and he gave a speech and i went up to him afterwards and i said nice speech, nice listening to you and he said who are you? i said i'm john warren with getty images and i'd like to get into youracademy . he said sure. i had to go directly to the source. this is a vigilante in arizona, arizona border recon. they come together two or three times a year for a week long operations targeting smugglers along the border and they carry weapons and although they look the part, rarely actually catch people along the border. they will call border patrol agents if they find someone coming across but they feel strongly about their desire

to help protect the border and you know, any law enforcement or military force that doesn't stand together will not do anything in the field that's worthwhile. >> many of the pictures you're seeing were taken from customs and border protection helicopters. i was able toget access with them over the years . i've been trying to photograph this story in as many angles as possible. and the captions arealways very straightforward .so when law enforcement asks, when i asked permission for them to go in, i will show them pictures i shot before and they're usually pretty straightforward. they believe in the work that they're doing and i don't have to tell whether i'm

working with law enforcement, to photograph law enforcement or i'm going with nonprofits like no more deaths or others that i've worked with, humanitarians over the years that helped immigrants, i don't have totell anyone that what they're doing is good or that i'm in favor of what they're doing. all i have to say is what you're doing is important and i'd like to show it . that's been my key for getting access with many different groups along the way. i can, if i run short of time i can stop. >> 2 more minutes. >> i've also spent a lot of time in immigrant communities within the us. the woman on the left, this immigrant mother, undocumented mother, she's an activist in colorado and has done work over the years for immigrants rights . the object is to humanize all sides of this issue because

when people are demonized, it's very hard for any side to reach solutions. as we know, health insurance is difficult for many people in this country, especially so for the immigrant community. the next series is relevant today. because as we read in the last few days, it was over 12,000 undocumented unaccompanied minors and children, some of the children who'd been separated from their parents in detention centers and in foster care around the us right now. that number as swollen probably because of people continuing to arrive but also because of many parents who would have collected their children earlier had detention facilities are undocumented themselves in the us. and there frankly just afraid to pick them up.

they're afraid they will be detained when they go to pick up their child and deported. because ice continues to hang out outside of court buildings and detain people are doing things that they lawfully need to do. and so it's a very tricky situation for many immigrants to collect their children when they come across as undocumented. this is the one and only sharon arpaio, america's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff. he lost his bid for reelection and to be the candidate for the republican party in arizona. this is tent city jail in arizona which has been closed . and these images here are from an ice federal prison.

they call it a detention center in adelanto california near san bernardino. several pictures from there, i was not able to show people's faces, that's one of the rules. when i'm given ground rules i follow them so i can come back again and hopefully it doesn't impact my story but the way i have to approach it visually in order to maintain myaccess . i've flown on deportation flights as well. in this case back to guatemala. i went back on a plane with them. this is another deportation here to ponderous and they go daily from mesa arizona and a few other states in the us where ice as of where they gather people from around the country and there will be for instance a flight on monday to guatemala, one to honduras and one on wednesday to el salvador. but also, it's worth mentioning that combining all of everyone who comes across or over stays their visa as undocumented immigrants,

there are far more numbers wise of people who manage to reach their american dream and become citizens. we've seen that there's a great effort right now by the trump administration to lower the number not just of undocumented immigrants and illegal entries but alsolegal immigration as well and the idea is to cut back by half . we will see if that happens. >> john, i hate to cut you off because your images are so powerful and beautiful, but i do want to cut you off because i want to have the opportunity for the audience to hear from our other authors. his bookis fabulous. you've got to buy it outside. he's going to be signing as they all are afterwards . thank you, and if we have time later we will come back to those images. second panelist today has written many books and the

one she's going to talk about today and we're in for a real treat, she's going to read a little bit from this book. it's called all the agents are insane, dispatches from the us borderland. stephanie is a daughter of self texas. she is like john, has lived all over the world, been a foreigncorrespondent . she is if i've got this correct, a faculty member at the university of north carolina.she is a woman of multiple identities and great creativity and i have a lot of questions for her but i just want to stop right now and let her read something from her book which is a very powerful book that you all want to buy also . >> iq so much. thank you so very much for being here and for these incredible images. it's so moving to see. so my friends, i'm from corpus christi texas.

fabulous. it's very great to find someone in the audience from corpus christi texas but you understand what i will say when i say all my life i wanted to get out of corpus christi texas. so i embarked on this journey about 15 years long. i lived in moscow, beijing, mexico, i traveled all around, wrote books about those journeys and happened to return home in 2007. no longer viewing my hometown with my childhood lens or my teenage lens that this is a boring place where nothing happened. when i arrived i was shocked to discover that south texas had become a major news story and i began to realize we were surrounded by 15 miles of petrochemical industries

poisoning people in close proximity. i began to realize that corpus christi had been named the fattest city in america with this profound obesity epidemic and began to realize that a border wall was about to split as much of this land into and i began to think about what it meant. so we are the citizens who do not cross the border, the border crosses over us . and so i began to document this. our reality. i spent about seven years and i'm going to read a brief excerpt from south texas and then i'll transition to what happened next after spending seven years in south texas. this is a very difficult excerpt i will read . it takes place in 2012 which is when i became aware of the fact that south texas was essentially becoming a graveyard for those who were attempting to cross. and i've been spending a lot of time in south texas 90 miles north of the border and

there's a checkpoint there. and basically if youcross over in the texas region, you have to go through south 40 in order to go on to houston and from houston , everyone branches off from houston in different directions. but many people don't make it because when you arrive to south florida undocumented, they generally pull over and people get out and walk and they have to walk about three miles to avoid the checkpoint which is where the border patrol agents are and they are doing this androutinely in 110 degrees temperatures . that one year in that one county, burke county, they found 129 bodies. that's just the bodies that are found and i happened to be with the sheriffs of berks county texas when they got in the call, they call this call code 500 and that meant go and retrieve the body and the sheriff looked over at me and said you've got a weak stomach?

and i paused and i said no. i boldly lied and he invited me to come with him on the recovery. so this is after we, i'll just start when they announce she's small. probably a hunter and she'd been outfor three days . base waddled her in the sheet, half stew. they stuffed herinto a black body bag with golden zippers . the sheriff and border patrol agent fan out 30 feet. they scanned the brush for approximately half a minute. before heading back to their respective trucks. there is no obvious evidence in sight. we leave behind only an empty water bottle and a host of beetles. no words are spoken. no rights are given.he wife's issues.

we've got to make sure there's no bodily fluid on me . it will stink, he says. we don't see undertakers struggling with the gurney. together they lay the body back on top and roll it into the back of the van. davila introduces me to the undertaker, his name is angel. i want to say, how fitting and applaud his professional graces and before i can speak, davila tell him i am a writer. a lot of people write stories , he says softly. nothing ever gets done. i hear this a lot. it never fails to shatter me. but i usually brush it off with a self-deprecating remark and the smile but there's something about standing in the woods with this three-day dead woman

that gives me the audacity to hope maybe something will change this time. policy will change and a humane immigration law will finally be enacted and although that hope vaporizes into mist before i can even articulate it, the remains a spark of optimism that by virtue of being written about, this code 500 might be remembered but even if we never learned her name, whether she's guatemalan or honduran or chinese, this one member of the 30 for her to die before her in the 94 who will die after in this county and in this one state , can be memorialized in spite of the story and at the very least, i will remember her, this woman who hiked illegally and got annihilated for it, i willremember her, what remains of her face and feet when i tried to fall asleep atnight. to pray if this counts as getting something done . i wish to say this . i wish to say all of this and a great deal more but there is time only to feebly smile before he retreats to the

drivers seat where he removes a pair of badly soiled gloves . he already knows. he will be back tomorrow and i will not. so that is what i came to bear witness for seven years insouth texas, taking notes . and then quite a shock. i was a freelancer during all this and got offered something i hadn't been offered in 10 yearswhich was a job . and i took the job and it was a job that st. lawrence university which is a university located just about 18 minutes south of the canadian border of new york so about nine miles, nine hour drive straight up north for all of you. and i arrived there and at that point to meet upstate new york was like the bronx. but this is, the only thing stopping his canada. it's way up there.

so i'll write a little bit about this. before arriving here, i didn't think the northern borderlands could differ more starkly from the one where i grew up.temperatures were approaching 60 degreesapart. south texas feels like a large wet dog sitting on your face . the heat and humidity are that oppressive. the north country smelled like a cat hissing and scratching you and it's that visceral, that extreme. yet the hot oil, the sun and snow affected me the same way. both returned me inward and when i step into the car and in 20 minutes reach a bridge that descends into a different economic strata, i recognize i've been here once before and when i learned a nearby community is rallying in the very same people are also battling poverty, obesity and industrial waste, i realized i will once again

be caught in suspension of disbelief and when i read about people getting arrested forsmuggling aliens by speedboat and drugs by snowmobile, i realize i am yet again living on an edge. other words as i stare around this remote new world i realize i am home . i wonder if anyone understands what community i'm referring to when i say these things? who lives across from cornwall canada? what nation has been there since time immemorial? the mohawk nation. so i was lucky to make ties to that community and i began spending every moment there for a year. i realized that essentiallyit was dcjcvu. every time i would turn to the community .our elders had it beaten out of us, many mohawks have lost the native language mohawk because of being forced to endure indian

residential school 450 years where kids were taken from their families, their hair was cut, they were shaved and forced to define which school they wear, just as my, all my cowboy uncles watched our livelihood in south texas, all the mohawks lost their traditional mode of being which was fishing because just as south texas is surrounded by petrochemical industries, they are surrounded by superfund sites who for 30 years dumped all their pcb waste into the river stream that decimated all the fish, killed all the fish, the toxic waste about that polluted the air deeply. that destroyed a lot of the cattle industry they had at the time and it's also not possible to eat things that grow in that community is the land is so tainted so they also now have the major obesity epidemic as we do in south texas. so many of our youth are imprisoned for smuggling.

we contend with the trafficking of firearms right through our neighborhood. i just begin to realize, all along i thought this was just our private tragedy in south texas and i began to realize this is endemic towhat it means to be a citizen of the borderlands . i read a lot of signs that for many years hung at the beginning of the mohawk nation. i encourage you all if you have a weekend, it's nine hours away but it's an exceptional place to visit and a tear in your state. although they don't consider themselves part of your state, they are very much their own nation. you will be under the jurisdiction of the following, canada, united states, the mohawk tribal council and the confederacy, new york, ontario, qucbec, st. lawrence county, the

mohawk police, the qucbec police force, the royal canadian mounted police, federal bureau of investigation, us border control and coming soon, the national guard. drive gently, have a nice day. so this community hasbeen living in a state of resistance 500 years and counting . >> thank you stephanie. and let me just say as we've seen vivid, visual images. the writing and the power of stephanie and her words are incredibly strong and i encourage you to also acquire this book. our third panelist, manwell pastore sitting right next to me is going to talk about his book state of resistance. what california's dizzying dissent and remarkable

resurgence means for america's future. well-knownfact, manuel is a native new yorker . but he has been a californian is the age of six months . so they claim him and he has been incredibly busy and prolific and important in california. he is a professor of sociology and american studies and ethnicity at the university of southern california and he directs the center for the study of immigration integration and connecting with points stephanie just made, he's been a scholar and an analyst and i think an activist on environmental and economic challenges that low income urban communities face. he is going to talk to us about his memorable phrase, california is america fast-forward . >> good to be with you and i'm going to start by pointing out a few things about undocumented folks, particularly in california.

we have about 2.7 undocumented residents in california. interestingly, more than two thirds of themhave been there for longer than 10 years . they are matched by about an equal number of us-born citizens who live in the same household as family members and a smaller number of lawful permanent residents live in the same household. so the phrase we often use is undocumented californians. because there are so deeply rooted in the community and you're right, the dynamics of how traumatically shifted and will continue, partly because the demographic forces have been so dramatically,the fertility rates have gone way down , about five or six children over the course of herlifetime, 35 years ago, 20 fertility rate of 2.3 now .

which in the united states is 1.7 so as those to come together we've seen this negative migration that you're talking about. more mexicans returning to mexico then coming to the united states which basically means if we build a wall, we are penning mexicans in which i'msure is not the president's intention . but what the book tries to talk about is the art of change in california. because if you think about the united states right now, and the anxiety that it has around demographic change, interestingly, most of the people who are the most nervous about immigrants don't have them. in the places like la who have a lot of immigrants are like, this is great. but in that anxiety is what

california went through in the 1990s with the passage of prop 187 and the passage of prop 187 which was about member that sought to deny undocumented immigrants all sorts of social services including educational services, that's one direct parallel but what people forget is in the early 1990s, 45 percent of the job losses and the recession of the early 1990s occurred in california and rush limbaugh began his talk radio career in the late 1980s in california so that's sort of a perfect stew of demographic anxiety, economic uncertainty and profiteering from political polarization. we did it first. and we've come out on the other side in terms of a state which is one of the first two states to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. a state which is finally incarcerating after the final insanity, a state which finally declared itself to be a sanctuary state in terms of lack of cooperation with ice

and immigration enforcement and the state which isleading on climate change and what the book tries to do is to talk about that arc of change . what these sort of structural, economic, demographic and political forces were but also really what was the community organizing andsocial movement mobilization that took place . it's a great book, you should buy it. if you're not a big reader, it's about to be made into a major motion picture in which i'll be portrayed by antonio banderas. i'm very excited about this. but i want to just pick up on immigrant part of this for this particular panel because it's important to realize that one thing that happened was that there was a backlash to proposition 187. it caused a lot of people who were lawful, permanent residents had not yet become citizens to become citizens and in the late 1990s, newly

naturalized latinos were voting at higher rates than us whites so an immediate motivation in political punishment. there was a big shift in terms of undocumented immigrants realizing they could engage elect orally. they couldn't vote but they could mobilize people to vote by being part of get out the vote efforts. there was also something that went on, there was a big shift that happened in california and now nationwide with labor which was seen its numbers declined recognized that immigrants were open to unionization. they brought with them repertoires from their own countries being engaged in social movements. they were facing the challenges of working poverty and los angeles was the only place in the metro area of the country that saw an increase inprivate-sector unionization as janitors , homecare workers and others

sort of unionized. so there was a lot of other forces that were going on at the same time and that's what the book is about. but i want to say just something about the intentionality of it and then something that i'm going to go with stephanie and read from the book because that seems like something you should do at a book festival. in terms of organizing, there's three things to remember about the organizing that took place , taking off from the 90s in california. number one, it was intersectional. there was a recognition that you couldn't just organize immigrants or african-americans, that you somehow needed to organize in an intersectional way and it also meant realizing you had to show up for other people's struggles so in 2008 when president barack obama got the majority vote in california but prop eight which outlawed marriage equality also passed, the lgbt community looking at the

election results in which latinos and african-americans had voted at a higher rate to pass proposition eight than whites, one reaction could have been to say my god, we really have to marginalize those communities but the reaction of many in the community was gosh, we're not showing up for immigrant rights so we cannot expect immigrants to show up around the marriage equality. there was the evolution of courage, kerry karen who was one of the organizers of courage who at the end of it said one of them said, we tricked you into coming here. he thought it was about marriage equality what it's about immigrant rights, it's about over incarceration, about over working-class people being left behind.

similarly on immigrant movement, a lot of immigrant rights organizations began to challenge catholic charities that had funded them and said we can no longer be quiet about these issues which are affecting a large sector of our population being intersectional. being intentional about building power and being integrated and integrated means not just bringing together labor and immigrants as i was talking about but also wedding together community organizing and elections and understanding that you needed to bring people together. so let me just do that thing of reading from the book if i can let myself scroll to the right part. this is in themiddle of the end of the book . so starts with the california dream emerge from an opportunity to create platforms of opportunity for those already in the golden state and those still to come and led to a commitment to

create housing to accommodate growth, to work to the economy that coulddeliver jobs and income for those in the middle and support a first-class education that trained workers and leaders for thefuture . creating the california dream version 2.0 will recognize , require recognizing that the achilles heel that has plagued california and the nation is racism, the racism of california's own residence got the better of themselves in the 1990s. so if you think about it, that's the challenge facing america. with an economy still stumbling its way out of the great recession, uncertainty about job prospects affecting older and younger workers alike, with both red states like florida and blue states like new york threatened by climate change, 2016 seemed like an appropriate time to come together. instead of like california in the 1990s, voters chose to

tear themselves apart in a last gasp of collapsing racial order. as incalifornia, racist pandering will cost us in terms of our moral values and social cohesion and also in dollars and cents of productivity and income , incarceration and unequal education. the wayout of this does not hinge on rejecting bad leaders . it does hinge on rejectingbad leaders, you know what i'm talking about but this is not enough . too many progressives hoped that electing barack obama would turn the american corner, offering a way to racism and the social disconnect into a sense of common destiny. instead we got political paralysis and as in the golden state, a revitalized right wing determined to hold progress in bay. jazz poet gil scott heron once sang that the only way to take this world, make it what it want to be, what want to be will be someday you will see.

realizing there's no such thing as a superman. the real need is not for a great leader but many leaders, not for winning at the top of the ticket but for winning across the board. not for pitting our hopes on one candidate or even one big march but rather on counting on the grassroots organizing that brings people together face-to-face, race to race and the place to place to see their common future and that is the blue wave that is now beginning to and in the 2018 midterms with andrew gillum, stacy abrams and ayana presley. who's going to make the change? not a bunch of leaders, it's you and us, it's all of us. [applause] >> and you can see what that

call to action and the prescription, why we needed to have our third speaker b manny well. i want to saybefore it becomes a major motion picture you should buy this book . it really lays out in both detail and with inspiration how to look at and react to the fractured place our society is right now. and it's a wonderful read, as are the other two books so if you will join me, we are out of time but i wish we had twice as much. we don't. if you wouldjoin me in thanking our authors and remember they will be signing outside the building their book . [applause]

>> that wraps up the author discussion about immigration live from the brooklyn book festival. book tv is on social media, facebook, instagram and twitter. we will be back in a few minutes with author discussions on innovation and invention. >>.

[inaudible] here's a look at books being published this week. pulitzer prize winning historian doris kearnsgoodwin examines qualities of leadership . former republican congressman and fox news contributor jason chase it's explores federal bureaucracy in the deep state. in dear america, josc antonio vargas reflects on his immigration to the united states and his life as an undocumented immigrant. talk show host glenn that offers his thoughts on political partisanship in addicted to outrage and in the improbable wendell wilkie, david lewis recounts the life of wendell wilkie, a midwestern businessman turned politician who was the republican nominee for president in 1940. our look at this week's new releases continues with a white house correspondent major garrett's report on the

trump administration. mister trump's wild ride. and rising out of hatred, the wallet washington post eli zalow outlines the life of the son of david duke who disavowed his upbringing and marsh, president of the school of government reports on the poor and working-class in her home state of kansas. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the future on book tv on cspan2. >> goodmorning you all . maybe i'm not a morning person. first, i'd like to thank everyone who made this possible, because i know that kind of work must have gone into making this happen and i'm just so very grateful to be a part of it. so thank you to the

mississippi art commission, the mississippi amenities council, to everyone in state government who allowed this and helped make this possible . and i hate to do this, but my prepared remarks are on my phone so i apologize. for being rude, but here we go. everywhere i go, journalists ask me why i chose to return home to mississippi. i recently wrote an essay about it where i wrestled with mississippi's violent history of racial inequality and after doing so came to the conclusion that it is the beauty of the place and the fierce fight and inherent good of so many people here who do everything they can make a better future for mississippi that make me feel better about my decision to return and even though i felt fairly satisfied with that answer in my essay upon

finishing it later, when i did the essay again, i didn't like many writers, i set to work and i found it unfinished, incomplete. why?in part, i realized my decision to return home was not final, not resolved. my return home is not a question answered by an essay but is instead a list question with a live dancer. that every day i am here, i am wrestling with my commitment to living and writing about this place, that every day when i set pen to paper or drop my kids off at school or visit mylocal park , i am asking if it is right to be here and in mississippi, it speaks to me in reply. she speaks when the spider lilies bloom and reach like white hands through the dark water of the bayou. she speaks in the snow of burning oak leaves permeating the air in the fall when the moon is like a luminous soft egg on the shell of the

clouds. she speaks in the glint of the sun on the golf before sunset which turns the water gray and metallic as the night. she speaks when i jump into the river and the current closes over me, leading the world to amber soil. when i was a child, mississippi taught me many things. it taught me what it was like to grow up hungryfor food and comfort in the long arm of history wraps around all of us and squeezes tightly, a discomfiting hug .it taught me that many who call this place home the people of my community but this place also taught me what it was to grow up satiated by love of family, community. it taught me to love language, to love storytelling and the connection it engendered. it taught me it never only spoke the language of the oppression, of hate, that it could speak love to. it could speak tenderly with

gentle hands, lilting language. mississippi speaks when my grandmother on me to her and eileen into her and close my eyes, inhaling her perfume, feeling her long hair on the skin of my face. she speaks when my nephew drives me home and plays songs for me that wants me to hear, dark eyes watchful for my approval, a quick smile when i say yes, i like this. she speaks when my son cuddles up to my mother and hold out his hand and my mother takes my sons paul in hers and walked with him, both of them tender in shirts and their grip on each other. mississippi speaks and i listen. i put pen to paper and i answer. every word and an, every word and affirmation. yes, this is all. every day i return. thank you for speaking with me, for teaching me to love language, to love that which binds us all one to another. thank you for reading with

me, inspiring me, being the place i can return to, where i am never cold, where i feel more myself than anywhere, where i know i am love. thank you to my family for nurturing me and to my community for protecting me. thank you for the great honor of writingabout you . it is a great responsibility and i hope to bear it well, to make you proud, flush with joy, tender, a little wistful. to make you remember, today are walking together a little easier while we have this time under this deep sky, under these reaching trees, these day hidden stars. thank you, thank you, thank you. [applause]

>> watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at authors recently featured on book tvs "after words", our author interview program that includes best-selling nonfiction books and bestsellers. marine corps lieutenant kate your motto offered her thoughts on gender bias in the military. economists debbie somewhere weighed in on why democracies are failing to produce economic growth and former education secretary arnie duncan looked at the successes and failures of schools in america. in the coming weeks on "after words", secretary of state john kerry will reflect on his life in korea. beth macy will discuss the opioid crisis and political columnist derek unter provides his thoughts on how progressives influence academia, the media and pop

culture. >> the media is the center point because it's the easiest conduit and they are, despite what your organization is fully addressing and documented for 30 years, they are trusted by a lot of people inherently. you see somebody on tv and you see a republican strategist or a democratic strategist and they're talking about what happened in north korea and they must know what they're doing because they're on tv. surely this giant news organization with them. there is no such job, it seems easy. all you do is talk on tv, i can't find that job but you begin to realize that it is all, you look good on tv, can you convey the message they want, are you willing to play along and it becomes kabuki theater. it is not brainwashing because i don't know that it's done for nefarious purposes most of the times, sometimes it certainly is but

it's done for convenience sake , out of laziness, it's done out of just, this is what we need, this person will do it like a lego piece will snap ittogether. you need journalism . >> .. [inaudible conversations]

>> thank you very much for joining us here to talk about what really drives innovation with two very accomplished and multiplatform talented authors who approached the subject from very different angles, quickly my name is sheila, staff writer at the new yorker, i cover business broadly defined there, i'm also a former hedge fund analyst, i published a book last year called black edge inside information, dirty money and the quest to bring down the most wanted men on wall street which is about a big insider trading investigation involving a group of corrupt hedge funds to innovation of a very different sort, i wanted to quickly mention that our authors' books will be for sell outside the kiosk outside building and both will be signing immediately following the program, so please at the conclusion go right town there and get in line to get

your book signed. so with me simon winchester, the professor and madman, atlantic, crack at the edge of the world, just a few, all of which were new york times best seller and appeared best and notable book lists. in 2006 mr. winchester was made officer of the order of the british empire by her majesty the queen which is very impress i have to me, i don't know, he looks very modest but he lives in western massachusetts, latest book perfectionist, how precision engineers created the modern world. steven johnson is the best-selling author of ten books, is that right? >> 11. >> 11 now. the queen doesn't know who i am. [laughter] >> you have more twitter followers, i think, you win on

that score. just to name a few of them, wonderland, how we got now, where good ideas come from, the ghost map and everything bad is good for you. he's the founder of several influential websites including the online magazine feed, the community site plastic.com and the hyperlocal site outside in. he's the cohost and cocreator of pbs how we got to now, steven lives in california and brooklyn new york, two of my favorite places in the entire world actually with wife and three sons and latest book is far sighted, how we make decisions that math the most. i want to ask you you both approach innovation from very different perspectives, i wanted to start by asking, first, steven, give us overview of far sided and how it is with innovation? >> somewhat a book that you allude today where good ideas

come from and squarely looking at innovation and the lessons were in innovation if you analyzed many different time periods, far sided which i've actually been working on and off for 8 years now which is appropriate for a book about long-term thinking is -- is a look at complex-life decisions, how we make them and in a sense some of the science behind how we make complex decisions and it actually starts with this kind of crazy excerpt from darwin's journals from 1838 in the middle of the period in darwin's period where he's coming with the theory of natural selection and has all the notes about observations from the beagle and the idea of this, you know, really transformative scientific idea coming to the head on the

page in these journals and at some point in the middle of the journals he devotes two pages to slightly different topic, different decision existential, different nature which is should he get married and what he basically does jots down pros and cons list and it's kind of a comical list if you look at it. one side is not mary and the other mary and writes the values he associates with both and hasn't aged particularly well and on the side of not marry, one of the advantages is clever conversation of men in clubs, one of the things he feels le give up if he gets married apparently and on the other side you have things like constant companion and children if it please god he writes, but he also writes something like an object to be beloved better than a dog anyway. that's the line that he has which is unfortunate.

i started because the pros and cons list is techniques that most of us do know for making complex decision in our lives and it actually dates back to ben franklin. so we have this kind of strategy for making complex decision and trying to be creative about coming up with all the potential variables and factors and that strategy has basically been stagnant for 200 years, we haven't seen innovation in terms of tools for making these kinds of choices and turns out that there's very rich literature, some of it scientific but some of it creative, artistic that has developed over the last 30 or 40 years that actually does help us make more complex decisions and much of it overlaps with the tools and strategies that we use to be more innovative and creative in our lives, farsighted is lots of

crazy stories, whole theme running through through it aboue march and novels and parallel simulation that helps us make choices and big analysis, the decision that led up to the raid on bin laden's compound. i think it's the only book, i believe in existences has threat of bin laden. but anyway, out of two weeks ago. >> already helped me make some complicated -- >> good, working. >> simon, could you explain what the perfection is, what you set out -- >> it's almost the same thesis as your book called how we got and looks machines that work properly and essential element that allows where that came from

and included in the manufacturing of things and that's precision, and you can actually fix it, a date 1776 which is very nice for americans but not july the fourth but may the fourth, what i didn't know when i read this book being an old foggy is there's another significance to the date of may the fourth, i'm sure young people here would know exactly may the fourth be with you, it's star wars day which seems wonder fully and it began because was incapable of making proper cylinders, when you put what he made it leaked steam all over

the place and it's insufficient, 70 miles away from where he worked, the english midlands, 70 miles away the welch border, sord of a lunatic called wilkinson who was upset with metallic iron. he melted it and did all sorts of things with it, iron desks, before me too movement if he knew that a las was come he would lie and spring it and surprise her. >> that sounds like an effective seduction. [laughter] >> he made cannons for the royal navy and developed a technique of drilling the iron, chunks of iron in such a way that the hole

through is constant damage throughout and when james met him and tried to sell him a steam engine so that he could drill into the iron instead of hands using steam and showing wilkinson that he didn't know how to make cylinders properly, wilkinson said, i can make one for you, and he did. i should be very brief but introduce critical number into the story. will -- wilkinson how big is the pistol, he said 30-inches, 2 for 6 across. you can make a cylinder 2 for 6 and a little bit that would be perfect. and so he did, he drilled a hole which was exactly 2-foot 6 and a little bit for about the 5 feet length, turned vertically, lowered the piston into it and once the governor, added to it

and lit the fire and set the water boat boiling, so the steam engine started going like crazy without any steam leaking from it and at that moment which was the fourth of may 1776 one can legitimate say the industrial revolution began and the number that i was mentioning is the distance, tolerance between the piston and the edge of cylinder which was for thickness of english chilling which was point one of an inch and so that number marks the beginning of this book and he goes right up to the times where i think one of the most precise mechanical things that's made to this day is also cylinder in one of the -- i don't know if you know, stands for the laser, gravitation, two of them, one in washington and one in

livingston, louisiana, the cylinders are those pieces, they are four of them, polished and measured, they can detect changes in distance of one 10,000 diameter of a -- so you have .1 at the end of the scale and ten minus 19 on the other one and within the story is how we got to now. i should have given it your title. >> the book is organized that way. the chapters get -- the tolerance gets increasingly high, right, you say higher tolerance which is one of the things that is so interesting when you think about books like, this there isn't a natural organizational structure, you're not just following the chronology of a single life or something like that so when you're writing a book like, this how do i organize this, what's

the best way to -- to create what's best architecture for this book and so simon designed the whole book about increasing tolerance levels as you go into the book which is one of the most inventive -- >> sweet of you to mention that, i should go to how it all began, they sent me an e-mail clear water florida, he read my books and liked them and he said i'm a scientific glass blower, makes extraordinarily elegant pieces all over the world and he was fascinated with the idea of precision and i could write a book about it. i read the story, english

chilling and i realized the numbers could tell the story. [laughter] >> you both had really the same theme although you're thinking about it differently, how do you start to figure out what to put in the books -- >> many years ago and the epidemic in london, i thought we could use more intestinal disease today, good to cheer everyone up. it's funny thing about book structure, the book follows the outbreak in london over the course of two weeks and every chapter is a day during that period and i knew i had this chronology that i had to follow on some level so anchored to that so i knew there was going to be this ticking clock,

there's an investigation that's going on that leads to the discovery of the water-borne nature of cholera and during research to have book given the events of each day corresponding to these chapters, there was a way to attach to each chapter one particular theme that i was exploring in the book that mapped on to the events, so there's one chapter tells the story of the tuesday but it's also about the way in which cities recycled their waste and the thursday actually maps on to the biographical history and to this day, i think it's one of the more -- when i came up with the idea that's really clever and this is going to add to the structure and interesting and add asymmetry to it and i'm very proud of that and no one has ever mentioned it. [laughter] >> in my review of the book, did

very nicely. no one has ever picked up on that and i sometimes think that those are -- those are the kind of crucial organizational choices that are processed somewhere by the reader and the book works on some level because the structural decisions have been made, you know, in a smart way but they aren't showing and if the structure is right is flows. after the book came out, maybe the best light that i've gotten from a reader, someone wrote in and said, listen, i did ve -- research in london, soho in london and i mentioned in the book that marks was there and in residence between the outbreak had happened, he would cross to

go, i love this to his fencing lesson because he would work congressman festo or capital or whatever he's working on and he would go take fencing class. the reader imagine if coming back from his fencing class he had been a little thirsty and stop at contaminated well and got sick and died out of the outbreak, thinking of how the course of history would transform because of that. >> i did a book few years ago, a biochemist who fell in love and had an affair with a chinese lady and didn't leave his wife but maintained household with the two women and learned chinese and ended up writing the

longest book on china ever written in english language, 24 volumes, 4 million words, he became civilization in china essentially demonstrating how china int vented almost everything from wheel barrel to air-conditioning and so on, he got himself terribly unstuck during korean war. he was a nudist and accordion player. brilliant fellow as his wife dorothy. fell under if you like the communist party during korean war and invited to go over to china and korea to prove in quotes that the americans had used biological weapons in the

korean war, infected with anthrax in northern part of chinese border and for that he was thrown out of college at cambridge but was banned from the united states. the ban was instituted at the time of mccarthy so he was sort of a communist legitimately banned from the united states. the ban was lifted, by which time he was elderly and master of college at cambridge and distinction, finally let in and he went to, let in to get honorary degree from the university of chicago and give speeches at north western

university, one of the speeches was on chinese gun powder, the view of the west that the chinese used gun powder purely for fireworks and never used it aggressive or military sense. in fact, he found a drawing from the second century ad, if you like to use the phrase, various bonds made by chinese using gun powder and drawing on the black board, very detailed diagram of the chinese bomb, second century, 2,000 years old roughly and sitting in the back was a wild head mathematic student copying furiously everything he was saying and six weeks later precisely mimicking the design that demonstrated, he sent the first bomb off to someone at the university of michigan which

exploded and killed security guard, he was the uni bomber. [laughter] >> so it had not been repealed, the unibomber had never occurred, i'm sorry, it's completely irrelevant. >> that's an amazing story. >> can i just talk about -- the two of us are interested in structure and i believe and i think you do the three key elements for nonfiction books, the principle idea, you might think that the next component in order is fancy s good writing, it's an important thing but it's not as important i'm sure you agree as structure because you can write about the most wonderful idea and if your structures, you'll lose the intention of the reader and the reader will get asleep and never finish the book.

that was the problem with steven's book with brief history of time. proved to be strangely organized and i -- i like you and very interested in organization and for instance when i did a book on the atlantic ocean, big, big subject, i decided to use the 7 ages of man from as you like it so child infancy, school child, soldier, lover, justice, old man returned to childhood, oddly enough you can coral everything you think you know about the atlantic into that structure, works very well, i'm wonder if you also used what you do structures. >> yeah, particularly with books like far farsighted an where ideas comes from, there isn't a timeline necessarily, good ideas which ultimately being structured on these patterns of innovation that i was seeing in resthearnlg -- research that

occurred in different stories and it would be across scales, innovation on the level of neurons. what is your work space and how do people create and on the scale of coffee houses an small clusters and cities and then networks and the internet and i think for like two years as i was researching and starting to write it, i had the structure in my head and i got to eventually when there's kind of this really challenging thing when you're commit today a structure and you start to realize actually you've kind of been on the wrong horse and, you know, what i loved about the ideas in the book and writing the book is it would jump around a lot and i was too trapped inside the brain and the

neuron level chapter and i was trapped inside the city and so i had to rethink the whole thing and that is emotionally draining because you so don't want to have to do that, you know, it's like renovating your house while you're living in it and which i'm kind of doing right now so i feel how painful that is. but i do think you have to get that right and -- and when you do, i do love that part of it, it's one of the things that whenever a friend of mine is writing a book, do you need my help with the structure? [laughter] >> you only get to think about it once every couple of years with the book for myself and it's the one thing that i do love the imagine how, you know, how a book could open and the book i wrote invention of air which maybe you reviewed for publishers weekly years ago. [laughter]

>> very nice of you. >> that could have been very awkward. [laughter] >> now finally i'm getting my revenge on stage. but that book jumps around in time, you start in the 1790's and go back to 1760 and you go back 200 million years, i'm going to write a history book but it's going to be structured like episode of lost, lost was on tv and it was doing all the interesting kind of time jumps and it was definitely one of the structural convexes -- conventions, the shape came into my head before i figured out how it was going to work with the actual facts to have book or the argument of the book, the inspirations can be really fun. >> while we are on the subject of process can you each explain how long it takes you write a

book, simon on the phone the other day outlined this very intimidating one-year research, it's out and what is the sequence and how quickly, at what stage do you start the book, are you working at two in once? >> yes, one is the lesser book. >> the later? >> the lesser? >> at the moment, i hope tomorrow monday being working day and if everyone is back in the office that we will sign the contract for the next book for which i've said i'll deliver, fairly long, 175,000 words, 400 pages, more than that. >> yeah. >> on the 31st of march 2020 and hope that it can be published later or early 2021. so once i've got -- you are going to hate, maybe you do exactly the same in which case --

>> i'm not going to hate you. it's safe space. >> you gave a good review. [laughter] >> you can never hate me for the rest of your days. i did the research obviously what you're doing when writing proposal, so you are when you sign the contract and some money starts coming into your account, you're hitting the ground running, but i will start writing that book in, let me see due march 2020, at the end of, middle of -- yeah. june 2019, given me nine months to finish. , what i do always is i put it at the top-left-hand side of my screen, 175,000 words, 180 days it is, do the math, 104 words a

day or something and every day say i see machines that you see in hotels with your head behind -- >> is that on a post-it? >> top left -- sort of post-it. >> on the screen and you have countdown. >> i change it every day. if i'm really virtuous and i'm four days ahead i will take a bit of time off. thus far -- did you ever work for a newspaper? you worked for a mag seen and you had to have deadlines, the new yorker is flexible. [laughter] >> sorry, you shouldn't be here. [laughter] >> i have my laptop. yes -- >> i worked for the essentially correspondence and you're

sitting in places where i lived and you know what the deadline is for the addition of the paper that's coming out in london, and you have a meeting. can i say a story? >> please, you're here to tell stories. i was covering the war which gave us bangladesh, east pakistan and india in 1971 and india is 5 and a half hours ahead of london, 10:30, 6:00 o'clock deadline, it was 11:30 p.m. we would send stories to london, one circuit sort of every hour and so we had an agreement among us that whichever foreign city we got through to which ever foreign newspaper, that we would download all the copy and in london or new york would pass it

on and there was no competition. we've all got -- you have long strips, probably no one here knows what italics machine is, you round it around your hand, so you had the bizarre scene of 12 or 15 foreign correspondents wondering around the hotel lobby what looks like big bandages on their hands, all they want to do a beer and shower and go to bed and coffee but the telex machine does not spring into life about 11:30 on deadline. it does and all of us craned over it to see was it bbc london, ny times new york or which was the foreign rodent that was going to talk to us, it was none of those. >> i recognized it to my horror it was my father in company in london typing one finger at the

time, mother and i greatly enjoying stories you sending from india. it was so humiliating and embarrassing and ended up with deadly sign, mother says, simon while in india take care to keep off the salads. [laughter] >> my approach to generating these things which is i have and this is umbrella topic of innovation, i think, which is i always have -- really at least three projects simultaneously going in different stages, so i try to have one book that i'm kind of wrapping up and in copy-editing mode and it just come out and i'm still thinking about it a lot and then one book i'm actually writing or

researching and then usually two or three ideas that are kind of planes on approach into an appropriate, you can see the lights out there, you know they are coming, you're not totally sure what they are but you have some sense that you will write a book about this general topic and research in the background. and there's an efficiency reason to do that because there's down time, once you send the first manuscript, you don't have nothing to do a month or two while you edit and if you have another project you can work on that. what really is important about that is you get all the interesting collisions between the projects even if they are on completely different topics, in fact, they are the most interested because they are on different topics, so you're working on one thing but on the side you've got the side hustle on the side that you're working on and something that n that research triggers the idea that you bring over and put to work

in the active man swipt or whatever it is, so and i just finished a draft of kind of ghost-map like single historical thread story about a pirate, true story about a pirate and i was researching and begin to go write as i was finishing up farsighted and a lot of what far sighted is talking about is the drama that -- literary drama of great decisions. you see interior perspective of someone making a choice. those are the dramatic history in narrative when someone is faced with cross roads and what solution they will come up to this problem and who are they going to choose and i was writing about this and finishing up this book and then i'm writing the story about a pirate and i began to realize, oh, it's really good as a trick in this

book at each of the points where some of the characters do have a choice to really slow down the narrative and the description and walk the reader through what was confronting this character at that particular moment, you know, in the middle of the indian ocean trying to decide whether to go after this ship and what all the factors were and to take, you know, to pause in a sense for four pages and take the readers through that choice so that when they actually do make the choice, they understand the full stake of it and i think it's actually -- i'm at a draft of the book, adds to the drama of it and i only got to that technique because i was simultaneously writing this other book and that is the story of innovation in many cases, if you look at a lot of the people that i've written about and it's true of you, simon too, one of the most creative people they have a lot of hobbies and interesting on different things, they are

working on one big idea and they are dabbling -- think of darwin, darwin had a million side hobbies that he was working on and in various different ways played into the big and influenced him. having those multiple frames of reference is multiple interest, i think, is a good strategy whether you're writing books or doing anything else. >> there used to be one every saturday. do you have a grasshopper mind? it should cure you, the affliction. people like you darwin, if you don't mind -- >> thank you. >> do grass hopper minds. [laughter] >> i'm surely glad i didn't or we couldn't afford it.

>> there's a darwin story about collection, collection among many he studied. i think it was beatles. i can't remember. he was constantly going off to study his beatles and his son had seen as given that this is what father did, they had a whole wing devote today beatle collection and son goes over to friend's house, where does your dad do his beatles? what we aretalking -- are you talking about kid? [laughter] >> we had innovation in the rise of tech companies, now we have these giant tech companies like google and facebook and amazon and apple and microsoft, a lot of anxiety is coming out about

those and a long time we were celebrating them changing the wave we live and people are anxious about the power and there's concern that they just through their sheer size are stifling innovation, i was curious to know what you thought about that? what is the downside of innovation, when can it cause a problem? >> well, you know, i talk about this a little bit in farsighted, there's a really interesting exercise that gary klein the psychologist came up with years ago in helping people making momentous decisions and he calls it a premortem and the idea is once you've gotten to that stage where you have decided whether it's a personal decision to get married or corporate decision to release a new product into the world and a technology company or whatever it is, once you've decided this is the path we are going to go, run this exercise as a group really, run the

premortem exercise, opposite of postmortem, the patient is dead, and explain the future death of the patient and you're about the make decision, take the time telling the story how and ends up unlocking a lot of creative inside that you wouldn't normally have. take a look at the decision that you're about to make, what are the flaws on this model and the choice you're making, it looks great, i'm excited, we've decided this is the path that we will take, if you ask them to tell the story about how it turns out to be catastrophic failure they end up seeing flaws that they wouldn't have otherwise seen. even if they don't end up doing

they aware of potential pitfalls of the past and i bring that because that's the exercise that i think every -- every start-up or big corporation that's in kind of disruptive space that is messing with the way that people communicate or the way that political values are shared or whatever it is, they need to be running those internal premortem commerces, that's what facebook and twitter i think kind of failed to do, right, they just kind of, hey, we will connect everyone, fantastic, we are able to share what we had for breakfast, what can go wrong, no, seriously, what could go wrong, let's imagine how these new technologies or how new features could be exploited by bad-faith actors and thinking of alternate more damaging scenarios and taking them for

seriously, by the way, we are starting to see happen before and debate of artificial intelligence, a lot of discussion of how can this be abused or how could it in 30 or 40 years turn into something that's threatening to us, the fact that we are conversations i think is a sign of progress. >> yes, my book is rather a little bit more limited but i look at the way fantasizing precision and wondering whether it is as good for us as we would like to think. i mean, i look at both mechanical position and electronic position, in the mechanical world there was a classic case 6 or 7 years ago with an air bus 380 taking off, one of the dobl-decker planes, 380 taking off from singapore on its way to sidney and they had four rolls-royce trenton 900 engines and it wanted to get

very high, once it was over in indonesia and as it was doing the engine exploded and took 5 pilots and manage today get aircraft back to singapore and didn't have any brakes, running on metal wheels, fuel gushing out of the wing, could have been awful, 500 people on board, in the end everyone lived and it was all right. 100-millimeter and that plane had taken off because every plane is monitored in this case

headquarters in sidney and they saw it take off in los angeles, but it survived and landed in london. london and singapore and then this take frawf singapore suddenly this tinny bit too narrow or thin a wall fractured aircraft, 1600 celsius, one begins to wonder whether we are machining things to tolerances that are beyond human abilities to deal with them and so why don't we say why don't we leave it to machines to make machines and artificial intelligence will look after it, i'm not so sure.

billion not million. the initial one was about the size of my fist and now so many of them, the statistic which still intrigues me is that there are now more working in the world today than there are leaves on all the trees in all the world, incredible number, 13 trillion and operating at such tinny tolerances if one can use that word, atomic level where things behave in peculiar fashions. and can precision on this scale really continue to operate without it becoming mysterious and weird. well, they say, don't worry, optical computer and quantum

computer will take care of it. in korea i have just come back from and in china, they still give awards to this day, government awards and pensions to what they call living national treasures, usually elderly men and women who spend their lives not making anything precise, not making microchips but working in ceramics, metal ware and societies that regard bamboo with the same degree that we regardty tan -- regard titanium. >> we are going to questions. i'm not sure if there are mics or people are just going to shout. >> there are mics. >> are people going to bring in the mics? hang on one second. we have a microphone.

[inaudible] >> okay. third -- [laughter] >> i understand. third row. >> hi, there, i really enjoyed the talk. i want you to get comment on the time and space in which it occurs, seems to have a certain pattern in space and time and can you comment on that? >> well, one of the spaces that i keep writing about, in fact, for a while i had post-it no more writing about the 18th century coffee house. it's where the enlightenment happened. it comes up so much because it

is where we have a third space, it's not work, it's not home and when these coffee houses appeared, you had flourishing of new ideas that happened in particularly in england in the late 1600's and early 1700's, when they took off they were so popular that charles the second issued official decree banning coffee houses, 1670 or something like that, the new spaces are distracting men from their lawful calling and affairs and that ban lasted one week because everyone was already so hooked on the coffee. what was important is he was exactly wrong. it led to the invention of magazines and a lot of the publishing, modern insurance, coffee house, franklin and used to hang out and political ideas, chemistry and publishing, so it

was incredibly generative space, one of the things that made it so generative was that it was by definition multidisciplinary space, not defined by university discipline or corporate mission, a space with people with interest would get together and have the open-ended conversations where interesting collusions could happen. we would have more coffee houses more than ever now, i'm not sure that necessarily the starbucks is that quite intellectual can top that and the coffee house wasn't in the 180th century but that's a great example of a space of innovation, i think. >> it's it's fascinating about conversations going on. james murray the auditor of the oxford english dictionary, they were true poly math, they knew about everything.

i want to know whether the people that run the great corporations that you were talking about a few minutes ago are polymatic too or single-minded. [laughter] >> you want me to answer that, i would say the style of managing of corporation has really changed and the mba-financially-oriented-family style has come in and there's been a decline in those people although you find them in silicon valley and are still celebrated there. but there's been a real change in the way companies are run and they are much more focused on short-term results for their shareholders and, you know, do i feel that that's a sort of innovation in the economy that

has negative effects, do we have another question? yes, front row, please. [inaudible] >> what can be disastrous for us and not everybody else and nobody wants to think about, for example, evolution, great physicians developed our geological space and also great for us destroying it, we don't include, we never include problem to have race in the --

in our way to industry, for example. [inaudible] >> you still don't think about anything, you don't want to innovate in this area, what do you think about it in. >> it's a really important objection, one of the things that i talk about a lot in farsighted in as nuance and advance decision-making set of techniques is really what we see in kind of a sustainable planning decision processes that have developed where you do design where you consult all the stakeholders, you don't look at the problem through a single lens but you think about the long-term impact, environmental impact of building park or freeway or something like that. that's a science really that has advanced over the last 50 years, we are able to make much more nuance decisions that factor in the impact on lots of different

communities that are kind of shaped by the decision. in the corporate model it's been very interesting to see, again, this is not widespread yet but things like benefit corporations b corp.s were created so a corporation doesn't have fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, that was a big thing that changed, we are obliged that our shares go up in value. executives who we wanted to actually think about other impacts, right, wanted to think about the environment for instance, were they breaking the law in some level. so these new -- there's a new actually spear headed by a bunch of people in new york, b corp., yeah, we are interested in profits and we are interested in shareholder value but we are saying at the outset that we are also interested in other things maybe like our employees'

benefits or the environment or civil discourse or whatever those extra values are and that is built into the definition of a corporation and so we are seeing companies like kick starter and etsy have embraced that kind of structure and that's a big improvement. i hope more companies push in that direction. >> do we have time for one more question, what do you think? >> yeah. [laughter] >> okay, one last one. someone in the back. okay. so we have someone standing up all the way at the back. >> creativity is human, right, so my question is do you think that innovations that we are creating now is like the next stifle creativity, what do you

guys think? >> you're probably better position to talk about it. it is true that when plastics were invented and if you remember celebrated from graduate, that's where the future is plastics. when you talk about artificial intelligence, now everyone is suddenly saying, wait a minute, this is something that we are creating or developing but we are not certain it's good for us and the long-term ramifications even in relatively primitive awareness of it are seeming to be profound and so i think to answer your question at the back, that specific area of artificial, one of the many things that people must be concerned about is whether two extensive, if artificial

intelligence makes extensive inroads in our lives it may well have the fact of starving intelligence. >> i think religion and bureaucracy, people wanting power is what stifled our innovation beforehand and where we are going now is the new road to stifling or innovation and creativity, like human creativity. >> i think the path we should be pushing ourselves towards is the scene orio -- scenario in a sense diversity that diversity of interest and perspectives makes us more innovative, better decision making, something that i talk a lot about in farsighted and that's going to include in the near future if it doesn't already machine intelligence, right, we will have different kinds of human intelligence and some problems will be best approached with a bunch of

humans, different background and different interests and ai who has got a seat at the table, we are not handing power to ai, it's up to you, we will sit here and play video games all day. this is going to be a collaborative process because we recognize the computer is good at certain things that we are not and we can turn it into a duet but if we hand over the reins entirely and how the work and the decisions that are making behind the scenes, that's the scene orio i'm worried about. >> sorry, we couldn't control religion and people who wanted power, what makes us think we will control what we are

creating? [laughter] [applause] >> i think we are out of time. >> we can go on till tuesday. >> yes, thank you so much everyone for coming, just a reminder, authors will be signing books outside. [applause] >> thank you so much. [inaudible [inaudible conversations] >> and that wraps our coverage of the brooklyn book festival for this year. if you missed any of the events we brought you today, watch them tonight starting at 10:00 p.m. pacific time or online at any time.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> book tv tapes hundreds of author programs throughout the country, here is a look at some of the events we will be covering this week, on tuesday library in baltimore to hear white house correspondent april ryan to give firsthand account of reporting on trump administration. on wednesday antonia phillips, also on wednesday at the heritage foundation in washington, d.c. where fox news host steve hilton will offer his ideas on the merits of populism. then on thursday look for us at the manhattan institute in new

york city for heather mcdonald's thoughts on identity politics on college campuses. on friday at the shelter island public library in new york andrea gabor will offer her take on education reform. on sunday live at new new york s library event, the brooklyn book festival. many of these events are open to the public, look for them to air in the near future on book tv on c-span2. >> what's made us the most successful nation in the world, capitalism has created more wealth and spreaded across broader demographics than ever devised in human history and the perfect example of those is the united states. the democrats have seized however upon the millennials affinity for socialism.

now, while bernie sanders didn't win the election as you know, they didn't even get the nomination, hillary clinton got the nomination, now, keep in mind a lot of people think that with some justification hillary clinton got nomination because debbie wasserman schultz and the dnc fixed the primary so nobody else could win it, so we really don't know who would have won it other than the election was fixed but hillary clinton won. .. .. maybe we have something to be worried about the poll after poll shows the millennial view

socialism favorably in capitalism less favorably. >> next on booktv strand booktv strand to come up liberal columnist derek hunter offers his thoughts on how progressives influence academia, the media and pop culture to advance their agenda. he's interviewed by brent bozell, founder and president of the media research center. afterwards is a weekly interview program with relevant guest host interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. >> derek, a pleasure to have you with us today. >> thank you. it's an honor to witness. we've never met although we followed each other for a long time. before talking about your book, how about something about yourself and what led you to write this