*A limited number of tickets include a copy of Abundance
Presented in partnership with Manny’s and The Long Now Foundation
Join us for a conversation that delves deeper in the abundance agenda in the context of a longer now.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s forthcoming book Abundance is a call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic scarcity: from climate change to housing, education to healthcare. The history of the twenty-first century in America is one of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need.
Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to over come them.
Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times and the author of Why We’re Polarized. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, host of the podcast Plain English and a news analyst with NPR.
For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers. Previous books include Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006). In 2021, he published a book titled This is Your Mind on Plants. In 2020, along with Dacher Keltner and others, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In addition to teaching, he lectures widely on food, agriculture, health, and psychedelic science. Pollan grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University, from which he received a Master’s in English. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer.
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Ezra Klein photo by Lucas Foglia
Derek Thompson photo by Shaughn and John, Inc