John Brockman is a literary agent

Literary agent

A literary agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers and film producers and assists in the sale and deal negotiation of the same. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwriters and major non-fiction writers...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 specializing in scientific literature. He founded the Edge Foundation

Edge Foundation, Inc.

The Edge Foundation, Inc. is an organization of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Its motto is 'To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have them ask...

, an organization aimed to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields. Referencing C.P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture" consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

Quotes

• "Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time." http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/
• "Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody." http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/

External links

• John Brockman
• Brockman's taste for Science or how to entertain the smartest people
• Guardian Interview
• John Brockman at HuffPo
• "So What Happens After Happenings?", New York Times, 4 September 1966
• John Brockman: 40 years of "intermedia kinetic environments"