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You are here: Home / For A Good Time In Cambridge (This Thursday)

For A Good Time In Cambridge (This Thursday)

by Tom Levenson|  October 6, 20153:58 pm| 33 Comments

This post is in: Rare Sincerity, Shameless self promotion, We Are All Mayans Now

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Yo! Local Juicers — if you’ve reserved Thursday evening for watching paint dry, I have an alternative.

I’m going to be moderating a really excellent iteration of the MIT Communications Forum — this time co-sponsored by our city-wide celebration Hub Week.

I’ll be very lightly riding herd on Annalee Newitz and Charles C. Mann as they wonder about how (and whether) study of the past can help us prepare for the future — with the possibility of apocalypse included.

Brueghel-tower-of-babel

Both are wonderful writers and thinkers.  Annalee was the founding editor of io9, and is now Gizmodo’s Grand Poobah.  She’s written Scatter, Adapt and Remember:  How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was, inter alia, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She’s at work now on a history of the city (and its possible future) — and more besides.

Charles  has been producing erudite and elegant science writing for yonks*. He’s perhaps best known for 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which won the the National Academies of Sciences Keck award as best popular science book of the year.  He followed that up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and is at work now on The Wizard and the Prophet, which he describes as a book about the future which makes no predictions. (Yogi Danish parliamentarians would approve.)

Time:  5-7 p.m., Thursday, October 8.

Place:  MIT Building 3, room 270.  Interactive map here.

PS:  If you’re into some long distance planning, I’ve got a couple of events coming up in support of my long-teased new book, The Hunt for Vulcan: and how Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe.  The book is timed to the centennial of Einstein’s discovery of the General Theory of Relativity, which he completed in November, 1915, and it gets to that striking moment through a marvelous oddity of a story from 19th century solar-system astronomy, the repeated discovery of a planet that should have existed, but didn’t.  The appearance and then vanishing of the planet Vulcan is not just a curiosity, (or so it seems to me), as its history reveals a great deal about what it takes for science really to change under the pressure of inconvenient fact.

Anyway — the book comes out on Tuesday, November 3, and we are in the midst of planning a launch event at the MIT Museum.  That will most likely run from 6-7:30, with details to come soon.

Then, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, I’ll be doing a reading and signing at my local:  Brookline Booksmith.  Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

*Yonks being a unit of measure of time roughly equal to more than you thought.

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

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Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    Marmot

    October 6, 2015 at 4:03 pm

    Iterate the shit outta that!

  2. 2.

    Elizabelle

    October 6, 2015 at 4:07 pm

    Sounds like a great program! Oh to be a few states northeast.

    Typo alert re date Einstein completed his work. We could still use him around.

    Your book sounds way above my paygrade, but might still buy it to support a starving author and find someone real smaht to give it to …

  3. 3.

    ruemara

    October 6, 2015 at 4:10 pm

    Fascinating. I’ve done speculative writing on the future of cities a few years back. Sounds very interesting.

  4. 4.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:13 pm

    @Elizabelle: Thanks. Fix’t.

    @Marmot: Not above anyone’s pay grade I think and hope — that was a major goal in the writing. See the early reader reviews at Amazon for corroboration.

  5. 5.

    aimai

    October 6, 2015 at 4:13 pm

    Alas! Erik Loomis of Lawyer’s Guns and Money will be presenting his new book “Out of Sight” at the Porter Square Bookstore tonight at 7:00. It is subtitled “The Long and Disturbing Outsourcing of Corporate Catastrophe” or something equallydepressing. Loyal LGM fans are encouraged to go and suffer together.

  6. 6.

    Roger Moore

    October 6, 2015 at 4:16 pm

    I was hoping you were going to highlight this anti-Renoir protest at the Museum of Fine Arts.

  7. 7.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:20 pm

    @Roger Moore: Awesome. Just the shiznit.

  8. 8.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:21 pm

    @aimai: Alas indeed! We live in a town w. too much cool stuff on tap. As against that, there are some millions in the metro area, so here’s hoping both and all events get the audiences they need.

  9. 9.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    October 6, 2015 at 4:22 pm

    Does it say that I’ve been watching too much Monty Python lately that I saw that headline and thought, “Jeez, what a tool. How the hell many of the readers here does he think are just going to be hanging out in Britain, waiting for something to do?”

  10. 10.

    Mandalay

    October 6, 2015 at 4:22 pm

    The Hunt for Vulcan is equal to the best science writing I’ve read anywhere, by any author…

    Wow! A review can’t get much better than that.

  11. 11.

    Origuy

    October 6, 2015 at 4:29 pm

    1491 and 1493 were two of the best history books I’ve ever read. They should be required reading for anyone interested in American history.

  12. 12.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 6, 2015 at 4:33 pm

    Planet Vulcan features in Rudolf Steiner’s eccentric gnostic-astrologic-theosophistic version of astronomy. Its existence would have provided a helpful boost to astrologers.

  13. 13.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 6, 2015 at 4:34 pm

    Just to be excessively pedantic, the line about “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future” has been (mis?)-attributed to lots of people. But attributing it to the late Mr. Berra is, as another famous line goes (correctly, IMO, attributed to Wolfgang Pauli), “not even wrong.” Anyone with any familiarity with English and with any familiarity with Yogi could never even imagine him saying those words.

    /pet peeve

  14. 14.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 6, 2015 at 4:40 pm

    We live in a town w. too much cool stuff on tap.

    You have too much beer?!

  15. 15.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:41 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: Fair enuf. Fix’t.

  16. 16.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:41 pm

    @sm*t cl*de: Never. No such thing.

  17. 17.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 6, 2015 at 4:49 pm

    Buggrit, comment eaten.

  18. 18.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:50 pm

    @sm*t cl*de: By millenium hand and shrimp?

  19. 19.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 4:51 pm

    @Mandalay

    : ;-)

    [blushes]

  20. 20.

    HumboldtBlue

    October 6, 2015 at 4:51 pm

    Thanks for the reminder, Levenson, just ordered my kindle versions of 1491 and 1493.

    Of course, as it always is when I am ordering kindle books I also ordered four others despite the voice in my head telling me to stop.

  21. 21.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    October 6, 2015 at 4:55 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    That might be an interesting question for a slow afternoon sometime — which “great” artist’s work can you just not stand, or at least can’t get what the fuss is about?

    I wouldn’t say I *hate* Lautrec, but I never seek him out, either.

  22. 22.

    Mandalay

    October 6, 2015 at 4:55 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: As Berra might (but probably did not) say: “I never said most of the things I said“.

    Just after Berra died I saw a replayed interview where he mentions the quote “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” but apparently it was not his line:

    it is often erroneously attributed to Berra, but John McNulty used it in a story in the New Yorker, Feb. 10, 1943, when Berra was not yet even in the major leagues.

    So while the bulk of quotes that are incorrectly attributed to Berra were born on the internet, maybe a few came from Berra himself? (I’m not accusing him of plagiarism…just suggesting that he may have popularized quotes from others that appealed to him.)

  23. 23.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 6, 2015 at 4:56 pm

    @Tom Levenson:

    By millenium hand and shrimp?

    Not just by any shrimp; I think it was an Anomalocaris.

    Rather than retype the comment, allow me to blogpimp with a link to the Vulcan-related blogpost I copied it from.

  24. 24.

    schrodinger's cat

    October 6, 2015 at 5:03 pm

    I like the Tower of Babel with a kitteh better!

  25. 25.

    Cervantes

    October 6, 2015 at 5:04 pm

    @Mandalay:

    Not that he’s wrong — far from it — but it should be noted: that reviewer, Alan Lightman, is someone’s close colleague at MIT.

  26. 26.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 5:08 pm

    @Cervantes: That would be true, as is Junot, another very kind blurber. But I will say that early reax do seem to be more thumbs up than not.

    As to whether any such kind folks are correct ain’t for me to say. ;-)

    What I can say is that the book is a very cute size, just right for properly capacious Christmas stockings (and Chanukah lederhosen). It also makes great insulation, though not quite the excellent doorstop of some of my previous, more verbose efforts. See — it is both a floor polish and a dessert topping!

  27. 27.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    October 6, 2015 at 5:13 pm

    @Tom Levenson:

    Never. No such thing.

    For some of it is a thing, we’ve sort of had our life’s allotment.

  28. 28.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 5:18 pm

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Yup. Sorry.

  29. 29.

    Cervantes

    October 6, 2015 at 5:20 pm

    @Tom Levenson:

    Frankly, at the moment, there is no book I’m looking forward to reading more than yours.

    Thanks for doing all that work.

  30. 30.

    schrodinger's cat

    October 6, 2015 at 5:23 pm

    @Tom Levenson: How is the beloved Tikka?

  31. 31.

    phoebes-in-santa fe

    October 6, 2015 at 5:28 pm

    Tom, I just preordered the ebook. I notice your publisher released it to Amazon Vine program. That was smart. I’m a “Viner”, but, unfortunately wasn’t offered it. The four reviews you received were well written and better than the publisher-generated “blurbs”.

  32. 32.

    Tom Levenson

    October 6, 2015 at 5:32 pm

    @Cervantes: Thanks! Means a lot.

    @phoebes-in-santa fe: And thanks again! Yup — I’d not heard of the Vine program until this all started. I’m very grateful to those willing to read the book on what must have been short notice.

    @schrodinger’s cat: dealing w. allergies, alas, but magnificent as always. Pix soon.

    And with that — have an obligation tugging on me, so I’ve got to drop out of this conversation. See y’all.

  33. 33.

    Cervantes

    October 6, 2015 at 5:34 pm

    @Tom Levenson:

    I’ve got to drop out of this conversation. See y’all.

    Same here. Have a great evening.

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