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Covid 19 and the Food System
The Hands That Feed Us
The Bomb, and Why We Must Remember It
Right now the world faces three great existential threats: climate change, viral pandemics, and nuclear weapons. Of the three, nuclear weapons pose by far the greatest immediate danger yet receive the least attention--a fact that only increases the threat.
The Longest War
The Risks of Complex Tech
Nuclear weapons, commercial airliners, driverless cars—all three are machines that can go wrong in unexpected ways. As the world grows more and more dependent on complex technological systems, we must keep in mind the flaws inherent in them and maintain a sense of humility about them. In this talk, Schlosser highlights that everything we create is imperfect, often in hidden ways, with potentially catastrophic consequences that need to be managed.
Eric Schlosser is a writer and filmmaker whose work explores subjects too often ignored by the mainstream media, shedding light on worlds that have been deliberately hidden. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Fast Food Nation (2001), Reefer Madness (2003), and Command and Control (2013).
Fast Food Nation helped to start a revolution in how Americans think about what they eat. Reefer Madness exposed the absurdity and injustices of the war on drugs, while revealing the exploitation of undocumented immigrants and the vast fortunes earned in America’s underground economy. Command and Control explored the effort, since the dawn of the atomic age, to prevent nuclear weapons from being stolen, sabotaged, or detonated by accident. It was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Schlosser has also helped to produce a number of films, including Fast Food Nation (2006), directed by Richard Linklater; There Will Be Blood (2007), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; Food, Inc., (2008), directed by Robert Kenner; and Food Chains (2014), co-produced with Eva Longoria and directed by Sanjay Rawal. Schlosser was the co-creator and co-director of the bomb (2016), a multimedia installation staged at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies in Oslo.
He has lectured at universities throughout the United States and spoken at the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, the Parliaments of the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Norway, as well as at the United Nations. Schlosser is currently at work on a book about the American prison system.
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