Today, Thursday (5/14), I'm honored to be moderating a free online conversation with two brilliant women whose work is a light in the darkness during these uncertain times. My friend Ann Druyan is the executive producer, writer, and director of Cosmos, the iconic TV show she co-created with her late husband and collaborator, astronomer and […]

Our brains are wired so that when a situation is framed as something bad, it's "stickier" in our minds than if it's presented in a positive light. If you see a glass as half empty, it's really really hard to start thinking about it as half-full. That was very beneficial to our evolutionary ancestors but […]

According to data from two large studies spanning thirty years, optimistic people live considerably longer than pessimists.

Today would have been Carl Sagan's 84th birthday. I wish he were here. Watch the above, climb aboard your Ship of the Imagination, and make the future. View this post on Instagram My dear wonderful dad would be 84 today. I find that very hard to imagine. I spend a lot of time wondering what […]

YouTuber Ingrid Nilsen sat down with Bill Gates to play "How much does the world suck?" and discuss some surprisingly optimistic facts about humanity. The video is a tie-in with Bill and Melinda Gates' recently released 10th Annual Letter, which this year centers on optimism. You can read the full letter on Gates' website, but […]

I was honored to be yesterday's guest on my favorite interview podcast, Erik Davis's Expanding Mind. Erik and I have been friends since the cyberdelic early 1990s. He is a brilliant head and prolific writer who explores the cultures of consciousness with rigor, wit, and genuine curiosity. On the podcast, Erik and I had a […]

In 2012, Kim Stanley Robinson published 2312, imagining how the world and its neighbors might look in 300 years, loosely coupled with the seminal Red Mars books, a futuristically pastoral novel about the way that technology can celebrate the glories of nature; in 2015, Robinson followed it up with Aurora, the best book I read that year, which used 2312's futures to demolish the idea that we can treat space colonization (and other muscular technological projects) as Plan B for climate change -- a belief that is very comforting to those who don't or can't imagine transforming capitalism into a political system that doesn't demolish the planet. Now, with New York 2140, Robinson starts to connect the dots between these different futures with a bold, exhilarating story of life in a permanent climate crisis, where most people come together in adversity, but where a small rump of greedy, powerful people get in their way.

The UK's Forbidden Planet is now offering signed hardcovers of Walkaway, my first novel for adults since 2009 — this is in addition to the signed US hardcovers being sold by Barnes and Noble.