Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age

Please note this is a free event! However, if you would like to make a contribution to support Books & Books' virtual events, we are grateful for any and all donations. Donations can be made in the upper righthand corner, above the "Save My Spot!" registration button. Thank you!

In The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-term Thinking, Roman Krznaric reveals six practical ways we can retrain our brains to think of the long view, including Deep-Time Humility (recognizing our lives as a cosmic eyeblink) and Cathedral Thinking (starting projects that will take more than one lifetime to complete). His aim is to inspire more “time rebels” like Greta Thunberg—to shift our allegiance from this generation to all humanity—in short, to save our planet and our future.

Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His books include Empathy, The Wonderbox, and Carpe Diem Regained, and have been published in more than twenty languages. He studied at the Universities of Oxford, London, and Essex, where he received his PhD. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life and is based in the UK.

A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future—our own, our families’, and our society’s.

Many of us never learned—or have forgotten—how to make smart decisions for the long run. In a world where immediate satisfaction is the norm, it’s easy to avoid thinking ahead. Whether it’s decisions about our health (our chronic overuse of antibiotics has triggered a shocking rise in superbugs that are resistant to them), our finances (20 percent of Americans save nothing for retirement), or our jobs (we slash R&D budgets to improve short-term profit and then can’t keep pace with competitors), we lack the tools to choose what’s best for the future. Today more than ever, we need to know how to make better long-term decisions—for ourselves, our families, and the world.

Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe and a fellow at New America. Before joining the Globe, she served as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, was the director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and taught in the program on Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. She was also a science journalist for The New York Times and other publications. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in Ohio and now lives in Boston. She is the author of The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, named a top business book by The Financial Times and a best book of the year by Science Friday and National Public Radio.

The Good Ancestor: A Virtual Afternoon with Roman Krznaric & Bina Venkataraman