Brainstorm Series: Shankar Vedantam
Join the Library, Center for the Arts, and Jackson Hole News & Guide for a series of presentations meant to ignite conversation and curiosity.
An Evening with Shankar Vedantam and Our Hidden Brains
Shankar Vedantam
MON, JAN 22, 2024
7:00 PM
Join us for an evening with Shankar Vedantam, host of the “Hidden Brain” podcast, as we explore how our “hidden brains” shape our world. Click here for free tickets to Shankar Vedantam>
The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses
Ed Yong
MAR 21, 2024
7:00 PM
Center for the Arts
In this engaging lecture based on his book, An Immense World:how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us, Yong takes audiences through the hidden realms of animal senses. With wit and humor learn the amazing ways in which animals perceive aspects of the world to which we are oblivious. Click here for free tickets to Ed Yong>
Presenter Bios
Temple Grandin is a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by many companies around the world. She has also been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs that are used by McDonalds, Wendy’s, Whole Foods, and other corporations. Temple has appeared on numerous TV shows such as 20/20 and Prime Time. Her books include: Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport and The Autistic Brain. Her books Animals in Translation and Visual Thinking have been on the New York Times Bestseller List. Temple was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in September 2017 and in 2022 was named a Colorado State University Distinguished Professor. See the video from Dr. Grandin's talk in September>
Jesse Eisinger is a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He is the author of the “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.” In April 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. See the video from Eisinger's talk in November>
Shankar Vedantam is the host and executive editor of the Hidden Brain podcast and radio show. Shankar and NPR launched the podcast in 2015, and it now receives millions of downloads per week, and is regularly listed as one of the top 20 podcasts in the world. The radio show, which debuted in 2017, is heard on more than 400 public radio stations across the United States.
Vedantam was NPR’s social science correspondent between 2011 and 2020, and he spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post. From 2007 to 2009, he was also a columnist, and wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for the Post.
Vedantam and Hidden Brain have been recognized with the Edward R Murrow Award, and honors from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Austen Riggs Center, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Webby Awards, the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, the American Public Health Association, the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship on Science and Religion, and the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship.In 2009-2010, Vedantam served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Shankar Vedantam speaks internationally about how the “hidden brain” shapes our world and is the author of two non-fiction books: The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives, published in 2010, and Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain published in 2021, an exploration of deception’s role in human success.
Ed Yong Named “the most important and impactful journalist" of 2020 by Poynter, Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong is a science staff writer with The Atlantic. He was awarded journalism’s top honor, the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for his crucial coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. He anticipated the course of virus, the complex challenges that U.S. faced, and the government’s disastrous failure in its response. An accomplished speaker, Yong brings his vast scientific knowledge and engages his audiences through his insightful conversations about the pandemic, the animal kingdom, the challenges of science journalism, and more.