From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When China started its open-door policy, 40 years ago, it was a much different environment. There was nothing to work with! It was a communist system before that, a planned economy, no free market. People started building things from scratch.
Complex societies needed repetitive rituals in order to get off the ground. Routinizing rituals makes deviations from the standard script easy to detect. And this means that when people step out of line, they can be sanctioned.
Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right. We're confident that if we have children, they will live long lives as well and we've never had those trends before in all human history.
Our world needs a more reflective way of communicating, something which the media are not promoting. We need an antidote to the current shooting-from-the-hip, and outrage sparking emotive content that is causing mutual incomprehension, it's a tragedy.
The essence of this connection lies in an enduring quest to effect positive change in the world. The judgement criteria revolve around whether the individual endeavored to make the world a better place. This book holds the key to one of the universe's greatest mysteries: the deciding factors for entry into heaven.
Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist,' i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible.
People think that life inside Silicon Valley firms is like life under an orange tree, where you suck on the oranges and everyone treats each other perfectly – but that's not quite right… people are ruthless, competitive… human.
After the Holocaust, political antisemitism became widely discredited. However, what persisted were the cultural stereotypes – the entrenched narratives and stereotypes about Jews within the culture, ready to be drawn upon whenever they seemed relevant or useful.
You know how difficult that is in a nightclub in New York at 5 in the morning? Everybody just stopped and started listening.
It's not just the internet which is contributing to these changes, its mobile and digital technology generally, it makes everyone a journalist. This is why the internet has blown apart the notion of journalism, because it gets rid of the gatekeepers.
We really overvalue work, and undervalue fun, play and life. We've made work our highest calling and made hours worked rather than output the key performance indicator.
Cinema also exists within a framework of genre- and that can be challenging as genre can often flatten storytelling. It can also be a strength- when you play inside a genre- take the case of John le Carre for instance, he's a great novelist but works within the genre of spy-fiction, and transcends the usual narratives.