Ablow, Keith

Ablow was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brown University in 1983, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science degree in neurosciences. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1987 and completed his psychiatry residency at the Tufts-New England Medical Center. He was Board Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology in psychiatry in 1993 and forensic psychiatry in 1999.

 

Ablow is the author of six psychological fiction thrillers featuring Frank Clevenger, a forensic psychiatrist dedicated to a search for truth, no matter where it leads. More than one of the titles was a USA Today bestseller.

 

Ablow's true crime book, Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2007, Ablow published a prescriptive self-help book, Living the Truth: Transform Your Life Through the Power of Insight and Honesty in conjunction with a self-help web community. His 2011 book, The 7, co-authored by Glenn Beck, was released in January 2011 . In November, St. Martin's Press published a second Ablow book, Inside the Mind of Casey Anthony: A Psychological Portrait.

 

Arysio Nunes dos Santos

Arysio Nunes dos Santos (1937 – 2005 AD), was a highly qualified engineer with many patents to his credit. He was Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and had also worked as a geologist and climatologist. He was also an amateur linguist who had mastered Greek and Sanskrit among others. Apart from his professional interests, Santos has written on a diverse range of subjects including Symbolism, Alchemy, the Holy Grail and Comparative Mythology and Religion. His studies led him to conclude that Atlantis and the biblical Eden were the same and more controversially that it had been located in the area of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Capra, Fritjof

Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American physicist. In 1995, he became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College.Capra first became popularly known for his book, The Tao of Physics, which explored the ways in which modern physics was changing our worldview from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological one. Published in 1975, it is still in print in more than 40 editions worldwide and is referenced with the statue of Shiva in the courtyard of one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research: CERN, the Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva.

 

Over the past 30 years, Capra has been engaged in a systematic exploration of how other sciences and society are ushering in a similar shift in worldview, or paradigms, leading to a new vision of reality and a new understanding of the social implications of this cultural transformation.

 

His book, The Systems View of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), presents a grand new synthesis of this work—integrating the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions of life into one unified vision. Several critics have suggested that The Systems View of Life, which Capra coauthored with Pier Luigi Luisi, Professor of Biology at the University of Rome, is destined to become another classic.

 

The main focus of Capra’s environmental education and activism has been to help build and nurture sustainable communities. He believes that to do so, we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms.

Dalrymple, Theodore

Theodore Dalrymple (London, 1949) is one of the pseudonyms of Anthony Daniels, a psychiatrist who has worked on four continents, in addition to having worked in a public hospital and a prison in Birmingham, England. He writes about culture, art, politics, education and medicine for several newspapers and magazines, such as The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and has published several books. In addition to his work in medicine in the aforementioned countries, Anthony Daniels has traveled extensively in Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

In his writing, Daniels frequently argues that the socially liberal and progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Dalrymple's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill.

Feder, Gottfried

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso is a fully accomplished meditation master and internationally renowned teacher of Buddhism. Geshe-la, as he is affectionately called by his students, is primarily responsible for the worldwide revival of Kadampa Buddhism in our time.
From the age of eight Geshe-la studied extensively in the great monastic universities of Tibet and earned the title ‘Geshe’, which literally means ‘spiritual friend’. Under the guidance of his Spiritual Guide, Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche, he then spent the next eighteen years in meditation retreats in the Himalayas. In 1977 he accepted an invitation to teach at Manjushri Kadampa Meditation Centre in England, where he has lived and taught ever since, giving teachings and guidance to an ever-growing group of disciples.


Each year, Geshe-la gives teachings and empowerments at the International Kadampa Festivals, which are attended by thousands of people from all over the world. He has published a series of remarkable books on Buddhism and meditation, from basic introductory books to advanced philosophical texts and meditation manuals. Geshe-la has established three unique study programs and 1100 centers and groups around the world, trained hundreds of qualified Teachers and a flourishing ordained community, and created a project to build Buddhist Temples in every major city in the world.


In his teachings Geshe Kelsang emphasizes the importance of meditation and how to apply it in daily life, the need to be truly happy, and how to cultivate a good heart to help others — and he demonstrates these qualities perfectly in his own life.This remarkable Teacher inspires so many people from so many different countries because he teaches from example.He is a humble Buddhist monk dedicated to helping people throughout the world find true happiness in their hearts.
r your prosperity. If you go side by side with the forces and beings of the Nature you are on the right path and direction.

Golding, William

Sir William Gerald Golding CBE (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth.


In September 1953, after many rejections from other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber and was initially rejected by their reader. His book however was championed by Charles Monteith, a new editor at the firm. Monteith asked for some changes to the text and the novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies.


After moving in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology. His publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia.


His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990; play, adapted by Nigel Williams, 1995), describes a group of boys stranded on a tropical island reverting to savagery.
The Inheritors (1955) shows "new people" (generally identified with Homo sapiens sapiens), triumphing over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) by deceit and violence.
His 1956 novel Pincher Martin records the thoughts of a drowning sailor. Free Fall (1959) explores the issue of free choice as a prisoner held in solitary confinement in a German POW camp during World War Two looks back over his life. The Spire (1964) follows the building (and near collapse) of a huge spire onto a medieval cathedral (generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral); the spire symbolizing both spiritual aspiration and worldly vanity. In his 1967 novel The Pyramid three separate stories in a shared setting (a small English town in the 1920s) are linked by a narrator, and The Scorpion God (1971) consists of three novellas, the first set in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band ('Clonk, Clonk'), the second in an ancient Egyptian court ('The Scorpion God') and the third in the court of a Roman emperor ('Envoy Extraordinary'). The last of these reworks his 1958 play The Brass Butterfly.

His later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), which is about a terrorist group, a paedophile teacher, and a mysterious angel-like figure who survives a fire in The Blitz, The Paper Men (1984) which is about the conflict between a writer and his biographer, and a sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, which includes the Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989), the first book of which (originally intended as a stand-alone novel) won the Booker Prize.

Gray, John

Gray was born into a working-class family, with a docker-turned-carpenter father, in South Shields, which was then in County Durham, England.

 

Gray's political thought is noted for its mobility across the political spectrum over the years. As a student, Gray was on the left and continued to vote Labour into the mid-1970s. By 1976 he had shifted towards a right-liberal New Right position, on the basis that the world was changing irrevocably through technological inventions, realigned financial markets and new economic power blocs and that the left failed to comprehend the magnitude and nature of this change.[7] In the 1990s Gray became an advocate for environmentalism and New Labour. Gray considers the conventional (left-wing/right-wing) political spectrum of conservatism and social democracy as no longer viable.
On liberalism, Gray identified the common strands in liberal thought as being individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The individualist element avers the ethical primacy of the human being against the pressures of social collectivism, the egalitarian element assigns the same moral worth and status to all individuals, the meliorist element asserts that successive generations can improve their sociopolitical arrangements, and the universalist element affirms the moral unity of the human species and marginalises local cultural differences.

 

 

More recently, he has criticised neoliberalism, the global free market and some of the central currents in Western thinking. It is perhaps for this critique of humanism that Gray is best known. Central to the doctrine of humanism, in Gray’s view, is the inherently utopian belief that humans are not limited by their biological natures and that advances in ethics and politics are cumulative and that they can alter or improve the human condition, in the same way that advances in science and technology have altered or improved living standards. Gray contends, in opposition to humanism, that history is not progressive, but cyclical.

 

Human nature, he argues, is an inherent obstacle to cumulative ethical or political progress. Seeming improvements, if there are any, can very easily be reversed: one example he has cited has been the use of torture by the United States against terrorist suspects. "What's interesting," Gray said, "is that torture not only came back, but was embraced by liberals, and defended by liberals. Now there are a lot of people, both liberal and conservative, who say, 'Well, it's a very complicated issue.' But it wasn't complicated until recently. They didn't say that five or ten years ago."

 

 

Furthermore, he argues that this belief in progress, is in fact derived from an erroneous Christian notion of humans as morally autonomous beings categorically different from other animals. This belief, and the corresponding idea that history makes sense, or is progressing towards something, is in Gray’s view merely a Christian prejudice.In Straw Dogs he argues that the idea that humans are self-determining agents does not pass the acid test of experience. Those Darwinist thinkers who believe humans can take charge of their own destiny to prevent environmental degradation are, in this view, not naturalists, but apostles of humanism.

 

 

He identifies the Enlightenment as the point at which the Christian doctrine of salvation was taken over by secular idealism and became a political religion with universal emancipation as its aim. Communism, fascism and "global democratic capitalism" are characterised by Gray as Enlightenment 'projects' which have led to needless suffering, in Gray's view, as a result of their ideological allegiance to this religion.

Gregory Roberts

Gregory David Roberts was born in 1952 in Melbourne, Australia. In interviews and on his website, Roberts talks little of his childhood years. During his student years he was a revolutionary involved in several anarchist and leftist causes. He lists these myriad causes on shantaram.com as follows: "Founder member, Anarchist People’s Liberation Army, 1969; Union activist, Builders Labourers Federation, 1972; Founder member, Australian Independence Movement, United Front Against Fascism, 1973; Student Leader, Melbourne University, occupation of university Council Chambers, 1974; Student Leader, Black Week Aboriginal Activism Movement, 1975."


Roberts' life took a turn for the worse in the mid-seventies, closely mirroring that of his protagonist in Shantaram. In 1976, Roberts' marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. Around this time, he began using heroin and took up armed robbery in order to support his habit. He committed these robberies using a fake plastic gun, and he earned a reputation in Australia as "the Gentleman Bandit" due to his polite demeanor during his crimes. In 1978, Roberts was captured and imprisoned. Two years later, Roberts escaped from the "escape proof" HM Prison Pentridge in Australia.


Roberts fled to Maharashtra, where he lived in a remote village for six months and learned the Hindu and Marathi languages. Like Lin, he established a free clinic in a Bombay slum. Roberts was recruited by the Bombay mafia and worked in illegal passports and currency. He went to Afghanistan on a gunrunning operation and was wounded.


After a short return to Bombay, Roberts moved to Germany, where he began to work as a singer in a rock band. He had previously worked as an entertainer in Bombay's Bollywood movie industry and appeared in several movies. In time, the European police learned of his true identity and arrested him. He escaped from custody twice more, in Italy and Switzerland, before returning to Bombay.


While smuggling drugs in Europe, Roberts was captured by Frankfurt authorities and imprisoned. He served two years in Europe before being shipped to Australia, where he served two years in solitary confinement, during which time he began work on Shantaram. Following several more years serving out his term, Roberts finished his novel, which became a major success. He has since sold the film rights to the book to Warner Brothers and plans on writing the screenplay himself.

Gustave Le Bon

7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931 was a French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics.He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.

He published a number of medical articles and books before joining the French Army after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Defeat in the war coupled with being a first-hand witness to the Paris Commune of 1871 strongly shaped Le Bon's worldview. He then travelled widely, touring Europe, Asia and North Africa. He analysed the peoples and the civilisations he encountered under the umbrella of the nascent field of anthropology, developing an essentialist view of humanity, and invented a portable cephalometer during his travels.

In the 1890s, he turned to psychology and sociology, in which fields he released his most successful works. Le Bon developed the view that crowds are not the sum of their individual parts, proposing that within crowds there forms a new psychological entity, the characteristics of which are determined by the "racial unconscious" of the crowd. At the same time he created his psychological and sociological theories, he performed experiments in physics and published popular books on the subject, anticipating the mass–energy equivalence and prophesising the Atomic Age. Le Bon maintained his eclectic interests up until his death in 1931.

Ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific establishment during his life due to his politically conservative and reactionary views, Le Bon was critical of democracy and socialism.

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Henry A. Murray

Henry A. Murray, born 1893, completed his undergraduate studies in history at Harvard in 1915.  More than a decade later, with graduate degrees in medicine and biology from Columbia University, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, and an expansive understanding of Carl Jung’s method of psychoanalysis, Murray was ideally suited to run the Harvard Psychological Clinic, which he did as its director from 1928 – 1937. In addition to practicing psychoanalysis at the clinic, Murray directed a research program investigating the constituent elements of personality (e.g. emotions, preferences, behavioral tendencies and relational characteristics). The results, Explorations in Personality, were published in 1938. Murray was also a founder of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society.

Murray’s syncretic approach to psychology reflected the diversity of his training and his expansive mind. ''Not since William James has there been an American psychologist so versatile, nor has anyone else written with equal verve and boldness” (Adelson, 1981). In 1938 Murray was recruited by the U.S. government to create a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler. He left Harvard temporarily to serve in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, working with American intelligence agencies to help assess the psychological fitness of their agents.

After the war, Murray returned to Harvard; he became a tenured lecturer in 1947, and Professor of Clinical Psychology in 1951. From 1948-1952, he worked with colleagues at the Psychological Clinic to apply and improve the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a projective test used to assess an individual's personality and self-understanding.  The TAT has been used in numerous studies in personality and motivation, and is still used widely today as a screening tool for employers.

From late 1959 to early 1962, Murray was responsible for unethical experiments in which he used twenty-two Harvard undergraduates as research subjects. ( Chase A , June 1, 2000,  "Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber". Among other goals, experiments sought to measure individuals' responses to extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray called "vehement, sweeping and personally abusive" attacks. Specifically-tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly. Among them was 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski, a mathematician who went on to become the Unabomber.

In 1960, Timothy Leary started research in psychedelic drugs at Harvard, which Murray is said to have supervised.Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of, or indemnified by, the US Government's research into mind control known as the MKUltra project.

Hoffer, Eric

Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1898 – May 21, 1983) was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work.



Hoffer was born in 1898 in The Bronx, New York, to Knut and Elsa (Goebel) Hoffer. His parents were immigrants from Alsace, then part of Imperial Germany. By age five, Hoffer could already read in both English and his parents' native German. When he was five, his mother fell down the stairs with him in her arms. He later recalled, "I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall. I lost my sight and, for a time, my memory."



He was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German immigrant named Martha. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. Fearing he might lose it again, he seized on the opportunity to read as much as he could. His recovery proved permanent, but Hoffer never abandoned his reading habit.



Hoffer was a young man when he also lost his father. The cabinetmaker's union paid for Knut Hoffer's funeral and gave Hoffer about $300 insurance money. He took a bus to Los Angeles and spent the next 10 years on Skid Row, reading, occasionally writing, and working at odd jobs. Skid Row contains one of the largest stable populations (between 3,000 and 6,000) of homeless people in the United States.mIn 1931, he considered suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but he could not bring himself to do it. He left Skid Row and became a migrant worker, following the harvests in California. He acquired a library card where he worked, dividing his time "between the books and the brothels." He also prospected for gold in the mountains. Snowed in for the winter, he read the Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne impressed Hoffer deeply, and Hoffer often made reference to him. He also developed a respect for America's underclass, which he said was "lumpy with talent."



He wrote a novel, Four Years in Young Hank's Life, and a novella, Chance and Mr. Kunze, both partly autobiographical. He also penned a long article based on his experiences in a federal work camp, "Tramps and Pioneers." It was never published, but a truncated version appeared in Harper's Magazine after he became well known.



Hoffer tried to enlist in the US Army at age 40 during World War II, but he was rejected because of a hernia. Instead, he worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco. At the same time, he began to write seriously. Hoffer left the docks in 1967 and retired from public life in 1970. In 1970, he endowed the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize for students, faculty, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley. Hoffer called himself an atheist but had sympathetic views of religion and described it as a positive force. He died at his home in San Francisco in 1983 at the age of 84.

Huxley, Aldous

Aldous Leonard Huxley ( 26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first-class honours in English literature.

The author of nearly fifty books, he was best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian future; for non-fiction works, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug; and a wide-ranging output of essays. Early in his career Huxley edited the magazine Oxford Poetry and published short stories and poetry. Mid career and later, he published travel writing, film stories, and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. In 1962, a year before his death, he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism,[8][9] in particular universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul, born June 19, 1947 in Ottawa, Canada, has had an increasing impact on political and economic thinking in many countries. Declared a "prophet" by Time magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader's list of the 100 most important thinkers and visionaries in the world. Saul is perhaps best known for his philosophical trilogy – “Voltaire’s Bastards”: “The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”, “The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense” and “The Unconscious Civilization”.
 
In 2005, with “The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World”, Saul warned that, like it or not, globalization was already collapsing and that if we don't act quickly, the world will be plunged into crisis, forcing emergency reactions. The book was re-released in 2009 with an updated epilogue that addresses the current risk of crisis.

Kaczynski, Ted

Theodore John Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American mathematician, anarchist and domestic terrorist. A mathematical prodigy, he abandoned a promising academic career in 1969, then between 1978 and 1995 killed 3 people, and injured 23 others, in a nationwide bombing campaign that targeted people involved with modern technology. In conjunction, he issued a wide-ranging social critique opposing industrialization and advancing a nature-centered form of anarchism.

Raised in Evergreen Park, Illinois, Kaczynski was a child prodigy and entered Harvard College at the age of 16. He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1962, then his master's and doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1964 and 1967, respectively. After receiving his doctorate at age 25, he became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley but resigned abruptly two years later. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Kaczynski was a research subject in an ethically questionable experiment conducted by psychology professor Henry Murray, which some analysts have claimed influenced Kaczynski's later actions.

In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. In 1978, after witnessing the destruction of the wildland surrounding his cabin, he concluded that living in nature was untenable and began his bombing campaign. In 1995, Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.

Kaczynski was the target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) longest and costliest investigation.[ Before his identity was known, the FBI used the title "UNABOM" (UNiversity & Airline BOMber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber. The FBI (as well as Attorney General Janet Reno) pushed for the publication of Kaczynski's manifesto, which led to his sister-in-law, and then his brother, recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipping off the FBI. After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, as Kaczynski did not believe he was insane. In 1998 a plea bargain was reached, under which Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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Leadbeater,Charles Webster

Charles Webster Leadbeater (16 February 1854 – 1 March 1934) was a member of the Theosophical Society, author on occult subjects and co-initiator with J. I. Wedgwood of the Liberal Catholic Church.

Originally a priest of the Church of England, his interest in spiritualism caused him to end his affiliation with Anglicanism in favour of the Theosophical Society, where he became an associate of Annie Besant. He became a high-ranking officer of the society and went on to write over 69 books and pamphlets as well as maintain regular speaking engagements. His efforts on behalf of the society assured his status as one of its leading members until his death in 1934.

Leadbeater was the first to connect Platos narratives about Atlantis to Sunda Continent, theme later continued by late Prof. Alyisio Santos, Brazil.

Meerloo, Joost

Joost Abraham Maurits Meerloo (March 14, 1903 – November 17, 1976) was a Dutch/American Doctor of Medicine and psychoanalyst. Meerloo specialized in the area of thought control techniques used by totalitarian and other regimes. He was the author of many books, including Rape of the Mind (a classic work on brainwashing), Conversation and Communication, and Hidden Communion.

Orwell, George

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.


Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".


Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian – descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices – has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, memory hole, newspeak, doublethink, proles, unperson, and thoughtcrime.

Paasilinna, Arto

20 April 1942 – 15 October 2018. The author was born in Kittilä, Lapland, in the northern part of Finland, 150km north of the Arctic Circle, one of eight children of a policeman. He was a Finnish writer, being a former journalist turned one of Finland's most successful novelists. Translated into 27 languages,over seven million copies of his books have been sold worldwide, and he has been claimed as "instrumental in generating the current level of interest in books from Finland".

Paasilinna is mostly known for his 1975 novel The Year of the Hare (Jäniksen vuosi), a bestseller in France and Finland and adapted twice into feature films: a 1977 Finnish film directed by Risto Jarva called The Year of the Hare, and a 2006 French film directed by Marc Rivière called Le Lièvre de Vatanen.

Peterson, Jordan Bernt

Born 1962 in Fairview, Alberta, Canada, JB Peterson is a  clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.
When he was 13, he was introduced to the writings of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ayn Rand

https://jordanbpeterson.com/

Pink, Daniel

Daniel Pink is a modern writer on business & management, with a strong focus on the changing nature of work and the workplace

Tegmark, Max

Max Erik Tegmark born 5 May 1967 is a Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a supporter of the effective altruism movement, and has received donations from Elon Musk to investigate existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.

Tegmark was born in Sweden, the son of Karin Tegmark and American-born professor of mathematics Harold S. Shapiro. Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology. (He had earned a B.A. in Economics the previous year at the Stockholm School of Economics.) His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1992, and Ph.D. in 1994.

 

His research has focused on cosmology, combining theoretical work with new measurements to place constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters, often in collaboration with experimentalists. He has over 200 publications, of which nine have been cited over 500 times. He has developed data analysis tools based on information theory and applied them to cosmic microwave background experiments.