Presenter Spotlight: Walter Isaacson at CHF
On March 11th at 7pm, acclaimed biographer Walter Isaacson visits CHF’s virtual stage to discuss the life and career of Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize-winning creator of the gene editing technology CRISPR.
Ahead of Isaacson’s program, we’re looking at his earlier talks about creative people who work at the intersection of the arts and sciences.
Check out the videos below and reserve your spot for Iaacson’s upcoming program now!
What matters is being creative, thinking out of the box. It’s Chicago types: people who care about industry, engineering, science, arts, and humanities. —Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson on Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Job Applications, Fig Leaves, and Lukewarm Soup
Da Vinci was almost destined for a career as a notary. He wrote an eleven paragraph job application to work for the Duke of Milan (genius he was, but brief he was not). The Vitruvian Man, which Isaacson calls the greatest drawing ever made (move over Mona Lisa), is a self portrait. Da Vinci did not have a problem with nudity, but may have had a problem with Michelangelo (these two things are related and a fig leaf is involved). The last sentence in Da Vinci’s 17,000 notebook pages is surprisingly not about his life’s ambition to square the circle, but the fact that his soup was getting cold (to quote Annie Dillard, we have to find “a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us”).
Walter Isaacson on the Innovators: A Digital Revolution in Secret Sauce, Shower Musings, and Serendipity
Isaacson posits that the secret sauce of the digital revolution is (drumroll please) the intersection of the humanities with business and technology. Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter) and Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game) disagreed about whether or not machines have the capacity for thought and creativity. Hypothesis proven: the best ideas are in fact shower musings, which is where Steve Crocker thought up the Internet protocol “Request for Comment.” According to Steve Jobs and Isaacson, “the real secret of creativity is that it happens in the flesh” because it fosters serendipity (*pandemic addendum: we think serendipity is possible over Zoom).
Join Isaacson in conversation with WBEZ’s Steve Edwards at CHF on March 11th at 7pm.
Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.
[Image credit: The banner image across the top of the media page is a photograph of Walter Isaacson onstage at one of his CHF events. In the image Isaacson, a white man in profile, is mid-speech and smiling. He is wearing a collared shirt and suit jacket. Behind Isaacson and out-of-focus is a blue and green painting projected on the stage’s screen. Image credit: Ben Gonzales]
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