Kentucky Author Forum

Plagues, Wars, and Famines: Elaine Pagels Discusses Revelations

Brad Yost — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000

"The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It's the most controversial. It doesn't have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular." So says scholar Elaine Pagels, who was in Louisville recently as featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum.

Learning From Past Societies to Improve the Future: Jared Diamond

Brad Yost — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:05:26 +0000

Jared Diamond spoke in Louisville on January 9, 2013 as featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum, discussing in detail his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies. Diamond is an author, physiologist, evolutionary biologist and bio-geographer, as well as a medical researcher and professor of geography at UCLA.

Predicting the Future of Artificial Intelligence: Ray Kurzweil

Brad Yost — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:48:44 +0000

Ray Kurzweil, arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist, is one of the leading inventors of our time and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Among his inventions, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition device, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Steven Pinker: World is Actually Less Violent Today; Why?

Brad Yost — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:21:11 +0000

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was the guest at the Kentucky Author Forum on Oct. 2, 2012, interviewed by NPR's Neal Conan. Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Taliban: Weighing the Options With Ahmed Rashid

Brad Yost — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:40:17 +0000

The final Kentucky Author Forum of the 2011-12 season took place on May 15, 2012 and featured journalist Ahmed Rashid, an authority on the Taliban, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Rashid is author of Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan. A leading journalist in Pakistan, Rashid draws on his keen knowledge of the region to explain what the future there may hold.