John Brockman (literary agent)

John Brockman (born February 16, 1941) is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.

Early life
Brockman was born to immigrants of Polish-Jewish descent in a poor Irish Catholic enclave of Boston, Massachusetts. Expanding on C.P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture" consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

Career
He led a scientific salon for 20 years, asking an annual question to a host of renowned scientists and publishing their answers in book form, which he decided to symbolically close down in 2018.

He is an editor of Edge.org.

Association with Jeffrey Epstein
In an interview with Prince Andrew dated November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking.

Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking.

Brockman's famous literary dinners—held during the TED Conference—were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings. This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires.

Quotes

 * "Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time."
 * "Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody."