Bina Venkataraman is a columnist at The Washington Post covering the future. Before joining the Post, she served as the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, overseeing the news organization s opinion coverage and editorial board. Prior to that, she was senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House. She has also taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT and at Harvard. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in a small town in Ohio and has since lived on three continents.

A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future--our own, our families', and our society's.

A READABLE BOOK OF BIG IDEAS: Like Nudge and When, this is a big-idea book that takes an abstract idea - making big decisions for the future-and gives it real-world value by delving into the surprising ways we can make more effective decisions that affect our future.AN ENGAGING, DYNAMIC VOICE: Bina Venkataraman brings a wealth of experience to this kind of book and audience. As an instructor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at MIT, she has a deep knowledge about how we think (or don't think) about the future and what the opportunities and consequences are of what we do. She brings a fresh perspective to her ideas and the examples, and insights she shares in the book are lively and unexpected.A WELL-CONNECTED AUTHOR: Venkataraman is well known and well regarded in the areas of politics, technology, science, and academia, and she already has garnered terrific pre-pub blurbs from Adam Grant and Arianna Huffington, with more to come.AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT ISSUE: Every day in government, business, education, and beyond, the debates about what our individual and collective futures should be are becoming more heated and more important. This book is a lucid, welcome, and reasoned approach to understanding the future in ways that we had lost or hadn't thought of before.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR

How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller s eye to this question. . . .  She is also deeply informed about the relevant science. The New York Times Book Review

A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families , and our society s.  

Instant gratification is the norm today in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for the long run. Whether it comes to our finances, our health, our communities, or our planet, it s easy to avoid thinking ahead.

The consequences of this immediacy are stark: Deadly outbreaks spread because leaders failed to act on early warning signs. Companies that fail to invest stagnate and fall behind. Hurricanes and wildfires turn deadly for communities that could have taken more precaution. Today more than ever, all of us need to know how we can make better long-term decisions in our lives, businesses, and society.

Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don t think ahead and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. With examples from ancient Pompeii to modern-day Fukushima, she dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives and the ones we must fight for as a society. The result is a book brimming with the ideas and insights all of us need in order to forge a better future.