Extremes

Darwin College Lectures

by Duncan Needham (Editor), Julius Weitzdorfer (Editor), Emily Shuckburgh (Contributor)

Humanity is confronted by and attracted to extremes. Extreme events shape our thinking, feeling, and actions; they echo in our politics, media, literature, and science. We often associate extremes with crises, disasters, and risks to be averted, yet extremes also have the potential to lead us towards new horizons. Featuring essays by leading intellectuals and public figures arising from the 2017 Darwin College Lectures, this volume explores 'extreme' events, from the election of President Trump, the rise of populism, and the Brexit referendum, to the 2008 financial crisis, the Syrian war, and climate change. It also celebrates 'extreme' achievements in the realms of health, exploration, and scientific discovery. A fascinating, engaging, and timely collection of essays by renowned scholars, journalists, and intellectuals, this volume challenges our understanding of what is normal and what is truly extreme, and sheds light on some of the issues facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

186 pages, Paperback

Published April 25, 2019

About the author

Duncan Needham is Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge and Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, Cambridge where he works on contemporary UK economic history. Before returning to academia, he worked as a credit trader at JP Morgan and then as a structured credit portfolio manager at Cairn Capital.

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, oddly poppy proceedings from an academic conference. A BBC war correspondent and a cross-ocean rower, and Nassim Taleb. Some of them are extremely mathsy, some of them cite Stephen Covey and Carl Jung as authorities on the human condition.

The Taleb talk is a peach, the first big idea I've seen from him in years, "the tableau of fat tails": all distributions can be split qualitatively by their potential for extremes using a couple of parameters (fig 4). This unifies . (He attributes some of it to a risk academic called Embrechts, idk.)

An expensive diverse magazine, then.