The Optimist’s Telescope

Journalist and professor Bina Venkataraman argues that “foresight” – the ability to anticipate future possibilities and to act to bring about the most desirable of them – springs from vivid, positive imagination. She warns that today’s destructive devotion to short-term calculations and impulses hamstrings individuals, businesses, communities, institutions and governments. Using examples from medicine, corporations, politics, and psychological and social research, Venkataraman outlines strategies to help people and societies keep a long-term picture in mind.

The author offers a fascinating combination of the practical and the lyrical to inspire you to reject the ever-seductive tendency to think only in the short term. Her credentials for the task are impeccable. Articulate and profound, Venkataraman teaches at MIT and is an editorial page editor at The Boston Globe. A former director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, she served as senior adviser for climate change during President Barrack Obama’s administration. She writes with professional ease and presents complex ideas with remarkable clarity.