At some point you might like to write a book that would attract interest from journalists and the broader public. The going models—Diamond, Pinker, Harari, Henrich, et al.—are less than appealing, and yet, you think, there must be a way to write for a broad audience without doing injustice to the things you’re writing about, let alone adopting the meliorist register of venture capitalism. In this workshop we’ll explore strategies for speaking to multiple audiences at once—specialists like yourself and others who might simply benefit from what you have to say, or at least your way of saying it. The discussion will range from writing style at the level of sentence and paragraph up to topic selection, working with agents and trade imprints, marketing and promotion. Berson will share stories from his own efforts to write books with what publishers refer to as "crossover appeal."

Josh Berson has held appointments at two Max Planck Institutes—Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the History of Science—and the Berggruen Institute, among other places. He is the author of The Human Scaffold, The Meat Question, and Computable Bodies and consults on the design of food systems, mobility systems, and built space.