Events

Past Event

The Story Collider: Communication

January 9, 2018
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM
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Caveat, 21 A Clinton St., New York, NY

Whether we wear a lab coat or haven’t seen a test tube since grade school, science is shaping all of our lives. And that means we all have science stories to tell. Every year, we host dozens of live shows all over the country, featuring all kinds of storytellers – researchers, doctors, and engineers of course, but also patients, poets, comedians, cops, and more. Some of our stories are heartbreaking, others are hilarious, but they’re all true and all very personal. Welcome to The Story Collider!  This evening’s storytellers explore the meaning and use of communication through a prism of personal, professional and scientific experience.

LINEUP:

  • Anna Freeman
  • Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik
  • Ted Olds
  • Laura Picardo
  • Judith Stone
  • Hosted by Erin Barker and Paula Croxson.

Doors are at 7:30pm, show 8:00pm; this is a 21+ event. Tickets are purchased on the Caveat website for $12.

Anna Freeman is a nurse and quality improvement specialist at Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders. She has worked in humanitarian response in ten countries over the past ten years, focusing on refugee health, infectious disease, and quality of care. Anna is an excellent dancer, an enthusiastic fumbler in any foreign language, and one of the world’s worst surfers.

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are award-winning neuroscientists and professors at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center. They are best known for their studies on perception, illusions, and attentional misdirection in stage magic. They produce the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, now in its 13th edition, and are the authors of the international bestseller Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions. Their new book, Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles.

Ted Olds has a Mechanical Engineering degree, and worked as a Patent Examiner at the US Patent & Trademark Ofiice. For the last thirty years he has worked as a patent attorney in a variety of high tech, and low tech areas. He has published short stories in a few small Journals. He mid-life crisis is storytelling. He has performed at a Risk event, and several Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers events. As a Moth “road tripper” he’s told stories in many many cities, and has won 14 Moth Story Slams and in 8 different cities.

Laura Picardo is an associate producer with NBC Learn, the education arm of NBC News. She has produced stories on a wide variety of topics including space weather, nanotechnology’s role in the fight against cancer, how the brain perceives information, and the technological advancements of World War II aircraft. She was named a 2017 Ocean Science Journalism Fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Laura is also an accomplished open water marathon swimmer, which means she spends a lot of time in the Atlantic Ocean and Hudson River. In August 2016, she swam 16 miles from the southern tip of New York City to Sandy Hook, NJ. She followed up that swim in June 2017, with a 28.5 mile circumnavigation of Manhattan.

Judith Stone is the author of Light Elements: Essays on Science from Gravity to Levity, a collection of her award-winning columns from Discover magazine. Her book When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race was named one of the Washington Post’s annual top 100 books. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Mysteries of Life and the Universe: New Essays from America’s Finest Writers on Science and Life’s a Stitch: The Best of Contemporary Women’s Humor, as well as in The New York Times Magazine; Smithsonian; O, The Oprah Magazine and many other publications. She was on the founding board of The Moth, and is currently an instructor in The Moth’s community outreach program. During the Late Cretaceous Epoch, she was a member of The Second City touring company.

This event is sponsored by the Story Collider.