Steven Pinker is pacing the green room. In a few minutes, he'll be seated across from Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, but for now he is collecting his thoughts and preserving his voice (a mild case of laryngitis is hampering his normal crisp delivery). On the wall are two TVs: one features panelists discussing the latest tweet from the president of the United States, while the other replays surveillance video of a thief climbing through a Burger King drive-through window. Pinker often skewers the news media for "keeping the country's anxiety at a boil" and "focusing on trivial gaffes and scandals" — a bias toward negativity and nonsense that, he argues, distorts the national conversation. The chatter from the dual screens seems to bolster his point.
And yet here he is, at CNN studios in New York. Pinker turns down interviews if he's asked to be a mere talking egghead, opining on that day's outrage. But if you wish to grill him about his thesis that humanity is better off now than ever before, Pinker is willing to oblige. Over the last year, since the publication of his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Pinker has made the rounds on PBS, NPR, and the BBC, popped up on Al Jazeera English and HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. He's been interviewed by all the usual outlets, like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, along with some less-usual ones, like Playboy and the Santa Barbara Independent. He hesitated before agreeing to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, hosted by the comedian and mixed-martial-arts commentator, but that booking introduced him to an audience beyond the usual ideas-conference crowd. (Says Pinker: "The guy at the airport who puts the wand in your crotch recognized me from the Rogan show.") Richard Dawkins recently crowned Pinker "our leading public intellectual," and a colleague declared him "the most-covered man in social science."
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