Michael Rogers is a dynamic futurist speaker who delivers an entertaining and common-sense vision of change for business and individuals, Michael blends technology, economics, demographics, culture, and human nature.
Michael began his career as a writer for Rolling Stone and went on to co-found Outside magazine. He then launched Newsweek’s technology column, winning a National Headliner Award for coverage of the Chernobyl meltdown. For ten years he was vice president of The Washington Post Company’s new media division, guiding both the newspaper and its sister publication Newsweek into the new century, and served as editor and general manager of Newsweek.com where he won the Distinguished Online Service award from the National Press Club for coverage of 9/11.
His work in interactive media ranges from early ground-breaking projects for LucasFilm and Apple to dozens of Internet ventures. He has been named to the Magazine Industry Digital Hall of Fame and has also received the World Technology Network Award for Lifetime Achievement in Media and Journalism.
Rogers recently completed two years as futurist-in-residence for The New York Times and is a columnist for NBC.com. He is also a best-selling novelist whose fiction explores the human impact of technology. He lives in New York City where he works on book and television projects. His most recent book is Email from the Future: Notes from 2084.
Emi Nietfeld wants her audiences to question the “cult of grit” and the notion of the American Dream. In Acceptance, Nietfeld chronicles her early struggle with her mother’s pathological hoarding, her own time spent in mental health facilities, and her experience with the foster care system. As a teenager, she believed attending an elite university was her ticket out of misery. So, even as she wrestled with housing insecurity, she wrote her college applications, packaging her life story into the one of a “perfect overcomer,” showing her strength and post-traumatic growth. Though she would go on to graduate from Harvard and become a software engineer at Google, Nietfeld discovered the cost of society’s fixation with resilience.
Nietfeld’s path from her tumultuous childhood marked by abuse and neglect to a highly coveted job in Silicon Valley would make for a perfect “phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes” story. However, Nietfeld believes that chance and privilege factor into her success as much as her drive and ambition. Now, she urges her audiences to reassess their ideas about resilience, meritocracy, and the American Dream.
Among her other accolades, Emi Nietfeld won the Scholastic Gold Medal Portfolio in Writing and was a YoungArts Finalist as a teenager. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Information, The Rumpus, Vice, Longreads, and other publications. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her work is noted in The Best American Essays of 2021.