Talk It Up

UCSB A&L launches the season debut of the “L” part of their name with a lecture by Salman Khan, the much-valued visionary behind educational nonprofit Khan Academy, which seeks to remove the barriers to education that leave over 600 million children lacking basic math and reading skills. His free curriculum, available to all at any time, has made a massive impact, with its videos offering practice exercises, instructional lessons, and a personalized dashboard to help students learn at their own pace. Khan’s platform has reached over a billion views. Now he is using the power of AI to make education even more accessible with the introduction of the revolutionary Khanmigo, an AI-powered personal tutor that The Washington Post calls “the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good.” Khan’s talk, titled after his new book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), is slated for October 5 at the Arlington Theatre. 

The following day, Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian author who has placed five books on the New York Times bestseller list – The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath – shows up across the street at the Granada for a book tour that sees his return to the topic of his first big influential book from a quarter-century ago. Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering revisits the subject of social epidemics, taking a stab at explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena, including the biggest epidemics of our day in COVID and the opioid crisis. Gladwell’s most personal book yet employs his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science to serve as a guide to making sense of the contagions of the modern world. Details and tickets at www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu