Jonathan Safran Foer

Author, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals, Here I Am, and most recently, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah.

Everything Is Illuminated won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Safran Foer teaches creative writing at New York University.

Live Event Appearances

Past event

Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are the Weather

Is clinging to habits and cravings destroying our future? An outspoken critic of factory farming and animal-centric diets, Jonathan Safran Foer writes that stopping climate change begins with a close look at what we eat — and don’t eat — at home for breakfast. At the office, industry leaders like Google are taking steps toward veggie-forward diets by reducing meat, rather than cutting it out entirely.

Podcast Guest Appearances

Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are the Weather

Sep 24 2019 - 12:00pm

Eating a climate friendly diet is one of the most powerful things a person can do to cut their personal carbon footprint. But virtuous individual action alone is not going to get carbon pollution down to safe levels. What’s required is changing social norms and systems at scale, which means dramatically rethinking some of our most basic collective behaviors.

Rewind: Jonathan Safran Foer and David Wallace-Wells

In this week’s episode we revisit conversations with two writers who confronted the climate challenge with new books in 2019.

In his most recent book "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming," David Wallace-Wells explores how climate change will impact not just the planet, but human lives – including how a five degree increase in temperatures would make parts of the planet unsurvivable.