 Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who writes about human behavior and public policy for TIME Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly. Her 2008 book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why, was published in 15 countries and described by NPR as “The thinking person’s manual for getting out alive.” Amanda is currently traveling around the world visiting classrooms for her next book, The Smartest Kids in the World , which will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2013. To discuss her work, Amanda has appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX News and NPR and given talks at the Pentagon, the U.S. Senate, the State Department and Fortune 500 companies. She is a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. TOPICS How did other countries manage to make their public schools fairer, cheaper and smarter than ours--while spending dramatically less than we do? Why do only 6% of Colorado teenagers perform at high levels in math, compared to 21% of Finnish students? To find out, Amanda spent a year following three American high school students temporarily embedded in schools in Finland, Poland and South Korea. Through the stories of these kids--and side-by-side comparisons with their schools back home in the States--Amanda helps unravel a mystery at the center of our global competitiveness. Her reporting led to the book, The Smart Kids Club, due out in 2013, as well as magazine articles in TIME, the Atlantic and Slate. In the end, Amanda returned home more optimistic than she left--convinced that the U.S. can in fact outperform the rest of the world, if we can sustain the political and public will. Amanda Ripley draws on years of disaster reporting to explain the three phases most people go through in life-or-death experiences—and how we can learn to do better. She tells detailed stories of specific survivors from recent news-making calamities and combines their wisdom with the latest science into how the brain functions under extreme stress. Presentation features: Case studies from the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11, the 2004 tsunami and the 2009 crash of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Disasters happen to groups of people: to offices, neighborhoods and families. The health of the group before a disaster directly shapes its ability to survive and recover afterwards. On 9/11, the culture and management style of each company in the World Trade Center dramatically influenced the behavior of the employees in those offices. Presentation Features: The case study of Morgan Stanley—and the lessons learned for how to build a survival culture in your company. |
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Amanda Ripley
TAGS: College and Universities, Education
