James Geary is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He has also taught at Bennington College, Harvard Extension School, and Tufts University and has been an Ida Beam Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa. He is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he edited Nieman Reports. Before joining the Nieman Foundation, he worked as a journalist in Europe for more than 20 years, including a decade with Time, where he was editor of the European edition of the magazine. Geary is the author of Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses. He has performed, given talks and conducted writing workshops at, among other venues, TED, Live from the New York Public Library, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Hay-on-Wye Festival, the Genoa Science Festival, the Chautauqua Institution and the Seoul Digital Forum.