Leonard Shlain is a surgeon, I think of him as a philosopher. He came to my house yesterday to speak, a kind of home-conference, and I don’t completely know how to describe it. In about 45 minutes, he changed every single person (probably about 50something people) in the room’s look at the world.

One of his books is called “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess-The Conflict Between Word and Image,” I have not read it, but know a bit about it due to the lecture. The brilliant lecture had to do with “what happened to the goddess? Women used to be the ones worshiped…what happened?” He also explored the affects of literacy in history. He made us all gape at the fact that the three (considered) greatest minds of all time—Plato, Aristotle, Socratese, were all very sexist, and many opted against writing down their thoughts. I don’t think I can describe what happened within the confines of that one room yesterday, all I know is that you really have to either look up/read his books, look up dvds of his lectures, I don’t know….anything! Bjork claims that his latest book, “Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution,” was the inspiration for her new album, Volta; I can’t explain how brilliant the experience was, and as he is a surgeon, it provided a cool medical twist to it. I just highly highly recommend that you find out more about him! He’s amazing!