Bina Venkataraman, author portrait

Bina Venkataraman

Bina Venkataraman is a columnist at The Washington Post covering the future. Before joining the Post, she served as the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, overseeing the news organization’s opinion coverage and editorial board. Prior to that, she was senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House. She has also taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT and at Harvard. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in a small town in Ohio and has since lived on three continents.
The Optimist's Telescope

Books

The Optimist's Telescope

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 284 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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