Jonathan Margolis

Jonathan Margolis has established a national and international reputation for writing (and more recently, speaking) in an informed and extremely witty, accessible style on a variety of topics of interest to business audiences, from technology to modern cultural issues.As a journalist, he writes both for popular and broadsheet newspapers. He appears principally in The Independent, the Financial Times "How To Spend It" magazine, the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday and is a frequent contributor to TIME magazine, the Reader's Digest and Red magazine. He has won a clutch of journalism awards in Britain and was nominated for two US journalism awards for his nine-page TIME cover story on reconstructive surgery by British doctors which rebuilt the face of a young Kosovo Albanian man after it was destroyed by a Serb militiaman's point blank shot. Jonathan is an accomplished and polished TV and radio guest, appearing frequently on Radio 4 and 5, RTE, BBC TV, Channel 4 and Sky TV. He wrote and produced a 50-minute 1998 Channel 4 / National Geographic documentary on the race between amateur rocket scientists in the US, UK and Australia to get the first home-made spacecraft into orbit. He has given talks to university societies at both Oxford and Cambridge, at the think tank Demos, where he spoke at London Calling, a symposium sponsored by Vodafone and Orange on how mobile technologies will transform our capital city. His continually updated and often very funny talk, Never Predict anything Especially The Future (the title is taken from a famous aphorism by Samuel Goldwyn) has for three years been stimulating, provoking and entertaining audiences at universities, at company dinners and conventions, at Rotary and similar clubs and at the think tank Demos. In it, Jonathan compares the visions of the future we all had in past decades (flying cars, monorails, robots making the tea, plastic hose-down furniture and so on) with the reality of how futures work out in the real world. He looks back at some of the hilariously wrong predictions in the past of how we would be living today and also assesses how some uncannily accurate futurologists actually got things (almost) right Jonathan's keynote talk at our 2005 Distributor Convention was the highlight of our three days in Rome. He is knowledgeable, original, smart, accessible and very funny. Our guys were still discussing the issues he raised at breakfast the next morning. Tom DeVesto, Chairman, Tivoli Audio