This is the first of a series of interviews with extraordinary people who are using their skills and training as artists and humanists to improve their communities, challenge assumptions, and advance our understanding of the human condition. In this piece, we spoke with world-renowned, best-selling author Daniel H. Pink about the ways his scholarship in the humanities shaped his career. He offered advice to young humanists and asserted the socio-cultural importance of the humanities.

Daniel Pink is the author of five books, including three long-running New York Times bestsellers, A Whole New Mind, Drive, and To Sell is Human. He was host and co-executive producer of Crowd Control, a television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel. He has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired as well as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. Daniel Pink’s TED Talk on the science of motivation is one of the 10 most-watched TED Talks of all time.

In 2013, the University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities–in collaboration with 4Humanities–created an award-winning The Humanities Matter! infographic with statistics and arguments for the humanities in high-impact visual form. Instead of worn out sayings and factually ungrounded criticisms, The Humanities Matter! draws on published statistics and a crowdsourced poll to give a shout out to the humanities in sections on “What the Humanities Do,” “But the Evidence Shows,” and “Culture is Important.”

…and then our pile of professionally printed banners ran out.

So we created a printable, 8.5×11 version of the banner due to popular request.

Scott L. Newstok, in his recent article “How to Think Like Shakespeare” published in The Chronicle this week, addresses the class of 2020. The class of 2020, after all, is the first to graduate from high school and earn a degree that largely depends on testing without other alternatives.