CULTURE The man who runs the Since the mid-1960s, John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. Here, John Naughton introduces a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, whose website, Edge, is a salon for the world's finest minds. On the facing page they discuss Marshall McLuhan, elitism and the future of the internet T o say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it's true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high- profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would he to say that he is a "cultural impresario" or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an "intellectual enzyme". The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow's "Two Cultures" - the parallel universes of the ars and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures. one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. But he's also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call. Cynics might say that this has something to do with the fact that Brockman has a reputation as an agent who can extract massive advances from publishers. And he is indeed a hustler who spotted early on that there was a massive audience for writing about science, but there's more to it than that Brockman is genuinely passionate about big ideas. He is fascinated, he told Wired magazine, "by people who can take the materials of the culture in the arts, literature and science and put them together in their own way. We live in a mass-produced culture where many people. even many established cultural arbiters. limit themselves to secondhand ideas. Show me p