22 Jan A World On Fire
with Masha Gessen + Mark Whitaker
From Europe to the Middle East, the bloodiest wars in a generation have inflamed world opinion—and threaten to spiral into regional conflicts. On the home front, democracies around the globe are under siege by would-be dictators who thrive on misinformation, target hard-won individual rights and seek to rewrite history. For decades, Masha Gessen, the National Book Award-winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker, has been reporting on and analyzing these ominous trends. In conversation with journalist and author Mark Whitaker, Masha will help us to understand how we got to this troubling place—and how to see our way forward.
Masha Gessen is the author of eleven books, including most recently Surviving Autocracy, the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A staff writer at The New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, Gessen teaches at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and lives in New York City.
Mark Whitaker is a former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, Washington bureau chief for NBC News, and editor of Newsweek, where he rose to become the first African American leader of a national newsweekly. He is now an author and Emmy Award-winning contributing correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Whitaker’s books include My Long Trip Home, his critically acclaimed memoir; Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance, about the historic legacy of Black Pittsburgh; and Saying It Loud: 1966-The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.
Get a Full Festival pass and you’ll get to take in the Story Slam on Thursday night. Then sail into the weekend: attending all the wonderful panels, both Little Bites and Big Libations Cocktail Parties, and both evening events. And share the bounty from our always-stuffed goody bag.