Pulitzer Prize-winning humor writer DAVE BARRY talks about his latest book, Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland, in which he explains why Florida is the way it is, and why it probably should not be expelled from the union. He also discusses getting old, which he is in the process of doing, as well as other pertinent topics, assuming he can remember what they are.

Read more about Dave Barry here.

It’s 1985. Robert Merkin, the resident genius of the upstart investment firm Sacker Lowell has just landed on the cover
of TIME magazine. Hailed as “America’s Alchemist,” his proclamation that “debt is an asset” has propelled him to dizzying heights. Zealously promoting his belief in the near- sacred infallibility of markets, he is trying to reshape the world. What Merkin sets in motion is nothing less than a financial civil war, pitting magnates against workers, lawyers against journalists, and ultimately, pitting everyone against themselves. AYAD AKHTAR’s play, which opened on Broadway in fall 2017, takes us back to the hotbed of the ‘80s and offers us an origin story for the world and a tale of how, while most of us weren’t watching, money became the only thing of real value. He takes us behind the scenes not only of an era, but of his creative process as well.

To open the 2017 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, we turned to Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. SCOTT BERG, the editor of a new Library of America anthology of writings by American observers and participants in World War I. Timed to coincide with the centenary of America’s entry into that war, the collection features the work and voices of 88 men and women, from nurses and soldiers to such well-known authors as Edith Wharton, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Searing, poignant, and evocative, the pieces taken together highlight many of the issues we are wrestling with today. When should America intervene in conflicts around the world? How does racial injustice here in the U.S. compromise our moral leadership? With music and readings from the anthology, Berg brings that pivotal time—and those themes—to vivid life.

Read more about A. Scott Berg here.

No playwright has challenged our perceptions of Muslims in America as boldly, and with such dramatic vigor, as has AYAD AKHTAR, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced, the most produced play of the 2015-2016 season. Join Akhtar for an exciting evening of theater as characters from three of his recent plays grapple with themselves and with each other, and with the very idea of character. In this hour, Akhtar stages monologues from his plays Disgraced and The Invisible Hand, followed by a scene from The Who & The What, all framed by the playwright’s narration and reflections on his craft and themes. He is joined by two actors steeped in his work, RAJESH BOSE and NADINE MALOUF.

At a time when the value of internationalism, along with its ethic of the common good, has been forcefully thrown into question, National Book Award-winning author ANDREW SOLOMON believes that learning about cultures other than our own is more essential than ever as a “necessary remedy to our perilously frightening times.” For the past twenty-five years, Solomon has been traveling to far-off places, many of them in the midst of seismic political, cultural and spiritual shifts. The literary result, as novelist Salman Rushdie has said, is much more than travel writing; it is “a portrait of our world.” Travels to countries like Myanmar, Afghanistan and South Africa have opened Solomon’s eyes and burnished his compassion and his courage. Join him as he takes us far and away, introducing us to the friends he has made along the way and reminding us that we are citizens not just of nations, but of the world.

Read more about Andrew Solomon here.

The Spanish Civil War continues to exert both a tragic and romantic pull on our imaginations. It is the conflict at the heart of Ernest Hemingway’s novel for Whom the Bell tolls, and is the subject of a book by journalist and historian ADAM HOCHSCHILD. The war, which lasted from 1936-1939, drew some 3,000 American volunteers who joined the fight against the fascist forces led by the ultimately victorious Francisco Franco. Hochschild focuses on a dozen of those Americans, weaving their stories together in a compelling, almost novelistic narrative. He takes us to Spain and back to those heady, heartbreaking days.

How do historians do their work? How do they find their stories, their source material? Journalist and historian ADAM HOCHSCHILD, award-winning author of eight books, including Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, talks about the process of writing history. Where does he start? How does he do his research? How does he find his way in, identify the characters to focus on, and keep their stories vivid and alive, and still truthful? Learn about the historian’s craft.

If you loved The Crown, you will want to hear author SALLY BEDELL SMITH share the real stories of the British royal family in all its quirks and complexities. Author of the book, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of An Improbable Life, and of an earlier volume on his mother, Elizabeth the Queen, Smith’s work aims to humanize the often misperceived duo. She tells us about the strange, privileged lives of the Queen and the Prince, about the ties that bind them, but also about their striking differences.

Remember when Amazon was a newcomer on the business and cultural landscape and its main business was selling books? Remember when the Kindle seemed like a newfangled gizmo that nobody needed or wanted? In his award-winning book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, author BRAD STONE gave readers the first in-depth, fly-on- the-wall account of life at Amazon. Listen into his discussion of Amazon’s influence on publishing companies and readers alike, and what he makes of Bezos’ business moves, including his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post.

Read more about Brad Stone here.

It is probably fair to say that the United States of America has never seemed less united, certainly in recent memory. How did it become this way? What are the political, economic, racial and psychological factors at the heart of the divide? We asked two of our most respected cultural commentators, sociology professor ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD and New York Times columnist DAVID BROOKS, to explore these questions in a wide-ranging conversation. Hochschild is the author of the much-discussed book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, in which she profiles voters in deepest Louisiana, a stronghold of the conservative right. Like Hochschild, Brooks is an investigator of the human heart and of what motivates all Americans, whatever their political affiliations, at the deepest level.

This session is one of our perennial favorites. This 2017 panel offered us a chance to introduce you to a group of new young writers you might not have been familiar with–yet. In a literary celebration filled with recognizable and established authors, our focus here is to highlight those at an earlier stage of their creative lives. So listen to DREW CALVERT, MAYA HLAVACEK, IMBOLO MBUE and CALLAN WINK as they read from their fiction and talk about their ambitions and their fears and about what they see, and hope for, ahead.

After centuries of bearing its reputation for notoriously dreadful food, London has undergone a complete culinary transformation and is now widely considered to be one of the most vibrant restaurant cities in the world. Award-winning food writer ALEKSANDRA CRAPANZANO, author of The London Cookbook, will look at the who, why, where and how behind this sea change, while also profiling some of the chefs who have spearheaded this tasty revolution. Much great food will be discussed. So too will Los Angeles, where Crapanzano sees a parallel food renaissance emerging.

Join award-winning novelist LAUREN GROFF on a luminous literary tour of the moon as it figures in some of our most beloved artistic works, from the plays of William Shakespeare to the fables of Italo Calvino and beyond. Through history, the moon has tugged at many a writer’s imagination, serving not just as subject, but as muse. Groff will tell us why that is and how the moon has exerted its pull on her.

Read more about Lauren Groff here.

Born in 1775 London, Louisa Adams was raised as many wealthy English girls were raised: to be married. Her marriage to John Quincy Adams, however, took her on a journey that she never could have expected. She experienced life in palaces and on farms and, in the White House, as the wife of the sixth president of the United States. That literal journey was matched by the journey of her mind. The love story of Louisa and John Quincy Adams was complicated, one that is brought to vivid life by historian and journalist LOUISA THOMAS. She traces the extraordinary and unexpected path of a shy, ambivalent, and sometimes contrary woman, who became not just a savvy partner to her husband, but also a strong human being in her own right.

Read more about Louisa Thomas here.

In his most recent book, Being Nixon, author EVAN THOMAS gives us a portrait of one of the most compelling, driven, and flawed men ever to occupy the White House, a man who, like the current president, thrived on conflict. He is, in Thomas’s telling, a Shakespearean character, so hungry and gifted in so many ways, and yet ultimately doomed by his own lack of self-awareness. Thomas, the author of nine books, says the example of Nixon is more relevant than ever. He will tell us why that is true and why the 37th president continues to haunt the national imagination.

For the last 25 years, KATI MARTON—herself the daughter of two Hungarian journalists who were jailed for their writings— has been traveling the globe on behalf of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. Marton, who recently returned from a CPJ mission to Ukraine and Brussels, will discuss what has changed and what has not during this past quarter century, where the greatest threats to press freedom exist today, and what we as citizens (and writers) can do to help protect this most vital of institutions.

New Yorker staff writer JANE MAYER spent five years writing the book Dark Money, her investigation into Charles and David Koch and a handful of allied billionaires, who have reshaped U.S. politics through the decades-long construction of what Mayer calls an “integrated political network” fueled by donations from hundreds of wealthy conservatives. In what is certain to be a lively and fascinating question-and-answer session with SVWC Board member and Pulitzer Prize-winning author LIAQUAT AHAMED, Mayer will talk about her journalistic methods—the public records, newly unearthed documents, and hundreds of interviews she relied on in reporting her story—and what she believes her conclusions reveal about and mean for the American political system.

Read more about Jane Mayer here.

Come hear IMBOLO MBUE talk about the books that helped shape her as a writer. In her beguiling debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, winner of the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award, she tells the story of a young Cameroonian couple starting a new life in New York just as the Great Recession arrives. She writes with wit and tenderness not only about these struggling immigrants, but also about the family of the Lehman Brothers executive who hires them, in a book The New York Times called “savage and compassionate in all the right places.” Mbue says that empathy is at the base of her drive to be a writer, a quality she learned from the books of Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, Andrew Solomon and others. She will talk about their work, and her own, in a conversation with JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour.

Read more about Imbolo Mbue here.

BJ MILLER has emerged as one of the country’s leading authorities on humane and emotionally attuned end-of-life care, and KATHY HULL founded the first freestanding pediatric palliative care center in the U.S. In this intimate Q&A session, they will use the audience’s own questions as their guide in discussing how our manner of dying can inform the meaning we are able to take, finally, from the lives we have lived.

Read more about BJ Miller here.

Follow BJ on Twitter @bjmillermd.

At a time when Russia is known to have attempted manipulation of the recent U.S. Presidential elections, KATI MARTON will tell us a remarkable true story of past intervention by Moscow at the highest reaches of Washington politics. Marton will unravel the mysterious life of Noel Field, the man at the center of her latest book, True Believer, an Ivy League-educated State Department official who, however deeply rooted in the culture and history of the United States, spied for Joseph Stalin. While the book is set largely from the 1920s to the 1970s, this story of the power of fanaticism and demagoguery and its profound effects on American life could not be more relevant than it is today.

A natural tension always exists between the media and those in power. They need each other and resent each other. That’s been true back to the time of the Founders. But the relationship between the current occupant of the White House and those charged with reporting on him has escalated to a full-tilt battle. What has brought us to this turn? What are the implications for the country and its democracy? We have invited two longtime journalists to discuss these issues: EVAN THOMAS, a writer and editor for 33 years at TIME and Newsweek (much of that time in Washington, D.C.) and JANE MAYER, New Yorker staff writer and former White House correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Their conversation will be moderated and joined by JEFFREY BROWN, senior correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.

Where does the desire to be a writer come from? EVAN THOMAS and LOUISA THOMAS are father and daughter authors, both well-regarded journalists and biographers. He was a longtime reporter and editor for TIME and Newsweek and has written nine books, including biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Kennedy. His daughter is also a widely published journalist and biographer with two books to her name, including her most recent about Louisa Adams. How did Louisa Thomas’s father pass on to her his love of words? How do they talk about their works in progress? And what have they learned from each other along the way?

The 2008 economic crash left Silicon Valley reeling and, as always, in search of the “next big thing.” Journalist BRAD STONE, author of the recent book The Upstarts, offers a close look at this moment and the entrepreneurial masterminds who managed to capitalize on it. At the intersection of business and culture, Stone will give us an insider’s perspective on major players such as Travis Kalanick of Uber, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, and other smart, driven, and yet often tragicomically flawed people who are upending industries and changing our world.

Read more about Brad Stone here.

Join two of today’s most talented and engaging novelists, LAUREN GROFF and MARIA SEMPLE, for a wide-ranging, free-wheeling, anything-goes conversation between good literary chums. They will discuss their writing lives, the pushes and pulls of success, and how they nurture their narratives and bring their characters to life. As we can see in their most recent books—Groff’s Fates and Furies and Semple’s Today Will Be Different—these very different writers share a love of the complex and absurd in human behavior.

Read more about Lauren Groff here.

Read more about Maria Semple here.

In researching her latest book on the American right wing over five years, ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD tried to turn off her own political and moral alarm system and to feel, instead, a great curiosity about Tea Party Trump voters in Louisiana, who seemed to her on the other side of an “empathy wall.” On fishing trips, at gumbo cook-offs and meetings of Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, she encountered a wide range of reactions to her presence from the right. She was also surprised by reactions from the left, among whom some told her, “I’d be so mad, it would be hard to listen” or “why aren’t they curious about us?” Hochschild was led to reflect on how to encourage relaxed encounters with “the other,” and on the paralinguistic ideas we hold about communication when we say what we say to the other.

The 2017 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference concludes with a discussion between two of America’s most empathic physicians, both of whom are ardently engaged with questions about the relationship between how we live and how we die. What is a good death? How do we judge? At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? What truly matters? BJ MILLER is a renowned hospice and palliative medicine physician whose own near-death experience and personal journey has deeply informed his thinking about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients. Miller will be in conversation with ABRAHAM VERGHESE, distinguished writer and professor in the Department of Medicine, Stanford University.

Read more about BJ Miller here.

Follow BJ Miller on Twitter @bjmillermd.

Novelist and former television comedy writer MARIA SEMPLE, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different, will freely and happily discuss one of her very favorite things about her job—namely, writing stories built around unlikeable autobiographical heroines. Why on earth does she do this, and what’s her secret to doing it with such great success? Come and find out for yourselves.

Read more about Maria Semple here.

How hard is it to watch a book you have written become a movie? Do you ache for lost nuance, the beauty of your words, the characters you carefully brought to life on the page?

These are some of the questions for A. SCOTT BERG, whose 1978 National Book Award-winner, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, became a 2016 film starring Colin Firth as the legendary editor of such major American writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Using film clips to illustrate, Berg will talk about how his biographical book finally made it to the screen and about his work as consulting producer on the upcoming Amazon series based on Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon.

Read more about A. Scott Berg here.

CRAIG JOHNSON’s New York Times best-selling Walt Longmire novels form the basis for the hit TV drama series Longmire. Johnson will talk about the ways his life has, and has not, changed from the days when he was just a northern Wyoming rancher in a town of 25.

Read more about Craig Johnson here.

What is it about birds of prey that stirs the human soul? Hawks, eagles, and falcons have held special meaning for us for millennia; they’ve been viewed as gods, hunting partners, diplomatic counters, vermin, conservation icons, and even weapons of war. In a talk rich with anecdote and humor, based on years of historical research, fieldwork, and the practice of falconry, author HELEN MACDONALD reflects on the nature of birds of prey, and what their rich and surprising history can tell us about our problematic relationship to the natural world.

Author and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry ANDREW SOLOMON won the National Book Award for his seminal volume The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Drawing on his own experiences with depression and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policymakers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtleties, the complexities, and the agony of the disease. Join Solomon for a talk about this most cruel and pervasive mental illness—a talk that promises to be as intimate as it is profound.

Read more about Andrew Solomon here.

Who gets to decide when and how America wages war? The Commander-in-Chief? The U.S. Congress? In his forthcoming book, DAVID BARRON, a federal appellate judge and longtime Harvard law professor, explicates the often fraught relationship between these two branches of government during wartime. Concerns over the executive’s imperial reach threatened to scuttle the Constitution before it was even ratified. Since that time, whether Lincoln’s tenure during the Civil War, FDR’s during World War II, or Obama’s during the War on Terror, presidents have had to accommodate or find ways to maneuver around Congress while simultaneously striving to prevail on the battlefield.

Losing his beloved pet pug Newton sent Emory University neuroeconomics professor GREGORY BERNS on a search into the workings of the canine brain. He knew what he had felt for Newton, but he wanted to know what Newton had felt for him. Thus the question: Do dogs love us, and can it be scientifically proven? Berns spent months training dogs, including his remarkable pound-pup Callie, to tolerate MRI brain scans so that he and his colleagues could observe which parts of the dogs’ brains light up in response to various smells and hand signals. The result: his book How Dogs Love Us. If you have ever looked into your dog’s eyes and wondered what he or she is thinking, you will not want to miss this.

Read more about Gregory Berns here.

Full of surprises and woven together from over a hundred original interviews, CLARA BINGHAM’s oral history of the end of the Sixties provides a firsthand narrative about the moment America turned on, tuned in and dropped out, at the same time it was careening to the brink of a civil war at home and fighting a long, futile conflict abroad. Bingham will reveal the wild depths of a truly extraordinary time in history, one that appears more relevant than ever, now that the country is once again entangled in racial turmoil, extended wars overseas, and a pervasive distrust of government, the Establishment, and the entire status quo.

Read more about Clara Bingham here.

In his bold and timely new book, Supreme Court Justice STEPHEN BREYER examines American law and its relationship to an increasingly interconnected world. Globalization has made it impossible, he says, for this country to remain aloof from knowledge of foreign laws. After all, Americans are daily engaged in cross-border issues – matters of security, trade, human rights, even child custody battles. In a conversation with STROBE TALBOTT, Justice Breyer will roam the world and enlighten us about new realities facing not only American jurists but all of us.

In her exhilarating recent book, So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures, Fresh Air critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN revisits Fitzgerald’s American classic. She says it is both the greatest American (and the greatest un-American) novel, largely for the way it places class issues in the foreground, something that was lost on many of us when we read the novel in high school primarily as a tragic love story. Here Corrigan offers a corrective and tells a fascinating story about how Fitzgerald’s masterpiece came back from oblivion to captivate readers around the world.

What is reality? Who are “you”? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human? In considering these and other questions, neuroscientist and author DAVID EAGLEMAN will guide us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality, all the while offering us a clearer picture of how our brains shape our lives and how our lives, in turn, shape our brains.

Read more about David Eagleman here.

Ireland is a country made of stories. Its move to independence was led by writers, poets, and playwrights, who imagined a nation and fought for it; ever since, Irish artists have both shaped and dissented from the country’s idea of itself. What does it feel like to grow up in a place so steeped in literature’s glory and actually become a celebrated writer? Not to mention, a celebrated woman writer? What territories, histories, myths, languages, feuds, families and stories make up the fabric that one is cloaked in by mere dint of one’s birth? Join Man Booker Prize-winning author ANNE ENRIGHT as she takes the multi-generational story at the center of her latest novel, The Green Road, and uses it as the springboard for a literary investigation into her own life as a writer in the “disputed territory” she calls home.

JUDITH FREEMAN has written about Western and Mormon themes in her novels Red Water and The Chinchilla Farm. But until now, with the recent publication of her memoir The Latter Days, she has never dealt directly or explicitly with her own personal story. Join her as she discusses the path she took – sometimes unwittingly, always bravely – from her Mormon upbringing in Utah through a thicket of profound personal challenges to become the writer and the person she is today.

Read more about Judith Freeman here.

CNN security analyst and former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security JULIETTE KAYYEM has been front and center in the fight against terrorism. She will address ongoing threats in Europe and the threats we face here at home. Kayyem will take a hard look at our strengths and vulnerabilities and share with us the practical advice she offers in her new book Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home. A mother of three, Kayyem will talk about how we can protect our families without yielding to irrational fears.

Read more about Juliette Kayyem here.

Join Harvard professor, homeland security official, and CNN analyst JULIETTE KAYYEM in a timely conversation about how climate change is affecting our world. Many people think of the warming planet as only an environmental issue. But there is a growing sense in national security circles that climate change is a threat to our global stability because a world affected by water shortages, rising sea levels, mass migrations, and conflicts over limited resources can only be a more volatile and dangerous place.

Read more about Juliette Kayyem here.

Writer ALEXANDER MAKSIK, whose first two novels, You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure Drift, garnered a great deal of praise, as well as their share of controversy and criticism, knows well the gauntlet of publication. His third novel, Shelter in Place, will be published this September. Join him for an intimate talk about writing in the face of fear: fear of critics, professional and amateur; fear of publishers and editors; fear of failure; and the importance of getting through those feelings and the necessity of doing so in order to do the work one believes in.

Read more about Alexander Maksik here.

In his elegiac and richly detailed book about Detroit, reporter DAVID MARANISS evokes a rollicking American metropolis in its exuberant heyday. It is 1963, the year the auto industry invented the Mustang, Martha and the Vandellas had their first Motown hit, and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the city’s Great March. We meet the visionary leaders Henry Ford II and labor leader Walter Reuther, Motown founder Berry Gordy and the Reverend C. L. Franklin and his daughter Aretha. Maraniss will talk about the once-great city and about the kind of dogged research and reporting a nonfiction writer must employ in his search for the truth.

Read more about David Maraniss here.

Pulitzer prize-winning reporter DAVID MARANISS has written books on Presidents Obama and Clinton and, more recently, on his hometown of Detroit. He also loves sports. In his biographies of Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, and of baseball great Roberto Clemente, Clemente: The Passions and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, Maraniss offers rich, complex portraits of two sports legends. He will talk about the place of sports in American life, and in his own life, including insights into the current controversies dogging professional football.

Read more about David Maraniss here.

Marine biologist JAMES B. MCCLINTOCK is a passionate fisherman as well as one of the world’s leading experts on climate change in the Antarctic. Join him as he tells stories about his fishing adventures in some of the world’s most breathtaking waters, from the Gulf of Mexico to New Zealand – stories that not only entertain, but also illustrate how sea-level rise, land erosion, pollution, water acidification, and overfishing are all affecting the present and future of our planet.

TOM MCGUANE is the prose laureate of the West and specifically of Montana, his home base for many years. His new collection of stories, Crow Fair, is an elegantly spare but big-hearted and often humorous look at the land he loves. He writes of disaffected wives and devoted sons, fishing buddies and cattle breeders, trying to get by and to make peace with one another (or not) against the beauty of Big Sky Country. The author of ten novels, as well as three books of stories and six collections of essays, McGuane will talk about his work, his love of fishing, and the long arc of his writing life. Perhaps he can answer this: does the writing, not the fishing, get easier or harder with the years? He will be joined in conversation by poet ARLO HASKELL, executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar.

As he did in his most recent book, Thank You for Being Late, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN will identify and discuss the tectonic movements that he believes are reshaping the world today, and how we as a society might get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. His thesis: to understand the twenty-first century, we must understand that the planet’s three largest forces—Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)—are accelerating all at once, radically transforming the workplace, politics, international relations, ethics, and community.

Over the last half-century, celebrated British-American journalist and author SIMON WINCHESTER has roamed the globe. From Northern Ireland to Southeast Asia, from the Arctic to the Tropics, he has gathered material for his books on everything from Krakatoa to the Oxford English Dictionary. But along the way, he has had various scrapes and perilous encounters. With the sharp-eyed wit and charm of a born raconteur, Winchester will share tales of his travails from his imprisonment on Tierra del Fuego in 1984 to the saga of the King of Tonga’s shoes—and more.

Read more about Simon Winchester here.

At a time in politics—not only in America, but in Europe and across the globe—when tribalism is aggressively on the rise, the idea of a moderate “center” in government would seem to be an anachronism. Is it, in fact, a thing of the past? How do we define the political “center” these days in America? The UK? Germany? Italy? Join JAMES FALLOWS, national correspondent for The Atlantic, SAM TANENHAUS, author of The Death of Conservatism and a forthcoming biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., and NADER MOUSAVIZADEH, author and co-founder/co-CEO of the global advisory firm Macro Advisory Partners, for a roundtable discussion on these and other urgent questions.

In one way or another, from the moment she left Haiti to settle in Brooklyn, New York, at age 12, EDWIDGE DANTICAT
has been writing stories (prize-winning novels, memoirs, and essays) about the experience and effects of immigration. In conversation with JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour, she will talk about the ways that first seismic journey in her life has shaped all the journeys she has lived and written since.

Read more about Edwidge Danticat here.

How is it possible that America is still engaged in seemingly interminable conflicts in South Asia? What happened?
What went wrong? There is no better person to explain this than STEVE COLL, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and, most recently, Directorate S, the story of America’s intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11. Coll, the very best kind of old-school journalist, will tell us about this epic story of intrigue and ineptness.

“In North Korea,” novelist ADAM JOHNSON has said, “I think the people know everything they are being told is a lie, but they have no idea what the truth may be.” This would not be the case if they had read Johnson’s remarkable The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Johnson spent seven years researching and writing the novel and journeyed to North Korea to see the country with his own eyes. Using his fierce imagination, he did what only great fiction writers can do—brought to light fundamental truths of North Korean society that go far beyond any literal accumulation of facts, and indelibly humanized the people he wrote about. Join him for a talk about how he did it and what the experience was like.

Before becoming a best-selling author, TESS GERRITSEN was a physician. On maternity leave, she began to write fiction and never stopped. Over the past 30 years, she has written dozens of thrillers, including the novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles that inspired the TNT television series Rizzoli & Isles.

A typical admiring review of one of her books reads: “A top- grade thriller. . .Sharp characters stitch your eye to the page. An all-nighter.” Gerritsen will tell us about where her ideas come from, about how she constructs her plots, and about how to commit the perfect literary murder.

In this session, New York Times columnist and author THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN and author and global strategist NADER MOUSAVIZADEH will engage in a conversation about the way in which global politics and economics are on a collision course leading to new risks of conflict and new opportunities for reform, from China to the Middle East, Europe and America.

Join National Book Award-winner TERRANCE HAYES, author of the collections How to be Drawn and Lighthead, among others, for a reading of his beautiful, compelling, electric poetry. As fellow poet Cornelius Eady has said of Hayes, “First you’ll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you’ll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.”

Read more about Terrance Hayes here.

It is hard to remember a time when Mount Everest was unknown terrain, when no one had yet reached the summit. The story of those who first attempted that feat is the subject of anthropologist WADE DAVIS’s monumental and magical history and adventure, Into the Silence. It was the early 1920s and the men were veterans of World War I. They had seen and survived unimaginable carnage and, in exhilarating defiance, turned themselves into adventuring—and sometimes tragic—heroes for a country shell-shocked by war. With words and photos, Davis will take us back to that time and that place and that mountain.

When Rupert Murdoch sells much of the media empire he built, when Netflix spends four times as much as the networks on programming, when viewers abandon expensive cable bundles, and Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook stare at even bigger, more threatening giants—governments— we have entered a new era. KEN AULETTA, whose 12 books have primarily focused on disruption of one kind or another, will explain these profound changes in the industry, and where things may be heading.

Read more about Ken Auletta here.

With the introduction of the Internet and the digital onslaught, we’ve witnessed the disruption and often the destruction of traditional media businesses, from music to newspapers to magazines to book publishing to radio and television. But the industry that funds much of media—advertising—stood up to the onslaught. Until now. Almost suddenly, $2 trillion of global advertising and marketing business is under assault, with profound consequences. By applying the familiar Watergate maxim “follow the money” in his new book, Frenemies, KEN AULETTA, the “Annals of Communications” writer for The New Yorker for almost three decades, explores what is happening to the industry that is the “free” ATM machine for much of the old and new media.

Read more about Ken Auletta here.

In her wise and compassionate book, pediatric psychologist JOANNA BREYER writes about how parents can navigate the fierce challenges of caring for a child who has been diagnosed with a serious illness. Arguably, no time on earth is harder and scarier and often more isolating. During her two decades at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Dr. Breyer provided counseling for dozens of young patients and their families. She will share vignettes about actual cases and their outcomes and talk about the times of joy and the times of grief along this bewildering road.

In her first book, Norwich, New York Times reporter KAREN CROUSE unearths the secrets of Norwich, a small town that has likely produced more Olympians per capita than any other place in the country. The surprising secret: an emphasis not on competition, but on community; on relationships, not championships. Kids engage in all sports, and no one is cut from a team. Their success is fostered in joy, not fear. Crouse’s book is being heralded as a welcome antidote to the heavy- handed parenting we read so much about. She will tell us about this remarkable town and the athletes it has fostered.

KAREN CROUSE has covered it all: football, golf, tennis, swimming. She has been in NFL locker rooms and Olympic stadiums around the world. A competitive college swimmer and a sportswriter for The New York Times since 2005, she has brought unusual empathy and insight into coverage of major athletes such as Michael Phelps (she was in Beijing in 2008 to cover his epic eight-gold-medal performance), Tiger Woods, and all the women athletes trying to fit motherhood into their prime competitive years. Crouse will share anecdotes from the road and talk about the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated field.

For the last five years, DEBORAH and JAMES FALLOWS, writers for The Atlantic, have been crisscrossing America in a single-engine prop airplane, visiting dozens of towns and meeting with hundreds of people to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign. They’ve talked with civic leaders and public servants, workers and business people, immigrants, entrepreneurs, artists, city planners, environmentalists, educators, librarians, and students. Our Towns: a 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself, despite the challenges and paralysis of national politics. They will tell us what they found out there.

Read more about Deborah and James Fallows here.

For the last five years, DEBORAH and JAMES FALLOWS, writers for The Atlantic, have been crisscrossing America in a single-engine prop airplane, visiting dozens of towns and meeting with hundreds of people to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign. They’ve talked with civic leaders and public servants, workers and business people, immigrants, entrepreneurs, artists, city planners, environmentalists, educators, librarians, and students. Our Towns: a 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself, despite the challenges and paralysis of national politics. They will tell us what they found out there.

Read more about Deborah and James Fallows here.

What turns a small-town mom into an environmental activist and whistle-blower? That’s the question at the heart of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, the troubling and evocative new book by poet and investigative journalist ELIZA GRISWOLD. When fracking first came to Amity, Pennsylvania, lifelong resident Stacey Haney was on board. But as she watched the energy companies deface the land and as mysterious illnesses infected her family, she became an outspoken critic. Griswold will talk about Haney, her town, and the polarizing forces at work in twenty-first-century rural America.

Read more about Eliza Griswold here.

In her beautiful and bracing memoir about her childhood, the South African-born novelist and playwright GILLIAN SLOVO evokes a time of violent historical upheaval in her homeland. Her parents, Ruth First and Joe Slovo, were South Africa’s best- known white opponents of apartheid. Often in jail or hiding, they were heroes, but their children also endured the cost of their parents’ commitment, including the assassination of First in 1982. The pain is palpable in Slovo’s pages, but so too is her commitment to the power of activism and of words. This ongoing commitment is reflected in her most recent novel, Ten Days, and in her highly topical play, Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State. She will talk about her parents and about her passion for getting at the truth in her fiction.

With dexterity and literary grace, celebrated writer MAILE MELOY moves between forms, shifting between short stories, (Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It) and novels (Do Not Become Alarmed), between fiction and nonfiction, and between writing for adults and writing for young readers (The Apothecary series). She is now writing for television and has written a picture book for young children. She will talk about the risks and vulnerability of working in different forms, and about how they inform each other and stretch the imagination.

Read more about Maile Meloy here.

Join AMANDA “BINKY” URBAN, one of the best-known agents in the literary world, for an hour of stories, observations, predictions, and lessons about publishing’s past and future. In a remarkable decades-long career with clients including Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Doris Kearns Goodwin among many others, there is little Urban hasn’t experienced in this business about which she is passionate.

In 2013, MacArthur Fellow, cartoonist, and graphic novelist GENE LUEN YANG published Boxers & Saints, a two- volume graphic novel about the Boxer Rebellion in China in the nineteenth century. Illustrating with his amazing drawings, Yang will discuss how the Boxer Rebellion was a turning point in world history—the first truly global conflict and deadly harbinger of the two world wars. For Yang, the book touches on something very personal: “When I first began my research,” he said, “I realized that it embodied a tension between East and West that I’ve lived in for my entire life.” Join this remarkable artist and cartooning evangelist as he talks about how he developed this project and what he learned along the way.

Read more about Gene Luen Yang here.

What makes an ordinary person step up to help the children of strangers? In Uganda, poverty, illness, and conflict have
left many families devastated and children stranded. Gladys Kalibbala, a woman of great heart but little means, has saved hundreds of these children through scrappy persistence. For over three years, JESSICA YU followed Gladys’s cases, each a poignant tale with dramatic twists. The Academy Award- winning filmmaker tells uplifting stories from her nonfiction account, Garden of the Lost and Abandoned, and explains why, after 20 years of making films, she felt compelled to write her first book.

Read more about Jessica Yu here.

Privacy is one of today’s hottest topics, a subject being wrestled with at the highest legal levels and around our dining room tables. Who does protect our privacy, if anyone, or is it indeed up for grabs or for sale? Put another way, who owns our communications? The government? The social media companies? These questions have been intensely debated since revelations of hacking incidents and possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. Please join Associate Supreme Court Justice STEPHEN BREYER and Facebook Vice President and Chief Counsel COLIN STRETCH and UC Berkeley Assistant Clinical Professor of Law CATHERINE CRUMP in a wide-ranging and provocative discussion about privacy and security. Their conversation will be moderated by KIT RACHLIS, senior editor of The California Sunday Magazine.

Join cellist/writer MARK SALZMAN and a few special guests as they perform musical selections from Bach to Schubert
to Simon & Garfunkel. In the spirit of this year’s conference theme, Mark will also read personal essays from young writing students around the world, including Chinese medical students in the 1980s, juvenile hall inmates in the 1990s, and seventh graders in Los Angeles today.

Join National Book Award-winner TERRANCE HAYES for an intimate journey through some of the great poets and poems that continue to inspire and nourish him along his own path as a writer and teacher of poetry.

Read more about Terrance Hayes here.

What is “fake news,” exactly, and how can it be combatted? How do we train journalists in the myriad new technologies required to identify such false reports that are often seamlessly disguised? How does this environment of pervasive uncertainty change the terms by which our best journalists must judge their work and their mission? Join STEVE COLL, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for
a fascinating discussion of these essential questions.

“Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses,” EDWIDGE DANTICAT says in her recent book The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.” Join this celebrated author for a talk and reading that is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that she and other writers have approached death in their literary work.

Read more about Edwidge Danticat here.

Join author and anthropologist WADE DAVIS as he takes us on a thrilling trip around the world and introduces us to the wisdom of indigenous cultures, as he did in his book, The Wayfinders. In Polynesia, we will set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ, while in Australia we will experience Dreamtime, the all- embracing philosophy of the first humans. Though we might tend to be oblivious of the fact, Davis reminds us that we all share the same ancestors, and in the stories and memories of these indigenous people we get our own story, too, of what it means to be human and alive and custodians of the planet.

Read more about Wade Davis here.

Join best-selling suspense novelist TESS GERRITSEN as she tells us how to commit murder on the page. How do you get started? How do you find the voice? How much of the plot do you have to know before you begin? Gerritsen practiced medicine before turning to fiction, and one of her hallmarks is turning her scientific knowledge into exciting drama without sacrificing character. She will talk to us about the art and craft of the thriller, about the trick of sustaining suspense, and about whether she’s ever gotten halfway through a book and discovered she had the wrong bad guy.

Read more about Tess Gerritsen here.

William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of modern conservatism, was also one of the most dynamic figures in American public and intellectual life. Author, magazine editor, columnist, and television debater, he embodied an idea of public-spirited debate that scarcely seems conceivable today in the age of social media. What became of the conservatism Buckley helped create? Would he recognize it today? Before his death in 2008, Buckley designated author SAM TANENHAUS to write his comprehensive biography. Join Tanenhaus for a discussion of Buckley’s remarkable life and career and for an assessment of his legacy in the age of Donald Trump.

2018: The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

With his usual graceful prose and dogged research, SIMON WINCHESTER has given us another revelatory book on
an unexpected topic: precision. In his latest work, The Perfectionists, he traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age, reminding us at every turn that precision and precise measurements are at the base of all progress. Winchester will discuss how he honed in on this topic, and talk about the engineers who have created our modern world, and how our obsession with precision might be distancing us from an appreciation of handmade things and natural beauty.

Read more about Simon Winchester here.

As a longtime literacy advocate and a former reading and writing teacher in the Montgomery County Public Schools, ANN B. FRIEDMAN has pursued a lifelong calling to help Americans of all backgrounds and ages forge a strong relationship with language as a means not only of expression, but also of social empowerment. After years of planning and fundraising, her ultimate goal—to create a museum where words will be honored and surprise and delight—will finally be realized: Planet Word will open its doors in Washington, D.C., in the winter of 2019. Join her for an hour of surprising stories about the challenges and pleasures of curating the world’s first museum of words and language.