TELLING THE TRUTH 2023
5:30 p.m. — Symposium, Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Join us for two panel discussions with major thinkers and journalists representing a variety of viewpoints about the present and future of our nation.
Panels will include:
“The American Presidency,” a conversation about the Biden administration and the prospect of a second Trump administration, featuring Franklin Foer and Miles Taylor.
“The American Backlash,” a conversation about the politics of revenge, and the impulse to punish “out groups” who have made political gains— particularly racial, sexual, and cultural minorities, and women, featuring Juliet Hooker and Jeff Sharlet.
Franklin Foer is the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future (2023), the definitive insider story of the first two years of the Biden presidency, with exclusive access to Biden’s longtime team of advisers, and a gripping portrait of a president during this momentous time in our nation’s history. Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and former editor of The New Republic.
Miles Taylor, White House whistleblower and security expert, served as chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security under President Trump. He is best-known for his “Anonymous” essay, titled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” published in the New York Times in Sept. 2018. His #1 national bestseller, A Warning by Anonymous, was published in 2019. His new book is Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump (July 2023).
Juliet Hooker, noted political scientist, is the author of the acclaimed new book, Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Oct. 2023). Jelani Cobb called it, "every bit as stark and urgent as the moment of racial reckoning that inspired it." Her 2017 book, Theorizing Race in the Americas, won the "Ralph Bunche Book Award" and "Best Book on Race, Ethnicity and Politics" of the American Political Science Association.
Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times and national bestselling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. His newest book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (W.W. Norton, March 2023). The New York Times praised it as a "riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America, one that horrifyingly corresponds to liberals’ worst fears." Sharlet is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and has been a frequent commentator on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," "All in With Chris," and NPR's "Fresh Air."
Major support and funding provided by The Professor Ben-Ami Lipetz NYSWI Fund.
