Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, 8th Floor
Join Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev on Oct. 29 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington as the co-hosts of The Atlantic podcast, Autocracy in America, explore the threats that autocratic leaders pose to American democracy.
Applebaum and Pomerantsev, senior fellows at the SNF Agora Insitute at Johns Hopkins, will share their most insightful lessons from the five-part series, relay stories that were left on the cutting room floor, and answer audience questions. The evening will be moderated by Jocelyn Frank, senior producer of Autocracy in America and narrative audio at The Atlantic.
Authoritarian tactics are already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look. Applebaum and Pomerantsev are ideal guides for this illuminating and frightening exploration.
This event is co-hosted by SNF Agora and The Atlantic.
Speakers:
Anne Applebaum is a journalist, a prize-winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, Autocracy Inc, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.
Jocelyn Frank is a sought-after leader in radio and podcast production. As Senior Producer of Narrative Audio at The Atlantic, she’s helped craft such projects as Holy Week, an 8-part series hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II, “Jenisha from Kentucky” with Jenisha Watts, and Autocracy in America. Frank has a BA in Music Performance from the University of Michigan. She’s worked with esteemed organizations such as BBC, R4, NPR, CBS, and Pushkin Industries, Slate’s Political Gabfest, and American Public Media’s Performance Today. With a passion for activating sound in innovative and transformative ways, she’s also a lead curator (going on 17 years) of Sound Scene, the Washinton D.C. region’s premier interactive art festival, presented in partnership with the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.
Peter Pomerantsev is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, an author, and TV producer. He studies propaganda and media development, and has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He writes for publications including Granta, The Atlantic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, and Politico, among others. His first book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House, and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages.