Events

Wedel, professor of public policy at George Mason University and a fellow of the New America Foundation, examines how a growing number of private networks, including Washington think tanks, have come to wield significant power over domestic, foreign, and financial policy with little or no accountability.

Wallis, author of The Great Awakening and God’s Politics, views the current economic downturn not as an ordeal to be endured, but as an opportunity for change. He argues that rather than restoring normality—the very circumstances that brought about the crisis—we should reassess our values and goals to create a new, more sustainable and satisfying normality, one based on community instead of competitiveness.

The award-winning translator of Grossman’s masterpiece, Life and Fate and, with his wife, Elizabeth, of works by Pushkin and Platonov, Chandler finds the Russian writer’s last, unfinished novel nearly overwhelmed by “the burden of history it carries.” Yet Grossman crafted the painful reality of the Soviet era into art that, by its truth-telling, shows that “histories can cease to be burdens.”