Evan Osnos

Staff Writer, The New Yorker | Author, "Wildland"

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The New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award winner Evan Osnos covers politics and foreign affairs spanning the U.S., the Middle East, East Asia, and China and is known for his articulate and accessible commentary. In 2021, Osnos released Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. Publishers Weekly called the book an “engrossing and revealing look at how deeply connected yet far apart Americans are.”The book follows Osnos’s return to three places he knows best in the United States — Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL — to illuminate the origins of America’s political fury.

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Osnos presents current assessments of the biggest stories of the day, from US-China tensions and life inside North Korea, polarization of our nation and the rebuilding of civic ties, as well as the future of technology and globalization. An eloquent speaker, Osnos offers a balanced and thorough view of world news and its consequences.

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His first book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Based on eight years of living in Beijing, it is a multi-layered look at the individual's rise in China and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. In 2020, he published Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, a concise, and trenchant examination of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s lifelong quest for the presidency. It was an international best-seller and a Financial Times Best Book of the year.

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Topics

Age Of Ambition: Ground Truth From The Newest World Superpower

A deep, anecdotally rich dive into the ambitions, tastes, and values of the men and women at the heart of China’s rise. They are consumers, students, and parents; nationalists and liberals and libertarians; Christians, Communists, and Taoists — By 2025, China’s wildly diverse middle class will be more than twice the size of America’s entire population. How are they remake our world?

Understanding Biden: How He Thinks And Why

Despite five decades in American public life, Biden remains indistinct in the eyes of many Americans. As recently as 2012, nearly a third of those polled in South Carolina could not name the sitting vice president. In the 2020 primary, even days before he secured the Democratic nomination, many Americans assumed his campaign was in its final moments. Then, almost immediately, the pandemic made a conventional campaign impossible — and forced Americans to weigh one of the most consequential choices of a lifetime through a limited window. Evan Osnos of The New Yorker has interviewed Biden repeatedly since 2014. In this intimate portrait, Osnos takes you inside Biden’s thinking on foreign affairs, economics, and negotiation. Based on interviews with the 46th president and with more than a hundred others, including former President Barack Obama, this is a window into Biden’s worldview, calculations, and inner circle.

Wildland: The Fall And Rise Of America's Common Good

How did Americans become so divided — and how will we stitch ourselves back together? For all the attention paid to Washington, the deeper roots of our political mood lie elsewhere. Consider that in 1968, the average sound bite on a network news broadcast was more than sixty seconds; by 2004, it had shrunk to less than eight seconds. Or, consider the fact that air rage is more common on American airplanes in which the passengers need to walk through the first-class cabin on their way to coach. In this fascinating, non-partisan presentation, rich with anecdotes and surprising research, National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos explores America’s divides, and efforts to repair them, connecting us to stories of those who are advancing community and prosperity in the 21st century.

Two Superpowers: Navigating China And America In The New Age Of Uncertainty

Starbucks is opening a new store in China, on average, every fifteen hours, and TikTok is redefining American social media — even as tensions build over Taiwan, cyber hacking, and threats to global public health. For the first time in a generation, the world has entered an era dominated by two superpowers — but, unlike rivals in the Cold War, the U.S. and China are also entwined on an unprecedented scale. What do people in the corridors of power in Beijing and Washington really say to one another about the future? How are companies, consumers, and global citizens charting a path to thrive? In this presentation, one of our preeminent analysts of foreign affairs and U.S. politics combines deep knowledge with up-to-the-minute insights to assess the new global balance of power. Are China and America on a collision course, or can we find common ground? What does each side misperceive about the other? An engaging narrative analysis of the players and the issues.

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