CGA Public Events Series

Peter Maass, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, is the author of Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil and Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. His first book, about the war in Bosnia, won literary prizes from the Overseas Press Club and the Los Angeles Times. Maass has also written for the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way, but all are touched by the “resource curse”—the power of oil to exacerbate existing problems and create new ones. In Saudi Arabia, officials deflect inquiries about the amount of petroleum remaining in the country’s largest reservoir; in Equatorial Guinea, two tennis courts grace an oil-rich dictator’s estate, but bandages and aspirin are a hospital’s only supplies; and in Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s campaign to redistribute oil wealth creates new economic and political crises. Rebels, royalty, middlemen, environmentalists, indigenous activists, CEOs—their stories tell the larger narrative of oil in our time. In Crude World, Maass presents a portrait of the troubled world oil has created.

A contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, Rich Cohen’s work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the New York Times. His books include Tough Jews, The Avengers, Lake Effect, Machers & Rockers, and Sweet and Low.

“It’s a great irony that Israel was more secure as an idea than it’s ever been as a nation with an army.” In A.D. 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it—by taking what had been a national religion identified with a particular place and turning it into an idea. In Israel is Real, Cohen suggests that the creation of Israel as a Jewish state has made Jews vulnerable in a way they have not been for 2,000 years. Cohen examines the myth of the wandering Jew, the paradox of Jewish power (how can you be both holy and nuclear?), and how the creation of modern Israel has changed what it means to be a Jew anywhere in the world.

Vali Nasr, an internationally recognized expert on Middle East politics, is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a senior fellow of The Dubai Initiative at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His book The Shia Revival was a New York Times bestseller. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time and appeared on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Fareed Zakaria GPS, Meet the Press, The Today Show, and Charlie Rose.

With a combination of historical narrative and contemporary reporting, Nasr takes us behind the news, dominated by the struggle against extremists and the Taliban, to introduce a Muslim world rarely seen—one in which the balance of power is being reshaped by an upwardly mobile middle class of entrepreneurs, investors, professionals, and avid consumers who can tip the scales away from extremist belligerence. His insights into Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the crucial bright spots of Dubai and Turkey provide new perspectives on the troubles and prospects in the region.

This event is presented by Foreign Affairs and the Center for Global Affairs in partnership with the CGA Global Women’s Initiative

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are a team of Pulitzer prize winning journalists whose previous collaborations include China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder From the East. Kristof has been an op-ed columnist for the New York Times since 2001. WuDunn, an investment advisor, has been a correspondent for the paper in Asia.

Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Kristof and WuDunn describe an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there. They show how a little help can transform the lives of these women. Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn show that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do, it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty.