The Atlantic Festival, September 18–20 in New York City, Announces First Speakers and Tickets on Sale
The festival's 2-Day Premium Passes will go on sale this Thursday, June 12, at 11 a.m. ET. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes.
The Atlantic Festival is the preeminent live exploration of The Atlantic 's journalism, and this year expands to a new stage for big ideas in the cultural capital of the world. Events will bring together more than 100 speakers––influential business leaders and technologists, cultural and media figures, and U.S. and global political leaders—along with film screenings, book talks, and performances. Events will be led by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and many of The Atlantic 's writers and editors, including Adrienne LaFrance, Tim Alberta, Anne Applebaum, Elizabeth Bruenig, Sophie Gilbert, Jemele Hill, Shirley Li, Ashley Parker, and Clint Smith.
Participants being announced today are IBM CEO Arvind Krishna; Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar; New York Liberty owner Clara Wu Tsai; Lieutenant General (ret.) H. R. McMaster, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump; CRISPR-gene-editing Nobel laureate and founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute Jennifer Doudna; directors and producers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein with historian Annette Gordon-Reed as part of a premiere screening of their PBS documentary series, The American Revolution; business mogul and entrepreneur Mark Cuban; activist and host of the podcast Reclaiming, Monica Lewinsky; Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana; host, filmmaker, and comedian W. Kamau Bell; and many additional speakers still to be announced.
The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Microsoft at the Title Level; CenterWell and Eli Lilly and Company at the Presenting Level; and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Destination DC, Diageo, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Hauser & Wirth, KPMG, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.
The Atlantic Festival
September 18–20, 2025
Perelman Performing Arts Center, and Virtually
For Passes: https://theatlanticfestival.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business of Fashion
6 hours ago
- Business of Fashion
Robin Givhan Exits The Washington Post
Robin Givhan on Sunday announced that she took a buyout from The Washington Post, which has been offering packages to tenured staffers who have been at the newspaper for more than 10 years. Givhan, who joined the Post in 1995, served as its premier fashion critic before transitioning to senior critic-at-large in 2020 — where she covered everything from European luxury fashion to the role of personal style in American politics. Givhan briefly decamped to Newsweek as style and culture correspondent from 2010 to 2012 before returning to the Post in 2014. In 2006, Givhan won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, remaining the only fashion writer to snag the award. In her Instagram post, Givhan said she'll be taking time to resume the tour for her book 'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh,' that was released in June and chronicles the rise of the late designer. But she remained coy about her future career plans. 'There's still a lot to be said, and I'm just self-centered enough to believe I'm someone who needs to be heard,' Givhan said in her post. 'So I'm not done. Democracy definitely dies in darkness, but it is gravely wounded by silence.' ADVERTISEMENT Learn more: Power Moves | Robin Givhan Appointed As The Washington Post's Senior Critic at Large, Fenty Fashion Names New Managing Director This week, renowned journalist Robin Givhan expands her role at The Washington Post, while Bastien Renard joined Rihanna's LVMH-owned Fenty brand as its new managing director.
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
Don't Believe What AI Told You I Said
John Scalzi is a voluble man. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers and has been nominated for nearly every major award that the science-fiction industry has to offer—some of which he's won multiple times. Over the course of his career, he has written millions of words, filling dozens of books and 27 years' worth of posts on his personal blog. All of this is to say that if one wants to cite Scalzi, there is no shortage of material. But this month, the author noticed something odd: He was being quoted as saying things he'd never said. 'The universe is a joke,' reads a meme featuring his face. 'A bad one.' The lines are credited to Scalzi and were posted, atop different pictures of him, to two Facebook communities boasting almost 1 million collective members. But Scalzi never wrote or said those words. He also never posed for the pictures that appeared with them online. The quote and the images that accompanied them were all 'pretty clearly' AI generated, Scalzi wrote on his blog. 'The whole vibe was off,' Scalzi told me. Although the material bore a superficial similarity to something he might have said—'it's talking about the universe, it's vaguely philosophical, I'm a science-fiction writer'—it was not something he agreed with. 'I know what I sound like; I live with me all the time,' he noted. Bogus quotations on the internet are not new, but AI chatbots and their hallucinations have multiplied the problem at scale, misleading many more people, and misrepresenting the beliefs not just of big names such as Albert Einstein but also of lesser known individuals. In fact, Scalzi's experience caught my eye because a similar thing had happened to me. In June, a blog post appeared on the Times of Israel website, written by a self-described 'tech bro' working in the online public-relations industry. Just about anyone can start a blog at the Times of Israel —the publication generally does not edit or commission the contents—which is probably why no one noticed that this post featured a fake quote, sourced to me and The Atlantic. 'There's nothing inherently nefarious about advocating for your people's survival,' it read. 'The problem isn't that Israel makes its case. It's that so many don't want it made.' As with Scalzi, the words attributed to me were ostensibly adjacent to my area of expertise. I've covered the Middle East for more than a decade, including countless controversies involving Israel, most recently the corrupt political bargain driving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's actions in Gaza. But like Scalzi, I'd never said, and never would say, something so mawkish about the subject. I wrote to the Times of Israel, and an editor promptly apologized and took the article down. (Miriam Herschlag, the opinion and blogs editor at the paper, later told me that its blogging platform 'does not have an explicit policy on AI-generated content.') Getting the post removed solved my immediate problem. But I realized that if this sort of thing was happening to me—a little-known literary figure in the grand scheme of things—it was undoubtedly happening to many more people. And though professional writers such as Scalzi and myself have platforms and connections to correct falsehoods attributed to us, most people are not so lucky. Last May, my colleagues Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel reported on 'Heat Index,' a magazine-style summer guide that was distributed by the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The insert included a reading list with fake books attributed to real authors, and quoted one Mark Ellison, a nature guide, not a professional writer, who never said the words credited to him. When contacted, the author of 'Heat Index' admitted to using ChatGPT to generate the material. Had The Atlantic never investigated, there likely would have been no one to speak up for Ellison. The negative consequences of this content go well beyond the individuals misquoted. Today, chatbots have replaced Google and other search engines as many people's primary source of online information. Everyday users are employing these tools to inform important life decisions and to make sense of politics, history, and the world around them. And they are being deceived by fabricated content that can leave them worse off than when they started. This phenomenon is obviously bad for readers, but it's also bad for writers, Gabriel Yoran told me. A German entrepreneur and author, Yoran recently published a book about the degradation of modern consumer technology called The Junkification of the World. Ironically, he soon became an object lesson in a different technological failure. Yoran's book made the Der Spiegel best-seller list, and many people began reviewing and quoting it—and also, Yoran soon noticed, misquoting it. An influencer's review on XING, the German equivalent of LinkedIn, included a passage that Yoran never wrote. 'There's quotes from the book that are mine, and then there is at least one quote that is not in the book,' he recalled. 'It could have been. It's kind of on brand. The tone of voice is fitting. But it's not in the book.' After this and other instances in which he received error-ridden AI-generated feedback on his work, Yoran told me that he 'felt betrayed in a way.' He worries that in the long run, the use of AI in this manner will degrade the quality of writing by demotivating those who produce it. If material is just going to be fed into a machine that will then regurgitate a sloppy summary, 'why weigh every word and think about every comma?' Like other online innovations such as social media, large language models do not so much create problems as supercharge preexisting ones. The internet has long been awash with fake quotations attributed to prominent personalities. As Abraham Lincoln once said, 'You can't trust every witticism superimposed over the image of a famous person on the internet.' But the advent of AI interfaces churning out millions of replies to hundreds of millions of people—ChatGPT and Google's Gemini have more than 1 billion active users combined—has turned what was once a manageable chronic condition into an acute infection that is metastasizing beyond all containment. The process by which this happens is simple. Many people do not know when LLMs are lying to them, which is unsurprising given that the chatbots are very convincing fabulists, serving up slop with unflappable confidence to their unsuspecting audience. That compromised content is then pumped at scale by real people into their own online interactions. The result: Meretricious material from chatbots is polluting our public discourse with Potemkin pontification, derailing debates with made-up appeals to authority and precedent, and in some cases, defaming living people by attributing things to them that they never said and do not agree with. More and more people are having the eerie experience of knowing that they have been manipulated or misled, but not being sure by whom. As with many aspects of our digital lives, responsibility is too diffuse for accountability. AI companies can chide users for trusting the outputs they receive; users can blame the companies for providing a service—and charging for it—that regularly lies. And because LLMs are rarely credited for the writing that they help produce, victims of chatbot calumny struggle to pinpoint which model did the deed after the fact. You don't have to be a science-fiction writer to game out the ill effects of this progression, but it doesn't hurt. 'It is going to become harder and harder for us to understand what things are genuine and what things are not,' Scalzi told me. 'All that AI does is make this machinery of artifice so much more automated,' especially because the temptation for many people is 'to find something online that you agree with and immediately share it with your entire Facebook crowd' without checking to see if it's authentic. In this way, Scalzi said, everyday people uncritically using chatbots risk becoming a 'willing route of misinformation.' The good news is that some AI executives are beginning to take the problems with their products seriously. 'I think that if a company is claiming that their model can do something,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress in May 2023, 'and it can't, or if they're claiming it's safe and it's not, I think they should be liable for that.' The bad news is that Altman never actually said this. Google's Gemini just told me that he did.
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
What Muriel Spark Knew About Childhood
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. The most recent issue of The Atlantic taught me that the Scottish author Muriel Spark had, according to Judith Shulevitz, 'a steely command of omniscience,' and frequently played with 'selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices.' I knew that Spark was funny, and that her work was highly recommended by people whose taste I respect. But I quickly realized I had very few other facts at my disposal. Most important, I'd never read her writing. So before I'd even finished Shulevitz's review of a new biography of the novelist, I downloaded The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie —Spark's best-known work—from my local library. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section: How not to fix American democracy 'Surface Support,' a poem by Michael D. Snediker Literature's enduring obsession with strange sisters Why so many MIT students are writing poetry The novella's title character works at an Edinburgh school for girls in the 1930s; she's an outré teacher who has marked a special group of pupils as 'hers.' She cares very little for teaching the approved curriculum. Instead, she takes her students to the theater; she walks them through Edinburgh's Old Town; she regales them with tales of her former loves; she praises the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. Her girls, she notes, will benefit far more from the artistic education provided by Brodie 'in her prime'—unmarried and pushing 40, she is entirely aware of her sexual and intellectual power, which are both at their peak. But the story, while named for Brodie, is not actually about her; it is primarily told through the recollections of the girls, and one in particular: Sandy, who in her adulthood has become a nun. The book's main question is not what will become of Brodie—we know from the early pages that she will be fired from the school, 'betrayed' by one of her chosen girls. Instead, it investigates the heady, hormonal days of adolescence, and the moral education of the students. That last theme is where Spark's 'central concern,' as Shulevitz puts it, becomes clear. The author was a Catholic convert, and her writing is full of characters searching for, asking about, and turning to God. For the girls, whom Brodie begins shaping when they're barely tweens, their teacher is something like a deity: at times hard to understand, often capricious, but ultimately fascinating, beautiful, and never wrong. As they grow up, most of the kids simply become who they were always going to be, shaking off Brodie's rules and stipulations and following their own whims. But Sandy feels her teacher's authority for the rest of her life. Her entanglement with Brodie, which continues into her late teens, leads her down a winding path that culminates in her own conversion to Catholicism. Her act of submission to the Church, which requires her to shed her individuality, is actually her final moment of separation from her former mentor: She has allowed God to dethrone her teacher. But even though Sandy's conversion mirrors Spark's own, I was surprised and pleased to see that the author doesn't make Sandy a perfect nun, devoted solely to the Church, free of Brodie's shadow. Instead, Spark is realistic about the effect a particularly magnetic figure can have on a young, impressionable person. Many years later, when Sandy is asked who or what most influenced her, it's Brodie's name on her lips. Similarly, Spark's is on mine. I've now got Memento Mori and Loitering With Intent, two of her other novels, waiting for me on my e-reader. The Judgments of Muriel Spark By Judith Shulevitz The novelist liked playing God—a very capricious one. What to Read The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan Tan coped with the political tumult of 2016 by returning to two of her childhood refuges: nature and art. Drawing was an early hobby of hers, but she'd felt discouraged from taking it seriously. At 65, she took 'nature journaling' lessons to learn how to depict and interpret the world around her—most notably the inter-avian dramas of the birds behind her Bay Area home. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a disarming account of one year of Tan's domestic bird-watching, a book 'filled with sketches and handwritten notes of naive observations,' she writes. That naivete is endearing: The accomplished novelist becomes a novice, trying to improve through eager dedication. Over the course of this engaging book, her illustrations grow more sophisticated, more assured—leaving readers with a portrait of the hobbyist as an emerging artist. — Sophia Stewart Out Next Week 📚 Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs 📚 Where Are You Really From, by Elaine Hsieh Chou 📚 Dominion, by Addie E. Citchens Your Weekend Read The Logic of the '9 to 5' Is Creeping Into the Rest of the Day By Julie Beck Over the past couple of years, the vloggers of social media have taken to documenting their routines from 5 to 9 p.m. Some creators also make a morning version, the '5 to 9 before the 9 to 5,' starting at 5 a.m. These routines are highly edited, almost hypnotic, with quick cuts, each mini-scene overlaid with a time stamp. Hours pass in just a couple of minutes, and the compressed time highlights a sense of efficiency. The videos have big to-do-list energy; the satisfaction they offer is that of vicariously checking boxes.
