12 DAYS: Register Now for “Stop Following and Start Thinking: A Conversation with Andrew Sullivan”
We’re 12 days away from the inaugural event of CPR’s new speaker series: Stop Following and Start Thinking. The idea is to hear from some of the most prominent against-the-grain thinkers and writers in America today.
At a free lunch event on September 19, we’ll hear from renowned journalist and thinker Andrew Sullivan.
Author, blogger, and editor Andrew Sullivan is known for his provocative, astute, and fiercely independent brand of political and social commentary.
The Washington Post called him “a media pioneer,” and The New York Times referred to him as “the most influential political writer of his generation.” In assessing his body of work, New York Magazine said, “[T]he archive makes a case for Sullivan’s outsize influence on the politics of the new century.”
Take a look at some of Sullivan’s feature work:
In this 2018 piece for New York Magazine, Sullivan is one of the first to sound the alarm that radical views on race, gender, and individualism are migrating from the back halls of elite universities to the country’s major institutions: “If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large.”
Sullivan argues in this 2022 piece that he senses a cultural shift afoot: “In the popular culture, the scolds are retreating. Netflix finally found a spine and told its woke employees to go elsewhere if they can’t handle shows they disapprove of. The great Dave Chappelle is doing a new show with Chris Rock. Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher have challenged trans extremism — and thrived…”
America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
In a 2016 essay for New York Magazine, Sullivan argues that America’s founders “constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.” But over the last 150 years, those barriers have been slowly deconstructed, and there are consequences.