Originally broadcast at 10:30 a.m. ET Thursday, August 26, 2021.

National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker specializing in politics and foreign affairs, known for his articulate and accessible commentary and offering assessments of the biggest stories of the day. Osnos closes the 2021 Chautauqua Lecture Series with a presentation on “American Bedrock: Renewing the Ties That Bind Us,” discussing the resilience of American democracy and those who are rebuilding community and prosperity in the 21st century.

Prior to joining The New Yorker, Osnos worked as the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series on the global trade in unsafe imports that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He also spent two years as the Chicago Tribune’s Middle East Correspondent, and in 2003, Osnos embedded himself with the U.S. Marines during the invasion of Iraq. He was the 2007 recipient of the Livingston Award, the nation’s leading prize for young journalists, and the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia. His 2011 New Yorker piece “The Fallout,” about the events and aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, won a 2012 Overseas Press Club Award.

Based on the eight years he lived in Beijing, his National Book Award-winning Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China is a multi-layered look at the rise of the individual in China and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. That book was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to Age of Ambition, Osnos is the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now and the forthcoming Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.

Osnos graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, and is a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

This program is made possible by the Barbara A. Georgescu Lectureship Endowment and the Edith B. and Arthur E. Earley Lectureship.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.