Edward Alden is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), specializing in U.S. economic competitiveness. He is the author of the new book Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy, which focuses on the federal government’s failure to respond effectively to competitive challenges on issues such as trade, currency, worker retraining programs, education, infrastructure, and support for innovation. In addition, Alden is the director of the CFR Renewing America publication series and coauthor of a recent CFR Discussion Paper “A Winning Trade Policy for the United States.”

Alden’s previous book, The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11, was a finalist for the Lukas Book Prize, for narrative nonfiction, in 2009. The jury called Alden’s book “a masterful job of comprehensive reporting, fair-minded analysis, and structurally sound argumentation.”

Alden was the project codirector of the 2011 CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Trade and Investment Policy, which was co-chaired by former White House chief of staff Andrew Card and former Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle. Alden was the project director of the 2009 CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy.

Alden was previously the Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and prior to that was the newspaper’s Canada bureau chief, based in Toronto. He worked as a reporter at the Vancouver Sun and was the managing editor of the newsletter Inside U.S. Trade, widely recognized as a leading source of reporting on U.S. trade policies. Alden has won several national and international awards for his reporting. He has done numerous TV and radio appearances as an analyst on political and economic issues, including on PBS NewsHour, NPR, BBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. His work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Fortune, and Toronto Globe and Mail.

Alden earned a master’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Berkeley, and pursued doctoral studies before returning to a journalism career. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of British Columbia. Alden was the winner of numerous academic awards, including a Mellon fellowship in the humanities and a MacArthur Foundation graduate fellowship.
 

Craig Benjamin is a Professor of History in the Meijer Honors College at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA, where he teaches Big History and ancient world history to students at all levels. Craig is a frequent guest presenter at conferences worldwide, and the author of several books and numerous chapters and articles on ancient Central Asian history, Big History, and world history. Recent books include Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (McGraw-Hill, 2014), Volume 4 of the Cambridge History of the World (CUP, 2015), Empires of Ancient Eurasia and the First Silk Roads Era (CUP, forthcoming 2018) and The Routledge Companion to Big History (Routledge, forthcoming 2018).

Craig has recorded several programs and courses for the History Channel, Discovery Channel, and The Great Courses, and has also lectured for Scientific American and New York Times cruises, and for Archaeological Tours. Craig is chair of the College Board Test Development Committees for the SAT World History exam. He is current Vice President of the IBHA; and immediate past-President of the World History Association. Before becoming an historian Craig was a professional jazz musician in his native Australia for 25 years. Craig has also been an adventurer for much of his life, and has trekked and climbed in most of the great mountain ranges on the planet.
 

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times bestsellers, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995.

Born in Washington D.C., Ms. Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer. In 1983, she joined The New York Times as a metropolitan correspondent and then moved to the Times’ Washington Bureau in 1986 to cover politics. Since then, Ms. Dowd has covered seven presidential campaigns, served as the Times’ White House correspondent, and wrote “On Washington,” a column for The New York Times Magazine. In the run up to the 2004 presidential election, G.P. Putnam published her first book, Bushworld which covered the presidency and personality of George W. Bush. After Bushworld quickly climbed the best-seller list, Ms. Dowd switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another bestseller Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, released in 2005. Her most recent book (published September of 2016) is The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics.

In addition to the New York Times, Ms. Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated, and others.
 

Carl Hulse is The Times’s Chief Washington Correspondent and managing editor of First Draft, a daily political newsletter. He is the author of On Washington, a regular and widely read New York Times column chronicling developments in the nation’s capital from the perspective of a longtime expert in politics and policy. Carl was previously Washington Editor for The Times, directing all facets of Washington coverage of the White House and executive branch, Congress, the courts, and the Pentagon from 2011 to 2014.

Carl also served as the Chief Congressional Correspondent for The Times for more than a decade and is considered one of the nation’s leading authorities on congressional affairs. He originally joined The Times in 1986 as a Washington correspondent and later bureau chief for The New York Times Regional Newspapers, a group of three dozen newspapers around the country then owned by the company. He became an editor for The Times in 2000 and played a leading role in managing the newspaper’s coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath.

He is a graduate of Illinois State University and spent the early years of his career working at newspapers in Illinois and Florida before coming to Washington in 1985. He and his wife Kimberly are longtime residents of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and have two sons, Nicholas and Benjamin. He is the drummer in the Capitol Hill garage band The NativeMakers and is a sought-after commentator and speaker.
 

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. is chairman of The New York Times Company.

Mr. Sulzberger served as publisher of The New York Times from 1992 to 2017. In his quarter-century as publisher, he transformed The Times into an international, digital-first news organization with a global audience of more than 130 million people and 3.5 million paid subscriptions. Early in his tenure, he led the push to take the paper national and, in 1996, launched nytimes.com. Under his leadership, The Times won 60 Pulitzer Prizes, doubling the paper’s total Pulitzer count.

Mr. Sulzberger joined The Times in 1978 as a correspondent in its Washington bureau. He moved to New York as a metro reporter in 1981 and was appointed assistant metro editor later that year. From 1983 to 1987, he worked in a variety of business departments, including production and corporate planning. In January 1987, he was named assistant publisher and, a year later, deputy publisher, overseeing the news and business departments. In both capacities, he was involved in planning The Times’s automated color printing and distribution facilities in Edison, N.J., and at College Point in Queens, N.Y., as well as the creation of the six-section color newspaper.

Mr. Sulzberger was chairman of the board of New York Outward Bound Schools and a member of the board of North Carolina Outward Bound. He also helped found and was chairman of the Times Square Alliance. He currently serves on the board of the Mohonk Preserve.

Before coming to The Times, Mr. Sulzberger was a reporter with The Raleigh (N.C.) Times from 1974 to 1976, and a London correspondent for The Associated Press from 1976 to 1978. He is a graduate of Tufts University.