A panel of writers and editors lay out what you need to know before heading to the polls in November.
Join some of the brightest intellectuals of our day as they break down what they see as the major issues steering this election season, and find out what they think you need to decide before you go to the polls in November.
Our panel of writers and editors will also discuss what they believe are the issues the next president will need to address to move our nation forward- The Commonwealth Club of California
Bio
Martin Kettle
Martin Kettle writes for the Guardian on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law, music and many other subjects. He has worked on the Guardian since 1984 in several capacities, including as a columnist, classical music critic, political leader writer, Guardian Europe editor and US bureau chief 1997-2001. He was chief leader writer 2001-6. He was appointed an assistant editor of the paper in 1994.
Before joining the Guardian he was political correspondent of the Sunday Times and before that home affairs correspondent of New Society magazine. He is the author of Policing the Police (with Peter Hain) and Uprising (with Lucy Hodges) and was the editor of the Guardian Guide to the New Europe and the Guardian Guide to the European Single Currency.
He was born in Yorkshire in 1949 and educated at Leeds modern school and Oxford University, where he studied modern history. He is married to Alison Hannah and has two adult sons.
Thomas Powers
Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, and The Confirmation (2000), a novel.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.
Frank Rich
Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.
From 2003-2005, Mr. Rich had been the front page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section's redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to The Times's culture editor on the paper's overall cultural news report.
Mr. Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 he became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page.
From 1999-2003, he additionally served as Senior Writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for The Times and allowed Mr. Rich to explore a variety of topics at greater length than before. His columns and articles in each venue have drawn from his background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics.
In addition to his work at The Times, Mr. Rich has written about culture and politics for many other publications. His childhood memoir, "Ghost Light," was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to Ghost Light have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich's drama reviews, "Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993," was published by Random House in October 1998. His book, "The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson," co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for the New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times magazine. He was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970's.
Born on June 2, 1949, in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rich is a graduate of its public schools. He earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, an honorary Harvard College scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship.
Robert B. Silvers
Robert B. Silvers is co-editor of The New York Review of Books. Prior to joining the Review, Mr. Silvers was, from 1959 to 1963, associate editor of Harper's magazine, editor of the book Writing in America and translator of La Gangrene.
Before that, Mr. Silvers lived in Paris for six years (1952 to 1958), where he served with the U.S. Army at SHAPE Headquarters and attended the Sorbonne and Ecole des Sciences Politiques. He joined the editorial board of The Paris Review in 1954 and became Paris editor in 1956.
He also worked as press secretary to Governor Chester Bowles in 1950. Mr. Silvers, who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947, was born in Mineola, New York.
Michael Tomasky
Michael Tomasky was previously a senior political columnist and contributing editor at New York magazine. He has also worked as an editor and writer at The Village Voice and The New York Observer.
He is author of two books, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and the Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America, and Hillary's Turn, an account of the New York Senate race of 2000. He has also been published in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, and was recently a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard. He is well known to Prospect readers for his weekly Web column and feature articles in the magazine.
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