Speakers
Robert Scheer "Keynote Speaker"
Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.
Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at Truthdig.
Scheer can be heard on the political radio program “Left, Right and Center” on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He is currently a clinical professor of communications at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Scheer has written nine books, including“Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power”; “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War”; “America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals”; with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, “The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq”; “Playing President: “My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton—and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush”; and “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.” Scheer’s latest book, “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street”(Nation Books), was released on September 7, 2010.
Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.
Scheer received the 2010 Distinguished Work in New Media Award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Greater Los Angeles Chapter, and in 2011 Ithaca College awarded him the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.
Most recently, Scheer was honored with the 2011 Society of Professional Journalist's Sigma Delta Chi Award for best independent online column writing.
Martin Beck
Martin Beck, social media and reader engagement editor for the Los
Angeles Times, is leading the Times' efforts to cultivate community and
connect with its audience in new ways. Working across the newsroom,
Martin is helping journalists identify effective ways to use social media
networks and other emerging technologies. In 22 years with the Times,
Martin has worked in a wide range of newsroom positions, including sports
writer, copy editor, page designer, technology editor and web deputy.
Martin, @latimesbeck on Twitter, is a graduate of UC Irvine and the
University of Missouri journalism school.
Jim Carlton
Jim Carlton has covered West Coast political and economic issues for the Wall Street Journal for the past six years. Prior to that, he was an environmental and real-estate writer for the Journal and also covered Silicon Valley. He is also author of "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania and Business Blunders." Before joining the Journal in 1990, he was a reporter at newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register and Houston Chronicle. Mr. Carlton is based in the Journal's San Francisco office as a senior special writer, and over the years has covered many social protests, including the riots at the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle. More recently, he has been one of the Journal’s lead writers covering the Occupy movement.
Rob Curley
Rob Curley began his career in 1996 as an education reporter and online editor at a small daily newspaper in Kansas.
For four years, beginning in 2008, he held executive newsroom positions at the Las Vegas Sun and Greenspun Media Group. During that period, the Las Vegas Sun became the first news organization in the world to win the top awards in digital journalism (the ONA and EPpy), the top award in broadcast journalism (the duPont) and the top award in print journalism (the Pulitzer).
Curley’s ground-breaking work has been documented in everything from college journalism textbooks to industry and mainstream magazines and white papers to even a 20-minute segment on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. In a 2005 Sunday business story, the New York Times referred to Curley’s work in Lawrence as “the newspaper of the future.”
In December 2006, he was named by the National Newspaper of Association’s PRESSTIME magazine as one of the top “20 Under 40,” a feature designed to recognize those who have proven themselves as “change agents within their companies and the industry, providing much needed leadership and vision.”
In 2007, Curley was named to Washingtonian Magazine’s annual list of the Washington D.C. metro area’s “40 under 40.” In the March issue of Creativity Magazine, he was named to the magazine’s annual list of the 50 most creative people in the world.
Tom Hayden
After over fifty years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden is still a leading voice for ending the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, for erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through a more participatory democracy.
He currently writes for The Nation, organizes, travels, and speaks constantly against the current wars as founder and Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, CA. He also recently drafted and lobbied successfully for Los Angeles and San Francisco ordinances to end all taxpayer subsidies for sweatshops.
“Tom Hayden changed America”, writes Nicolas Lemann of The Atlantic. He created “the blueprint for the Great Society programs”, writes former presidential adviser Richard Goodwin. He was “the single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement” according to a New York Times book review. During his time in Sacramento, he was described as “the conscience of the Senate” by the Sacramento Bee’s political analyst. The Nation magazine recently named him one of the 50 greatest progressives of the 20th century.
Hayden has taught recently at Scripps and Claremont colleges in Claremont, Occidental College, the Harvard Institute of Politics, and is the author or editor of 19 books and hundreds of articles for publications from the Los Angeles Times to the Boston Globe to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Hayden describes himself as “an archeological dig.” He may be the character in the Kris Kristofferson song who was “partly truth and partly fiction, a walking contradiction.” It is a fact that he was the batting champion of the Los Angeles Dodgers fantasy baseball camp in the 1980s.
Kate Linthicum
Kate Linthicum is a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about City Hall. Previously, she worked on the Times’ national desk. She covered the 2008 presidential campaign and has contributed stories from across the nation and abroad. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Oregonian, Politico, and People Magazine.
Jarret Lovell
A native of Southern California, Jarret Lovell earned his bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of California, Irvine and his master's degree and doctorate in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University. He is the author of several scholarly articles examining criminal justice and popular culture, and he is the author of two books. His book Good Cop/Bad Cop: Mass Media and the Cycle of Police Reform (2003; Willow Tree Press) examines the influence of media on law enforcement practices and police accountability. His most recent book, Crimes of Dissent: Civil Disobedience, Criminal Justice and the Politics of Conscience (2009; NYU Press) provides readers with an in-depth understanding of why activists break the law for justice, and what happens to them when they do. When not working, he spends his time as a deejay hosting a weekly radio program.
His research interests are alternative means of justice attainment such as civil disobedience, direct action and social protest as well as system responses to these strategies of protest. Other interests include understanding our fascination with violence in popular culture, and media portrayals of the administration of justice. He is currently researching how the justice system investigates and responds to instances of cruelty and abuse toward animals.
Vanessa Williamson
Vanessa Williamson is a third-year PhD student in Government and Social Policy. She is the co-author, with Theda Skocpol, of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, January 2012). Her primary research interest is the politics of taxation in the United States.
Before coming to Harvard, she served at the Policy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Williamson lobbied to improve the benefits and support available to military veterans, including for the passage of the 2008 GI Bill, a $60 billion investment in veterans’ college education. She is also the author of Supporting Our Troops, Veterans and Their Families: Lessons Learned and Future Opportunities for Philanthropy, an analysis of almost $250 million in philanthropic spending by the California Community Foundation.
Her work has been cited in diverse media outlets, including the New York Times, the Economist, the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," McClatchy, the Guardian, and Mother Jones. She has also testified before the House Veterans Affairs Committee regarding outreach to new veterans.
She received her B.A. in French language and literature from NYU, and her MA from NYU's Institute of French Studies. Vanessa also manages the website I Heart Taxes, a pro-tax project that donates its proceeds to the United States Treasury. In her spare time, Vanessa is an amateur aerialist at Aircraft Aerial Arts.
