Saturday, April 9, 8:15–9:15 AM
Colorado Convention Center, Bellco Theatre
Because our goal is to send you home from conference bursting with new ideas and knowledge, we’re featuring something special each day—a BIG idea. These are ideas and messages that can impact and empower the way you think, act, and work.
Anand Giridharadas is a writer.
He is a New York Times columnist, writing the biweekly “Letter from America.” He is the author, most recently, of The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him (optioned for movie adaption by the director Kathryn Bigelow). In 2011 he published India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking, about returning to the India his parents left.
His datelines include Italy, India, China, Dubai, Norway, Japan, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Uruguay, and the United States. He has also written for The Times‘s arts, business, and travel pages, and its Book Review, Sunday Review, and magazine.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and in Maryland, and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard. He worked briefly as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Mumbai, before becoming a journalist in 2005, reporting from that city for the International Herald Tribune and The Times for four and a half years. He was appointed a columnist in 2008. He first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics under the tutelage of Jill Abramson.
He appears regularly on TV and the radio in the United States and globally, including on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Morning Joe, and The Daily Show. He has given talks on the main stage of TED and at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the Aspen Institute, Summit at Sea, the Sydney Opera House, the United Nations, the Asia Society, PopTech and Google. He has received honors from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. He is a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Giridharadas lectures on a wide range of topics, bringing a special cultural take to his subjects, whether it’s the prospects for America’s future or the rise of the non-Western powers or the relationship between humans and our technologies. His Big Ideas presentation will focus on inequality, Islamaphobia, and the True American.
This Big Ideas session will be captioned for our deaf and hard of hearing attendees.