Festival Pass

Hanna Rosin is an American journalist and author. She is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the editor and founder of DoubleX, Slate’s women’s section. Her latest book is the best-selling The End of Men and the Rise of Women.

Arlie Hochschild is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of eight books, including The Outsourced Self, The Second Shift, and So How’s the Family? And Other Essays.

In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich) she explores the global migration of care workers and in The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, she examines how we keep personal life feeling “personal” even as we turn to the market to meet ever more of our needs. In So How’s the Family? And Other Essays, she lays out the powerful links between government policy, social class and family.

Among other awards, she has received the Jessie Bernard Award, the Charles Cooley Award, and the Award for Public Understanding of Sociology from the American Sociological Association, as well as Guggenheim, Fulbright and Ford fellowships. Three of her books have been named to the New York Times ‘Notable Books of the Year’ list and plays have been based on two. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, at a seminar hosted by Pope John Paul II at Castel Gandolfo, and has been a keynote speaker at the annual conferences of the British, Scandinavian and American Sociological Associations.

Her work appears in sixteen languages.

Dan Savage is the author of the internationally syndicated advice column Savage Love, host of the popular podcast Savage Lovecast. He is also an essayist whose work has featured in the New York Times and on This American Life. His latest book is American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics.

He is the Editorial Director of The Stranger, Seattle’s weekly alternative newspaper, and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Onion, and on Salon.com.

Savage is also the author of several books, including: Savage Love; The Kid: What Happened When My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant (PEN West Award for Creative Nonfiction, Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction); Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America; and The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family.

In addition to his appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and The Colbert Report, Savage is a contributor to Ira Glass’s This American Life, and has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and ABC’s 20/20. Savage is a frequent and popular speaker on college campuses across the United States and Canada.

In September 2010, Savage created a YouTube video with his husband Terry Miller to inspire hope for LGBT young people facing harassment. In response to a number of students taking their own lives, Savage and Miller wanted to create a personal message to let LGBT youth know that “it gets better”. Today, the It Gets Better Project has become a global movement, inspiring more than 50,000 It Gets Better videos viewed over 50 million times. The It Gets Better book, co-edited by Savage and Miller, was published in March 2011, and an MTV documentary special, It Gets Better, aired in February 2012.

Savage’s latest project is his television series for MTV, Savage U. Cameras follow Savage and his producer Lauren Hutchinson as they travel to college campuses across the country, taking students’ questions and offering a crash course on relationships, responsibility, sex, love and life.

Dan Savage grew up in Chicago and now lives in Seattle, Washington with his husband Terry Miller and their son, DJ.

David Simon is a journalist, author, and television writer/producer best known as the creator and show runner of HBO series The Wire and Treme. He spent twelve years on the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. He also worked on the adaptations of his books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood for NBC and HBO respectively.

Born in Washington, he came to Baltimore in 1983 to work as a crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun. While at the paper, he reported and wrote two works of narrative non-fiction, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the former an account of a year spent with the city homicide squad and the latter, a year spent on a West Baltimore drug corner.

Homicide became the basis for the NBC drama which aired from 1993 to 1999 and for which Simon worked as a writer and producer after leaving the Sun in 1995. The Corner became an HBO miniseries and won three Emmy Awards in 2000. The Wire, a subsequent HBO drama, aired from 2002 to 2008 and depicted a dystrophic American city contending with a fraudulent drug war, the loss of its industrial base, political and educational systems incapable of reform and a media culture oblivious to all of the above.

Simon served as a writer and executive producer of HBO’s Generation Kill, a miniseries depicting U.S. Marines in the early days of the Iraq conflict. Simon also co-created the HBO series Treme. Simon also does prose work for The New Yorker, Esquire and the Washington Post, among other publications.

Kirby Ferguson is a New York-based writer, director and producer. He is the creator of the web series Everything Is A Remix and the forthcoming This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory.