Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and a Senior Fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of three critically acclaimed and award-winning histories of the Soviet Union: “Red Famine, Iron Curtain, and Gulag” - winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” raises an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West and explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy.

Jason Stanley is a best-selling author of five books, including “How Propaganda Works,” winner of the Prose Award in Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers, and “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” Stanley serves on the Advisory Board of the Prison Policy Initiative and writes frequently about propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, democracy, and authoritarianism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Boston Review.