Skirball Talks: Facts Matter

Panel 1

Tina Brown is an award-winning journalist, editor and author.  Between 1979 and 2001, she was editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk. For her services to journalism, she was awarded the honor of Commander of the Order of the British Empire by H.M. Queen Elizabeth in 2000. She was inducted into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2007.

In 2008, Brown launched and edited the digital news site The Daily Beast which won the news website of the year award in 2012 and 2013. She founded Women in the World in 2009 as a live journalism platform for female leaders, CEO’s, celebrities, and global activists and hosted ten sold-out summits at New York’s Lincoln Center from 2010 to 2020. Some of the women who appeared on the summit stage include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Queen Rania, Madeleine Albright, Susan Rice, Afghan First Lady Rhula Ghani, Oprah, Nicole Kidman, Scarlett Johansson, Anna Wintour, and Nobel Peace Prize winners Leymah Gbowee and Nadia Murad.  Brown expanded Women in the World internationally with summits in London, Toronto, Dubai and Delhi and with salons throughout the United States.

Brown is the author of 2022’s The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil, her inside account of the British royal family’s battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years—only to confront new, 21st-century crises. It is a follow-up to her 2007 New York Times best-selling biography of the Princess of Wales, The Diana Chronicles. She is also the author of The Vanity Fair Diaries which was chosen as one of the best books of 2017 by Time, People, Amazon, The Guardian, The Economist, Entertainment Weekly, and Vogue. In 2018, she hosted the podcast TBD with Tina Brown, in which she interviewed politicians, actors, journalists, and newsmakers. In 2021, she was honored as a Library Lion by the New York Public Library.

From 1981 until his death in 2020, Tina Brown was married to the editor, publisher, and historian Sir Harold Evans. She is the mother of two children and lives in New York City. 

Matthew Purdy was named editor at large of The New York Times in August 2022. Previously he served as deputy executive editor and deputy managing editor. In a variety of roles, Mr. Purdy has overseen investigative reporting for The Times since 2003. He joined The Times in December 1993 and in addition to editing has worked as a reporter, a columnist and an editor.

In recent years, he has been involved in shepherding The Times’s biggest investigative projects, including those into former President Donald J. Trump’s finances, the casualties of U.S. military airstrikes, and the sexual misconduct of prominent men in Hollywood and other industries. All three won Pulitzer Prizes.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Purdy worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 12 years, covering local government and Washington.  In 1989, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for a series of stories about abuses in the federal government’s kidney dialysis program.

Linda Kinstler (Moderator) is the executive editor of The Dial magazine, and a contributing writer for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine and for Jewish Currents.

Her first book, Come to this Court and Cry, won the 2023 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize for Jewish literature.  She was also a 2023 finalist for the Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing, and her reporting for Jewish Currents has been honored by the American Jewish Press Association’s Rockower Awards.

Linda’s reporting has been cited by the ICJ and has inspired documentaries. Her work appears in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Wired, and more. She was previously a Marshall Scholar in the UK, where she covered British politics for The Atlantic. She has been a contributing writer at Politico Europe, which she helped launch in Brussels in spring 2015. Prior to that, she was the managing editor of The New Republic, where she covered the war in Ukraine.  

Linda received her Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley in August 2023.

Panel 2

John Avlon is senior political analyst and fill-in anchor at CNN, appearing on CNN This Morning every day. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast between 2013 and 2018, during which time the site’s traffic more than doubled to over one million readers a day while winning 17 journalism awards. He is the author of the books Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, and Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations as well as co-editor of the acclaimed Deadline Artists anthologies of America’s greatest newspaper columns. In his twenties, Avlon served as chief speechwriter to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, he and his team were responsible for writing the eulogies for all firefighters and police officers murdered in the destruction of the World Trade Center. Avlon’s essay on the attacks, “The Resilient City” concluded the anthology Empire City: New York through the Centuries and won acclaim as “the single best essay written in the wake of 9/11.” He’s appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily Show. He won the National Society of Newspaper Columnists award for best online columnist 2012. He lives with his wife Margaret Hoover, host of Firing Line on PBS and a CNN contributor, and their two children in New York.

Paul Tash is a journalist, news executive and teacher. He is chairman of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and an adjunct instructor at Duke University.

Paul worked most of his career at the Tampa Bay Times, Florida’s leading news organization. He started as a reporter in 1978 and worked his way through various news jobs – including Washington bureau chief – to become the editor of the Times and chief executive of the company. He retired in 2022. While Paul was chairman, journalists at the Times won eight Pulitzer Prizes, more than all but seven other news organizations.

Paul remains chairman of the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and media leaders; it owns the Times Publishing company. He has served on the boards of America’s leading journalism organizations, including the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Pulitzer Prizes, where he was chairman.

A native of South Bend, Indiana, Paul graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University and earned a law degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he was a Marshall Scholar. 

Paul is married to Karyn (Krayer) Tash, a teacher who retired after a distinguished career at St. Petersburg High School. They have two daughters, a physician and a lawyer, and three grandchildren.

Nabiha Syed (Moderator) is the chief executive officer of The Markup, an award-winning journalism non-profit that challenges technology to serve the public good. Under her leadership, The Markup’s unique approach has been referenced by Congress 21 times, inspired dozens of class action lawsuits, won a national Murrow Award and a Loeb Award, and been recognized as “Most Innovative” by FastCompany in 2022.

Before launching The Markup in 2020, Nabiha spent a decade as an acclaimed media lawyer focused on the intersection of frontier technology and newsgathering, including advising on publication issues with the Snowden revelations and the Steele Dossier, access litigation around police disciplinary records, as well as privacy and free speech issues globally. Described by Forbes as “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers”, she has briefed two presidents on free speech in the digital age, delivered the Salant Lecture at Harvard, headlined SXSW to discuss data privacy after Roe v. Wade, and was awarded the NAACP/Archewell Digital Civil Rights award in 2023 for her work.

A California native and daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Nabiha holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she co-founded one of the nation’s first media law clinics, a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, and a law degree from Oxford, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar. She serves on the boards of the New York Civil Liberties Union, The New Press, and the Scott Trust, among others.

PRESENTING PARTNERS

The Association of Marshall Scholars is the official alumni organization of the Marshall Scholarship, one of the world’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships for postgraduate study.

The AMS works to support the legacy and aims of the Marshall Scholarship Program by supporting current scholars during their time in the UK, by connecting alumni personally and professionally, and by contributing to a culture of knowledge, expertise, and the enduring transatlantic friendship between the United States and United Kingdom.