Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A bestselling author and award-winning reporter covering artificial intelligence, Karen Hao was the first journalist to profile OpenAI and to write the book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, about the company, Sam Altman, and the AI industry.

Hao writes for publications like The Atlantic and leads The AI Spotlight Series, a program she designed with the Pulitzer Center that trains thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI.

Previously, Hao was a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal focused on AI & China, and a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, where she wrote about the latest AI research and its social impacts. She has been a fellow with the Harvard Technology and Public Purpose program, the MIT Knight Science Journalism program, and the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. Before coming to media, she was an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google[x].

Hao received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a minor in energy studies from MIT.

Photo credit: Shoko Takayasu

Hussein Banai is an associate professor of international studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. His research focuses on international relations and political theory, with particular focus on topics in political ideologies, conflict, diplomatic history and practice, and modern Iran and he is currently working on a multi-volume project on the logic and functions of enmity in politics. 

Banai is a distinguished non-resident fellow at the Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania, and research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT. He is the author of several books and peer-reviewed articles on topics in US-Iran relations, Iranian political development, diplomatic theory and practice, human rights, and democratic theory. He currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of International Studies Review. 

Professor Banai’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC. 

Photo credit: Emily Wehner

Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

After a selected reading from his works, Cohen will engage in a moderated conversation with Leland de la Durantaye, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Mr. Cohen’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center, both at CMC