The New Republic: Chris Hughes, Franklin Foer, and Hendrik Hertzberg on the Legacy of the Magazine

Chris Hughes, Franklin Foer, and Hendrik Hertzberg come together on the centennial of The New Republic to reflect on the magazine's enduring legacy and to celebrate the new anthology, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America. Insurrections of the Mind is a collection of the magazine's most seminal essays from the past century, featuring a stunning lineup of writers including, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, Michael Lewis, Zadie Smith, and Margaret Talbot. 

CHRIS HUGHES has spent his career using emerging technologies to transform industries and how we communicate and share. A co-founder of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Chris was responsible for communications, user experience, and product development in the early years of the social network.  In 2007 he became Director of Online Organizing for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, creating a social network that empowered Obama supporters to create tens of thousands of grassroots groups and events and to give over $500 million online. Today Hughes is the owner and publisher of The New Republic, a 100-year-old magazine about politics and culture that is growing into a multi-platform digital media company. Integrated across mobile, tablet, web, and print, The New Republic is setting the standard for how mid-sized, traditional media brands can transition to the participatory web. Hughes is also the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Segovia, a for-profit company leading the charge in digitizing the world’s social programs with a focus on cash transfer technology in emerging markets.Hughes is also an independent investor in technology and media companies, a trustee of the Knight Foundation, and a board member of GiveDirectly.  He has been named a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum. Hughes graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2006 with a degree in History and Literature.

FRANKLIN FOER is the editor of The New Republic. Foer edited the magazine's centennial anthology, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America. He is the author of the international bestseller How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, which has been translated into 27 languages. He is also the editor of Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, which won a National Jewish Book Award. He is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a graduate of Columbia College, and a native Washingtonian.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG has been a Presidential speechwriter, editor of The New Republic, and an editor and staff writer at The New Yorker.  Mr. Hertzberg broke into big-time journalism in 1966 as a cub reporter for Newsweek in San Francisco, where he covered the  Beatles’ last concert, Ronald Reagan’s first campaign, and the birth of hippiedom. In 1969, after three years in the U.S. Navy, he joined The New Yorker as a reporter for “The Talk of the Town.” In 1976 he decamped for the White House, where he worked on all of President Carter’s major speeches, up to and including the Farewell Address. For twelve years after Mr. Carter’s re-election defeat, Mr. Hertzberg was with The New Republic, as editor, political correspondent, and editor again. In 1992 he rejoined The New Yorker, initially as executive editor, and has been there ever since, currently as a staff writer.A four-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Mr. Hertzberg is the author of Politics: Observations & Arguments(2004), a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and of ¡Obámanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era (2009).