Denver Gold Forum 2013

Seth Lipsky has been described in the Boston Globe as “a legendary figure in contemporary journalism,” in the Atlantic.com as having “the most interesting mind in journalism,” and in the New Criterion as “one of our age’s great journalists.” Steve Forbes has called his editorials on monetary reform “brilliant” — “the Federalist Papers for a gold standard.” Those editorials are contained in the anthology It Shines for All: The Gold Standard Editorials of The New York Sun.

Mr. Lipsky is the founding editor of The New York Sun and The Forward newspapers. He helped found two others, The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal Europe. He is a former member of the editorial board and foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal. He was a roving correspondent in Asia for the Wall Street Journal and a combat reporter in Vietnam for Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Mr. Lipsky’s most recent book is The Rise of Abraham Cahan which is due for release in October 2013. His third book is  The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide. The first is an anthology he edited, The Billion Dollar Bubble and Other Stories From the Asian Wall Street Journal. The second was The Iconoclast, a collection of his humor columns for the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Lipsky is a member of the adjunct faculty of Columbia Journalism School and is a painter of portaits and landscapes. A graduate of Harvard College, he is married to the author Amity Shlaes. They have four children and reside at New York.

Walter Russell Mead is the James Clark Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest. From 1997 to 2010, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy from 2003 until his departure. Until 2011, he was also a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale, where he had taught in the Yale International Security Studies Programsince 2008.

His book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), was widely hailed by reviewers, historians, and diplomats as an important study that will change the way Americans and others think about American foreign policy. Among several honors and prizes, Special Providence received the Lionel Gelber Award for best book in English on international relations in 2002.

Prof. Mead’s most recent book, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), is a major study of 400 years of conflict between Anglophone powers and rivals ranging from absolute monarchies like Spain and France through Communist and Fascist enemies in the twentieth century to al-Qaeda today.

Mr. Mead is also the author of the “Via Meadia” blog at The American Interest, where he writes regular essays on international affairs, religion, politics, culture, education, economics, technology, literature, and the media. Mead’s writings are frequently linked to and discussed by major news outlets and websites such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Harper’s, the Washington Post, and RealClearPolitics, as well as by foreign periodicals. He also frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs. He serves as a regular reviewer of books for Foreign Affairs and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs. In 1997, he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the category of essays and criticism.

He is an honors graduate of Groton and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and the translation of New Testament Greek. Mr. Mead has traveled widely in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and often speaks at conferences in the United States and abroad. He is a founding board member of the New America Foundation. He is a native of South Carolina and lives in Jackson Heights, New York.