Participant(s) Bio
Christopher Buckley was born in New York City in 1952 and graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1976. He shipped out in the Merchant Marine and at age 24 became managing editor of Esquire magazine. At age 29, he became chief speechwriter to the Vice President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Since 1989 he has been founder and editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI magazine.
He is the author of twelve books, most of them national bestsellers. They have been translated into sixteen foreign languages, including Russian, Korean and Indonesian. They include: The White House Mess, Wet Work, Thank You For Smoking, God Is My Broker, Little Green Men, No Way To Treat a First Lady and Florence of Arabia. Thank You For Smoking has been made into a major motion picture starring Aaron Eckhart, Robert Duvall, William Macy, Rob Lowe, Adam Brody and Katie Holmes. His novel Little Green Men is being made into a move starring John Malkovich and will be directed by Whit Stillman.
Mr. Buckley has contributed over 60 comic essays to The New Yorker magazine. His journalism, satire and criticism has been widely published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Washington Monthly, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Esquire, and other publications. He is the recipient of the 2002 Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. In 2004 he was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written widely on issues of race, immigration, ethnicity, politics and America's changing demographics in such leading publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, where he is a Sunday Op-Ed columnist. The Economist has praised him for "decisively changing the understanding of the Latino experience in the United States," and Esquire magazine recently listed him among the "Best and Brightest" Americans under 40 who will revolutionize the way we think. His essay "Mongrel America," which first appeared in The Atlantic, was included in The Best American Political Writing of 2003.
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