New York Times Opinion Writers on the President's First 100 Days

BPL Presents hosts New York Times Opinion columnists Michelle Goldberg, Bret Stephens and M. Gessen to discuss key events and policies marking the President’s first 100 days back in the White House, moderated by Patrick Healy, deputy editor of Times Opinion.

Join us at Central Library for a discussion covering multiple perspectives on the key events and policies of the Presidential Administration in a live discussion on Brooklyn Public Library’s main stage. The Times writers will expand on their positions from various vantage points, engaging each other and the audience. New Yorkers will have an opportunity to participate in the Q&A session that will close the public forum.

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PARTICIPANTS

M. Gessen, a Times Opinion columnist since 2024, writes about their homeland of Russia, Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine, and, more recently, life in America under the Trump regime. Their expertise extends to civil rights, authoritarianism, history, politics, philosophy, gender and the Middle East. Gessen was born in Moscow and immigrated to the United States with their family at the age of 14. They got their start in journalism covering the AIDS crisis. In 1991, they returned to the Soviet Union as a reporter, first for U.S. magazines and then also for Russian ones. Gessen returned to the United States in 2013 after the Kremlin’s campaign against L.G.B.T.Q. people threatened their family. Gessen has written 11 books of nonfiction. Their 2017 book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, won the National Book Award and a number of other honors. Their other books include The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and Surviving Autocracy. Gessen has been awarded a Nieman fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Hannah Arendt prize for political thinking and other honors. Before joining the Times, Gessen was a staff writer at the New Yorker.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist at The New York Times since 2017. She writes about politics and culture, with a particular interest in the rise of authoritarianism here and abroad, the state of the progressive movement and the evolution of gender relations. Her books include Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, about religious authoritarianism in American politics; The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, about global battles over gender and reproductive rights; and The Goddess Pose, about wellness culture and the long Western fascination with Eastern spirituality, as refracted through the story of a Russian yoga evangelist. In 2018 she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on issues of workplace sexual harassment. Goldberg is also an on-air contributor at MSNBC; before joining The Times, she was a columnist at Slate.

Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times. Since joining The Times in 2017, he has written about everything from the enduring relevance of Edmund Burke to his grandmother’s advice about sex to his misgivings about The Times’s 1619 Project. He is often described as a conservative, though he’s been a vocal critic of the direction of the Republican Party. He is a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and was, for many years, The Wall Street Journal’s foreign-affairs columnist, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Bret was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. In 2022, the government of Russia barred him for life--a distinction he considers his highest personal honor. 

Patrick Healy is the deputy editor of The New York Times Opinion section, where he works closely with the columnists, the editorial board, the Audio team and the guest essay editors on a wide range of issues and ideas, in particular politics and government. Before joining Opinion in May 2021, Healy worked in the Times newsroom for 16 years, serving as Politics editor during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the 2018 congressional midterm elections, and as a deputy Culture editor. As a reporter at the Times from 2005 to 2016, Healy was national political correspondent covering the 2016 presidential election, helping lead the team of reporters assigned to that race; he also covered Hillary Clinton's campaign in the 2008 race. From 2009 to 2014 Healy was the Times theater reporter. Before coming to the Times, he was a reporter for the Boston Globe. Healy was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting, for his higher education coverage at the Globe. He received The Livingston Award in 2001 for his Globe series on Harvard honors and grade inflation, as well as prizes for his coverage of student suicide at M.I.T.