#About the event
Duration: 60 minutes
6:00pm, Tuesday 10th March 2026
Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse
119 Lamington St, New Farm
In 2020 (an eventful year), award-winning journalist and New Yorker contributor M. Gessen released Surviving Autocracy, an astute and pragmatic guide to navigating the erosion of political norms and freedoms. Drawing on their Soviet childhood and years spent working as a journalist in Putin's Russia, Gessen offers a deep and incisive analysis of how language, media and other social fixtures are co-opted and dismantled by autocratic leaders like Trump – and why institutions won't save the day. Five years on, as the collapse of the liberal international order (not to mention the East Wing of the White House) accelerates, Gessen's work is essential to surviving what might come next. Join this leading thinker and commentator on our global authoritarian turn in conversation with Scott Stephens (ABC Radio National's The Minefield) as they discuss what Trump 2.0 means for the future of democracy.
#Artists
M. Gessen
M. Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014 and was a staff writer from 2017 to 2024. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. They have written about Russia, Ukraine, autocracy, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among other subjects, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, they have been a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, they were dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. They are a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They are the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, a Polk Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award.
Scott Stephens
Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. He has published widely on moral philosophy, literature and democratic theory. He and Waleed Aly are the authors of Uncivil Wars: How Contempt is Corroding Democracy (Quarterly Essay 87, 2022). He is editor of Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other Writings by Raimond Gaita (2023), and the co-editor and translator of two volumes of the selected writings of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (2005) and The Universal Exception (2006). His forthcoming book is The Demand of Decency: Reflections on the Moral Life.
