Join us on Zoom for a special event with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior policy advisor Ami Fields-Meyer, authors of the new book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. You may remember their acclaimed 2025 New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” which offered a roadmap for resisting authoritarianism through courage, community, and nonviolent action, and sparked a wave of conversation and debate.
Now, at a time when the fight for freedom touches every aspect of our lives, they have delivered a deeply reported manual for political courage. Based on over 100 original interviews with dissidents, activists, and theorists worldwide, On Courage offers sixteen essential lessons for taking personal risks and defying authoritarianism in our daily lives.
Meet a student from Hong Kong who risked everything for democracy. A mom in a working-class neighborhood of Caracas who broke with the political movement that raised her. Cairo twentysomethings who staged a gutsy stunt to help bring down a dictator. A mild-mannered immigrant fighting to save a landmark U.S. civil rights law. People throughout the United States and across five continents who faced serious risks for dissenting in their workplace, their community, or their country. On Courage is the story of how they did it anyway – and how you can do it, too. Rachel Maddow called the book “invaluable” and “a classic of our time”, writing that “everybody should read it.”
The event will include a program delivered by the authors followed by a Q&A with questions submitted by attendees.
JULIA ANGWIN is an award-winning investigative journalist, a bestselling author, a New York Times contributing Opinion writer, and founding director of the Independent Media + Audience Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. She is the founder of two nonprofit newsrooms – Proof News and The Markup – that investigate the impacts of technology. She is a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014) and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (Random House, March 2009).
AMI FIELDS-MEYER is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a former senior policy advisor at the White House, where he led U.S. policy initiatives related to civil rights, consumer protection, and technology policy. He has served as a strategist to national civil rights organizations, political candidates, and high-profile public officials from Los Angeles City Hall to the West Wing. Fields-Meyer’s writing on issues of democracy and public policy has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. A former speechwriter, he is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Old North Illuminated’s 2026 Speaker Series events are brought to you in part by Hub Town Tours.
