David Wolman, author, award-winning journalist and a contributing editor for Wired magazine, will speak on “Digital Dissidents: Inside Egypt’s Youth Movement, 2008-2012” Tuesday, April 17, at 7 p.m. in Richard and Lucille Ice Auditorium at Linfield College.
Two and a half years before there was anything called the “Arab Spring,” Wolman traveled to Egypt to research and write about tech-savvy dissidents protesting against the Mubarak regime. Those same activists went on to play a central role in organizing the revolution that began on January 25, 2011. Wolman will share stories about his reporting, both from 2008 and during two trips in 2011, and discuss the roles of social media in recent uprisings from Cairo to California.
Wolman’s 2008 story was one of the earliest pieces of journalism about the conflict, before the movement came to be known as the “Arab Spring.” He followed that with his e-book, The Instigators, published May 2011.
Wolman, a graduate of Stanford University’s journalism program, is the author of three books, A Left-Hand Turn Around the World, Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email and his most recent, The End of Money, published in February 2012. He has written for a variety of publications including Outside, Mother Jones, Newsweek, Discover and Forbes, among others. Wolman’s work has appeared in Best American Science Writing 2009. Wolman’s many accomplishments include receiving a 2011 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship and serving as a Fulbright journalism fellow in Japan.
The event is sponsored by the Edith Green Lectureship and is free and open to the public. For more information, call Dawn Nowacki, 503-883-2276.
