Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including GULAG: A HISTORY which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; IRON CURTAIN, on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature; and RED FAMINE, on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, which provides the background to today's Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In 2020 she published the bestselling TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY, which analyzed the appeal of autocracy to Western intellectuals and politicians.

Her newest book, AUTOCRACY, INC, published in July 2024, examines the network of dictatorships - Russia, China, Iran, Norht Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others - who now work together to support one another, preserve their power and undermine the democratic world.

Anne has been writing about Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989, when she covered the collapse of communism in Poland for the Economist magazine. She has also covered US, UK and European politics for a wide range of American and British publications. She is a former Washington Post columnist and a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine. She is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and writer, and lives in Poland and the U.S.

Danielle Crittenden is International Blog Editor for the Huffington Post Media Group. A longtime contributor to the Huffington Post site, her numerous articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and the Ladies Home Journal, among other publications. A former columnist for the New York Post, she has appeared on NBC's Today show, The O'Reilly Factor, ABC's 20/20 and Nightline, and network news shows, as well as numerous programs for CSPAN, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, Fox, NPR, CTV, and CBC. She is co-author of the cookbook, From a Polish Country Kitchen (Chronicle, Fall 2012), with Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum, and the author of three previous books: Her non-fiction book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1999; Touchstone 2000), resulted in Vanity Fair describing Crittenden as “one of the most important new thinkers about women and family”. She also has written two works of fiction: The President’s Secret IMs (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007), originally published on the Huffington Post; and Amanda Bright @ Home, the first novel ever to be serialized by the Wall Street Journal(Warner Books, 2003).

Crittenden is married to journalist and author David Frum, a former special assistant and speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and contributor to CNN and Daily Beast/Newsweek. They have three children and live in Washington, D.C. and Wellington, Ontario. You can email her at Danielle.Crittenden@huffingtonpost.com