Evan Osnos: Shadows of the American Dream
National Book Award–winning author and longtime New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos examines what pursuing the American Dream means in an era of extreme economic inequality, where wealth and opportunity are increasingly concentrated among elites. Drawing on his book ‘The Haves and Have-Yachts’, Osnos offers a sharp, often darkly humorous portrait of billionaires and oligarchs, revealing both the allure and isolation of immense wealth. In conversation with Tracy Metz, Osnos explores how concentrated power influences workplaces, public life and opportunities for ordinary people worldwide.
Together with Evan Osnos Staff writer at The New YorkerAbout the speakers
Evan Osos is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, and Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, works that collectively reflect his enduring engagement with power, ambition, and the forces that define our contemporary world.
About the moderator
Tracy Metz is a journalist, author and podcaster who served as the director of the John Adams Institute from 2013 to 2025, where she moderated and curated conversations between American thinkers and European audiences on politics, culture, and society. Throughout her career, Metz has written extensively about urban life, housing policy, and the social consequences of economic and spatial inequality—subjects that intersect closely with Evan Osnos’s examination of wealth, power, and access in contemporary America.
