Eric Schlosser

Background

A decade after Fast Food Nation exposed the harms of our industrial food system, famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety addresses the existential threat of nuclear weapons. Unlike other books on the high-level diplomacy of arms control, Schlosser provides an unprecedented look at the everyday management of our weapons systems and the dangers routinely faced by those managing the arsenals— and what needs to be fixed. Command and Control is a groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes the reader into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Schlosser originally appeared at The Progressive Forum on September 30, 2010 to discuss his book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Fast Food Nation was on The New York Times bestseller list for over two years and translated into more than twenty languages. The book is a fierce indictment of our industrialized agricultural food system. It helped start a revolution on how American’s think about what they eat and earned Schlosser comparisons to Upton Sinclair. Schlosser also served as executive producer and cowriter of the film Fast Food Nation and coproducer and cowriter of the celebrated documentary Food, Inc. His other books include the bestselling children’s book Chew on This, cowritten with Charles Wilson, and Reefer Madness. Schlosser began his career as a journalist with The Atlantic Monthly. His work has appeared in several publications, including Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Nation. He won the National Magazine Award as well as the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. This past speaker page shares the entire Command and Control event from September 2013 as well as the Fast Food Nation event Q&A from September 2010.