The Dreamland & Wavemaker Productions Present – Graeme Wood: Behind the Scenes in Saudi Arabia, the West Bank & Iran

This one hour conversation will be followed by a reception with Graeme Wood in the Harborview Room for those with combination ticket. Hors d’ oeuvres, wine, and beer will be served.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Wavemaker’s Michael Schulder, journalist Graeme Wood, of The Atlantic, will share surprisingly revealing stories from his recent meetings with MBS — the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He will tell us what he has learned post October 7th in his reporting from the Gaza border, the West Bank, and throughout Israel, as well as from earlier reporting journeys in Iran.  And we will probe his uniquely insightful takes on the political and cultural issues dominating the American conversation.

Memberships allow the Dreamland to stay open year round.  Members pay no service fees, receive discounted tickets, early access to purchase special event tickets, free popcorn and free entry to special screenings and events. Become a Dreamland Member today!

General Public (Discussion Only): $35 + $3 Service Fee
General Public (Discussion & Reception): $70 + $8 Service Fee
Dreamland Members (Discussion Only): $30 + No Service Fee
Dreamland Members (Discussion & Reception): $60 + No Service Fee

About Graeme Wood:

Graeme Wood is a journalist with a breathtaking range and depth of reporting and analysis on the most consequential issues of our time. His work at is an exhilarating antidote to the often-entrenched narratives of daily news cycles.

Before he was hired as a correspondent by The Atlantic in 2006, Wood satisfied his thirst for travel by becoming a courier and bootlegger in northern Iraq and hiking around Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan during a particularly violent period. 

Fluent in Arabic, Wood’s book: The Way of the Stranger: Encounters with the Islamic State, is based on his deep immersion in Islam and his meetings with the “seducers” of ISIS. 

Among other honors, Wood has received fellowships from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide and he led Nazi-hunting expeditions to Paraguay for the History Channel. 

In addition to writing for The Atlantic, he teaches at Yale University and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

About Michael Schulder:

I am sitting down to write this short bio during a fraught time in our nation and world. That sentence is, what we journalists call, evergreen.

But fraught does not mean hopeless. And fraught does not mean joyless.

I created Wavemaker Conversations in 2013, after many years in the heart of network news, to better understand our world and our human challenges and potential — to discover important things I’d never noticed, and to share the wisdom.
These in-depth conversations — distributed on my podcast, videos, newsletter, and at   live events — feature some of the most knowledgeable or talented or inspiring or just plain fascinating people imaginable.

Sometimes they’re big names.  Often they’re under the radar — at least for a general audience.

They include historians and historic figures, athletes and coaches, experts on conflict resolution, political players and performing artists, leaders in journalism and medicine and mental health (I can’t resist a free conversation with a therapist.) 

Many Wavemaker guests are preeminent authors, some of whom I have the joy of interviewing each June at the Nantucket Book Festival.

My time in network news included five years as a Writer for Peter Jennings at ABC World News Tonight and seventeen years as a Senior Executive Producer at CNN. I graduated from Vassar, where I received a liberal arts education — which I continue to pursue through my journalism. 

I never know exactly where a Wavemaker Conversation will lead, because they all are driven by curiosity. But no matter how fraught the subject matter, they often arrive at a place where curiosity meets hope.