Reading the World When the Map Keeps Changing: Julia Ioffe at Dent 2026
Julia Ioffe, journalist, author, and media entrepreneur
A tariff. An election. A border crisis. A diplomatic move announced on a Friday night that the markets read on Monday morning. Any of these can take a strategy that made sense in January and render it obsolete by April. The plans most leaders are operating on right now were built in a different version of the world than the one they're now trying to lead through.
This is the territory Julia Ioffe has spent her career mapping.
Ioffe is one of the most respected journalists working in foreign affairs today. She was born in Moscow, came to the U.S. as a child, and went back as a working reporter, filing from Russia for The New Yorker and Foreign Policy. She has written for The Atlantic, GQ, and The Washington Post, and is now a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck. Her book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia traces a century of the country's history through the lives of the women in her own family.
What sets her apart goes beyond access, though she has plenty of it. Instead, it's her refusal to flatten things. Ioffe writes about Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East, and U.S. domestic politics with the same insistence on getting the texture right, the same impatience with explanations that sound clean because they leave out everything that's actually going on. She translates international power into language that people who have to act on it can use, without dumbing any of it down.
For the last several years, she has been one of the steadiest American voices on Russia and the war in Ukraine. Before that she covered the 2016 election and its aftermath. Before that she was reporting from Moscow during the Putin era's consolidation. The pattern across her career is that the stories she's been telling for years tend to become, eventually, the headlines everyone else is trying to catch up to.
That's a useful pattern to bring into a room of people whose work depends on getting the next decade roughly right.
The leaders coming to Dent this year run companies, products, and bodies of work that play out inside a global system that can shift overnight. Their supply chains, their hiring, their fundraising, their growth markets, all of these are exposed to events most have no direct way of forecasting. The instinct is to either ignore geopolitics entirely or to consume too much news and end up paralyzed. Neither works.
What works is learning from someone who has spent twenty years learning how to read the signal. Ioffe will help us look past the headlines and see what the current moment actually means for technology, business, and people.
Dent 2026 runs September 13–15 at La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe. Ioffe joins a lineup that includes psychologist and author Maria Konnikova, persuasion researcher David McRaney, and National Geographic Fellow Chris Rainier.
