In an age when words travel faster than understanding, language demands more care than ever. Words document what happened, imagine what could be, and set the terms for how we interpret the world we inhabit. They can clarify history or distort it, deepen understanding or oversimplify it. It’s easy to forget how much weight a single sentence can hold.
For the five authors featured here, words are the engine of wildly different pursuits. A financial journalist decodes high-stakes decisions and power structures that drive the global economy. A daughter of Hollywood’s golden era turns to her parents’ handwritten letters as a way of understanding and preserving their story. A Pulitzer Prize–winning author reconstructs history through rigorous reporting and a lyrical touch on the page. A political strategist recognizes how a turn of phrase can shift public sentiment and steer national debates. A writer exploring identity finds in words the very tools for self-definition. Their subjects diverge, but all treat language as craft.
Ahead of their appearances at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Jan. 28–30, we asked them to reflect on the force words hold in their lives — how they think about precision, truth, memory, and the impact of what we all say.
WHO’S WHO
Meet the Roundtable
The five writers featured in this conversation appear at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Jan. 28–30. The 12th annual event has already sold out. Consider this your sign to get tickets next year.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box and financial columnist for The New York Times
Lucie Arnaz
Actor, singer, Broadway veteran, producer, Palm Springs resident, and daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
Rick Atkinson
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of eight narrative histories about American wars; former reporter for The Washington Post
Karl Rove
Writer and political strategist; former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to President George W. Bush
Bonnie Tsui
Journalist and feature writer whose work explores identity, place, and the body; former competitive swimmer
The Weight of a Single Word
Nearly every literary project begins with a pause, when the idea hasn’t fully formed and only the right words can bring it into focus.
Financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin understands that need for precision more than most.
Sorkin: Words carry weight, and that creates a responsibility to make sure they’re precise and fact-based.
His work lives at the intersection of p ower and money, where a single word can affect markets, damage reputations, or clarify the incomprehensible.
Sorkin: If I do my job, I’m not telling you what to think — I’m making you think.
Actor and singer Lucie Arnaz has witnessed the stakes of language her entire life.
Lucie Arnaz: When I was 20, dancing with my father at my first wedding, he whispered the simplest advice in my ear: “Be careful of the words.” I’ve never forgotten it.
Growing up around performers, she learned the lift of a clever line, the sting of a cutting remark, and the subtle intimacies that can slip by unnoticed.
Arnaz: Sometimes you don’t even remember how a conversation started, but what you say is very hard to forget.
Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson thinks about that, too — especially when the words he writes will influence how readers understand the past.
Atkinson: I aspire to art. History deserves that level of care.
So too does the present, where language can move us toward new viewpoints and perspectives.
Atkinson: There’s nothing more important than language for analyzing and assessing meaning in this life.
The Responsibility of Words
Political strategist Karl Rove has spent a lifetime watching the ways words shape a nation.
Rove: We’re a nation birthed by words, then followed by action. Without the words, we couldn’t have sustained the action.
He points to moments when a single phrase rallied the public mood: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” “Ask not what your country can do for you.” To Rove, these speeches were turning points in the American narrative.
Rove: Words are the tools with which we shape reality. The wrong phrase at the wrong moment can change everything, while the right phrase can inspire, unify, and endure.
Atkinson picks up the thread from a historian’s vantage.
Atkinson: Accuracy is the coin of the realm. In journalism and in history, your legitimacy — your credibility — depends on getting it right. I’ve always hated making a mistake the way the devil hates holy water.
Finding the People Inside the Stories
Atkinson’s research has carried him from battlefields to palace archives, tracing paper trails in pursuit of forgotten or overlooked truths.
Atkinson: When you’re deep in archives, it can feel cheek-by-jowl with the people you’re writing about. … You have a tactile sense of being in someone’s presence when you spend time with their words.
Reporting can capture the skeleton of an event, but lasting stories need a pulse. Numbers tell you what happened; people tell you why it mattered. Sorkin listens for that heartbeat.
Sorkin: People are always at the center of my work. When you tell [complex stories] through the people making the decisions, suddenly they become relatable, because we’re all human.
These stories are how we seek meaning through chaos, how we pass on survival instructions, how we cultivate empathy.
That’s the terrain where Bonnie Tsui works. She writes about identity, the body, and the ways a place can influence a person, examining each story the way a jeweler studies a gem. Slowly, carefully, turning it in the light to understand what it reveals.
Tsui: When someone trusts me with their story, I have a responsibility to take care of it … to share it in a way that is true to their intent but also carries a purpose beyond it.
Some stories belong not only to the people who lived them, but also to those who guard them after they’re gone. Arnaz knows this well after discovering years’ worth of her parents’ love letters.
Arnaz: This book was the right way to share them. It’s a humanizing side of a couple that people don’t really know.
The Internet and Outrage
Then there’s the other side of modern communication: the discourse we’ve built on outrage, shaped by algorithms, emboldened by anonymity. None of these writers is naive about what has happened to language online.
Rove: Social media’s algorithms prey on us. Outrage, conspiracy, meanness. Yes, they get clicks. But they’re poisonous for our public discourse.
He has watched American political rhetoric coarsen as nuance disappears under the pressure of engagement metrics.
Arnaz: There’s a lot of rage on the internet. A lot of lonely people scrolling, jumping into other people’s lives with the nastiest thing they can think of, then disappearing. They never have to face you.
It’s a system that flattens complexity, but Sorkin works against that reduction.
Sorkin: Real life isn’t a straight line. It’s messy and complicated. That’s what makes it so hard — and so important — to write the truth. … Nothing is black and white. Words are the way we communicate that grayness.
When Words Heal
Words can wound, but at their best, they can repair what’s broken. It’s an old truth, as Rove reminds us with a thread from another century.
Rove: In 1896, when Confederate veterans marched to meet William McKinley, people wept to see the blue and gray together.
Former enemies, men who had tried to kill each other just 30 years earlier, stood shoulder to shoulder.
Rove: McKinley greeted them by saying, “If we are ever forced to fight again — God forbid — we shall fight as brothers under a common flag.” Words can do that. They can heal.
Language can also offer refuge, providing a passport to faraway worlds.
Tsui: Growing up as a Chinese American kid on Long Island, I often felt like there were worlds that were open to me in books that were not necessarily open to me in real life.
Reading makes space for feelings that everyday life sometimes can’t hold.
Tsui: When you don’t feel like your real-life world mirrors what’s going on inside you, that’s where books and reading and words are so important to the imagination.
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777–1780
BY RICK ATKINSON
Military and political tensions intensify as Revolutionary War campaigns reveal shifting alliances, battlefield pressures, and a nation struggling to define itself.
Lucy & Desi: The Love Letters
BY LUCIE ARNAZ
Private correspondence traces Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s partnership, capturing ambition, conflict, humor, and devotion as their creative and personal lives evolve behind the public spotlight.
The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters
BY KARL ROVE
Economic upheaval and fierce political rivalry drive the 1896 presidential race, as McKinley’s campaign introduces new tactics that recalibrate party power and national messaging.
The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
BY ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Rising financial pressures collide with institutional failures as influential figures confront escalating risks, triggering a market collapse whose effects reverberate throughout the global economy.
On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters
BY BONNIE TSUI
Scientific insight and personal stories reveal how muscle functions and adapts, connecting physical movement to identity, resilience, and our understanding of the body in daily life.
