America, Seen From Elsewhere

Join Madeleine Schwartz, founder and editor in chief of The Dial, and writer Saumya Roy in conversation with anthropologist Cari Borja for an evening exploring The Dial’s forthcoming book How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 9), a sharp, surprising, and deeply human collection of essays examining America through the eyes of writers across the globe.

From Mumbai to Dublin, Las Vegas to Taipei, the anthology gathers voices tracing the fantasies, contradictions, seductions, and consequences of American power. Saumya Roy, whose award-winning book on slums in Mumbai illuminated the architecture of invisibility, turns her gaze toward the profound loneliness of homelessness in the Bay Area. Dónal Gill unpacks Canada's "heroic delusion" that the country could be fully sovereign. Lauded Irish poet Jessica Traynor describes what US tech did to Dublin, her hometown. Egyptian writer-in-exile Ahmed Naji delivers a hilarious and heartbreaking diary from his years in Las Vegas.

At once literary, political, intimate, and global, How We See It asks what becomes visible about a country when viewed from elsewhere, and what Americans themselves may no longer be able to see.

This conversation will move between literature, journalism, identity, exile, cities, loneliness, empire, and the strange theater of American self-invention, asking not only how the world sees America, but what it means to be seen at all.

Madeleine Schwartz is founder and editor in chief of The Dial, an international magazine of reporting and writing. She is also a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker and New York Review of Books, where she worked as an editor. She has won multiple awards as a journalist and editor, including the European Press Prize, One World Media Award and O.Henry Award.

Saumya Roy is a contributor to How We See It: The World Looks At America in The Age of Trump (New Press, 2026). She is also the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Waste Pickers of Mumbai (Astra House, 2021), a narrative nonfiction book about waste pickers in Mumbai’s vast landfill. It was selected among many the best books of the year by NPR, Washington Independent Week In Review, Telegraph India, print.in, and GQ India among others. She has also written for The Guardian, aljazeera.com,bbc.com, The New York Times, the examination.org, the wire.in, among others.