Jordan Blashek & Christopher Haugh

Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh’s timely Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground, is the just-released story of the two friends’ three-year journey across America. One a Republican and one a Democrat, they traveled together through 44 states and along 20,000 miles of road to find out exactly where the American experiment stands at the close of the second decade of the 21st Century.

Jordan is a military veteran and businessman from Los Angeles. After college, he spent five years in the US Marine Corps as an infantry officer, serving two combat tours overseas, in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He holds degrees from Yale Law School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Princeton University. He is based in New York, where he invests in entrepreneurial efforts to grow the American middle class as part of Schmidt Futures, a new philanthropic venture created by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.

Christopher is a speechwriter and journalist from the Bay Area. He attended UC Berkeley and Oxford University and started speechwriting as an intern in the Obama White House. He went on to join the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff where he served as a speechwriter to the Secretary. In 2018, he graduated from Yale Law School where he was a Yale Journalism Scholar. Chris is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York.

Arjun Moorthy is CEO and co-founder the Factual– a company that finds and delivers the most credible stories on the most important news topics using a transparent, unbiased machine-learning engine.

Arjun has always been passionate about news and was Editor-in-chief of The Stanford Reporter. He has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal and The Next Web, is featured in the award-winning book Savvy: Navigating Fakeness, and writes regularly about the news industry and startups. He’s an active speaker in community forums in the Bay Area. Prior to founding The Factual, Arjun was Vice President of Business Development at HubSpot, the industry leader in inbound marketing. Arjun has a computer engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Stanford University.

A personal note from Jordan & Christopher. 

Sent August 11th, following their Conversations with Authors session.

Dear Book Passage and Readers,

Thank you so much for joining us for last week’s conversation! We were so honored to share Union and our message of hope with you during these hard times. 

On the road, we found over and over again a spirit of renewal. Despite the challenges our country faces—both during the pandemic and more systemically—the two of us believe that our best days can still be found ahead of us. The people we met on the road reinforced that belief through their words and deeds. Even now, we are united in our care for our friends, neighbors, and community, and our desire to come together to build a better future. We might have different ideas about how to get there, and what needs to be prioritized, but ultimately a vast majority of us want the same things. That brought the two of us together, and we hope it does for you as well. 

If you enjoy our book, we have a few others to recommend. Chris loves Joan Didion’s South and West, Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Jordan is a big fan of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Sacks’ Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, and William Zinsser’s American Places.

Once again, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on Union!

All the best,

Chris and Jordan