• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

The Atlantic has been publishing since 1857, but its annual festival feels freshly urgent. At the Perelman Performing Arts Center in lower Manhattan, the magazine convened generals, politicians, journalists, and cultural figures for a day of conversations about the state of the nation and the future of truth. The marquee names were plentiful: former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, former Vice President Mike Pence, comedian W. Kamau Bell, actor Richard Ayoade, and others. But the heart of the day came not from Washington insiders nor celebrity pundits. It came from a late-night comedian and a Pulitzer-Prize–winning playwright.

David Letterman walked onto the stage with the crowd expecting mischief and stories. Instead, they got a bracing warning. Letterman spoke with a seriousness that surprised even longtime fans, defending political satire as a vital civic space -- one now under pressure. His mix of indignation and absurdist humor gave the festival its most electric moment.

He reminded the audience that for three decades he skewered presidents without ever fearing political reprisal. What has changed, he argued, is not the comedians but the climate around them. 

His riff on the Federal Communications Commission was both funny and cutting: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy, for God’s sake,” he said, recalling the days when the FCC’s role was limited to handing out small fines. To see it now, he warned, is to see an agency turned into an instrument of fear.

Letterman’s critique landed hard. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was a warning: If satire bends to authoritarian pressure, America loses a pressure valve, a truth-telling space that politicians cannot control.

If Letterman railed against political gatekeepers, Ayad Akhtar turned his attention to technological ones. The playwright, whose new work “McNeal” probes the meaning of authorship in the age of AI, spoke candidly about experimenting with large language models in his own process. “I read a script generated by an LLM. It wasn’t good, but it had my number the way my phone has my number. I kept turning the pages with this reptilian compulsion. I don’t know how to do that -- but the machine does.”

Akhtar explained that the experience fascinated him, but also clarified what machines cannot do. “Storytelling is not about closing meaning. It’s about opening meaning. LLMs are always closing meaning -- finishing the thought, answering the prompt. But the flash of aha, the feeling of experience? They don’t have that. They don’t have a soul.”

He went further, describing a cultural “cognitive decay” already well underway: Instagram loops replacing books, executives reducing human motivation in scripts to nothing more than sex, money, power, or revenge. AI, he argued, amplifies that flattening. “Everybody in Hollywood is running pitches through AI. Nobody admits it, but they all do it. And it creates this slurry effect in drama and comedy -- a loss of complexity, a loss of human motivation. That’s what we’re up against.”

Still, Akhtar grounded his view in history. “McNeal” begins with a reminder that Shakespeare himself stole 70% of “King Lear” from another play. Art has always borrowed. What matters, Akhtar insisted, is the transformation of theft into meaning. “It just doesn’t make sense to build a creature higher than you on the food chain. Leopards don’t sit around saying, what if we invent an animal that eats us? But that’s sort of what we’re doing.” The audience laughed uneasily. Akhtar smiled -- the playwright’s version of Letterman’s punch line.

By the close, the parallels were unmistakable. Letterman warned that political fear threatens to silence comedy. Akhtar warned that technological shortcuts threaten to hollow out storytelling. Both spoke to a narrowing of human possibility -- whether by authoritarian politics or by algorithmic logic.

The Atlantic Festival will continue, with more sessions on climate, geopolitics, and culture. But for many in the room, it was the comedian and the playwright who cut through the noise. They left behind a common plea: Protect the spaces where human truth can still breathe.