P.J. O'Rourke to give Park Lecture April 8

Author and political satirist P.J. O’Rourke will deliver the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s Roy H. Park Distinguished Lecture in the Carroll Hall auditorium April 8 at 5:30 p.m.

O'Rourke's lecture — "The Government vs. The Citizenry: Which Is Worse?" — is free and open to the public.

Both Time and The Wall Street Journal have labeled O'Rourke, best-selling author of 12 books, “the funniest writer in America.”?? Born in Toledo, Ohio, he attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. After receiving a master’s in English, he worked at small newspapers in Baltimore and New York.??In the early 1970s, he joined The National Lampoon where he became editor-in-chief. He became a foreign correspondent in the 1980s and since has covered crises and conflicts in more than 70 countries.??

O'Rourke has written for Car & Driver, PARADE, The Weekly Standard, House and Garden, Automobile, The American Spectator, Forbes FYI, The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone, where he was the foreign-affairs desk chief for 15 years.

He is the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and a frequent panelist on National Public Radio’s game show “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”

The Roy H. Park Distinguished Lecture Series began in October 1999. The Triad Foundation of Ithaca, N.Y., sponsors the lectures to enhance the Roy H. Park Fellowship Program that began in the school in fall 1997. The fellowships go to 22 new graduate students in the school each year.

The lecture series brings outstanding professionals to the campus each year with the goal of enriching the educational experience of undergraduate and graduate journalism students, and presenting speakers of interest to the campus and beyond.

The lecture series honors Roy H. Park, the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Park Communications Inc., which became an expansive multimedia company with broadcast and print properties throughout the U.S.

For more information, contact Morgan Ellis at morgan_ellis@unc.edu or 919.843.0472.