2024 Conference | Awardees

Amy Goodman, 2024 Humanist of the Year

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration.”

Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Before than, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Breaking the Sound Barrier, both written with Denis Moynihan, give voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-authored her first three bestsellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She co-writes a weekly column with Denis Moynihan (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.

Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.

She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.

Ted Chiang, 2024 Inquiry and Innovation Humanist Award (formerly Isaac Asimov Award)

Ted Chiang is an renowned science fiction writer. His fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.

Karen Hao, 2024 Humanist Media Award

Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist covering artificial intelligence. She was the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI; and is now working on a book about the company and the AI industry for Penguin Press, to publish in 2025. She is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and lead of The AI Spotlight Series, a program she designed with the Pulitzer Center to train 1,000 journalists on how to cover AI.

Previously, she was a foreign correspondent at The Wall Street Journal focused on AI & China, and a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, where she wrote about the latest AI research & its social impacts. She has been a fellow with the Harvard Technology and Public Purpose program, the MIT Knight Science Journalism program, and the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.

Her work won an American National Magazine Award in 2022 for “outstanding achievement for magazine journalists under the age of 30.” Her former weekly newsletter, The Algorithm, was named by the Webby Awards as one of the best newsletters on the internet.

Her pieces on the forced dismissal of Google’s ethical AI co-lead; Facebook’s addiction to and funding of misinformation; and OpenAI’s heavy toll on workers in Kenya were cited by Congress. In 2018, her “What is AI?” flowchart was featured in a museum exhibit in Vienna.

She regularly gives talks about AI and journalism and has guest lectured at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Notre Dame, and HKU, among other institutions. She sits on the board of the Co-Opting AI Series, a book series from the University of California Press exploring the different social dimensions of AI, and on the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism AI Advisory council. Her work is taught in universities around the world.

Congressman Jamie Raskin, 2024 Religious Liberty Award

Congressman Jamie Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes most of Montgomery County and a small part of Prince George’s County. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fourth Term at the start of the 118th Congress on January 6, 2023.

Raskin co-chairs the Congressional Freethought Caucus and is a co-founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. As Chair of the Oversight Committee’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee Raskin has said, “I’ve helped lead the Oversight Committee’s painstaking investigation into violent white supremacy over the last two years. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has declared domestic violent extremism the number one security threat in the country. We saw that threat explode right in front of our eyes at the Capitol on January 6.”

Congressman Jared Huffman, 2024 Religious Liberty Award

Congressman Jared Huffman represents California’s 2nd Congressional District which spans the North Coast of the state, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, and includes Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, and Del Norte counties. He was first elected to Congress in November 2012 and currently serves on the Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. In the 118th Congress, he serves as the Ranking Member of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries with jurisdiction over federal water projects, fisheries management, coastal zone and oceans policy, and wildlife and endangered species. Jared also founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which he co-chairs, to promote sound public policy based on reason, science and moral values, while protecting the secular character of government and championing the value of freedom of thought worldwide.

During his time in Congress, Jared has built a reputation as a progressive leader and an environmental expert who focuses on making a difference. Jared is also committed to ensuring our communities are resilient to the effects of climate change, including wildfires and droughts. He has been instrumental in defending America’s coastlines from offshore oil and gas drilling, introducing legislation to protect the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as part of a coordinated, nationwide effort to protect oceanic ecosystems and coastal economies, while reducing our unhealthy dependency on fossil fuels.

Jared graduated magna cum laude from U.C. Santa Barbara, where he was a three-time NCAA All-American volleyball player. He went on to play for the USA Volleyball Team in 1987 when the team was ranked #1 in the world, before attending and graduating cum laude from Boston College Law School. Jared lives in San Rafael with his wife Susan, a teacher. They have two children, Abby and Nathan. In his free time, Jared enjoys fishing, hiking, and playing tennis.