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Read about our Salon series here. Salon tix are $5. And that $5 comes off the purchase of a visiting author’s book(s) at the event.

Alex Davies

I’m a journalist and author born and raised in New York, and I tell stories about the people, technologies, and ideas shaping the future. I’ve reported for and led editorial teams at Wired, The Athletic, and Business Insider, covering everything from autonomous vehicles and electric aviation to Formula 1 and the engineers behind the systems we rely on every day.

My debut book Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2021), is an award-winning inside account of the self-driving industry. My forthcoming book, Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering (W.W. Norton, 2026), explores the hidden world of product testing and the people pushing machines, medicines, and models to their limits to keep the world safe.

I now work at Amazon, where I lead feature storytelling through deeply reported, narrative features about the people, inventions, and ideas shaping the company’s future.

I graduated cum laude from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I studied history and French. After years in newsrooms across the country, I now live in New York’s Hudson Valley with my husband, daughter, and dog.

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Davey Alba

I’m a technology reporter for Bloomberg, based in New York City. I cover Big Tech and its power in all its forms.

Most recently, I was a reporter for The New York Times, where I covered online disinformation and its global harms. Before that, I was a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News, where I wrote about artificial intelligence and tech’s invasive effects on people and communities. And a few years ago, I worked as a reporter for WIRED in Silicon Valley.

In 2019 I won a Livingston Award for excellence in international reporting for my piece, “How Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War.” I also won a 2019 Mirror Award in the special topic category, Best Story on Journalism in Peril, for the same feature. In 2020, I and several of my Times colleagues won an honorable mention at the SABEW Awards for our stories exploring the information ecosystem’s growing dark side. In 2022, I and my Bloomberg colleagues won an Online Journalism Award and a Deadline Club Award for our reporting on the post-Roe information crisis, and we were Sigma Award and SABEW finalists in the investigations category.

I’ve spoken publicly about my work at Oxford University during the Blavatnik School of Government’s “Challenges of Government” 2018 Conference, and at the University of Florida, where I was the Science Journalist in Residence for Spring 2019.

I studied science writing at Columbia University, and grew up in Manila, Philippines. Today I live in Brooklyn, New York, with my two cats, Laser Beam and Vivienne.