Amy Larocca is an award-winning American journalist. She spent 20 years working at New York Magazine as both Fashion Director and Editor at Large. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country and the London Review of Books, among others. She lives with her family In New York and North London. How to Be Well will be published by AA Knopf in 2025.

Regents professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, Lauretta is also the principal investigator on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

Visiting professor at both the University of California and Georgetown University, John Lawrence is the former longtime Chief of Staff of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Politico, among other publications.

Derek Leebaert won the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award for Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957; his pre­vious books include Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan and To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, both Washington Post Best Books of the Year. He was a founding editor of the Harvard/MIT journal International Security and is a cofounder of the National Museum of the United States Army.

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and The Meat Racket.

After a career in law and academia, Levin spent the last twenty years working with governments and institutions, focused on economic development and political reform. Over the past ten years, he’s run the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, through which he’s helped monarchies democratize their political foundations and state and non-state actors in armed conflict zones. His first book, Nothing But A Circus, was published in the UK, Germany, Russia, and Japan.

A former editor at both Wired and Billboard, Levine has also written for the New York Times, Fortune, Business 2.0, Conde Nast Portfolio, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair.

Adam Valen Levinson is a multimedia backpack journalist and travel writer whose work focuses on human stories in conflict areas. His work has appeared in numerous outlets, including VICE, the Paris Review, Al Jazeera, and Haaretz. He is currently an affiliate of the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. and a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University

Allan J. Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and the author of many acclaimed books on U.S. political history, including White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), and the National Bestseller, The Case for Impeachment. He is regularly sought out by the media for his authoritative views on voting and elections.

Dr Matt Lodder is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory, and Director of American Studies at the University of Essex. He teaches European, American and Japanese art, architecture, visual culture and theory from the late 19th century to the present, specialising in the art history of tattoos. He has given invited lectures at venues including the V&A, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Museum of London, and has published academic papers in venues including the Sculpture Journal, and contributed forewords for over a dozen popular books on tattooing. He has contributed articles to the Royal Academy Magazine, History Today, The Guardian and others, and appeared on broadcast media across the globe. His first monograph, on the history of Western tattooing, is currently in production. His latest major exhibition, 'British Tattoo Art Revealed', began at the National Maritime Museum Falmouth in March 2017 and is currently on tour nationwide through 2021. Matt also serves as the presenter of the landmark television series "Art of Museums" / 'Magie des Grands Musées' / 'Magie der Museen', airing across Europe and beyond in late 2018 and early 2019.

Ernesto Londoño is a journalist for The New York Times. He joined the newspaper in 2014 as a member of the editorial board and served as Brazil bureau chief from 2017 to 2022. He previously worked at The Washington Post, where his assignments included covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and the Pentagon. He was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia.

Emily Lordi is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and a writer-at-large for the New York Times’s T Magazine. She has published three acclaimed books on Black artistry, with Rutgers University Press, Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series, and Duke University Press, and her writing as appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Erika Lust is an award-winning indie erotic filmmaker. Her sex-positive adult cinema features relatable characters with an everyday look and realistic sex, transgressing gender stereotypes and fetishisations to offer a groundbreaking alternative to mass-produced mainstream porn. Erika Lust has reshaped the landscape of adult filmmaking, challenging societal norms and paving the way for a new era of empowered sexuality. With her unique storytelling approach, she has captured hearts and minds, showcasing eroticism in a way that is authentic, inclusive, and respectful. Erika Lust has been a beacon of change throughout her journey, championing body positivity, consent, and diverse representations of pleasure.

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Andrew Lycett is a biographer, author and broadcaster. He also writes and reviews for a large number of newspapers and magazines. Lycett lectures and speaks at schools, universities and literary festivals. He recently finished a stint on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors. He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). 

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Brian MacQuarrie is an award-winning journalist. His first book, The Ride: A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father’s Journey from Rage to Redemption, about the 1997 murder and abduction of ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley, has been called a "fascinating story of loss, profound anger, pain, and the difficult, soul-searching aftermath of trauma" (The Boston Globe) and "a first-rate combination of true crime and social history" (Kirkus).

Kim MacQuarrie is a writer, a four-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and an anthropologist. He is the author of four books on Peru and lived in that country for five years. During that time, MacQuarrie lived with a recently-contacted tribe of indigenous Amazonians called the Yora. MacQuarrie currently divides his time between the U.S. and Peru and is directing a 3D IMAX film. He is represented in association with Lucas Alexander Whitley in the UK.

A bi-weekly magazine, New York covers life, culture, politics, and style with a particular emphasis on New York City. In the past decade, New York has won 34 National Magazine Awards, including six General Excellence awards.

Aaron Mahnke is the creator of the award-winning "Lore" podcast; scary, true-life stories based on global superstitions and the frightening folklore surrounding them. Lore's growing platform includes an upcoming television series on Amazon streaming content and a 3-book series to be published by Del Rey/Random House.

Declared one of America’s most influential women by Vanity Fair, Malcolm is the founder and chairwoman of the venerated political action committee EMILY’s List. Malcolm has been named a Woman of the Year by Glamour and one of the 100 Most Important Women in American by Ladies’ Home Journal.

Lauretta Malloy is a critically acclaimed performer, writer, vocalist, musician, and producer and a visual artist who has illustrated and published children’s books. As a research writer she worked with Dr. Ralph Gomes, Howard University Chair of Sociology and Criminology.  

Will McCants is a scholar of militant Islamism, a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution and founder of Jihadica.com. He is also the author of The Isis Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (Palgrave).

Dr. Jeffrey D. McCausland is an expert on defense, national security and leadership who has taught at Dickinson College, the Army War College, and the U.S. Naval Academy. A national correspondent for CBS radio, Dr. McCausland is a retired Colonel from the U.S. Army who held senior positions during the Kosovo War and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. As CEO of Diamond6 Leadership, he is the organizer of leadership workshops at battlefields including Gettysburg, Yorktown and Pearl Harbor.With Tom Vossler, he is the author of the forthcoming book Battle Tested.

Jessica McDiarmid is a Canadian author and investigative journalist whose first book, Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, was a national and international bestseller, a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, and published in Canada, the United States, Poland and Germany. Highway of Tears was featured in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Journal of Books, the Globe and Mail and Outside magazine, among others, and touted by Whoopi Goldberg on The View. Her work has been published by the Toronto Star, The Associated Press, Al-Jazeera, The Canadian Press, the Harvard Review, Chatelaine, and many others. McDiarmid has been a finalist for the NationalMagazine Awards’ feature writing prize and the Canadian Association of Journalists’ investigative reporting award.

A contributing editor at The New York Observer, McDonald has also written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Fortune, and Esquire, among other publications.

A professor of history at the University of Connecticut, McElya specializes in the histories of women, gender, race, and sexuality in the U.S. from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, on NPR, and elsewhere, and her previous book, The Politics of Mourning, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Kembrew McLeod is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He has published and produced several books and documentaries about music and popular culture, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Slate, Salon, SPIN, MOJO and Rolling Stone. Kembrew’s documentary Copyright Criminals aired on PBS’s Emmy Award-winning Independent Lens series and his 2007 book Freedom Of Expression® received an American Library Association book award. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship to support the writing and research of his book The Downtown Pop Underground.

Jane McManus is the Executive Director of the Center for Sports Media at Seton Hall University. From 2018 until 2022 she was Director of the Center for Sports Communication at Marist College. In 2010 she was at ESPN covering the NFL’s New York Jets, and was one ofthe original five women hired for a new venture covering women’s sports called espnW. She was also an analyst on the first all-women’s episodes of First Take and The Sports Reporters,and one of the hosts on the first three-woman radio show on ESPN Radio, The Trifecta. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Journal News, Newsday and numerous other outlets. She has a regular Deadspin column and has also been a columnist for The New York Daily News, The Independent of London and ESPN. McManus lives with her husband and two daughters in Westchester County, NY.

J. David McSwane is an investigative reporter for ProPublica, based in Washington, D.C. His investigations and narrative stories have won numerous awards, including Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a Peabody.

Marisa Meltzer is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is a columnist for The New York Times Styles section, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and many other national publications. She is the author of Girl Power: Feminism, Music, and Marketing in the Nineties and How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time.

Louis Menand is an award-winning essayist, critic, author, professor, and historian, best known for his Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America. His other notable works include the National Book Award-nominated The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, American Studies, Discovering Modernism, and The Marketplace of Ideas. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.

Joshua Mendelsohn is a veteran attorney, historian, law school professor, and author. His first book, The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), was praised as “a legal thriller” by the Wall Street Journal.

Jonathan Van Meter is a contributing editor at Vogue magazine; contributing editor at New York magazine; creator and founding editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine, owned in partnership by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, from 1992-1994; executive producer of Let’s Get Frank (2003), a documentary about former U.S. Representative Barney Frank; and author of the acclaimed book The Last Good Time (Crown Publishing Group).

UC Regent’s Fellow and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University, Tesla A. Monson, PhD, is an internationally recognized, award-winning scholar whose research and teaching focus on the evolution of reproduction and the growth of the skeletal system in living and fossil primates. She teaches courses on biological anthropology, human evolution, and the human skeleton at Western Washington University and her writing on these topics has been viewed and shared by millions of people worldwide. She earned a BA from Princeton University, a MA from San Francisco State University, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ann Morgan is a freelance writer and editor, formerly working for the Guardian. She blogs for Huffington Post and has written for Australian, the New Internationalist, BBC Music Magazine, the South London Press and the Literary Review. Her debut project The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe, which chronicles Ann’s worldwide reading journey as she samples one book from as many of the world’s 196 independent countries as she can, was published by Harvill Secker in the UK and Liveright/Norton in the US.

Guy Morpuss QC is a barrister who works in house at a large commercial law firm. He has argued in some of the UK's largest legal cases around copyright and sports. He lives in Surrey with his wife and children.

A longtime articles editor for The New Yorker, Morrison was the Editor-in-Chief of The New York Observer and a founding editor of Spy. She is the president of the Century Association.

Simon Morrison is a musicologist and cultural historian specializing in Russia, a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Music at Princeton University and a Visiting Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. Author of, most recently, Bolshoi Confidential (Liveright/Norton) and a biography of Lina Prokofiev (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Simon has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the TLS, and Time.

Doug Most, Deputy Assistant Managing Editor of The Boston Globe, is the author of The Race Underground (St. Martin’s), a book about the dramatic competition between New York and Boston to build the first American subway, named a Best Book of 2014 by Amazon and Kirkus Reviews. It has been optioned by PBS’s prestigious American Experience.

David Mountain is a freelance writer who can’t resist pointing out the flaws and contradictions in how we think we understand the world. His first book, Past Mistakes, takes a fresh look at the study of the past. He currently lives in Edinburgh.

Maura Moynihan, the author of Yoga Hotel, and her mother, Elizabeth, oversee the estate of her father, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait In Letters was chosen by the New York Times as one of the top 20 nonfiction books of 2010 and was a Washington Post bestseller.

Luma Mufleh, immigrant, Muslim, gay, entrepreneur, mother, introvert, leader, and speaker, is best known as "Coach" by the students and families for whom she founded the first network of middle and high schools for refugee kids in the United States. She writes from her own experiences of both struggle and privilege, with a combination of humor, humility, and inspiration.

Liza Mundy, former Washington Post reporter and a Bernard Schwartz Fellow and Director of the Work and Family Program at the New American Foundation, is the author of the award-winning Everything Conceivable: How the Science of Assisted Reproduction is Changing Our World (Knopf), the internationally bestselling biography of Michelle Obama, Michelle (Simon & Schuster), The Richer Sex (Simon & Schuster), and Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (Hachette Books).

Murphy is a reporter for the Metro section of The Boston Globe. She covers organized crime, homeland security, legal affairs, criminal and civil court cases, and breaking news. She graduated from Northeastern University. She is co-author of the New York Times best-seller Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice.

Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Easter Europe. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vice, and elsewhere.

LeeAnet Noble is an internationally critically acclaimed multi-faceted artist who has played lead roles in STOMP and Drumstruck, has worked with Disney Theatricals as a creative advisor and teaching artist and works with major theatres (Broadway and Regional) in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion efforts.  She teaches a Black history course forGeorge Washington University’s MFA graduate studies program.

Laine Nooney is assistant professor of media and information industries at New York University. Their research has been featured by outlets such as the Atlantic, Motherboard, and NPR. They live in New York City, where their hobbies include motorcycles, tugboats, and Texas Hold'em.

Jenni Nuttall has been teaching and researching medieval literature at the University of Oxford for the last twenty years, so she’s had a lot of practice at making old words interesting. She is at work on her first trade book about the rich, provocative and entertaining history of women’s words, which explores some surprisingly progressive thinking and challenges our assumptions about the past.

Eric is the founder of The Georgetown Group, a premier investigative and security consultancy, where he specializes in counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations, as well as investigations into economic espionage and cyber security penetrations. He also serves as the National Security Strategist for Carbon Black, the leader of next gen. endpoint protection, where he works on cyber security issues. Eric was formerly an FBI undercover operative, and he earned a JD from George Washington University Law School.

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa were key reporters on the newspaper’s award-winning series George Floyd’s America and contributors to the well-received Post Reports podcast episode on Floyd’s life.Olorunnipa grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and is the son of immigrants from a small village in central Nigeria. He has covered national politics since 2015, reporting from five continents and more than 20 countries as part of the presidential press pool. Olorunnipa’s reporting has received awards and recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the National Press Foundation, the Diverse Future Initiative and others. He earned master’s and bachelor’s degrees in sociology from Stanford University, where he conducted research on social movements.

Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie is an innovative educator, speaker, author and a Babson Professor of History and Foodways. Dr. Opie has appeared on NPR, BBC Radio, The History Channel, PBS television, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Oprah Magazine.

Mark Oppenheimer is editor at large of the Jewish online magazine Tablet, founder and co-host of the podcast Unorthodox, and director of Yale University’s Journalism Initiative. For six years, he wrote the biweekly “Beliefs” column at the New York Times; he continues to write regularly for the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Nation, among others.

Jung H. Pak has held senior positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and is now a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies where she focuses on the national security challenges facing the United States and East Asia, including North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities. Prior to her work in national security, Pak taught history at Hunter College in New York City and studied in South Korea as a Fulbright Scholar. She has written for and appeared in numerous publications, interviews, documentaries, and podcasts and writes for The New York Times, The Financial Times and Foreign Affairs, among others.

Richard Parker is an award-winning journalist whose writing has regularly appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Politico Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and The New York Times, among other publications. He and his writings have received numerous prizes and fellowships from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Times-Mirror Foundation, the Knight Center, and the National Press Club. He has won the E.H. Schaeffer Prize for in-depth journalism numerous times and the first prize from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 2018 for his commentary in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, and he was a finalist for the coveted Livingston Award for International Reporting. In 2019, NBC named him one of the 20 most influential Latinos in America and in 2020 the National Society of Newspaper Columnists named him the number one columnist in America in digital media for his work for The New York Times. The author of the book Lone Star Nation: How Texas Transforms America, Parker resides in his home state of Texas.

Shoshi Parks is a journalist and anthropologist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Smithsonian Magazine, Atlas Obscura, Vice, NPR, and Scientific American. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Bennett Parten is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University.

Patricia Pearson is an award-winning author and the recipient of three Canadian National Magazine Awards, the Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian nonfiction crime writing, and a North American Travel Journalism Association award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Toronto Life, Reader’s Digest, The Toronto Star, National Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, More, TheGlobe and Mail, TheDaily Telegraph, Business Week, NPR, CBC Television, The History Channel, and TV Ontario, among many others. In 2003, she was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, Canada’s version of the Mark Twain prize.

A contributor to Rolling Stone, Details, Spin, and the New York Times, Peisner is also the co-author of Professional Idiot by Stephen "Steve-O" Glover.

Longtime Professor of English at Georgetown University, Pfordresher has written about various pre-Raphaelite writers. He is also a member of the National Council of Teachers of English.