Edward Reese Allen is an American author and television personality. He was the food and wine connoisseur on the Bravo network's television program Queer Eye, and has been the host of the TV cooking competition series Chopped since its launch in 2009, as well as Chopped Junior, which began in mid-2015. On April 13, 2014, he became the host of another Food Network show, originally called America's Best Cook; a retooled version of that show, retitled All-Star Academy, debuted on March 1, 2015. In early 2015, he also hosted a four-part special, Best. Ever. which scoured America for its best burgers, pizza, breakfast, and barbecue. He is a longtime contributing writer to Esquire magazine and is the author of two cookbooks, and regularly appears on the Food Network show Beat Bobby Flay and other television cooking shows.
Tina Louise is an American actress widely known for her role as movie star Ginger Grant in the CBS television situation comedy Gilligan's Island. Louise is the last surviving cast member of the TV series.
Arnold Stephen Jacobs Jr., commonly called A.J. Jacobs is an American journalist, author, and lecturer best known for writing about his lifestyle experiments. He is an editor at large for Esquire and has worked for the Antioch Daily Ledger and Entertainment Weekly.
Gaetano "Gay" Talese is an American writer. As a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson, one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.
Michael Lupica is an author and former American newspaper columnist, best known for his provocative commentary on sports in the New York Daily News and his appearances on ESPN.
Joel Stein is an American journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote a column and occasional articles for Time for 19 years until 2017.
Adrian Anthony Gill was a British journalist, critic, and author. Best known for his food and travel writing, he was also a television critic, was restaurant reviewer of The Sunday Times, wrote for Vanity Fair, GQ, and Esquire, and published numerous books.
Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
Dave Zirin, born 1974, is an American political sportswriter. He is the sports editor for The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine dedicated to politics and culture, and writes a blog named Edge of Sports: the weekly sports column by Dave Zirin. As of January 2022, he has authored eleven books.
Bruce Feiler is an American writer and television personality. He is the author of 15 books, including The Council of Dads, a book that describes how he responded to a diagnosis of a rare cancer by asking a group of men to be present in the lives of his young daughters. The book was the subject of a TED Talk and inspired NBC drama series Council of Dads. His latest work explores the power of life stories. Drawing on interviews with Americans in all 50 states, he offers strategies for coping with life's unsettling times in his new book, Life Is In The Transitions. Bruce writes the "This Life" column in the Sunday New York Times and is also the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries Walking the Bible and Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler (2014).
Mark Bittman is an American food journalist, author, and former columnist for The New York Times. Bittman has promoted VB6, a flexitarian diet.
Emerson James Spartz is the founder of the viral media company Dose and the founder of MuggleNet, a Harry Potter fansite.
James "Jim" McManus is an American teacher, writer and poker player living in Kenilworth, Illinois. He is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts program for writers at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Roy "Wrong Way" Riegels played for the University of California, Berkeley football team from 1927 to 1929. His wrong-way run in the 1929 Rose Bowl is often cited as the worst blunder in the history of college football. That one play overshadowed Riegels' football talents, since he earned first team All-America honors and served as team captain for the Bears in 1929. Riegels' notability has been shared by motivational speakers who use his life as an example of overcoming setbacks.
Mike Sager is an American author, journalist, and educator.
Joseph Nocera is an American business journalist, and author. He has written for The New York Times since April 2005, writing for the Op-Ed page from 2011 to 2015. He was also an opinion columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
Scott Raab is an American nonfiction author and former contributing journalist for Esquire.
Dwight Garner is an American journalist and longtime writer and editor for The New York Times. In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper. He is the author of Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany and Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements. In 2023 he published his memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.
David M. Granger is an American journalist. He was editor-in-chief of Esquire Magazine from June 1997 until March 2016. Granger is a literary agent and media consultant working with Aevitas Creative Management.
Francis Lam is an American food journalist, cookbook editor, and since 2017 the host of American Public Media's The Splendid Table.
