Debra J. Dickerson (born 1959) is an American author, editor, writer, and contributing writer and blogger for Mother Jones magazine. [1] Dickerson has been most prolific as an essayist, writing on race relations and racial identity in the United States.
She dropped out of Florissant Valley Community College and the University of Missouri, [2] soon after to serve in the United States Air Force from 1980 to 1992 as an intelligence officer. She earned a BA in Politics and Government from the University of Maryland, College Park. [2] Dickerson attended St. Mary's University and completed her master's in International Relations while still in the military. [2] Her Air Force career culminated in her appointment as Chief of Intelligence at Ankara Air Station. [2]
In 1992 she worked for President Clinton's presidential campaign while awaiting entrance to Harvard Law School. She graduated from HLS in 1995. While attending Harvard, she said she "had no stomach for the law. I decided to study less (a whole lot less) and have some fun." She began writing a column for the Harvard Law Record , the school's newspaper. Ultimately she pursued a full-time career in writing. [2]
She credits the 1996 New Republic essay "Who Shot Johnny?" for jump-starting her career. It describes a drive-by shooting that left her nephew paralyzed, and the family's ambivalence and frustration in knowing the shooter was a fellow African American. Her work has since appeared in The Washington Post , The New York Times Magazine , Good Housekeeping , VIBE , Mother Jones , Slate , The Village Voice , Salon and many other publications. She was a fellow at New America Foundation from 1999 to 2002. After giving up her personal blog in September 2007, Dickerson announced she will become a blogger for Mother Jones magazine.
Dickerson has published two books, An American Story, a memoir, and The End of Blackness. She attracted some attention, as well as accusations of race baiting, in 2007 by declaring that because Democratic president Barack Obama is not a descendant of West Africans brought involuntarily to the United States as slaves, he is not "black." [3] [4]
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In her later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.
Terry Gross is an American journalist who is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview-based radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed nationally by NPR. Since joining NPR in 1975, Gross has interviewed thousands of guests.
Robert Wright is an American author and journalist known for his wide-ranging interests in philosophy, society, science, history, politics, international relations, and religion. He has published five books: Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (1988), The Moral Animal (1994), Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), The Evolution of God (2009), and Why Buddhism is True (2017). Wright has taught at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania; more recently, in 2019 he was Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York.
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
Joshua Micah Jesajan-Dorja Marshall is an American journalist and blogger who founded Talking Points Memo. A liberal, he currently presides over a network of progressive-oriented sites that operate under the TPM Media banner and average 400,000-page views every weekday and 750,000 unique visitors every month.
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
Ana Marie Cox is a liberal American author, blogger, political columnist, and critic. The founding editor of the political blog Wonkette, she was also the Senior Political Correspondent for MTV News, and conducted the "Talk" interviews featured in The New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2017.
Daniel Radosh is an American journalist and blogger. Radosh is a senior writer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Previously, he was a staff writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and a contributing editor at The Week. He writes occasionally for The New Yorker. His writing has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, GQ, Mademoiselle, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Might, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Playboy, Radar, Salon, Slate, and other publications. From 2000 to 2001, he was a senior editor for Modern Humorist. In the 1990s he was a writer and editor at Spy. Radosh began his writing career at Youth Communication in 1985, where as a high school student he published more than a dozen stories in New Youth Connections, a magazine by and for New York City teenagers.
Timothy Robert Noah is an American journalist, author, and a staff writer at The New Republic. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic assigned to write the biweekly "TRB From Washington" column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the "Chatterbox" column. In April 2012, Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.
Linda Diane Redlick Hirshman was an American lawyer, pundit, academic, and author. She began her career practicing as union-side labor lawyer and argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. She next taught law and philosophy at Chicago-Kent College of Law and Brandeis University, then wrote books focused on law, women, and social movements, including the New York Times best-sellerSisters in Law, which describes Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Hirshman was also known for her 2005 article "Homeward Bound", in which she prominently and controversially criticized the absence of women from the workplace, urging women in high-status jobs to continue pursuing careers rather than become homemakers.
David Edelstein is a freelance American film critic who has been the principal film critic for Slate and New York magazine, among others, and has appeared regularly on NPR's Fresh Air and CBS Sunday Morning programs. Over a long career, Edelstein has published more than 2000 film reviews. In 2021, Colin McEnroe called Edelstein "America's greatest living film critic".
John Frederick Dickerson is an American journalist and a reporter for CBS News. His current assignment is anchoring “The Daily Report with John Dickerson” on the news division’s streaming network. His previous roles include 60 Minutes and CBS News' Election specials. Most recently, he was co-host of CBS This Morning along with Norah O'Donnell and Gayle King. He served as an interim anchor of the CBS Evening News until Norah O'Donnell took over in the summer of 2019. Previously he was the host of Face the Nation on CBS News, the political director of CBS News, chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and a political columnist for Slate magazine. Before joining Slate, Dickerson covered politics at Time magazine for 12 years, serving the last four years as its White House correspondent, and he is also a fill-in and substitute anchor for CBS Mornings, CBS Evening News, and Face The Nation.
Jonathan Scott Cohn is an American author and journalist who writes mainly on United States public policy and political issues. Formerly the executive editor of The American Prospect and a senior editor at The New Republic, Cohn is now a senior national correspondent at The Huffington Post.
Mary Louise Kelly is an American broadcaster and author. She anchors the daily news show All Things Considered on National Public Radio (NPR), and previously covered national security at the network. Prior to NPR she reported for CNN and the BBC in London. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her first novel, Anonymous Sources, was published in 2013; her second, The Bullet, in 2015; and her memoir, It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs, in 2023.
Hanna Rosin is an American writer. She is the editorial director for audio for New York Magazine Formerly, she was the co-host of the NPR podcast Invisibilia with Alix Spiegel. She was co-founder of DoubleX, the now closed women's site connected to the online magazine Slate, and the DoubleX podcast.
Deborah Solomon is an American art critic, journalist and biographer. She writes for The New York Times, where she was previously a columnist. Her weekly column, "Questions For" ran in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011. She was subsequently the art critic for WNYC Public Radio, the New York City affiliate of NPR. She is sometimes confused with another reporter, Deborah B. Solomon, who is a financial journalist now working at The New York Times after a long career at The Wall Street Journal.
Amanda Marie Marcotte is an American blogger and journalist who writes on feminism and politics from a liberal perspective. Marcotte has written for several online publications, including Slate, The Guardian, and Salon, where she is currently senior politics writer.
Robert Michael "Mickey" Kaus is an American journalist, pundit, and author, known for writing Kausfiles, a "mostly political" blog which was featured on Slate until 2010. Kaus is the author of The End of Equality and had previously worked as a journalist for Newsweek, The New Republic, and Washington Monthly, among other publications.
Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers. The site was started by the journalist and author Robert Wright and the blogger and journalist Mickey Kaus on November 1, 2005. Kaus has since dropped out of operational duties of the site as he didn't want his frequent linking to be seen as a conflict of interest. Most of the earlier discussions posted to the site involved one or both of those individuals, but since has grown to include a total of over one thousand individual contributors, mostly journalists, academics, scientists, authors, well known political bloggers, and other notable individuals.
Gabriel Mac is an American author and journalist. From 2007 to 2012, he was a staff reporter at Mother Jones, eventually in the position of human rights reporter. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and other publications.