Ty Tashiro is an author and social scientist. He received his PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota and has taught at the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado.
He is the author of Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome (2017), in which he explains why some of the same characteristics that make people feel socially awkward can be the same traits that propel them toward extraordinary achievements. [1] He is also the author of The Science of Happily Ever After (2013). [2] He lives in New York City.
David Brooks is a Canadian-born American book author and political and cultural commentator. Self-described as an ideologic moderate, others have characterised his regular contributions to the PBS NewsHour, as opinion columnist for The New York Times and other work as being centrist, conservative, or moderate conservative. In addition to his shorter form writing, Brooks has authored 6 non-fiction books since 2000, two appearing from Simon and Schuster, and four from Random House, the latter including The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), and The Road to Character (2015). Beginning as a police reporter in Chicago and as an intern at William F. Buckley's National Review, Brooks rose to his positions at The Times, NPR, and PBS after a long series of other journalistic positions .
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science is a 1994 book about the philosophy of science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt.
Cass Robert Sunstein is an American legal scholar known for his work in constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars (2016) and Nudge (2008). He was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012.
Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project in 2008 to investigate fundamental questions about the universe and served as the project's director.
Anna Marie Quindlen is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
Paul Gerard Hawken is an American environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist.
Franklin Delano "Frank" Roosevelt III is an American retired economist and academic. Through his father, he is a grandson of 32nd U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and through his mother, he is related to the prominent du Pont family.
Jerry Allen Coyne is an American biologist and skeptic known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design. A professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, he has published numerous papers on the theory of evolution. His concentration is speciation and ecological and evolutionary genetics, particularly as they involve the fruit fly, Drosophila. In 2023 he became a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Paul Feig is an American film director, producer, screenwriter and actor. He is best known for directing films such as Bridesmaids (2011), The Heat (2013), Spy (2015), Ghostbusters (2016), A Simple Favor (2018), and Last Christmas (2019). He often collaborates with actress Melissa McCarthy.
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
Taylor Jane Schilling is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Piper Chapman on the Netflix original comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), for which she received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series and two Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy and Best Actress – Television Series Drama. She made her film debut in the 2007 drama Dark Matter. She also starred as Nurse Veronica Flanagan Callahan in the short-lived NBC medical drama Mercy (2009–2010). Her other films include Atlas Shrugged: Part I (2011), the romantic drama The Lucky One (2012), the comedy Take Me (2017), and the science-fiction thriller The Titan (2018).
Andrew Eric Gelman is an American statistician and professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University.
Daniel O'Brien, also known as "DOB", is an American humorist, author, writer, actor, comedian and songwriter; formerly for Cracked.com. In August 2018, O'Brien started as a staff writer on the HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and is currently a senior writer. In 2019 through 2024 he was part of the writing team that won six Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing on a Variety Series.
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science writer. He currently serves as professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind(2011), is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. Among his other works, are other bestsellers like Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering.
Stephen Louis Silberman was an American writer for Wired magazine and was an editor and contributor there for more than two decades. In 2010, Silberman was awarded the AAAS "Kavli Science Journalism Award for Magazine Writing." His featured article, known as "The Placebo Problem", discussed the impact of placebos on the pharmaceutical industry.
Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Director of the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science which began in September 2014. Dolan conducts research on the measurement of happiness, its causes and consequences, and the implications for public policy, publishing in both scholarly and popular outlets. He has previously held academic posts at York, Newcastle, Sheffield and Imperial College London and he has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is the author of two popular press books: Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After and the creator and presenter of the Duck-Rabbit podcast.
Matthew Hussey is an author, British dating coach and YouTuber. He is known for his 2013 book Get the Guy and his 2024 book, Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily .
Stephanie Perkins is an American author, known for her books Anna and the French Kiss, Lola and the Boy Next Door, The New York Times bestseller Isla and the Happily Ever After, and, There's Someone Inside Your House, the latter of which was adapted into a film of the same name by Netflix.
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-American sociologist, and the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is also a columnist for The New York Times. Her work focuses on social media, media ethics, the social implications of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, as well as societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic using complex and systems-based thinking. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, she is one of the most prominent academic voices on social media and the new public sphere. In 2022, Tufekci was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her "insightful, often prescient, columns on the pandemic and American culture", which the committee said "brought clarity to the shifting official guidance and compelled us towards greater compassion and informed response."