Episodes

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. From January 2009 to January 2011, he served as special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Since 1997 he was chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and a breast oncologist. Dr. Emanuel received his M.D. from Harvard Medical Sc...

Evy Poumpouras is a former Secret Service Special Agent and on-air national TV contributor who frequently appears on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and HLN. She also costars on Bravo's Spy Games, an espionage-inspired reality competition. Evy holds a Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology from Argosy University and a second master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is also the recipient of the United States Secret Service Medal of Valor for her heroism on 9/11 and has been par...

David Kirkpatrick is the author of the definitive book on Facebook, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World, published by Simon & Schuster. He was for many years senior editor for internet and technology at Fortune, which he joined in 1983. He covered the computer and technology industry as well as the impact of the Internet on business and society. Today he is founder and CEO of Techonomy Media, a conference and publishing company focused on the central...

Matt Alt is a Tokyo-based writer, translator, and reporter. He is a contributor to The New Yorker online, CNN, Wired, Slate, The Independent, Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, and many other publications, and is the co-author of six illustrated books about Japan.

Maëlle Gavet is on the board of Edenred SA. In the past she occupied the position of Chief Executive Officer at Ozon Holdings Ltd. and Chief Executive Officer of Internet Solutions LLC (a subsidiary of Ozon Holdings Ltd.), Chief Operating Officer for Urban Compass, Inc., Executive Vice President-Global Operations at Booking Holdings, Inc., Partner at The Boston Consulting Group, Inc. and Chief Operating Officer at Compass Group USA, Inc. Ms. Gavet received an undergraduate degree from Sorbonne U...

Ian Bogost is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a founding partner at Persuasive Games, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Bogost lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Peter Wehner is a New York Times contributing Op-Ed writer covering American politics and conservative thought and a popular media commentator on politics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and veteran of three White House administrations.

JENNIFER MERCIECA is associate professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Founding Fictions and coeditor of The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency. She frequently appears as an expert commentator and consultant for national and international media outlets

Scott Santens is a founding member of the Economic Security Project, an adviser to the Universal Income Project, a founding committee member of Basic Income Action, committee member of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, and founder of the BIG Patreon Creator.

Robin Hauser is the director and producer of cause-based documentary films at Finish Line Features, LLC and Unleashed Productions, Inc. As a businesswoman, longtime professional photographer, and social entrepreneur, Robin brings her leadership skills, creative eye and passion to her documentary film projects. Her artistic vision and experience in the business world afford her a unique perspective on what it takes to motivate an audience. Robin’s most recent award-winning film, CODE: Debugging ...

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, among other novels, and several nonfiction books, including Out of Sheer Rage. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. He lives in Los Angeles.

Maya Alexandri is a novelist, lawyer, certified EMT, medical school student, and 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Maya's collection of short stories, The Plague Cycle, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in May 2018. She is also the author of the novel, The Celebration Husband (TSL Publications 2015).

Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of How Soccer Explains the World, which has been translated into twenty-seven languages, and is a winner of a National Jewish Book Award. For seven years, he edited The New Republic magazine.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and Deep Down Dark, filmed as the major motion picture The 33. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Laura Lexx is an award-winning comedian and writer. She recently came to the public’s attention with her fictional Twitter thread about being married to Jurgen Klopp which went viral and was retweeted and liked by Seth Meyers, Gary Lineker, Marian Keyes, Billy Bragg and Kathy Burke. She was also featured in The Times, The Telegraph, the Guardian and the Evening Standard. Laura’s first book, Klopp Actually: (Imaginary) Life with Football’s Most Sensible Heartthrob, will be published on 3rd Septem...

Matthew B. Crawford is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. He earned a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago, specializing in ancient political thought; he majored in physics as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. Crawford has been working on cars since the age of fifteen and currently drives a 1970 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. Why We Drive is his latest book.

Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author of several books, including From Fascism to Populism in History, Transatlantic Fascism, and The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War. His books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Italian. He contributes to major American, European, and Latin American media, including the New York Times, the Washington Pos...

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, andThe New York Times. The former editor of Granta and one-time president of the Nat...

Casey Schwartz is the author of Attention: A Love Story and In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. She contributes regularly to The New York Times and lives in New York City.

Barton Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist. Since 2013 he has been a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. During 21 years at the Washington Post he served tours as legal, military, diplomatic, and foreign correspondent. He has taught courses at Princeton on nonfiction writing, investigative reporting and national security secrecy. His bestselling Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a New York Times Best Book of 2008.

Frank Smyth is an independent, award-winning investigative journalist specializing in armed conflicts, organized crime and human rights overseas, and on the gun movement and its influence at home. He is a former arms trafficking investigator for Human Rights Watch breaking the role of France in arming Rwanda before its genocide. Smyth is a global authority on journalist security and press freedom having testified to Congress and member states of several multilateral organizations.

Barbara Freese is the author of Coal: A Human History, a New York Times Notable Book. She is an environmental attorney and a former Minnesota assistant attorney general. Her interest in corporate denial was sparked by cross-examining coal industry witnesses disputing the science of climate change. She lives in St. Paul.

Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, "Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn't Work for You" was included in the Columbia Journalism Review's compilation Best Business Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius.