Episodes

Simon Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994. He wrote the daily currencies column, before leaving the FT in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has been there ever since. Nowadays he writes a general column for the Weekend FT on all manner of topics from politics to books, and on cities including London, Paris, Johannesburg and Miami.

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington D.C., Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Prior to the Times, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. And before that, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine. He attended the University of Virginia, where he graduated with a degree in polit...

Conservative Commentator John J. Pitney Jr. frequently writes for USA Today,The National Review,Claremont Review of Books, and other publications and is frequently interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and many other media outlets. He teaches political science at Claremont McKenna College and resides in Claremont, CA.

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, Oxford. He appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and other papers. He advises government and the office for national statistics. Among his books are All That Is Solid; Population 10 Billion; So You Think You Know About Britain?; and Injustice.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of more than two dozen books, ranging in topics from ancient Greece to modern America, most recently The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. He lives in Selma, California.

Timothy L. O'Brien is an award-winning author and journalist with more than 20 years of experience at leading media enterprises, including Bloomberg LP, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and HuffPost. He's currently the executive editor of Bloomberg LP's two premier public policy, politics and business commentary platforms: View and Gadfly. O'Brien edited a series on wounded war veterans that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. He's also the recipient of a 1999 Loeb Award for Distinguished Busin...

Anne Nelson has received a Livingston Award for her journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship for her historical research, and a Bellagio Fellowship for her research on the social impact of digital media. A graduate of Yale University, she began her career as a journalist in the U.S and abroad. She won an Associated Church Press Award for her writing on the conflict in Central America, which she covered for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the BBC. She has taught at Columbia University for over two dec...

Valerie Hansen is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches Chinese and world history. An accomplished scholar and author, she traveled to nearly twenty countries to conduct research for The Year 1000. She is several acclaimed works, including The Silk Road: A New History and The Open Empire, and co-author of Voyages in World History.

Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. Prior to joining the UT facu...

Don Tapscott is one of the world's leading authorities on the impact of technology on business and society. He has authored 16 books, including Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which has been translated into over 25 languages. Don's most recent book was co-authored with his son, Alex Tapscott. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies Is Changing the World was published in May 2016 and is, according to Harvard Business School's Clay...

John Elkington is a writer, thought-leader, serial entrepreneur, and, at heart, an environmentalist. Described as the "Godfather of Sustainability," he has now written or co-authored 20 books, including the million-selling Green Consumer Guide series.

William H. Davidow is a general partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, California. Before forming this venture capital firm, he was senior vice president of sales & marketing for Intel Corporation and shepherded the renowned Intel 8080 and 8086 to success. Prior to joining Intel he was a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard's computer group. Davidow graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Katherine Stewart's work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, American Prospect, The Atlantic and other publications. She is the author of The Good News Club, an investigation of the religious right and public education.

Uché Blackstock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, where she is also the Faculty Director for Recruitment, Retention and Inclusion in the School of Medicine’s Office of Diversity Affairs. Dr. Blackstock is the CEO and Founder of Advancing Health Equity LLC, which partners with healthcare organizations to address several of the critical factors that contribute to health inequity, through educational trainings and racial equity culture ana...

Alex Lazarow is a venture capitalist specializing in global innovation and impact. He presently works with the global investment firm Cathay Innovation. He was previously a principal with Omidyar Network. He is a Kauffman Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations term member, and an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Lazarow is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Manitoba. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay area.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of the novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and other works of nonfiction, including Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and The Village of Waiting. His play, Betrayed...

James Crabtree is an Associate Professor in Practice at the LKY school, as well as a senior fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation (CAG). He initially joined the school as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow in 2016, on sabbatical from his previous job at the Financial Times. Between 2011 and 2016, James led the FT’s coverage of Indian business as Mumbai bureau chief, having previously worked on the opinion page in London, as Comment Editor. At the school, James teaches courses on leaders...

Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering and a director of research at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. He is a globally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post; author of The Immigrant Exodus, which the Economist named a Book of the Year of 2012; and coauthor of Innovating Women, which documents the struggles and triumphs of women in technology. Wadhwa has held appointments at Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, UC Ber...

Howard Steven Friedman, a leading statistician and health economist, is an expert in data science and applications of cost-benefit analysis. He teaches at Columbia University.

Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic. She is the co-author of A Planet To Win: Why We Need A Green New Deal (Verso) and the co-editor of We Own The Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style (The New Press).

Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and founding director of the Center for the Study of Private Law.

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. He joined the FT in 2006, after 15 years at The Economist, where he served as a correspondent in Washington D.C., Brussels, and Bangkok. In 2010 Rachman published his first book, Zero Sum World, which predicted the rise in international political tensions and turmoil that followed the global financial crisis. In 2016, Rachman won the Orwell Prize, Britain's leading award for political writing. He was also named Commenta...

Jennifer Senior has been an Op-Ed columnist since September 2018. She had been a daily book critic for The Times; before that, she spent many years as a staff writer for New York magazine, doing profiles and cover stories about politics, social science and mental health. Her best-selling book, "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood," has been translated into 12 languages, and her work has been anthologized in many essay collections, including four volumes of “The Best American Po...

Mark O'Connell is the author of To Be a Machine, which was awarded the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Guardian. He lives in Dublin with his family.