Allison Schrager is an economist who turned the study of risk into a full-contact reporting beat - hanging out with brothel madams, big-wave surfers, paparazzi and horse breeders to figure out how the best risk-takers actually decide. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Bloomberg Opinion columnist and City Journal contributing editor, she holds a PhD in economics from Columbia and once helped Nobel laureate Robert Merton design retirement products. Her 2019 book 'An Economist Walks into a Brothel' argued that financial theory belongs everywhere people gamble with their futures; her follow-up, 'Worth the Risk,' is due from Yale University Press in September 2026.
Jonah Goldberg is a conservative journalist, author, and podcaster who co-founded The Dispatch in 2019 after a 21-year run at National Review, where he launched National Review Online. He hosts the long-running interview podcast The Remnant, writes the twice-weekly G-File newsletter, holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute, and writes a syndicated column. The author of three books including the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism, he has become one of the most prominent 'ideologically grounded but politically homeless' voices on the American right, having walked away from Fox News in protest in 2021.
Josh Barro is an American journalist who left legacy media to run Very Serious, a subscription newsletter and podcast about politics, business, economics, and culture. A former Republican turned Democrat, ex-host of KCRW's Left, Right & Center and onetime New York Times and Business Insider columnist, he now writes a weekly mailbag called the Mayonnaise Clinic and co-hosts the litigation podcast Serious Trouble with attorney Ken White.
Kevin D. Williamson is an American journalist and author who roams the country as national correspondent for The Dispatch, filing the Monday-morning newsletter Wanderland and the recurring column Econ for English Majors. A former roving correspondent who spent 15 years at National Review, he writes about economics, liberty, and the texture of American life with a prose style that prizes wit, contrarianism, and the long view. He is the author of seven books, including The Smallest Minority and Big White Ghetto.
Michael Lind is an American writer, columnist, and professor who has spent three decades refusing to sit in either political team's section. A fifth-generation Texan who began on the right at the Heritage Foundation and migrated toward New Deal economic nationalism, he co-founded the New America Foundation in 1999, wrote for The New Yorker, Harper's and The New Republic, and now teaches at the LBJ School at UT Austin while writing a column for Tablet. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The New Class War, Land of Promise and Hell to Pay, all of them circling one question: who actually runs the country, and what do they owe the people who don't.
Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A Princeton-trained historian who started at National Review as an intern and never really left, he has spent more than two decades as one of the most cited voices in American conservatism, championing 'reform conservative' ideas like expanding the child tax credit and rethinking monetary policy. He is also a contributing editor to the policy journal National Affairs and a frequent television commentator.
Ben Shapiro is the editor emeritus and co-founder of The Daily Wire, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a syndicated columnist since age 17, and the author of more than a dozen books. A Harvard-trained attorney turned media operator, he has built one of the most-listened-to political podcasts in the United States and helped grow The Daily Wire into a conservative media company valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek and one of the sharpest observers of American consumer culture. Writing the 'Buying Power' column, she dissects how everyday purchases shape identity, politics, and society - bringing a decade of retail experience and almost six years at The Atlantic to one of journalism's most under-examined beats.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, prolific author, and one of the most widely-read economic commentators in the world. After 24 years as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, he left in December 2024 to launch a daily Substack newsletter that quickly surpassed 569,000 subscribers. A Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center, Krugman won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. With 4.3 million Twitter followers, 27 books, and a career spanning academia, policy advising, and public journalism, he remains a defining voice at the intersection of economics and politics.
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.