Mehdi Hasan is a British-American journalist, broadcaster, and media entrepreneur best known as the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Zeteo - an independent digital news company he launched in 2024 after departing MSNBC. A relentless interviewer and master debater who studied PPE at Oxford, Hasan has built a formidable track record at Al Jazeera, The Intercept, and MSNBC before going independent. His 2023 book 'Win Every Argument' became a New York Times bestseller, and Zeteo has rapidly grown to over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers and 450,000 newsletter subscribers within its first year.
Jeremy Caplan is a journalist, educator, and newsletter creator who built Wonder Tools into one of Substack's most-recommended productivity and AI tools newsletters, with 85,000+ subscribers in 201 countries. He is Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where he also runs the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program. A Princeton and dual-Columbia grad, former Time magazine reporter, and one-time international concertmaster, Caplan has spent over a decade helping journalists and knowledge workers find tools that actually save time.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and media critic whose decade of reporting on criminal justice, race, and policing in America has made him one of the most consequential voices in modern journalism. Best known for leading the Washington Post's 'Fatal Force' database - the first real-time national tracker of fatal police shootings - Lowery has written two landmark books, built a distinctive independent newsletter, and become an outspoken advocate for objective, truth-centered journalism that refuses false balance. His career spans the Washington Post, CBS News, The Marshall Project, and academia, and his 2016 book 'They Can't Kill Us All' remains essential reading on race, protest, and the limits of American democracy.
Yashar Ali is an Iranian-American journalist, newsletter publisher, and social media powerhouse who built one of the most influential independent media presences in the US almost entirely through Twitter/X. Known for breaking stories that bigger outlets fear to touch - from Fox News sexual misconduct to Scientology cover-ups - Ali runs The Reset newsletter on Substack with over 61,000 subscribers. Time magazine named him one of the most influential people on the internet in 2019. His career is anything but linear: TV production assistant, personal cook for Kathy Griffin, political operative for Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom, and now independent journalist with a devoted following.
Max Read is a Brooklyn-based journalist, media critic, and newsletter writer who runs Read Max, a Substack publication covering tech culture, internet phenomena, AI, and digital media with acerbic wit and analytical depth. Former Editor-in-Chief of Gawker and founder of New York Magazine's Select All vertical, Read is one of the sharpest observers of how platforms reshape human behavior - a thinker who treats the internet with the seriousness of a literary critic and the irreverence of someone who has watched it eat itself alive.
Simon Owens is a Washington, DC-based media industry journalist, newsletter writer, and podcast host who runs Simon Owens's Media Newsletter on Substack. Known for deep-dive reporting on how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content, he has interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs and built one of the most-followed independent media newsletters, with 38,000+ Substack followers and 61,000+ LinkedIn followers. His work covers the creator economy, subscription models, local news, and the evolving business of digital publishing.
Stephanie Palazzolo is an AI reporter at The Information and author of the AI Agenda newsletter, covering artificial intelligence startups, Big Tech, chips, cloud, and policy. A former Morgan Stanley investment banker who pivoted into journalism, she broke major stories on OpenAI, Anthropic, and the broader AI industry, and was part of a SABEW Best in Business award-winning team for coverage of the OpenAI CEO firing in 2023.
Timothy B. Lee is an independent AI journalist and newsletter writer who runs Understanding AI, a Substack newsletter with over 263,000 subscribers that explains how artificial intelligence actually works - minus the hype and minus the doom. Drawing on a rare combination of a computer science master's from Princeton, two decades of tech policy reporting at outlets like Ars Technica, the Washington Post, and Vox, and an instinct for clear, jargon-free prose, Lee has become one of the most-read independent voices in AI journalism. His superpower is translating complex machine learning concepts into accessible explainers that neither oversell nor undersell the technology.
Matthew Zeitlin is an economics and energy journalist currently reporting for Heatmap News, where he covers the intersection of policy, finance, and the energy transition. With bylines at BuzzFeed News, Grid, Slate, The Nation, n+1, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic, Zeitlin has built a career dissecting how money, power, and policy shape the energy grid. He writes a personal economics newsletter on Substack and is one of the sharper voices covering how the U.S. economy navigates decarbonization.
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.
Anne Helen Petersen is an American journalist, culture critic, and author best known for her newsletter Culture Study and her book 'Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.' Holding a PhD in Media Studies from UT Austin, she went from academic celebrity-gossip historian to BuzzFeed News Senior Culture Writer before launching one of Substack's most-read newsletters. She writes about the structural forces — work culture, consumerism, loneliness, burnout — that shape everyday life, blending academic rigor with deeply personal, accessible prose. She now lives on Lummi Island, Washington, with her partner Charlie Warzel and their dogs.
Bari Weiss is the founder of The Free Press and, since October 2025, editor-in-chief of CBS News following Paramount's $150 million acquisition of her media company. A former Wall Street Journal and New York Times editor whose viral 2020 resignation letter made her a symbol of anti-groupthink journalism, Weiss built one of the fastest-growing independent news outlets in America - reaching 1.5 million subscribers in under five years - before landing the biggest job in legacy broadcast news.
Dylan Matthews is a policy journalist, effective altruism advocate, and former senior correspondent at Vox, where he founded and led the Future Perfect newsletter and section for seven years. Known for his deep-dive reporting on global health, animal welfare, and evidence-based philanthropy, Matthews embodies his own editorial philosophy: he donated a kidney to a stranger in 2016, initiating a chain that helped four people. As of December 2025, he joined Coefficient Giving (backed by Open Philanthropy) to manage the $120M+ Abundance and Growth Fund, moving from writing about doing good to actually doing it.
Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former constitutional lawyer who broke the world's most consequential surveillance story - Edward Snowden's NSA revelations - earning a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar-winning documentary. After co-founding The Intercept and exposing judicial corruption in Brazil, he now runs 'System Update,' an independent nightly show on Rumble, where he delivers unfiltered political commentary captive to no institutional master. He lives in Rio de Janeiro with his two adopted sons and 20+ rescue dogs.
Isaac Saul is the founder and editor of Tangle, an independent nonpartisan politics newsletter with 500,000+ subscribers in 60+ countries. A former newspaper editor who contributed to CNN, TIME, HuffPost, and Vox, Saul launched Tangle in 2019 to fight news polarization by presenting the best arguments from left, right, and center on the day's biggest political debates. He's a Shorty Award winner, TED speaker, and one of the most trusted voices in independent political media.
Jason Kessler is an Emmy-winning writer, food and travel journalist, TV writer, and creative director who penned episodes of NBC's The Office, wrote a weekly column for Bon Appétit, hosted Trip Testers on Travel Channel, and created the Fly&Dine travel and dining platform. A North American Travel Journalist Award winner, cancer survivor, documentary filmmaker, and classical guitarist, Kessler is a rare multi-hyphenate who moves between advertising copy, primetime TV, and long-form journalism with the same easy wit he brings to rating airline food.
Joe Weisenthal is a Bloomberg executive editor, co-anchor of 'What'd You Miss?' on Bloomberg Television, and co-host of the Odd Lots podcast with Tracy Alloway. Known on Twitter/X as @TheStalwart, he has spent 20+ years making arcane financial topics accessible and engaging for broad audiences. He helped grow Business Insider into a 50-million-visitor destination, then brought that digital-first energy to Bloomberg. His Odd Lots podcast, launched in 2015, is one of the most respected finance podcasts in the world. He is also one-quarter of the band Light Sweet Crude, proving that a man can love yield curves and guitar riffs in equal measure.
Matt Levine is Bloomberg Opinion's most-read finance columnist and the voice behind Money Stuff, a daily newsletter that turns Wall Street's most bewildering moments into something approaching comedy. A Harvard classics grad turned Yale-trained lawyer turned Goldman Sachs banker turned Dealbreaker editor, Levine spent his career collecting lenses before finding the one that let him explain finance to everyone who ever wondered what a 'synthetic CDO' actually is - and why it matters. With over 300,000 subscribers, Money Stuff is the rare financial publication that people actually look forward to reading.
Kelsey Piper is an American journalist and effective altruism advocate best known for her work at Vox's Future Perfect newsletter, where she spent seven years covering AI safety, global catastrophic risks, evidence-based philanthropy, and education policy. She broke major stories including OpenAI's non-disparagement agreements and conducted the first post-collapse interview with Sam Bankman-Fried. In August 2025, she left Vox to co-found The Argument, a Substack newsletter focused on reasoned policy debate. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who pledged 30% of her lifetime income to charity, Piper brings a rare combination of technical fluency, ethical rigor, and accessibility to some of the most consequential questions of our time.
Laura Shin is the leading voice in crypto journalism - host of the Unchained podcast, author of The Cryptopians, and founder of Unchained Crypto. A Stanford and Columbia-educated journalist, she was the first mainstream reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time, amassing 25+ million downloads and solving one of crypto's biggest mysteries: the 2016 Ethereum DAO hack.
Mona Charen is a syndicated political columnist, author, and podcast host who has spent four decades at the center of American conservative commentary. A former speechwriter for Nancy Reagan and one of the original Never Trump voices, she writes with unflinching honesty about the GOP's drift toward extremism. Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of The Mona Charen Show on The Bulwark, she is one of the few conservative commentators who has maintained intellectual consistency through decades of partisan turbulence.
Tracy Alloway is an award-nominated financial journalist and Executive Editor at Bloomberg Markets, best known as co-host of the Odd Lots podcast alongside Joe Weisenthal. With nearly two decades of experience covering global finance - from the 2008 financial crisis at the FT to cross-asset markets at Bloomberg - she has a rare gift for making the arcane mechanics of capital markets both comprehensible and entertaining. Her forensic curiosity and dry wit have made Odd Lots a must-listen on Wall Street.
Virginia Sole-Smith is an award-winning journalist, NYT-bestselling author, and creator of Burnt Toast - a newsletter and podcast with 66,000+ subscribers dedicated to dismantling diet culture and anti-fat bias. Her books 'The Eating Instinct' (2018) and 'Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture' (2023) have made her one of the most influential voices in fat liberation and body-positive parenting. She writes with unflinching clarity and warmth, blending rigorous investigative reporting with deeply personal narrative.
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.