Ryan Avent is an American economics writer and author who spent 15 years at The Economist, six of them writing the magazine's flagship Free Exchange column. He wrote The Wealth of Humans (2016), a widely discussed argument that automation, globalization and a productive elite are creating a glut of labor that breaks the old social contract of work. He now runs portfolio communications at the investment fund Select Equity Group, writes the Substack newsletter The Bellows, and has a book on belief and the fate of societies forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic who turns the dry machinery of economic policy into stories people actually read. She coined the phrase the time tax to name the hours Americans waste navigating government paperwork, wrote Give People Money to make the case for a universal basic income, and has spent more than a decade explaining how money moves through people's lives. Her work spans The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, and Foreign Policy.
Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on business and economics for The New York Times editorial board, and the author of 'The Economists' Hour,' a history of how economists came to reshape American policy. Before joining the editorial board in 2019, he spent nearly a decade as a Washington correspondent covering the Federal Reserve and economic policy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. His subprime-lending investigation at The Charlotte Observer won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Catherine Rampell is an economics journalist who turned spreadsheets into prime time. After 11 years as a Washington Post opinion columnist, she now runs the economics desk at The Bulwark, writes the 'Receipts' newsletter, and co-anchors 'The Weekend: Primetime' on MS NOW. Her trademark is data-driven argument: charts, receipts and footnotes deployed against political spin, on immigration, inflation, trade and the cost of living.
Eric Levitz is a senior correspondent at Vox who covers American politics, economics and the future of the Democratic Party, most visibly through his newsletter and column 'The Rebuild.' A former creative-writing student turned wonk, he spent roughly eight years at New York Magazine's Intelligencer before joining Vox, earning a reputation for data-driven, argument-forward pieces that frequently irritate both the online left and the right - sometimes in the same week.
Jennifer Rubin is a political commentator, author, and editor-in-chief of The Contrarian, the Substack publication she co-founded with attorney Norm Eisen in January 2025 after resigning from The Washington Post. A former labor lawyer who graduated first in her class at UC Berkeley Law, she spent years as the Post's resident conservative voice writing the 'Right Turn' column before breaking sharply with the Republican Party over Donald Trump and registering as a Democrat in 2020. Today she writes daily commentary in defense of democracy and is an MSNBC contributor.
Jim Tankersley is the New York Times Berlin bureau chief and a longtime economics journalist who spent 17 years dissecting Washington's tax fights and the fortunes of the American middle class. A small-town Oregon kid turned Stanford grad, he broke major scoops on the Biden economic agenda, won the Livingston Award, was part of a Pulitzer-finalist team, and wrote 'The Riches of This Land,' a narrative reckoning with what happened to the postwar middle-class dream. In 2025 he traded the West Wing for Germany.
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.
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.
Reihan Salam is the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a Brooklyn-born son of Bangladeshi immigrants who climbed from editorial researcher to one of the most cited voices on the American right. A former executive editor of National Review and associate editor of The Atlantic, he co-wrote Grand New Party with Ross Douthat and authored Melting Pot or Civil War?, making the case for a working-class, multi-ethnic conservatism and a skills-based immigration policy.
Jon Auerbach is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in the US. A former Pulitzer Prize-nominated technology journalist who covered conflict zones for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, Auerbach pivoted into venture capital in 2000, co-founding M-Qube (acquired by VeriSign for $275M) before joining CRV in 2004. Over two decades at CRV, he has backed transformative companies including Zendesk, DoorDash, and Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft for $1.35B), earned a spot on the Forbes Midas List (ranked #16 in 2020), and now leads the firm's founder support operations spanning legal, finance, marketing, and talent.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Ashlee Vance is a South Africa-born, Texas-raised journalist, author, and documentary producer who spent 14 years at Bloomberg Businessweek before launching Core Memory in January 2025 - an independent sci-tech media company. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books including the definitive pre-Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, producer of HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die, and creator of Bloomberg's most-watched video series Hello World. In 2025 he is writing a forthcoming book on OpenAI and Sam Altman with exclusive access, and already sold the film rights.
Codie Sanchez is the founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking, a financial media company with over 8 million followers, and author of the NYT bestselling book 'Main Street Millionaire.' A former Wall Street executive and award-winning journalist, she built a portfolio of 26-30 'boring businesses' - think laundromats, car washes, and handyman services - and teaches her audience how ordinary businesses can create extraordinary wealth. Her weekly newsletter reaches over 1 million readers, and her mission is to create 1 million financially free humans through business ownership.
Jon Stokes is a 25-year veteran of online media who co-founded Ars Technica in 1998 with Ken Fisher, helping build it into the internet's premier tech publication before selling it to Condé Nast for $25 million. An engineer turned journalist turned product builder, he holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from LSU alongside two master's degrees from Harvard Divinity School in early Christian history - a combination that explains his unusual range: equally comfortable dissecting CPU microarchitecture, AI policy, Second Amendment law, and New Testament scholarship. Today he's co-founder and CPO of Symbolic AI, runs a Substack newsletter on AI and crypto with 13,000+ subscribers, and serves as a fellow at Open Source Defense.
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.