manhattan-institute
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David Goldhill
David Goldhill is the co-founder and CEO of Sesame, a cash-pay online marketplace where patients buy doctor visits, labs, and prescriptions at fixed prices with no insurance in between. A former entertainment executive who ran the Game Show Network for a decade, he turned healthcare critic after his father died of a hospital-acquired infection, wrote the 2009 Atlantic cover story 'How American Health Care Killed My Father' and the book 'Catastrophic Care,' then built the company that tries to fix what he spent years writing about. He chairs the board of the patient-safety nonprofit Leapfrog Group and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Allison Schrager
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.
Chris Papagianis
Chris Papagianis is the Chief Strategy Officer of Hudson Bay Capital Management, a multi-strategy hedge fund, a role he took in November 2023. Before that he spent nearly eight years as a partner at Paulson & Co. and president of the Paulson Family Foundation, working public markets, private investments, and the firm's government affairs. His path runs through the West Wing - he was Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under George W. Bush - and through the policy-shop world, where he ran Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute and became one of Washington's most cited voices on housing finance and the unfinished business of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Harvard grad, Peabody Fellow, congressional witness, and a rare operator equally fluent in spreadsheets and statute.
Howard Husock
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies housing, municipal government, civil society, and philanthropy. A former Emmy-winning WGBH documentary filmmaker who later taught case studies at Harvard's Kennedy School and ran research at the Manhattan Institute, he has spent four decades arguing that American housing policy keeps making the same trillion-dollar mistake. His 2025 book The Projects rereads the history of public housing as a story of demolished communities, not just demolished buildings.
Nicole Gelinas
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Post columnist who has become one of the most-cited voices on how New York moves, pays its bills, and keeps itself safe. A Chartered Financial Analyst turned urban-policy writer, she translates municipal bonds, subway capital plans, and congestion-pricing math into prose ordinary readers can follow. Her 2024 book Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize and reframed the century-long fight over the city's streets as a story with many heroes, not just one Robert Moses villain.
Oren Cass
Oren Cass is the founder and chief economist of American Compass, the think tank that rewired the economic playbook of the American right. A former Bain consultant and domestic policy director for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, Cass turned against the free-market orthodoxy he once served and built an intellectual case for tariffs, industrial policy, and worker power that now echoes through the speeches of JD Vance and Marco Rubio. He is the author of The Once and Future Worker and editor of The New Conservatives, and a contributing opinion writer for the Financial Times.
Reihan Salam
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.