Wesley Morris is the only writer in history to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism twice - once in 2012 at The Boston Globe and again in 2021 at The New York Times, where he serves as Critic at Large. A Yale-educated Philadelphia native, Morris writes about film, music, race, and American identity with a voice that is simultaneously playful and incisive. He co-hosted the NYT podcast Still Processing for six years, launched Cannonball in June 2025, and runs a Substack newsletter. His work stands at the intersection of entertainment and cultural politics, making him one of the most respected voices in American criticism.
Trung Phan is a Canadian writer, newsletter author, and co-founder who built one of the internet's most entertaining business media brands. His Saturday newsletter SatPost mixes deep-dive tech and business analysis with viral memes, earning him 725k+ Twitter followers and tens of thousands of Substack subscribers. A former equity analyst, Kensho Technologies researcher, and The Hustle writer, Phan is descended from Vietnam's most famous anti-colonial revolutionary, Phan Boi Chau - a lineage that sits somewhere between irony and destiny for a man who now runs his own media empire from a laptop.
Brooke Averick (@ladyefron) is the Philadelphia-born preschool teacher turned TikTok royalty with 1M+ followers, 68.4M likes, and zero shame. She went viral in April 2020 reading her childhood diary, quit teaching, launched Brooke & Connor Make a Podcast (named Best Comedy Podcast of 2024 by Adweek with 30M+ YouTube views), started a solo show called Obsessed with Brooke Averick, and is now publishing her debut novel — Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It — with Crown/Penguin Random House in May 2026. The internet's favorite oversharer, described as 'the app's Jewish voice of Gen Z' by Hey Alma.