Sasha Sagan’s essays and interviews on death, history, and ritual through a secular lens have appeared in The Cut, O the Oprah Magazine, Parents, Atmos and beyond. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book For Small Creatures Such As We. She is also the host of the podcast Strange Customs. Sasha regularly speaks in the U.S. and abroad about the ways science can inform our traditions and expand our sense of wonder.
Andrew Ross Sorkin is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC’s signature morning program. He is also the founder and editor at large of DealBook, an online daily financial report published by The New York Times that he started in 2001. Sorkin is the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail and the co-producer of the 2011 film adaptation, which was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards. Sorkin is also the co-creator of the drama series Billions on Showtime.
Michael Pollan is the author of ten books, including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine. A Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow, Pollan has taught writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University.
Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Professor at Princeton University, investigates the history of religion. She is best known for her research and publication involving a cache of over fifty ancient Jewish, Greek, and Christian texts discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945—including secret gospels that Christian leaders declared heretical, and successfully obliterated for nearly two millennia.
George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.
Zibby Owens is the founder of Zibby Media which includes the award-winning daily podcast Totally Booked with Zibby, Zibby Publishing in New York, and Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica CA, plus a book club, retreats, events, and more. She is the author of six books including the USA Today bestsellers Blank: A Novel and On Being Jewish Now: Reflections from Authors and Advocates, and founded the On Being Jewish Now Substack.
Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and on Substack at SusanOrlean.Substack.com.
MEGHA MAJUMDAR is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal.
Patricia Lockwood is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021, and the memoir Priestdaddy, one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017, as well as the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black.
Nancy Lemann is the author of Lives of the Saints, The Ritz of the Bayou, Sportsman's Paradise, Sportsman's Paradise, Malaise, and forthcoming from NYRB: The Oyster Diaries. She has written for the Paris Review, Harper's, the Oxford American, Lapham's Quarterly, and more. She lives in Washington, DC.
