by Sid Holt
Mac McClelland is an award-winning journalist and the author of Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story and For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story From Burma’s Never-Ending War, which was a finalist for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She’s written for Rolling Stone, Reuters, Mother Jones, New York, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and corresponded for PBS and Vice News Tonight on HBO. She’s been nominated for three National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing. Her features have been translated and reprinted around the world.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times, and Cell. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com
David Quammen is an author and journalist whose fifteen books include The Song of the Dodo (1996), The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2007), and Spillover (2012), a work on the science, history, and human impacts of emerging diseases (especially viral diseases), which was short-listed for eight national and international awards and won three (including the Merck Prize, given in Rome). More recently he published two short books, Ebola and The Chimp and the River, both drawn largely from Spillover. His latest book is Yellowstone: A Journey Through America’s Wild Heart, which is an expanded version of the May 2016 special issue of National Geographic on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, with text by Quammen and photos by a team of eight photographers. Quammen is a contributing writer for National Geographic, in whose service he travels often, usually to Africa. He has also written for many other magazines, ranging from Harper’s, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review to Outside, Rolling Stone, and Powder. He is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award for essays and other work in Outside and National Geographic. Much of his nonfiction is focused on ecology and evolutionary biology, frequently garnished with history and travel. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction, and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. In addition he has published three novels and a book of short stories, one of which, “Walking Out,” has recently been adapted into an independent film, premiering in January at the Sundance Festival. Quammen has lived in Montana for forty-three years and in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for most of that time. He is presently at work on a book on the Tree of Life. His home is in Bozeman, where he shares a house and a small lot with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, a conservationist finishing a doctorate in environmental history, and their family of other mammals.
Zandria F. Robinson is a writer and cofounder of the Center for Southern Literary Arts in Memphis. She is the author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South and coauthor with Marcus Anthony Hunter of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Robinson blogs at New South Negress and tweets sundries at @zfelice.
Becca Rothfeld is a doctoral candidate in the department of philosophy at Harvard University.
George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (for the best short-story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s hundred most influential people by Time. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
Gabriel Sherman was named New York magazine’s national affairs editor in 2015, covering politics and business, having previously served as a contributing editor at the magazine since 2008. In 2016, he broke one of the most significant media stories in years—the downfall of Roger Ailes at Fox News, building on his biography of Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room (2014), a New York Times best-seller, and previous reporting for the magazine. Sherman has written news-making features for New York on Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, Rupert Murdoch, Jared Kushner, NBC News, the New York Times, a Facebook scandal at Horace Mann School, Time Inc., Jeff Zucker, and Stuyvesant Town. He has written profiles of Michael Bloomberg, Sarah Palin, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, among others. His 2010 cover story “Chasing Fox” won the Mirror Award from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School for Best Single Article, and his Horace Mann piece was a finalist for the Livingston Award for young journalists. Since September 2016, he has served as a contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, and he has also appeared on Charlie Rose, CNN, Fox News, CBS This Morning, ABC World News, and National Public Radio. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, The New Republic, Slate, GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, and Outside magazine, among other publications. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Jennifer Stahl.
Rebecca Solnit, a writer, historian, and activist, is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope, and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is also the director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches a course on covering immigration and refugee issues. She has written on topics ranging from civil forfeiture to debtors prisons and from Mexico’s drug cartels to Bangladesh’s garment-factory workers. She won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on United States military bases and also received the Michael Kelly Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award for international human-rights reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. Her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs received a George Polk Award and the Molly National Journalism Prize. Before joining The New Yorker, Stillman wrote about America’s wars overseas and the challenges facing soldiers at home for the Washington Post, The Nation, newrepublic.com, Slate, and TheAtlantic.com. She cotaught a seminar at Yale on the Iraq War and also ran a creative-writing workshop for four years at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Connecticut. Her work is included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2012. She is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.
Andrew Sullivan joined New York as a contributing editor in 2016 before becoming a staff writer at large in 2017, writing features for the print magazine as well as commentary and live blogs for nymag.com. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism in 2017. Sullivan began his pioneering blog The Daily Dish in 2000, eventually hosting it at publications including Time, The Atlantic, and the Daily Beast before launching the Dish as an independent, subscriber-funded website in early 2013. In January 2015, he closed the site and stepped back from daily blogging. Sullivan was editor of The New Republic from 1991 to 1996, a writer for the New York Times Magazine from 1996 to 2002, and a weekly columnist on America for the Sunday Times of London from 1996 to 2015. He is the author of several books, including The Conserv
ative Soul and Virtually Normal, the first book to argue for marriage equality. A graduate of Oxford University, he received an MPA and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Matt Taibbi has been a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine since 2003. He is also the author of seven books, the past four being New York Times best-sellers: The Great Derangement, Griftopia, The Divide, and Insane Clown President. He won the National Magazine Award for Commentary in 2008. Before his work in the United States, Taibbi lived in the former Soviet Union for eleven years and for a while edited his own English-language newspaper, the eXile, in Moscow. Matt is married and with his wife Jeanne has three young boys: Max, Nate, and Zeke. He is forty-seven.
Nicholas Thompson was named editor in chief of Wired in 2017. Before joining Wired, Thompson served as editor of NewYorker.com from 2012 to 2017, during which time monthly readership increased by 700 percent. He also oversaw the redesign of the website, the launch of the New Yorker Today app, and the introduction of an online paywall, which contributed to a 130 percent increase in annual subscriptions. Before The New Yorker, Thompson was a senior editor at Wired, where he assigned and edited the feature story “The Great Escape,” which was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo. During his career, Thompson has written about politics, technology, and law for numerous publications. In 2009, his book The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War was published to critical acclaim. Thompson is also a contributor for CBS News and regularly appears on CBS This Morning and CBSN. He is a cofounder of The Atavist, a National Magazine Award–winning digital publication. Thompson is a senior fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Young Leaders Council on the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He was a United States Truman Scholar and graduated from Stanford University.
