Randall Kennedy is one of the most sought after media experts on the topic of race in America. A professor at Harvard Law School, the National Law Journal said he "is doing the smartest work in the area of race." He is the author of Interracial Intimacies, Nigger, and Race, Crime, and the Law. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. A Rhodes Scholar, he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

A three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Carl Hiaasen has written over 1300 pieces for The Miami Herald exposing land corruption scams, drug smuggling rings, dangerous doctors, and corrupt politicians. Hiaasen is perhaps best known as the author of twelve novels, including the best-selling Sick Puppy and Skinny Dip and two novels for young readers, Flush and Hoot, which was awarded a Newberry Honor.

Jonathan Gold is the LA Weekly's restaurant critic and the author of Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles. He has been restaurant critic for California, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine and Gourmet, where he was the first food writer ever to be nominated for a general national award in criticism, and he has won James Beard Awards for both magazine and newspaper restaurant reviews. Gold also contributes to the radio shows "Good Food" and "This American Life." In 2007 he became the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

William Grimes was the restaurant critic of the New York Times from 1999 to 2003. He is the author of Straight Up Or On the Rocks and My Fine Feathered Friend, and the coauthor of the New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants 2004.

Irene Khan, the first woman, first Asian, and first Muslim to serve as the Secretary General of Amnesty International, has brought a strong focus to socioeconomic rights and violence against women around the world. She spent 20 years at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was appointed in 1995 as the Chief Mission to India, becoming the youngest United Nations representative. Khan was awarded the Pilkington "Woman of the Year" Award in 2002, as well as the Sydney Peace Prize in 2006.

Christopher Hitchens is the author of more than ten books, including God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq; Why Orwell Matters; The Trial of Henry Kissinger; and Letters to a Young Contrarian. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and has written prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek International, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. He is also a regular television and radio commentator.

Julius Shulman was born in Brooklyn on October 10, 1910 and moved to Los Angeles with his family at the age of ten. Photography went from a hobby to a professional occupation for Shulman in 1936, when he was exposed to modern architecture for the first time on a visit to Richard Neutra's Kun House in the Hollywood Hills. Neutra was so impressed with his photos of the home that he immediately hired Shulman to photograph additional projects, thereby launching an unanticipated, prolific career.

Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times's editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish her latest book, When Everything Changed. She returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. Before joining the New York Times, Collins was a columnist at Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International.

Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

Christos H. Papadimitriou was born and grew up in Greece. He studied electrical engineering at the National Technical University, Athens, and then was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, from Princeton. After teaching at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, he now holds the Lester C. Hogan Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. Christos's research work is in the theory of algorithms, computational complexity and game theory, fields in which he is one of the leading international experts. He has published over three hundred original articles in leading scientific journals, which have received, to date, over twenty-five thousand citations. His books, Elements of the Theory of Computation, Computational Complexity and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity, are the standard textbooks in their fields, while his first novel, Turing, was published in 2003 by MIT Press. Christos is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and other distinctions, among them the prestigious Charles Babbage Prize. He also plays the keyboards in a rock band.

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, where he has taught since 1980, and the author of many books. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.