Eduardo Berti was born in Argentina in 1964 and has lived in France for nearly thirty years. A writer in Spanish, and also more recently in French, he is the author of several novels (including La mujer de Wakefield, Todos los Funes, Un padre extranjero, and Un hijo extranjero), collections of short stories and flash fiction (Lo inolvidable, La vida imposible), and unclassifiable texts, such as Inventario de inventos (inventados) and Mauvaises méthodes pour bonnes lectures. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. His English titles are Agua (Pushkin Press), The Imagined Land (Deep Vellum), and An Ideal Presence (Fern Books). In parallel, he has published several books on popular music (tango, Argentinian rock) and Spanish translations of authors such as Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Georges Perec. He became a member of the Oulipo in June 2014. His last book published in France, Faster, recently received the Prix Roger Caillois.
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. He has written for, among others, the New York Times, National Geographic, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of Spoils of War, Kill Chain, and Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. His new book, Washington Is Burning, will be published in March.
Emily Davis is an actor, writer, and producer. Recent New York credits include Tartuffe (New York Theater Workshop), Well, I’ll Let You Go (Irondale), Is This A Room (The Vineyard Theater, Broadway’s Lyceum Theater; Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Drama Desk nomination), and Singlet. Recent TV credits include The Patient (FX), Tulsa King (Paramount+), American Rust (Showtime/Amazon), Servant (Apple TV), High Maintenance (HBO), and the upcoming: Widow’s Bay (Apple TV). Film credits include The Plagiarists and Gwen in Corpus. She produced the film The Misconceived, which premiered at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Miriam Elhajli is a singer-improviser, musicologist, and geographer of Venezuelan and Moroccan heritage based in Flatbush, Brooklyn. A part of the avant-garde and folkloric communities of New York City, she has performed alongside artists such as Anne Waldman, Shahzad Ismaily, Raven Chacone, Blake Mills, Victor Campbell, and Orquesta Akokán. She has performed locally at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, the Noguchi Museum as well as internationally in farms, basements, and living rooms.
Elhajli is a band member of local punk, cumbia, and noise bands and is releasing her fifth album this year on Numina Records, a label she founded to aid in the documentation of women’s music and poetics in the Maghreb and around the world. Elhajli works as a researcher at the Association For Cultural Equity founded by Alan Lomax, and as a public school teacher at City Lore, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting folklore and oral histories of New York City.
Christiane Ahouefa Fagbemi is a graduate of the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po Paris. Born in Benin and raised in working-class neighborhoods in the Paris suburbs, she grew up navigating structural inequalities in access to education and public institutions. Her personal trajectory informs her civic commitment. She is the President of Cité des Chances, a nonprofit organization dedicated to activating democracy by empowering young people from underserved neighborhoods to feel both legitimate and capable of engaging with public debate and institutions. The organization relies on peer-to-peer learning and hands-on civic practice, creating spaces where young people learn by doing, debating, simulating institutions, and actively participating in democratic life.
John Ganz is the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. He writes the widely acclaimed Unpopular Front newsletter for Substack. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Artforum, the New Statesman, and other publications.
Anna Gát is a writer and technologist based in New York City. She is the founder and CEO of Interintellect where she hosts online and in-person salons on philosophy, literature, history, and society. With a background in aesthetics, languages, and theater she also writes for The Spectator and Quillette, and hosts The Hope Axis podcast.
Megan Gafford is an artist and writer based in New York City. For about a decade, she exhibited artwork about science and technology, before pivoting to writing about aesthetics and the Enlightenment tradition. Gafford publishes visual essays at Fashionably Late Takes, regularly contributes to Quillette and The Metropolitan Review, and hosts Interintellect salons online and in person.
Richard Hell was born and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, but dropped out of high school and moved alone to New York at the age of seventeen. He first came to public attention in the mid-1970s as an originator of punk. In 1984 he retired from music and returned to his original ambition of writing books. He is the author of several works of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, and autobiography, including The Voidoid, Across the Years, Artifact, Go Now, Hot and Cold, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Massive Pissed Love, and What Just Happened, as well as co-author of book-length collaborations, including the collection of poems Wanna Go Out? (published under the heteronym Theresa Stern) with the musician Tom Verlaine and the image-texts of Psychopts with the artist Christopher Wool. First published in 2005, Hell’s novel Godlike was reissued this year as an NYRB Classic.
Jim Holt writes about math, science, and philosophy for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Review of Books. His Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story was an international bestseller. He is also the author of When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought and Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
Sophie Kemp is the author of the novel Paradise Logic, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2025. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Vogue, and Pitchfork. She teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
Daniel Levin Becker is a critic, editor, and translator from Chicago. He is the author of What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Literature (City Lights, 2022) and Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012), and the co-founder of the very small press Fern Books. His recent translations from French include Like a Sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic (Fern Books, 2024), Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard (Yale University Press, 2024), and The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (Fitzcarraldo Editions/Transit Books, 2023). He has been a member of the Oulipo since 2009.
John R. MacArthur is the president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine. An award-winning journalist, he has previously written for The New York Times, United Press International, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of the acclaimed books You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America, The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy, and Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. He lives in New York City.
Underground System is a shape-shifting force in New York City’s dance music scene, fusing afrobeat, punk, and disco into a sound that’s as unpredictable as it is infectious. Their 2018 debut LP, What Are You, earned cult status, praised for its “David Byrne meets Soulwax” energy and propelling them onto global stages. A whirlwind 2019 European tour saw them electrify crowds at festivals like Eurockéennes and Fusion, cementing their reputation for kinetic live performances. Now, with their recent EP’s and the release of their two latest singles, “Heads Of State” and “Devotion,” they’re charging full-speed toward a sophomore album and more tour dates.
P.E. Moskowitz is a writer born and raised and living in New York City. They run the newsletter Mental Hellth which covers psychology and psychiatry and culture from a critical, leftist perspective. They’re the author of the three books, the most recent of which is Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs.
Alissa Quart is the author of five books of acclaimed nonfiction including Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. She created and directs the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a media non-profit. She writes frequently for The Guardian, The New York Times, and Time, among other publications. She is the recipient of an Emmy for her documentary work and is the author two books of poetry, including Monetized.
Ramya Ramana is an award-winning American author, poet, lyricist and writer. She was born, raised and currently resides in New York. Ramana won the NY Knicks Poetry Slam, which awarded her a full tuition scholarship to St. John’s University. Soon after, she became the Youth Poet Laureate of NYC. She has since performed at events such as the US Open, Tribeca Film Festival, TV One’s Verses and Flow, Pharrell’s Adidas Campaign, SONY TV’s Asian Women in the Arts Awards and many more. Her work can be found in the Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets. Ramana published her first collection of poems through Penmanship Books, which was released at Lincoln Center. In addition to performing and writing, Ramana has also worked as an educator and mentor for young poets and young women. She received her MFA in creative writing from the New School. Ramana is currently working as a librettist for an operetta film.
Randy Frazer is the Executive Director of Yvote, a youth-led nonprofit that empowers young people ages 14 to 18 to understand and engage in democracy through programs such as Democracy Camp, the Changemakers Institute, the Civic Fellowship and youth-led media teams. The initiatives introduce participants to the political landscape and equip them to lead and shape their communities.
Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter, editor, and the owner-operator of Read Max, a weekly newsletter guide to the future. His work concerns the weird ways the internet makes us think, feel, and organize ourselves. His writing has appeared in New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times, where he writes the “Work Friend” column. He’s also the former editor of Gawker and Select All. His Bookforum essay “Going Postal” was selected for The Best American Essays 2021, and his New York feature “The Year in Memes” was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and child.
Erica Robles Anderson is an associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. Her research focuses on forms of collective life. By paying attention to under-appreciated sources of invention, she asks: where does change come from—and how does it stick? Erica is currently writing American Collectivity, a three-volume cultural history that charts conservative innovations across churches, households, and school to argue that traditional narratives can and do shape migrations into new technological regimes. Erica is an award-winning historian. She was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and is a co-founder of the OIKOS working group on kinship economy, as well as co-editor of Public Culture, an award-winning journal for transcultural study. Erica holds a Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University. These days, she teaches courses about fame, architecture as media, marriage, and positive sum think tanks.
Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, Nineteen Reservoirs, and, most recently, I Heard Her Call My Name, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other honors include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She retired in 2023 after 24 years teaching writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
Stephanie Wambugu lives in New York City. She was born in Mombasa, Kenya and grew up in New England. Her work appears in The Nation, Granta, frieze, Bookforum and The Drift. Her debut novel Lonely Crowds was published by Little, Brown in 2025.
Reggie D. White is the artistic director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC.
White made his Broadway debut in Matthew López’s Tony Award–winning The Inheritance and has earned praise for roles on stage and screen including, most recently, Goddess at The Public Theater. His directing credits include Atlantic Theater Company, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and The Williams Project.
As a playwright, his work has been developed at Bay Street Theater and Berkeley Rep, and his play Fremont Ave. will next be seen at California’s South Coast Repertory after its world premiere at Arena Stage last fall opened to critical acclaim and won the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. He previously served as Artistic Director of the Atlantic Acting School (2018–2022), Associate Artistic Director of The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis (2022-2024), and as a resident artist at Vineyard Theatre. He is a recipient of numerous honors, including the Colman Domingo Award, TCG Fox Fellowship, TBA Titan Award, and the RHE Artistic Fellowship.