Robert Maynard Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher. He is the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974) and Lila: An Inquiry…
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosop…
Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor i…
Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Pete…
Frederick Forsyth, CBE was a English author and occasional political commentator. He was best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, …
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher and professor at Harvard University. He was educated at Columbia (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, at Princeton (Ph.D. …
Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an eth…
Robert Axelrod (born 1943) is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He has appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Gerald…
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics col…
Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker Prize- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top…
Rachel Ingalls grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She held various jobs, from theatre dresser and librarian to publisher’s reader. She was a confirmed radio and film addict and started living in Lon…
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Revie…
Donella H. "Dana" Meadows was a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer. She was educated in science, receiving a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College in 1963, and a Ph.D. …
John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), was an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré had resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Grea…
Nathaniel Read “Nate” Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight blog and …
Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. He has written for The Paris Review, N+1, The New York Times, VICE, WIRED, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and others. He has recei…
David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. His next book, Inside the B…
Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He was one of TIME's inaugural list of 100 most influentia…
Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has …
Karen Hao is an American journalist. Currently a freelancer for publications like The Atlantic and previously a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal and senior artifici…