Negin Farsad is the author of How to Make White People Laugh, the host of the Fake the Nation podcast on Earwolf, and the director of feature films The Muslims Are Coming! and 3rd Street Blackout. She has also given a TED Talk on social-justice comedy, was named one of the 50 Funniest Women by the Huffington Post and one of the 10 Best Feminist Comics by Paper Magazine.

Isaac Fitzgerald is the editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-author of Knives & Ink and Pen & Ink.

Anne Trubek is the author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Smithsonian, Slate, Salon, Belt and other publications. She is the founder and director of Belt Publishing and was a tenured professor at Oberlin College from 1997-2015.

David Pescovitz is a writer and journalist best known for his work on science, technology and Internet culture. He is also a co-editor of Boing Boing and a research director with the Institute for the Future. He is co-founder of Ozma Records, which plans to reissue NASA’s original Voyager Golden Record on vinyl.

Ed Yong is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of The New York Times bestseller I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, about the amazing partnerships between microbes and animals. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and more.

Amy Sedaris is an actor, author, and comedian based in New York. Her most recent film, Ghost Team, was released in August of this year. You can also hear Amy in the Netflix animated series BoJack Horseman.

Latif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata. Thanks this week to Bill Mallon, Tony Bijkerk, and Carl Posey.

Jen Kober is a comedian based in Los Angeles who blends stand-up, story telling, and improvised rock-n-roll comedy. She regularly appears on NPR’s Snap Judgment Live, as well as The Mindy Project, Real Husbands of Hollywood, The Middle, and Franklin & Bash.

Baratunde Thurston is a futurist comedian, writer, and cultural critic. He helped re-launch The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, co-founded Cultivated Wit and the About Race podcast, and wrote The New York Times bestseller ​How To Be Black​. Baratunde is a public speaker, television personality, and thought leader who has contributed to Fast Company, TED, the MIT Media Lab, and The Onion.

Tracey Helton Mitchell is a recovering addict and author of The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin. She’s contributed to CNN, The Daily Beast, and The New York Times. Tracey has a masters in public administration and is a certified addiction specialist. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and three children.

Giovanni Nieves is a hairstylist and a drag performer in East Orlando.

Kate Bingaman-Burt is an illustrator and educator. Her work orbits around the objects in our lives: the things we buy, the things we discard, and the collectivity and social interaction that can arise from cycles of consumption. Via illustrations, daily documentation, publications, events, large-scale participatory projects,client work, and a full-time role as educator, Kate’s work invites a dialogue about contemporary forms of exchange.

Natalie Batalha is an astrophysicist at the NASA Ames Research Center and the Mission Scientist for the Kepler Mission, a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars.

Peggy Orenstein is the author of The New York Times bestseller Girls & Sex, which offers a clear-eyed picture of the new sexual landscape girls face in the post-princess stage—high school through college—and reveals how they are negotiating it. Her previous books include Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy, a memoir.

Watani Stiner is a writer and activist, who was incarcerated in 1969 for life after a shootout on the UCLA campus. He writes for the San Quentin News and is working on a memoir.

Aparna Nancherla is a comedian and writer based in New York City. She has made appearances on Conan, Comedy Central, and NPR, and written for Late Night with Seth Meyers, as well as Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. Her Twitter feed was named one of the Top 140 Twitter feeds of 2014 by Time magazine.