Chris Heiser is the publisher and co-founder of LA-based Unnamed Press. Started in 2014, Unnamed has quickly become one of the country's leading independent publishers of contemporary literature. The press releases approximately 25 titles a year, across a variety of categories, including fiction, memoir, poetry and classics, though it has made a particular name for itself as a publisher of new contemporary writing by women, among them celebrated authors like Esmé Weijun Wang (The Border of Paradise), Chelsea G Summers (A Certain Hunger), Jennifer Croft (Homesick) and Bethany Morrow (Mem). In 2023, Unnamed Press partnered with LA-based publisher Rare Bird to launch North Figueroa Bookshop, a community bookstore and event space in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. In late 2024 Unnamed Press launched a classics imprint, Smith & Taylor, created by two of its editors, Allison Smith and Brandon Taylor, that seeks to broaden the discourse around old books. Previously, Chris was deeply involved with starting up nonprofit translation press Phoneme Media (now an imprint of Deep Vellum) and worked at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Before that he worked at The New Press and John Wiley & Sons in New York. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature from NYU, and a BA in English from Occidental College.

Scott James is a veteran journalist and novelist. He’s the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, which reopens the case of The Station Nightclub fire, one of America’s deadliest disasters. Trial by Fire won the top prize for nonfiction from the New England Society Book Awards and was adapted for television by the CBS News program “48 Hours.”  In his weekly eponymous San Francisco column for the New York Times, James’ stories drew national and international coverage. He’s been honored with three Emmy Awards for his work in television news. He's also the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, finalist for the national Lambda Literary Award for debut fiction, under the pen name Kemble Scott. James lives in San Francisco.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s newest book, Stolen Pride, Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, was selected by Barack Obama as one of his “10 favorite books of 2024” and was selected as one of the New York Times notable books of the year. Others of the retired UC Berkeley sociologist’s ten books include Strangers in Their Own Land, the Second Shift and The Managed Heart.

Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication for over a decade. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. Max Boot’s new biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend, is a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Pick. It has been acclaimed as the "definitive biography" (The New Yorker), a “magisterial,” “vivid,” and “splendid” account (The Washington Post), and a book that "stands out for its deep research, lucid prose and command of its subject’s broad political and social context" (The New York Times).

Sarah Lacy is one of the best-known investigative journalists, authors, and serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She helped build TechCrunch as its first Editor-at-Large, before founding investigative news site Pando.com in 2011, and the online community ChairmanMom.com in 2018.

She is the author of three critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011) and “A Uterus Is a Feature Not A Bug: The Working Woman’s Guide to Overthrowing the Patriarchy” (Harper Business, November 2017).

Alissa Wilkinson is a film critic at the New York Times and was formerly a senior correspondent and critic at Vox. Her previous book, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women, was published in 2022. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former Dean at the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. 

He graduated from Harvard University in Far Eastern History; studied Chinese at Stanford University, was a student at National Taiwan University; and did his PhD work at Berkeley in Chinese History. After working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, he covered the war in Indochina and has been in and out of China since the mid-70s. He’s the author of numerous non-fiction works including  Wealth and Power: China’s long March to the 21st Century and My Old Home: A Novel of Exile. 

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Smith Richardson Foundation grant and is the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, a Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism and is a fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the Annenberg School of Communications at the USC.

Louis Ferrante is a former Mafia associate and heist expert who served eight years in prison after refusing to incriminate his fellow Gambino family members. His last book, Mob Rules (HarperCollins), was an international bestseller, and his Discovery Channel Series, Inside the Gangsters Code, earned him a Grierson Award nomination for Presenter of the Year.

Ferrante has just released his new book, Borgata: Rise of Empire, “a riveting history of the Mafia’s first one hundred years, from 1860’s Sicily to 1960’s America.

Greg Sarris received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where he was awarded the Walter Gore Award for excellence in teaching.  He has published several books, including Grand Avenue, an award-winning collection of short stories, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries and co-executive produced with Robert Redford.  He is serving his seventeenth consecutive elected term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. In addition to serving as Chairman of his Tribe, he serves as President of the Tribe’s Economic Development Board, overseeing all of the Tribe’s business interests, including the Graton Resort and Casino.  Formerly a full professor of English at UCLA, and then the Fletcher Jones Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University, Greg now holds the title of Distinguished Emeritus Graton Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, where he taught a number of courses in Creative Writing, American Literature, and American Indian Literature.  His book How a Mountain Was Made, a collection of stories was published in October 2017 and was awarded a Bronze Medal from Independent Publisher Book Awards.  His book Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors was released in April 2022.  He is executive producer of I Am A Noise, a Joan Baez documentary film, appointed as Chair to the Board of Trustees for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Co-Chair of Smithsonian Campaign, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lisa M. Krieger is a journalist for The San Jose Mercury News/Bay Area News Group, covering science, medicine and environmental research news from Stanford University, University of California, NASA-Ames, U.S. Geological Survey, Lawrence Livermore Labs and other Bay Area-based research facilities.  She covered public health crises in Mississippi after 2005's Hurricane Katrina and rebel-held Sri Lanka after 2004's East Asian tsunami, on loan to Knight-Ridder News Service.

Krieger also teaches “News Feature Writing” in the Science Communication Program (M.S. degree) at UC-Santa Cruz.

Chip Conley is Co-founder and Executive Chairman of MEA (formerly Modern Elder Academy) and a renowned entrepreneur, best-selling author, and dynamic speaker celebrated for his innovative approach to leadership and hospitality. As the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, he expanded a single boutique hotel into the second-largest boutique hotel brand in the U.S. In 2013, he joined Airbnb as Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, mentoring its founders and helping shape its culture during a rapid growth phase. Inspired by his midlife journey, experience at Airbnb, and extensive research and collaboration with thought leaders in the area of aging, Chip co-founded the Modern Elder Academy (MEA), the world’s first midlife wisdom school. With campuses in Baja and Santa Fe, MEA offers transformative programs to help individuals navigate midlife transitions and cultivate a renewed sense of purpose. A prolific author of several influential books, including Wisdom@Work and Learning to Love Midlife, Chip continues to inspire and reframe the concept of aging through his writing and keynote speeches.

Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.

Mr. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. While working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia during his student years, writing articles to cover his expenses. Mr. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 140 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. He's also one of the very few Americans to be at least a two-time visitor to every member of the so-called "Axis of Evil." During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs and an African airplane crash.

Dr. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he served as founding director of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. Recognized as one the country’s leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and of strategic nonviolent action, Professor Zunes has served as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, and a contributing editor of Tikkun until June 2024. Dr. Zunes was honored to serve March-June 2024 as Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Research Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. [See his Vitae, Photo and Contact/Appearances.]

Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. The latest of his eleven books is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. His King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. He is a three-time winner of the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the California Book Awards. His reporting from five continents has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Web page: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/person/adam_hochschild/

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently THE BEZZLE (a followup to RED TEAM BLUES) and THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATION, a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include RED TEAM BLUES, a science fiction crime thriller; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the LITTLE BROTHER series for young adults; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Thomas Singer, MD, is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst who trained at Yale Medical School, Dartmouth Medical School, and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the author and editor of many articles and books, including a series of books on cultural complexes in Australia, Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America won the IAJS award for Best Edited Book of 2020. In addition, Dr. Singer has co-edited a series of books on Ancient Greece/Modern Psyche. His most recent book, Mind of State: Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring US Society and Politics, explores the many layers of conflict contributing to the polarization and dystopian mood of our times. Dr. Singer serves on the Board of ARAS (Archive for Research into Archetypal Symbolism) and has edited ARAS Connections for many years.

Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-nine novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Resurrection Walk, Desert Star, The Dark Hours, The Law Of Innocence, Fair Warning, and The Night Fire. His books, which include the Harry Bosch series, the Lincoln Lawyer series, the Renée Ballard series, and the Jack McEvoy series, have sold more than eighty-five million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He is the executive producer of the tv series Bosch and Bosch: Legacy on Prime Video, and The Lincoln Lawyer series on Netflix, and the documentary films Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales of the American. He is the creator and host of the podcasts Murder Book and The Wonderland Murders & The Secret History Of Hollywood. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Dennis Prager is the co-founder of PragerU, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, and columnist who has authored nine books and is known as one of America’s most respected conservative thinkers.

Alexander Nemerov is the author of many books on American art, most recently The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as "one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender"; and Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, named by Vogue one of its best books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Nemerov is a professor of art history at Stanford University.

Richard V. Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM). Before founding AIBM in 2023, Reeves was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. While at Brookings, he focused on policies related to economic inequality, racial justice, social mobility, and boys and men.

Reeves is the author of several books, including "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It" and "Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to do About It."

Inspired by his own experiences as a father and policy expert, Richard founded AIBM to bring awareness to the challenges facing boys and men today and to develop evidence-based solutions.

Ron Elving is Senior Editor and Correspondent on the Washington Desk for NPR News, where he is frequently heard as a news analyst and writes regularly for NPR.org.

He was previously the political editor for USA Today and for Congressional Quarterly. He has been published by the Brookings Institution and the American Political Science Association. He has contributed chapters on Obama and the media and on the media role in Congress to the academic studies Obama in Office 2011, and Rivals for Power, 2013. Ron's earlier book, Conflict and Compromise: How Congress Makes the Law, was published by Simon & Schuster and is also a Touchstone paperback.

During his tenure as manager of NPR's Washington desk from 1999 to 2014, the desk's reporters were awarded every major recognition available in radio journalism, including the Dirksen Award for Congressional Reporting and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 2008, the American Political Science Association awarded NPR the Carey McWilliams Award "in recognition of a major contribution to the understanding of political science."

Felicity Barringer created the online magazine, & the West, for the Bill Lane Center in 2016, with Geoff McGhee, a data journalist who has been her partner in the enterprise ever since. Felicity, who is 73, started the work about 18 months after retiring from a 28-year career at The New York Times, where she had been a reporter and editor on the national, foreign and business desks. Her career at The Times began in Moscow, where she reported on the reawakening of Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachev – and covered Chernobyl, including a visit to the plant. Her last decade at The Times was spent as a national environmental reporter, covering everything from the build-out of natural gas wells in western Wyoming to the passage of California’s groundwater management law. Before joining The Times in 1986  she worked for nearly a decade at The Washington Post. The Heart of & the West's coverage has always been environmental reporting – from droughts to floods to land use and wildlife issues. We try to look behind the news and look over the horizon at the issues that will soon dominate environmental coverage.

British born Canadian Malcolm Gladwell is a Non-fiction writer, journalist, public speaker and podcaster, (Revisionist History) and a New Yorker staff writer since 1996 and the author of eight books, Including The Tipping Point; Blink; Outliers; What the Dog Saw; Talking to Strangers; The Bomber Mafia and Revenge of the Tipping Point.

Jim Louderback is among the most respected figures in digital media with a 30-year history of leadership at the intersection of traditional media, digital media, experiential and technology. He recently ended an 8-year run with VidCon, starting in 2014 as editorial director of the industry track, taking over as CEO in 2017. In early 2018 he led the sale of VidCon to Viacom (now Paramount). He previously led investments in numerous startups as a Venture Partner at Social Starts, built and sold online video network Revision3 to Discovery, was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine and founding content lead for cable network TechTV. Jim writes the popular weekly newsletter "Inside the Creator Economy" on LinkedIn, advises startups, and develops, curates and moderates events and experiences globally.

A founding co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, David Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Kennedy received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2000 for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War. He received an A.B. in History from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women’s history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999) recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

Elizabeth Farnsworth

Documentary filmmaker (The Judge and the General) and former chief correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She was a reporter covering crises in Iraq, Cambodia, Vietnam, Botswana, Chile, Haiti, Iran and Israel and is a recipient of the Alfred I DuPont Columbia Award. She is also the author of the memoir A Train Through Time and the novel Last Light, which takes place in Kansas in 1943 with a young woman newspaper reporter and an amnesiac POW who claims to be a corporal but acts more like a high officer.  We will discuss memoir and novel writing and documentary film making as well as the present geopolitics in some of the hot spots she worked in and covered as a reporter.  Your questions and comments welcome!

Veteran journalist, editor and speaker and author of the best-seller, Buddha or Bust and Becoming Gandhi. He has written for The New York Times, The L.A. Times and National Geographic. We will talk to him about Gandhi and the Mahatma’s legacy in India’s independence and passive resistance and the challenge of trying to live his 6 moral truths in immortal times as well as the importance of faith, fasting, vegetarianism, celibacy, non-violence and the role of compassion and goodness.  How is the often called father of India viewed in today’s India under Modi and do Gandhi’s ideals and principles continue to hold up?  We invite you to submit our questions and comments here: www.askgreymatter.show

This week's conversation at 11am Pacific time will feature a live conversation with best-selling author (The Joy Luck Club; The Kitchen God's Wife; The Bonesetter's Daughter) Amy Tan. We will focus on her most recent best-seller, The Backyard Bird Chronicles  -- a fascinating immersion into nature, the world of birds and the dedication to drawing them. You don't need to be a bird lover to listen and join in. Start sending in your questions and comments now to Amy Tan here at www.askgreymatter.show.

Click View Event for more information about Amy Tan.

A Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jessica is an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024).