Public Intellectual Creators & Guests

Jessa Crispin is a critic, author, feminist, and the editor-in-chief of Bookslut, a lit blog and webzine founded in 2002.

Assistant Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. Co-Director, Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights Crime and Security and host of Heidi Matthews On Demand podcast. Research interests include: international criminal and humanitarian law; feminist, legal and political theory; law and sexuality. Wifey, Newfie, twin mom.

Jacob Silverman is a journalist who reports on about technology and national security for The New Republic.Silverman's work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, The Washington Post, and Politico. He also writes for The Baffler, where he is a contributing editor. His first book, "Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection," was published in 2015.

Mia Gallagher is a fiction author and a professional actor, performing in theatre, radio and occasionally film.Gallagher's first novel, "HellFire," was published in 2006, and received the 2007 Irish Tatler Women of the Year Literature Award.

B.D. McClay is an essayist and critic.

Alec MacGillis is a reporter at ProPublica, writer, and author of the book The Cynic.

Melissa Gira Grant is a journalist, author, and filmmaker. She is is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso), which was named a Village Voice favorite book of the year; and the co-director of They Won’t Call It Murder, selected for the 2021 DOC NYC Short List.

Mark Arax is a journalist and nonfiction author who writes about California.Arax was a staffer at the Los Angeles Times, and left in 2007 after a public fight over censorship of his story on the Armenian Genocide. He has taught literary non fiction at Claremont McKenna College and Fresno State University.Arax's work has appeared in The New York Times and the California Sunday Magazine.His first book, a memoir of his father's murder, "In My Father's Name," was published in 1997. His second book, "The King of California," was published in 2005, won a California Book Award, the William Saroyan Prize from Stanford University, and was named a top book of 2004 by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. His most recent book, "The Dreamt Land" was published in 2019.Arax received his degrees from Fresno State and Columbia University.

Pankaj Mishra is an essayist and novelist.

Heather Widdows is a British philosopher, specializing in applied ethics, currently the John Ferguson professor of Global Ethics and Deputy pro-vice-chancellor for research impact at the University of Birmingham.