Tom Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of The Age of Austerity. His column on demographic and strategic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. During the year leading up to the 2012 elections, he wrote for The Times as a weekly contributor to Campaign Stops. He covered American politics at The Washington Post from 1981 to 2006, and before that at The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal. He has written four other books: Building Red America, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, Power and Money: Writing About Politics and The New Politics of Inequality. He splits his time between Washington and New York.
 

Chip McGrath is a longtime writer and editor who is currently a writer at large for The New York Times. McGrath spent many years at The New Yorker magazine, where he rose to become head of the fiction department and then deputy editor. From 1996 to 2004 McGrath served as editor of The New York Times Book Review. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He is also the editor of two golf books — The Ultimate Golf Book and Golf Stories — and is currently editing the stories of John O’Hara for The Library of America. McGrath has written in many genres, including fiction, non-fiction, humor and essays, and has edited and known many great writers throughout his career. McGrath graduated from Yale University and did graduate studies in the United Kingdom as a Marshall Scholar. He divides his time between suburban New Jersey and southeastern Massachusetts.
 

Dr. Diana Krumholz McDonald is an art historian and lecturer specializing in ancient art. She received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Harvard, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she concentrated in Ancient Near Eastern and Pre-Columbian art.
        Since 1997, she has been on the faculty of Boston College, where she teaches The Art of Ancient America and Ancient Mediterranean Art.
        She frequently lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where her courses have included the Art of Egypt and Nubia, Art of the Ancient Near East, and Art of the Ancient Americas. Most recently Dr. McDonald advised on, and lectured at the Symposium for the Museum of Fine Art’s 2011–2012 exhibition “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love.” She wrote the first chapter in the show’s catalog, entitled Aphrodite’s Ancestors: Ancient Near Eastern Goddesses of Love.
        Her primary interest is in animal iconography in ancient art, and in aspects of evolution that help explain the origin of art and symbolism in art. She wrote her dissertation on Serpent Imagery in the Ancient Near East. More recently, she has been focusing on lion symbolism, the goddess Ishtar, and the history of the horse.
 

Michael Salemi is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Salemi is the author of more than sixty published articles in macroeconomics, domestic and international monetary theory, and economic education. He is also author of Money, Banking and Financial Markets: What Everyone Should Know, part of the Great Courses series produced by The Teaching Company. Salemi has served as chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Education and as Co-Principal Investigator for the Teaching Innovations Program sponsored by the Committee. Salemi was awarded the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Instruction by UNC-CH in 1987 and 2004, the Bower Medal by the National Council on Economic Education in 1998, the Villard Research Award by the Association of Economic Educators in 2001, and the Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award by the Southern Economic Association in 2012. Since retiring, Salemi has focused on wood turning, photography, music, and hiking. His photos, including images of some of his wood turnings, may be viewed at MichaelSalemi.com.