Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Russian: Александр Иса́евич Солженицын) was a Soviet and Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his writings he helped to make the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system—particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of his best-known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.AKAAlexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Russian: Александр Иса́евич Солженицын) was a Soviet and Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his writings he helped to make the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system—particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of his best-known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.AKAAlexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)

Aleksandr

Antonio García Martínez is an American New York Times Best Selling author and tech entrepreneur. He is a former product manager for Facebook, the CEO-founder of AdGrok and a former quantitative analyst for Goldman Sachs.

Antonio García Martínez

Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American author, neuroscientist, philosopher and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Since September 2013, Harris has hosted the Making Sense podcast (originally titled Waking Up), in which he interviews guests, responds to critics, and discusses his views. In September 2018 Harris released a meditation app, Waking Up with Sam Harris.

Lena Dunham is an American actress, writer, director, and producer. She is known as the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls, for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards.

Lena

Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski is an American model and actress. She was born in London, England, to American parents, Kathleen (Balgley), a professor, and John David Ratajkowski, a painter. She is of British Isles, German, Polish, and Jewish ancestry. Emily was raised in Encinitas, California, near San Diego.

Emily

Paul Graham is an English-born American computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News.

Paul

Patrick James Rothfuss is an American writer of epic fantasy. He is best known for his ongoing trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicle, which won him several awards, including the 2007 Quill Award for his debut novel, The Name of the Wind. Its sequel, The Wise Man's Fear, topped The New York Times Best Seller list.

Patrick

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Steven

Vera Mindy Chokalingam, known professionally as Mindy Kaling, is an American actress, comedian, and writer. She initially gained recognition for the NBC sitcom The Office, where she played the character Kelly Kapoor and served as a writer, executive producer, and director.

Mindy

Chris Anderson is a British-American businessman who is the head of TED, a non-profit organization that provides idea-based talks and hosts an annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Chris

Ricardo Semler is the CEO and majority owner of Semco Partners, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering.

Ricardo

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. He was ranked No. 328 on the Forbes 400 in 2018, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.

Peter

Barack Obama is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president of the United States.

Barack

Joshua Waitzkin is an American chess player, martial arts competitor, and author. As a child, he was recognized as a prodigy, and won the U.S. Junior Chess championship in 1993 and 1994. The film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" is based on his early life.

Josh

Arianna Huffington is a Greek-American author, syndicated columnist, and businesswoman. She is the founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of fifteen books.

Arianna

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and former option trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Joan

An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. From one of Americas iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion.  Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock.  She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support.  Days later–the night before New Years Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary.  In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over.  Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through.  Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didions attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness .  .  .  about marriage and children and memory .  .  .  about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. 

Rupi Kaur is an Indian-born Canadian poet, illustrator, and author. Kaur rose to fame on Instagram and Tumblr through sharing her short visual poetry.

Rupi

Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy is an actress and model. She has received several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a SAG Award, and a Critics' Choice Television Award, and nominations at the BAFTA Film Awards and the Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2021, Time magazine placed her on the Time 100 Next list.

Anya

Brendon Burchard is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and "the world's leading high performance coach". His latest book, High Performance Habits, was a Wall Street Journal best-seller and named by Amazon as one of its top three best business and leadership books of 2017.

Brendon

Janet Mock is an American writer, television host, director, producer and transgender rights activist. Her debut book, the memoir Redefining Realness, became a New York Times bestseller. She is a contributing editor for Marie Claire and a former staff editor of People magazine's website.

Janet

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion was born in California and lived in New York City. She was best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.

In her novel Play It as It Lays, published in 1970, Joan Didion captures the mood of an entire generation through spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader.  Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose. 

Frank Chimero is a successful designer, illustrator, and author based in New York. His clients range from Nike to NPR and his work has been featured in Monocle, The Atlantic, Time, Slate and The New Yorker.

Frank

Jack Edwards is the author of 'The Uni-Verse: The Ultimate University Survival Guide' (HarperCollins, 2020) which seeks to make university less intimidating for future students. He is also a Youtuber and social media creator, talking about literature with reference to popular culture.

Jack

Play It As It Lays

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s.  Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era―including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall―through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it.  Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography. 

Anthony Michael Bourdain was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian who starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition.

Anthony

The White Album

In these bold essays, Joan Didion dissects the American political process at all levels, exploring the way campaigns are engineered to appeal to voters.  Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics.  She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them.  These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of our democracy—an essential reading of our democracy. 

Audrey Gelman is an American businessperson and political staffer. She is the founder of The Wing, a women's co-working space and social club founded in New York City in 2016. She was the inspiration for Allison Williams's character Marnie on Girls.

Audrey

Political Fictions

Written before she became a major figure, Joan Didion's first nonfiction book remains the essential portrait of America in the sixties, focusing on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and especially the essence of San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. 

Lambert is the mastermind and creative force behind the Austin-based Bunkhouse Group, which includes two boutique hotels in Austin, one in San Antonio, and a “nomadic hotel and campground” in the artist mecca Marfa, where mod travelers are flocking to stay in her retro-fitted trailers, teepees, and yurts.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion reexamines portions of her life, work, history, and ours in her latest book, which is both poignant and enlightening.  Didion, a native Californian, examines the states ethic of merciless self-sufficiency with her scalpel-like acumen in order to evaluate the ethics frequently shaky link to reality. Where I Was From analyses Californias romances with land and water, its unspoken obligations to railways, aerospace, and large government, and the contradiction between its code of individualism and its obsession for jails, combining history and reporting, biography and literary critique.  Didion is an unrivalled observer, whether shes writing about her pioneer ancestors or wealthy sexual predators, robber barons, or authors (including herself), and her work is both academically intriguing and personally intimate. ‍‍

Cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in Social Media and recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers, Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, a training company that empowers marketers internationally with the skills they need to drive success at their companies.

Joan Didion

Best author’s book

The Year of Magical Thinking

Written books

Play It As It Lays

The White Album

Political Fictions

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Where I Was From

The Year of Magical Thinking

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