Contributors

Haley Shapley is a journalist living in Seattle. A prolific freelance writer, her insatiable curiosity has led her to pen stories on everything from exploring a cave in Belize to digging into the history of Chautauqua life, to looking at why women and men are treated differently in the doctor's office. She has written for outlets including Teen Vogue, The Seattle Times, Forbes Health and the Telegraph. She is the author of Strong Like Her: A Celebration of Rule Breakers, History Makers, and Unstoppable Athletes.

Bill Schutt is Professor of Biology at LIU-Post (Long Island University) and Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures and a novel, Hell's Gate (with J. R. Finch).

David Schmader is an American writer known for his solo plays, his writing for the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, and his annotated screenings of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls.

A practitioner of mindfulness and meditation for over 30 years, Barb Schmidt is the author of the internationally bestselling book The Practice. Over the years, she has been on over 100 retreats and studied with teachers around the world from Deepak Chopra to the Dalai Lama. In 2011, she founded the non-profit organization Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life to bring mindfulness teachings to the community and make them accessible to everyone. She has taught meditation courses at Nova Southeastern University, and currently she offers classes and workshops at Florida Atlantic University as part of the Peace Studies Program's community outreach.

Nelson Schwartz has been a writer at the New York Times for a decade and covers economics. Before that, he wrote about Wall Street and banking for The Times, and also served as European economic correspondent in Paris.

Delmore Schwartz (1913 – 1966) was an American poet and short story writer. He was an influence on Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, immortalised in songs by Lou Reed and John Berryman. He died destitute in a New York hotel in 1966.

Jeremy Scott was born into the eccentric decaying upper classes, he had a spectacularly successful life in advertising in the 1960s and 1970s until reinventing himself, first in Provence and then as an ascetic, whose life was saved by Marcus Aurelius 10 years ago.

Roger Scruton is a philosopher whose books include Art and Imagination (1974), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Beauty (2009), How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012) and Our Church (2012). In 2010 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews on 'The Face of God'. He has been described, by Daniel Hannan, MEP, as 'The man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is.'

Mick Scully lives in Birmingham. He has been a bouncer, teacher, acupuncturist and now works as a humanist funeral minister. His story collection Little Moscow was highly praised; The Norway Room is his debut novel.

Matthew Scully (born March 30, 1959) is an American author, journalist, and speechwriter.

Daniel F. Seidman, Ph.D., is the director of the smoking cessation service at Columbia University Medical Center whose revolutionary techniques for quitting have been featured on Oprah and in the Wall Street Journal.

Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been writing about physics and mathematics for two decades. He is the author of six books, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, which won a PEN/Martha Albrand Award; Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe</i>; Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes</i>; Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, which won the 2009 Davis Prize from the History of Science Society; Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception</i>; and Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It's True? Seife holds an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Meridith, and his children, Eliza and Daniel.