Contributors

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Cribsheet and Expecting Better. Listed as one of TIME's most influential people 2022, her work is centred around humanising data to help people work through hard decisions. She spoke at the 2007 TED conference and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Esquire. Oster is married to economist Jesse Shapiro and is also the daughter of two economists. She has two children.

Emanuele Ottolenghi was born in Bologna, Italy. A Political Science graduate of the University of Bologna, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught Israel Studies at Oxford from 1999 to 2006. Since 2006, he has been the director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute. A frequent commentator on Middle East affairs and transatlantic relations for many English-language and Italian publications, he is the author, most recently, of Autodafé: L'Europa, gli Ebrei e l'Antisemitismo (Lindau, 2007, in Italian).

William Outhwaite studied at the Universities of Oxford and Sussex, where he taught for many years, and has been Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University since 2007. He is the author of numerous ground breaking books on Social Theory.

Born in Essex, Mez Packer works as a lecturer in multimedia and futurism at Coventry University. Before that, she worked as a jazz singer in Portugal. She lives with her partner and her two children in Leamington, Warwickshire. Her debut novel Among Thieves was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Authors Club First Novel Award.

Mark Palmer has written for national newspapers and magazines for more than thirty years. He was formerly with theDaily Telegraph and is now with the Daily Mail. He has written the authorised history of Clarks shoes.

Musa Okwonga is an Oxford University graduate who since then has practised both law and football, with the emphasis on the latter. He won the Junior Bridport Prize for fiction in 1994, for poetry in 1995, and the WH Smith Young Writers competition a year later. He lives in South London.

Michel Onfray was born in 1959 in the village of Argentan near Caen where he still lives. A high-school philosophy teacher for 20 years, he resigned from the state education sector and in 2002 set up the People's University in Caen. His twenty books map out a theory of hedonism: some celebrate the senses – smell, taste and the visual; others formulate a contemporary atheist ethics. He is currently at work  on a six-volume alternative history of philosophy of which the first two volumes have been published.

Pola Oloixarac was born in Buenos Aires. She is one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists. She was awarded the 2021 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award and is an Eccles fellow at the British Library. Oloixarac is a regular contributor to The New York Times, El País and La Nación, and her fiction has appeared in Granta, n+1, the White Review and Freeman's. She lives in Barcelona.

Redmond O'Hanlon is best known for his journeys into some of the most remote jungles of the world. His books include Congo Journey, Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again, and Trawler.

Sybil Oldfield is half German and half English. Her grandmother was a pacifist feminist socialist who was placed unofficially under Schreibverbot during the Nazi dictatorship. Her mother was classified as an 'enemy alien naturalized by marriage' in Britain after WWII broke out. Oldfield is now Emeritus Reader in English at the University of Sussex and a researcher for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A nuclear pacifist, she has campaigned on the psychological disarmament side of the anti-war movement since the 1960s.

David Olusoga is an Anglo-Nigerian historian and producer. Working across radio and television, his programmes have explored the themes of colonialism, slavery and scientific racism. He has written three books: The Kaiser's Holocaust, The World's War and Black and British: A Forgotten History, was a Waterstones History Book of the Year 2016, which was longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Prize and won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman and Longman History Today Trustees awards.
Find him on Twitter @DavidOlusoga