Contributors

Justin McCurry has lived in Tokyo since 1991 and reports on Japan and South East Asia for the Guardian

Sandra McDonald is an independent advisor and trainer on mental capacity issues. She was the Public Guardian for Scotland for 14 years, supervising those appointed to manage the affairs of individuals no longer able to do so personally. She holds qualifications in law, public sector management and nursing. She also operated as her father's Power of Attorney, so knows first-hand the challenges that attorneys face.

Christopher McDougall is author of the internationally bestselling Born to Run, which is being adapted into a TV series, Natural Born Heroes, and Running with Sherman. He lives in rural Pennsylvania and Hawaii.

Paul McMahon has authored reports on sustainable food systems as an advisor to The Prince of Wales's International Sustainability Unit and to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. He co-founded and now helps run SLM Partners, a business that invests in sustainable agriculture in Australia and across the world. Born in Ireland, he holds a PhD from Cambridge University.

James McManus is best known as a poker writer and player. He finished fifth in the 2000 World Series of Poker (winning almost $250,000) and used the experiences for his bestselling memoir Positively Fifth Street. He has also published novels, poetry and has been the poker columnist for the New York Times.

Sean McMeekin is Professor of History at Bard College, New York. For some years he taught at Bilkent University, Istanbul. His books include the highly successful The Berlin-Baghdad Express (Penguin), The Russian Origins of the First World War and July 1914.

Albert Memmi was born in 1920 in Tunisia, when it was a French protectorate. He grew up speaking Tunisia-Judeo-Arabic and French, and went on to be educated at the University of Algiers and the Sorbonne in Paris. During the Second World War, he was imprisoned in a forced labour camp which he later escaped from. A supporter of Tunisian independence in the post war, he left the country for France after independence citing increasing marginalisation due both to his French education and Jewish identity. He published several widely acclaimed novels as well as major works on racism and Judaism. He died in France in 2020.

Dr Emily Mayhew is a military medical historian specialising in the study of severe casualty, its infliction, treatment and long-term outcomes in 20th and 21st century warfare. She is historian in residence in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College, and a Research Fellow in the Division of Surgery within the Department of Surgery and Cancer. She is the author of Wounded: From Battlefield to Blight 1914-1918, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize 2014.

Valerie Martin is the author of eleven novels, including I Give It To You, Italian Fever and Property, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction. She has also written three collections of short fiction and a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, Salvation. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize for Mary Reilly.

Antone Martinho-Truswell is a behavioural ecologist and Dean of Graduate House at St Paul's College, University of Sydney. He studied at Harvard University and at University College, Oxford. His work focuses on animal minds and learning and on human behaviour and interaction with the natural world, and has been covered in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times and New Scientist. Antone writes about biology and animal behaviour for Aeon and the BBC and is the author of The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to Be Like Birds Made Us Human (Oxford University Press, 2022). He lives with his wife and daughter in Sydney.

Emmérick-Adrien Maury was a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. As a resident physician at the Royal Homeopathic Hospital in London, he devoted himself to homeopathy and acupuncture. He died in 1990.

Rollo May was an innovative American psychologist and psychotherapist, best known for his work in the field of existential therapy. He taught at Harvard, Princeton and Yale, and was Regents' Professor at the University of California. He authored many influential books and articles, including the bestsellers Love and Will and The Meaning of Anxiety. He died in 1994.

Paris Marx is a journalist who publishes in Wired, Time, and MIT Technology Review, among other publications. His award winning Tech Won't Save Us podcast has 25,000 listeners per episode, while his Disconnect newsletter has a reach of over 10,000 people who get his updates right in their inbox. Beyond that, he has over 50,000 followers on Twitter/X, and tens of thousands more on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and all the rest.