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.

Dr Julia Martins is a cultural historian specialising in gender and medicine in the early modern period.

After completing her PhD in History at King's College London, she has focused on public history, creating the Living History YouTube channel and blog. She is passionate about bringing the forgotten world of women healers to a wider audience, uncovering their fascinating and often surprising stories.

Steve Martin is the co-author of the New York Times International bestseller Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion. His work in the field of persuasion science has featured widely in the global media. His regular business columns for the British Airways in-flight magazine and the Harvard Business Review are read by over 2 million people each month. He is a guest lecturer at the London Business School and the University of Cambridge.

John Marincowitz began his career as a history teacher at a secondary school in a deprived area of Cape Town. He returned to London to pursue his interest in historical research and was awarded a PhD at SOAS in 1985. In that year he joined the History Department at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet. He worked at the school for 26 years during which time the focus of his attentions shifted increasingly to matters of pedagogy, school management and leadership. He was Headmaster of Queen Elizabeth's from 1999 to 2011. His various other positions of responsibility in education included the Chairmanships of the Governors of Little Heath primary school, the Management Committee of the Adolescent Education Unit at Edgware Psychiatric Hospital and Barnet Council's Schools' Finance Committee. This book, which reflects his abiding interest in history and education, is the product of research he conducted over eight years following his retirement as Headmaster.

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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.

Andrew Martin is a rail expert and author. His previous titles include Underground, Overground, Night Trains, Belles & Whistles, Steam Trains Today and Train Teasers. He is also the author of Seats of London, a field guide to Transport for London's iconic moquette patterns.

Gerry Martin is an industrialist who has made the history of glass technology his hobby.

Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde (husband and wife) are laboratory directors at the Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI) in Phoenix, Arizona, where they study various aspects of visual, sensory and cognitive neuroscience. They have collaborated with Teller (of Penn & Teller) in their academic work, and their research has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, New Scientist and Wired magazine.

Richard J. DeMartino, the co-author along with Erich Fromm and D.T. Suzuki of the little 1960's classic, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, died January 6 2013 in New York. DeMartino retired from the Department of Religion at Temple University as a senior associate professor in 1986 after teaching there for some 20 years.
Born in Harlem, New York on August 28, 1922, DeMartino graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School. He earned his bachelor's degree in social science at the City College of New York. He was recruited as a Phi Beta Kappa member into the U.S. Navy Language School and he served active duty at the Joint Intelligence Center in Pearl Harbor and as naval language officer with the U.S. force occupying Japan in 1945-1946. After his discharge, he served in Tokyo as historical consultant to the defense panel of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
During this period, he met D.T. Suzuki and began studying Zen Buddhism in Kita-Kamakura with him. DeMartino's studies continued during Suzuki's early years in the United States through the 1950s at the University of Hawaii, Claremont Graduate School, Harvard Divinity School and Columbia University as Suzuki's assistant.
DeMartino also studied with Zen thinker Shin'ichi Hisamatsu and translated many of Hisamatsu's writings into English. He participated in, and served as interpreter for, extended exchanges between Paul Tillich and Hisamatsu, which he edited for publication in the Eastern Buddhist as 'Conversations between Dr. Paul Tillich and Dr. Shin'ichi Hisamatsu.'
DeMartino's own treatments of the human situation and Zen Buddhism in his Ph.D. dissertation and several articles serve as a unique conceptual introduction to Zen Buddhism, on which he focused his academic career.
He is survived by his centenarian aunt who lives across the street, his extended family of cousins, his former students and his wife.

Deirdre Mask graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude, and attended the University of Oxford before returning to Harvard for law school, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She completed a master's in writing at the National University of Ireland. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. Originally from North Carolina, she has taught at Harvard and the London School of Economics. She lives with her husband and daughters in London.

Paris Marx is a tech critic, journalist and creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Tech Won't Save Us. In 2024 he published the series Data Vampires, an exposé of the hyperscale data centre industry. He is the author of Road to Nowhere, and his writing has appeared in Wired, TIME, NBC News and CBC News. Hyperscale is Marx's second book.

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. He is based in Newfoundland, Canada.