Contributors

Daniel Tammet is the subject of the award-winning television documentary, The Boy with the Incredible Brain, as well as a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Two Poets (with Les Murray) and the Kate Bush song, Pi. He is the author of nine books, including the memoir Born on a Blue Day, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; two collections of essays, Thinking in Numbers, a New Yorker recommendation, and Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing, a Booklist Editors' Choice and Listener Magazine Book of the Year; a bilingual poetry collection in English and French, Portraits, and a novel written in French, Mishenka. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Aeon and Quadrant, and his books have been translated into thirty languages. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2012, and awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, The Open University, in 2023. Daniel Tammet lives in Paris.

Vicki Tan is a digital product designer who has led teams at Pinterest, Spotify, Headspace, Lyft and Google. She draws from behavioural science to create meaningful, inspirational products that help people build healthy habits. Vicki lives in San Francisco.

Glen E. Swanson is a historian of space exploration and former Chief Historian of
NASA's Johnson Space Center, where he led the digitization of the Apollo mission transcripts
and served as a consultant to astronauts, authors, and filmmakers.

A Fellow of The Explorers Club, Swanson is the author of Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek (Schiffer, 2025) as well as numerous essays on NASA history and the culture of spaceflight.

His research sheds light on how the Golden Record emerged from NASA's post-Apollo environment, an era of budgetary restriction and necessary innovation, and how the Voyagers' journey reshaped humanity's sense of itself.

Dr Lixing Sun is a Harvard Radcliffe fellow and distinguished research professor at Central Washington University. He first studied at East China Normal University in Shanghai before completing a PhD in ecology, behaviour and evolution at the State University of New York and Syracuse University.

He has authored or co-authored over 60 research articles in scientific journals, and contributed extensively to a number of academic books, as well as authoring four academic books. The most recent, The Liars of Nature and the Nature, of which was selected as a Book of the Week by the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. He was awarded a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship in 2024.

Susan Stryker is an award-winning historian and filmmaker whose work has shaped conversation on gender and feminism for decades. She holds a visiting Professorship at Stanford University. Previous works include Transgender History, Gay by the Bay and the Emmy Award-winning documentary Screaming Queens.

Ruby Tandoh is an author and journalist who writes for, among others, the Guardian, Elle and Vice. A finalist on the 2013 Great British Bake Off, she has published Eat Up, a book about the pleasure of eating, as well as two cookery books, Crumb and Flavour. She lives in Brixton.

Kressmann Taylor was living in New York with her husband and working as a copywriter when Address Unknown was published in Story magazine. She later taught at Gettysburg College and is also known for her novel Until That Day. She died in 1996.

Frank Taylor, OBE, was a legendary British sports journalist who wrote for the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, and the Sun. He was the first Briton to serve as president of the International Sports Press Association in 1973 and was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his services to sport and journalism.

Charlie Taverner is a writer, historian and farming policy advisor, who has taught at Birkbeck and Trinity College, Dublin. He has worked as a business and agricultural journalist, and is the author of Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London.

Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki was a Japanese author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin to the West.

Bokyeong Sunim was ordained at Songgwangsa, one of South Korea's most prestigious and ancient temples. He has spent over a decade at Beopryeonsa Temple in Seoul. He is also the author of Time Spent Reading a Cat and The Happiness Cats Bring.

Rachel Syme has covered fashion, style, and other cultural subjects for The New Yorker since 2012, where she is now a staff writer. Her cultural criticism and reported features focus primarily on the intersections of women's lives, artistic production, history, and fame. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and now resides in Brooklyn.