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| Thaddeus Russell |
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Thaddeus Russell, Historian and Author
Thaddeus Russell is a historian and cultural critic and the author of A Renegade History of the United States (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010). He teaches American history and cultural studies at Occidental College and has taught history, American Studies, and the history of philosophy at Columbia University, Barnard College, the New School for Social Research, and Eugene Lang College.
Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Russell graduated from Antioch College and received a PhD in history from Columbia University.
Russell's first book, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Re-Making of the American Working Class, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2001. He is a frequent contributor to The Daily Beast and has written for The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, Salon, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He has also published scholarly essays in American Quarterly and The Columbia History of Post-World War II America.
Russell has appeared on the History Channel, Al-Jazeera, Fox News, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
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| Leda Cosmides & John Tooby |
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Leda Cosmides, Co-Director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UCSB
John Tooby, Co-Director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UCSB
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are best known for their work in pioneering the new field of evolutionary psychology. This multidisciplinary new approach weaves together evolutionary biology, cognitive science, human evolution, hunter gatherer studies, neuroscience, and psychology into a new approach to discovering the mechanisms of the human mind and brain. According to this new view, by understanding the adaptive problems our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced during their evolution, researchers can uncover the detailed functional designs of the emotions, reasoning "instincts" and motivations that human evolution produced.
Cosmides and Tooby both developed their interest in rebuilding psychology along evolutionary lines while undergraduates at Harvard, which is where they met, married, and began their 29 year collaboration. Tooby's A.B. was in experimental psychology and his Ph.D. in biological anthropology; Cosmides' A.B.was in biology and her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. They did postdoctoral work with Roger Shepard, a cognitive psychologist at Stanford, and were then made Fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where they formed the Special Project on Evolutionary Psychology with three other researchers. In 1990 they moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where they are professors of psychology and anthropology and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology. In 1992, they published The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, an edited volume designed to be a state of the art survey of the new field.
They have published research in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, cultural and biological anthropology, genetics, and economics, on topics such as how humans have "cognitive instincts" specialized for reasoning about cooperation, on the adaptive design of the emotions, on the evolution of sexual reproduction as a defense against parasites, on conflict in the genome, and on the cognitive foundations of cultural transmission.
They have both won awards for their work on the foundations of evolutionary psychology. In 1991, Tooby won a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Cosmides won the 1988 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research, the 1993 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and the NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2005) for their joint research. They both received J. S. Guggenheim Fellowships, and Tooby has served as President of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. They are currently working on a number of projects, including the exploration of the evolved psychology underlying coalitions and intergroup conflict, the evolutionary psychology of anger, the motivational basis of the aversion to incest and within family altruism, and the cross-cultural validation of human psychological universals.
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| Nick Gillespie |
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Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com
Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com, the online platforms of Reason, the libertarian magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets. The two sites draw over 4 million visits per month and have been named among the nation's best political sites by Playboy, Washingtonian,National Journal, and others. Gillespie is co-author, with his Reason colleague Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, to be published June 28, 2011 by Public Affairs. The Daily Beast has named Gillespie one of "The Right's Top 25 Journalists," calling him "clear-headed, brainy...[and] among the foremost libertarians in America." He is a two-time finalist for digital National Magazine Awards for his work on "UPS vs. FEDEX: Ultimate Whiteboard Mix" and the documentary series Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey: How to Fix the Mistake on the Lake and Other Once-Great American Cities.
Gillespie served as Reason magazine's editor in chief from 2000 to 2008. Under his direction, Reason won the 2005 Western Publications Association "Maggie" Award for Best Political Magazine. Gillespie originally joined Reason's staff in 1993 as an assistant editor and ascended to the top slot in 2000. In 2004, Gillespie edited the book Choice: The Best of Reason, an anthology of the magazine's best articles. The Washington Post featured Gillespie's tenure at Reason magazine, asking, "Which monthly magazine editor argues that the spread of pornography is a victory for free expression? And that drugs from marijuana to heroin should not only be legalized, but using them occasionally is just fine? And is also quite comfortable with gay marriage? The answer is Nick Gillespie, libertarian and doctor of literature, who...is injecting [Reason magazine] with a pop-culture sensibility."
Gillespie's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, Salon, Time.com, Marketplace, and numerous other publications. He was a regular contributor to the late, lamented satire site, Suck, where he wrote under the name Mr. Mxyzptlk.
He is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and PBS. He has worked as a reporter for several New Jersey newspapers and as an editor at several Manhattan-based music, movie, and teen magazines. He is almost certainly the only journalist to have interviewed both Ozzy Osbourne and Nobel laureates in economics such as Milton Friedman and Vernon Smith.
In 1996, Gillespie received his Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also holds an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University and a B.A. in English and Psychology from Rutgers University. Gillespie, the father of two sons, lives in Washington, DC, and Oxford, Ohio.
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| Matt Welch |
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| Matt Welch, editor in chief of, Reason magazine
From 2006 to 2007, Welch served as assistant editorial pages editor at the Los Angeles Times, shaping and writing editorials, and overseeing the section's web operations.
From 2002 to 2006, Welch worked at Reason as an associate editor and media columnist. From 2002 to 2004, he also wrote a regular "Letter from California" column for Canada's National Post newspaper and contributed to the Online Journalism Review; WorkingForChange.com (for whom he covered Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign); and the now-defunct Los Angeles tech/biz magazine Zone News.
Welch's work has appeared in The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Los Angeles Daily News, Orange County Register, LA Weekly, ESPN.com, Salon.com, Wired, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,The Daily Star of Beirut, and dozens of other publications.
Before 1998, Welch lived for eight years in Central Europe, where he co-founded the region's first post-communist English-language newspaper, Prognosis, worked as UPI's Slovakia correspondent and managed the Budapest Business Journal.
He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Emmanuelle.
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