Sam Wasson is an author and film critic, whose most recent book is "The Long Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood."

Miguel Farias is an experimental psychologist at Coventry University, where he leads the Brain, Belief, and Behavior research group. He is co-author of the book, "The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?"

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, professor of English at Middlebury College, and the author of several books, most recently "Borges and Me: An Encounter."

Dr. James Lineback is a practicing pulmonary physician with an academic appointment at the University of California Riverside, College of Medicine, as associate clinical professor of medicine. James Fallon is a neuroscientist and a professor at UC Irvine school of medicine.

Srdja Popovic is a Serbian political activist, whose student group Otpor! helped topple Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. His group CANVAS teaches activists around the world how to overthrow autocratic governments.

Ervand Abrahamian is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on modern Iran, and is a professor of history at City University of New York. He is the author of several books, including "The Coup: 1953,  the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations."

Russell Foster is a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, and is the Director of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, as well as the head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute.

Alex Hutchinson is a former Canadian national team runner, a contributing editor to Outside Magazine, and the author of "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance."

James B. Steele is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the author of "America: What Went Wrong?" and "Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness."

Graeme Turner is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Queensland, and the author of several books, including "Understanding Celebrity" and "Ordinary People and the Media."