A staff writer at The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for ''Twenty Years Gone,'' an account of a family still reeling from the loss of a loved one on 9/11. Her critically acclaimed 2015 book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and in 2014 she delivered a popular TED Talk on happiness and child rearing. A frequent guest on numerous news programs, Senior formerly worked as a book critic and columnist at The New York Times and was a staff writer at New York Magazine for 18 years. On Grief is an Atlantic Edition volume of her Pulitzer-winning essay.

A sports columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer since 2013, Mike Sielski is the author of Fading Echoes, the true story of two Pennsylvania high school football rivals who later found brotherhood while in the U.S. military in in the battlefields of the Middle East, and is the co-author of How to Be Like Jackie Robinson, a collection of life lessons taken from the trailblazing baseball legend. In 2015 he was voted the best sports columnist in the U.S. by The Associated Press Sports Editors. His most recent book The Rise is about the life of Kobe Bryant and offers a thorough account of Bryant's identity as a sports and cultural figure and an assessment of his impact on our society. Bob Costas described the books as a ''story informed by meticulous research and rendered with clear-eyed insights.'' (recorded 4/10/2023)