Mike Pesca is host of The Gist,and guest hosts the NPR Programs All Things Considered and the news quiz, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. His work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Planet Money. He has frequently appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and The PBS Newshour, and written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, GQ, Slate, and Baseball Prospectus.

Tanael Joachim (TJ) is a stand up comic, a regular at the Comedy Cellar and an Op-Ed contributor for the New York Times. His first special, January 3 is available on Amazon Prime. 

Noam, Dan and Periel catch up: Dan gets to Vegas despite a cancelled flight, Louis CK's Grammy, Noam’s interview with The Hollywood Reporter about the slap, Justice Jackson, "Don't Say Gay" and more. 

A CONVERSATION highlighting the role of comedy as a political, moral and analytic tool in our time: Taboos are everywhere. Plain facts are being denied. Arguable propositions are foisted on us as if they were certainties. Decorum and politeness sometimes blind us or intimidate us or deceive us. The comic makes us laugh, for sure. But, in that act he also creates space for saying the unsayable. He has "plausible deniability." He can be a truth teller, a liberator, a sage...

• Glenn Loury: Professor of Economic and Professor of International and Public Affairs, Brown University. Host of The Glenn Show podcast. He is among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality.
• Roland Fryer: Harvard Economist, Macarthur "Genius" Fellow, Time 100 Honoree, McDonalds Employee of the Month specializing in Race and Education. Standup Comedian.
• Coleman Hughes: Writer, podcaster, rapper, and multi-instrumentalist who specialises in issues related to race, public policy and philosophy.
• Noam Dworman: Owner of the Comedy Cellar

Mia Jackson is a Georgia native now living in New York.  Her first half hour special is available on Epix and her second half hour special is on Comedy Central. She is a regular at The Comedy Cellar. 

David Stone is a Comedy Cellar superfan. He has played in Scrabble tournaments since the mid-1990s and was once rated within the top 50 players in North America.

Katie Hannigan is a stand up comic and actor. Her television appearances include The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central, Just For Laughs New Faces and MTV. She is a Comedy Cellar regular. 

Michael Mailer has been working extensively in the independent film world since graduating Harvard University. His first feature film, A Fool And His Money, starred Sandra Bullock and George Plimpton. Since then, Mailer has gone on to produce over 25 features. His father is the American novelist, Norman Mailer. 

Nick Griffin has appeared on Conan, The Late Late Show, in his own half-hour Comedy Central special and was featured on The Late Show with David Letterman eleven times. He is a Comedy Cellar regular. 

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU.  He is president-elect of the American Philosophical Association.  He is known for his formulation of the "hard problem" of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard's play, The Hard Problem, and the idea of the "extended mind", which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds.

Al Lubel is stand up comic and a regular at The Comedy Cellar. His special, Mentally Al, is available on YouTube.

Alan M. Dershowitz is Brooklyn native who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world. He was a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for  fifty years. 

He has published more than 1000 articles in magazines, newspapers, journals and is the author of fifty books.