Andrew Hammel holds law degrees from the University of Houston and Harvard Law School and was admitted to the bar of the State of Texas in 1996. He is a former death-row defense lawyer and law professor. He is the author of Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Perspective (2010) and many scholarly articles. He is fluent in English and German. His long-form journalism on famous true crime cases has appeared in Quillette, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Berliner Zeitung, and other outlets.

Ric Burns is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. He has written, directed and produced historical documentaries since the 1990s, beginning with his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War (1990), which he produced with his older brother Ken Burns and wrote with Geoffrey Ward.

Nick McDonell is an American writer who has worked as a journalist, screenwriter, producer, novelist and researcher.

Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. A full-time freelance writer, she has bylines in the New York Times, Nieman Storyboard, Outside, Bicycling, Garden & Gun, CNN.com, ESPN.com, and USA Today.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.

Christopher L. Miller is retired professor in the Department of French and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, published by the University of Chicago Press.

His new book "Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity" examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. 

Charles Leerhsen is a former executive editor at Sports Illustrated. He has written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times. His books include Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty; Crazy Good: The Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America; Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500; and Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw.

Lori Grinker is an American documentary art photographer and filmmaker from New York City. She is best known for her self-directed, long-term documentary projects, and has conducted these projects through photography, video and multimedia.

Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers Texas and the Southwest.

Gary Smith is an American sportswriter. He is best known for his lengthy human interest stories in Sports Illustrated, where he worked from 1983 to 2013.