Michael J. Copps was sworn in for a second term as a member of the Federal Communications Commission in January 2006. His term runs until 2010. From 1998 to 2001, he was assistant secretary of commerce for trade development at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he worked to improve market access and market share for nearly every sector of American industry and devoted much of his time to building private sector-public sector partnerships. From 1993 to 1998, he served as deputy assistant secretary for basic industries, a component of the Trade Development Unit. Mr. Copps moved to Washington, D.C., in 1970, joined the staff of Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC), and served for more than a dozen years as his administrative assistant and chief of staff. He has been director of government affairs for a Fortune 500 company and senior vice president for legislative affairs at a major national trade association. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught history at Loyola University of the South. A native of Milwaukee, he lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Konstanty Gebert, a former dissident activist, is a columnist and international reporter for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and a frequent contributor to international media. He was the co-founder of the (unofficial) Jewish Flying University in 1979, and of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews in 1980. In September 1980, he co-founded a white-collar trade union that soon merged with Solidarity, the independent self-governing trade union that precipitated the downfall of Polish Communism. After avoiding internment in the 1981 coup, Gebert became, under the pen name of Dawid Warszawski, a well-known editor and columnist for various underground publications. The author of eight books, he has served as a visiting professor at a number of American universities. He lives in Warsaw.

Masha Gessen is an author and a journalist living in Moscow. Her books about Russia are Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Dial Press, 2004) and Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism (Verso, 1997). She has written for and worked at many publications in Russia and the United States, including The New Republic, The New York Times, US News and World Report, Bolshoy Gorod, Itogi, The Moscow Times, and others. She was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States with her family in 1981, and returned to Moscow as a reporter in the early 1990s. In addition to Russia, she has reported from the Balkans.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a journalist and international correspondent who has reported for PBS, NPR, and most recently CNN, as Johannesburg bureau chief. She was the chief national correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS from 1983 to 1997. During her tenure at the NewsHour, which she joined in 1978, she won two Emmys, a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism, and a Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She has been an editor for Trans-Action Magazine, a reporter at The New Yorker, and an investigative reporter and anchorwoman on WRC-TV's evening news. She later joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter covering the urban African-American community. She has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, Essence, and Vogue. Born in Due West, South Carolina, she made civil-rights history as the first African-American woman to enter the University of Georgia, the topic of her memoir In My Place (1992). She has received more than two dozen honorary degrees.

George Lakoff is Senior Fellow and Co-Founder of the Rockridge Institute and the Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies the framing of issues in politics. He is one of the world's best-known linguists and a founder of the field of cognitive science. He has published hundreds of articles and numerous books on linguistics, psychology, poetics, philosophy, and mathematics. Among his works on mind and language are Thinking Points (with the Rockridge Institute); Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea; Don't Think of an Elephant!; Moral Politics; and Metaphors We Live By (with Mark Johnson). His next book, The Political Mind (Viking/Penguin, 2008), is an introduction to recent scientific results about the brain and mind that have a bearing on politics. As a private citizen, he helps progressive citizens' groups, activists, and policy makers think through their values and principles, formulate policies, and frame issues to express their deepest beliefs more effectively.

Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Lemann has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Slate, and American Heritage; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. Lemann continues to write for The New Yorker and serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives with his family in New York City.

Frank Luntz has been called the "hottest pollster" in America by The Boston Globe, and was named one of four "top research minds" by Business Week. He was the winner of the coveted Washington Post "Crystal Ball" award for being the most accurate pundit in 1992. Luntz has written, supervised, and conducted more than 1,500 surveys, focus groups, and dial sessions in more than two dozen countries and four continents over the past decade, and is the pioneer of the "instant response" focus-group technique. He consults Fortune 100 companies — from General Motors to Federal Express, Disney to American Express, AT&T to Pfizer, Kroger supermarkets to McDonald's and the entire soft-drink and motion-picture industries, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable — on communication and language. He also served as a consultant to the award-winning NBC hit show The West Wing. He is the author of Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear (Hyperion, 2008)

Josh Marshall is the publisher of Talking Points Memo, TPMmuckraker, TPM Election Central and TPMCafe. He also writes a weekly column for the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill. His articles on politics and foreign affairs have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers across the United States as well as abroad, including The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Times, Salon and Slate. Marshall graduated from Princeton in 1991 and holds a doctorate in American history from Brown. He lives in New York City with his wife Millet, their son Sam and their dog Simon.

Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs of the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. A former MacArthur fellow, Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography, which has been translated into sixteen languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and other publications. Born in Chicago in 1942, Miles was a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before earning a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages from Harvard. He is fluent in several modern languages. He serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A former literary editor and member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, he is currently general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Orville Schell is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the recently appointed Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City. He is the author of more than a dozen books, nine of them about China, and a frequent contributor to major newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books. He has served as a television commentator for several network news programs, worked both as correspondent and a consultant for a number of PBS Frontline documentaries, and been the correspondent for an Emmy Award-winning 60 Minutes segment. He divides his time between Berkeley and New York City.

George Soros is chair of Soros Fund Management LLC. Born in Budapest in 1930, he survived the Nazi occupation and fled Communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. An active philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Cape Town University in apartheid South Africa, Soros has established a network of philanthropic organizations in more than fifty countries. These organizations are dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and an open society. The foundation network spends about $450 million annually. Soros is the author of nine books, including most recently The Age of Fallibility. His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world. He lives in New York City.

Alessandra Stanley was named chief television critic for The New York Times in 2003. Before that, she was a foreign correspondent for the newspaper, serving as Rome bureau chief (1998-2001) and co-chief of the Moscow bureau (1994-1998). She has also covered national politics and metropolitan news for the Times. Ms. Stanley has served as a writer and correspondent for Time, working in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and finally, Washington, D.C., covering The White House and presidential campaigns. While at Time, she reported from Central America, Afghanistan, Asia and Africa. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, GQ and Vogue. Born in Boston, MA, Ms. Stanley grew up in Washington, D.C. and Europe, and studied literature at Harvard University. She lives in New York City with her daughter.

András Szántó is a writer, researcher, and consultant whose work spans the worlds of art, media, policy, and cultural affairs. He is a member of the senior faculty of the Sotheby's Institute of Art and director of the NEA Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University. The former head of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia, he has designed conferences, conducted research, and launched initiatives for major foundations and cultural organizations. He is co-author and editor of five books, and his reporting and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, The Art Newspaper, and other newspapers and periodicals. He is a founder of the online arts publication Artworldsalon and has edited the journals ARTicles and Reflections. Born in Budapest, he lives in New York City.

Deborah Tannen is a University Professor and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. In addition to her fourteen academic books and more than a hundred articles, she has written six books for general audiences, including You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for nearly four years and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. The Argument Culture won the Common Ground Book Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and has received five honorary doctorates. She is a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows. Her first play, An Act of Devotion, is included in Best American Short Plays 1993-1994.

Drew Westen is a clinical, personality, and political psychologist and a professor in the departments of psychology/psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University. As the founder of Westen Strategies, a consulting firm, he advises Democratic leaders and candidates. He holds a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. in social and political thought from the University of Sussex (England), and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. He has been chief psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a blogger for The Huffington Post and a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. His book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (PublicAffairs, 2007), explores how politicians can capture the hearts and minds of voters through examples of what candidates have said — or could have said — in debates, speeches, and ads. He lives in Atlanta.

Ernest J. Wilson III became dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication in July 2007. He was previously a professor and senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. He has also served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarship focuses on the convergence of communication and information technology, public policy, and the public interest. His current work concentrates on China-Africa relations, global sustainable innovation, and the role of politics in the diffusion of communications technology. Nominated by President Bill Clinton and reappointed by President George W. Bush, Dean Wilson is the ranking senior member of the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He has also held positions with the National Security Council, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Global Information Infrastructure Commission. Originally from Washington, D.C., he earned a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.