David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He is the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing and Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown. He is at work on a biography of Joni Mitchell.
Steven Shapin is a professor of the history of science at Harvard. He has written books on 17th-century science and is now interested in things to do with taste and subjectivity.
Moira Weigel is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. Her first book, Labors of Love, a feminist history of dating, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year. Follow @moiragweigel.
Justin E.H. Smith is university professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris Diderot. He is the author of Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy, out next month from Princeton University Press.
Daniel A. Bell is a professor of political theory at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, and author of The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy.