Samuel Black is a reporter and producer at More Perfect Union, where he covers tech, labor, energy, finance, and U.S. politics. Across two decades as a documentary filmmaker, he has produced or directed projects for Frontline PBS, HBO, Al Jazeera English, Showtime, Vice, Universal, A&E, and This American Life, and received awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Walter Cronkite Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, the Scripps Howard Awards, the Producers Guild, and the News & Documentary Emmys.

Bhairavi Desai is the Executive Director and a co-founder of the 28,000-member strong New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), the union that represents NYC’s yellow taxi, green cab, and Uber/Lyft drivers. NYTWA has radically transformed the labor movement and New York City as a whole by standing up to greedy gig lords and fighting back against billionaires to reclaim power for the working class. NYTWA’s driver-led campaigns have won over $450 million in stolen wages for Uber, Lyft, and yellow cab drivers and over $475 million in debt forgiveness for yellow cab owner-drivers after drivers held a 15-day hunger strike.

Professor Veena Dubal is a leading scholar of law, technology, and labor whose work examines inequality and the conditions of precarious workers. She is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint courtesy appointment in Anthropology. Combining legal and empirical analysis, her research explores how digital technologies and evolving regulatory regimes reshape work, identity, and collective organizing.

Anand Giridharadas is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Persuaders and Winners Take All, as well as The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MS NOW. He has received the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ilana Glazer (they/she) is a comedian, actor, advocate, and creator best known for co-creating and co-starring in the acclaimed series BROAD CITY. The internationally touring standup comedian debuted her second special HUMAN MAGIC on Hulu. You can find her comedy & socio-political video-podcast “IT’S OPEN with Ilana Glazer” every Thursday on YouTube, audio-only available everywhere you podcast. Additionally, Glazer co-wrote and starred in BABES, which premiered at SXSW 2024 to rave reviews before its release with Neon. And in 2025, she made her Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of GOOD NIGHT, & GOOD LUCK alongside George Clooney for a special limited run.

Lorena Gonzalez has dedicated her career to expanding workers’ rights and has relentlessly championed the cause of the working class. Her efforts as a labor leader and legislator have achieved groundbreaking advances for working Californians—including paid sick leave for all workers, overtime pay for farmworkers, and the strongest laws in the nation against worker misclassification and wage theft. She is a leader in the fight to establish guardrails on the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace and currently serves as the National Co-Chair of AFL-CIO State Federation AI Task Force. In 2022, Lorena became the first woman and first person of color to be elected as President of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO. Lorena consistently and unapologetically ensures that the voices, needs, and rights of all workers remain at the forefront of public discourse in California.

Karen Hao is the NYT bestselling author of Empire of AI and an award-winning reporter covering the impacts of AI on society. She has written for publications including the Wall Street Journal , The Atlantic , and MIT Technology Review; produced short documentaries for More Perfect Union; and co-hosted a podcast for the BBC. She sits on the board of AI Now. She has received numerous accolades for her work, including a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30, and a TIME100 AI honor. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Grandell “Bird” Hallett Logan comes from the Tonawanda Seneca Snipe Clan and has been serving as the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s Spokesperson on the WNY STAMP site since 2021. His work focuses on bringing attention to the existential threat brought to the “Big Woods” on their territory. He also works in Language Revitalization as a resource coordinator, teacher, and a learner of the Seneca Language.

Lina Khan served as chair of the Federal Trade Commission from June 2021 to January 2025. She teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, the antimonopoly tradition, and law and political economy. Several of her writings have focused on the ways that dominant digital platforms freshly reveal the shortcomings of the current approach to antitrust. Prior to joining Columbia Law in 2020, where she is an Associate Professor of Law, Khan served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she helped lead the Committee’s investigation into digital markets and the publication of its landmark report. She has also served as legal adviser to Commissioner Rohit Chopra at the Federal Trade Commission and legal director at the Open Markets Institute.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and the international bestselling author of ten books published in over 35 languages including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, On Fire, and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World which won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. A columnist for The Guardian, her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world. She is the honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University and is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of British Columbia where she is the founding co-director of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice. Her new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, was published September 15, 2026.

Kota The Friend is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Kota has over 1.8 million monthly Spotify listeners and he has nearly 1 billion streams globally. Kota has remained an independent artist throughout his career—turning down 3 major record label offers: instead, creating his own label and apparel brand, FLTBYS, short for Flight Boys. He frequently cites a do-it-yourself mentality, such as filming his own music videos, recording within a home setup or on the streets of New York or whatever city he happens to be in, and producing most of his discography. His mentality was fueled by a desire for creative freedom and to avoid the sense of musical confinement.

Zohran Kwame Mamdani is the 112th Mayor of New York City. Born in Uganda and raised in New York City, he was elected in 2020 to the New York State Assembly, where he fought to lower the cost of living, expand access to public transit, and secure fi nancial relief for taxi drivers. A former housing counselor, Mamdani brings a deep commitment to working-class New Yorkers to his leadership as mayor.

KeShaun Pearson is a Memphis-based leader at the forefront of the fight for environmental justice, known for making complex issues accessible to the communities most affected by them. As Executive Director of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP), he leads campaigns to protect South Memphis residents from toxic air pollution and safeguard community health from corporate overreach.

Matthew Rodriguez is a co-founder of Amanecer People’s Project, who has been leading the fight against the $14b Meta data center in El Paso. Matthew is also the data center organizing & base building director with the Athena Coalition, where he supports others in their data center campaigns including organizers in Iowa, Washington, New Mexico, and Indiana. Prior to Athena, he was at People’s Action for 5 years building out the Deep Canvass training institute and working as the Movement Politics Field Director.

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Both novels have been translated into more than forty languages. Roy’s works of nonfiction include The End of Imagination, The Doctor and the Saint, My Seditious Heart, and Azadi. In 2023 she was awarded the prestigious European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2024 the PEN Pinter Prize for telling “urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.” Her latest book, a memoir, is Mother Mary Comes to Me, which was named one of the top five nonfiction books of 2025 by The New York Times and won The National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She lives in Delhi.

Noam Scheiber covers white-collar workers for The New York Times. He has written extensively about the impact of artificial intelligence; worker frustration in the tech sector; and remote work. His 2026 book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, is about the leftward shift among college grads who struggle to find jobs.
Before coming to the Times, Scheiber covered the Obama administration and three presidential elections for The New Republic. His 2012 book, The Escape Artists, was about the Obama administration’s response to the Great Recession. He holds economics degrees from Tulane University and Oxford University.

Jasmine Sun is an independent writer covering the culture and politics of AI on her Substack (jasmi.news). She is also a contributor at The Atlantic, and has published stories for outlets including The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Before pivoting to journalism in 2025, she spent 4 years at Substack, where she led the core product team and oversaw its top writers, mobile apps, podcast tools, and social features. She has also worked in AI policy research at Mozilla and Schmidt Futures. She is based in San Francisco.