dunc tank Creators & Guests

David Gerard writes frequently about cryptocurrency and blockchain. He is the author of the 2017 book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts and the 2020 book Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money.As well as being a crypto journalist, David also works as a Unix system administrator, where his job includes keeping track of exciting new technologies, and advising against the bad ones. He has also been an award-winning music journalist, and has blogged about music since 2001. He is a volunteer spokesman for Wikipedia, and for skeptical wiki RationalWiki. Originally from Australia, he lives in east London with his spouse Arkady Rose and their daughter.

Phoebe Hoban is an independent journalist and author, best known for her biographies of the artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel.Hoban's articles on culture and the arts have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Her first book, "Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art," was published in 1998. Her second book, "Alice Neel: The Art of not Sitting Pretty," was published in 2010. Her third book, "Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open," was published in 2014. She has also published two children's books.Hoban started her career as a technology journalist at Newsweek. She then wrote a technology column for New York Magazine before becoming a feature writer on culture. From there she became a staff writer at The New York Observer, then a staff writer for US Weekly.

Scott Joel Aaronson is an American theoretical computer scientist and David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of research are quantum computing and computational complexity theory.

Derrick Jensen is an American author, eco-philosopher, radical environmentalist, anti-civilization advocate, activist, writer, and founder of Deep Green Resistance.

Rachel N. Corbett is an author and journalist. Currently, she is deputy editor at Artnet News.Corbett was the executive editor of Modern Painters from 2016-2017. Prior to that, she worked as a correspondent for The Art Newspaper.Corbett's work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine. Her first book, "You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin," was published in 2016.Corbett received her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

Forrest Gander is a poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for "Be With." He is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jack Weatherford is a cultural anthropologist and author.

Mir Tamim Ansary is an author and speaker on the topic of Afghanistan-American relations and Muslim history. He is best known for a widely circulated e-mail in which he denounced the Taliban but warned of the dangers of a military intervention in Afghanistan by the United States.Ansary's first book, the memoir "West of Kabul, East of New York," was published in 2003.He was previously a columnist for the encyclopedia website Encarta.

William Charles Ayers is a retired professor of Education at the University of Illinois. He is best known for his activism with the radical leftist group Weather Underground, which he co-founded with his wife Bernardine Dohrn.