David Brooks became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003.  He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer." He is the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, both published by Simon & Schuster. In March of 2011 he came out with his third book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, published by Random House.

Mr. Brooks joined The Weekly Standard at its inception in September 1995, having worked at The Wall Street Journal for the previous nine years. His last post at the Journal was as op-ed editor. Prior to that, he was posted in Brussels, covering Russia, the Middle East, South Africa and European affairs. His first post at the Journal was as editor of the book review section, and he filled in for five months as the Journal's movie critic.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

He has published twelve books. His most recent book is Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a PBS/Channel 4 documentary series. His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. 

He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall is a weekly columnist for Newsweek and a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV. 

In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin, and prompted Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Two years later he published The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, a television adaptation of which was screened by PBS in 2007. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World followed in 2008 and was also a PBS series, winning the International Emmy award for Best Documentary. High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg appeared in 2010. 

William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. A former policy advisor to President Clinton and presidential candidates, Galston is an expert on domestic policy, political campaigns, and elections. His current research focuses on designing a new social contract and the implications of political polarization.

He is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland.  Prior to January 2006, he was Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, co-chaired by William Bennett and Sam Nunn.   A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Galston is the author of eight books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics.  His most recent books are Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2002), The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), and Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).  A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Galston has appeared on all the principal television networks and is a frequent commentator on NPR.  He writes a weekly column, The Vital Center, for the online edition of The New Republic.

Lewis H. Lapham is the founder and editor of Lapham's Quarterly, an award-winning journal of history and ideas praised by the historian David McCullough as "a god-send and a genuine treasure" and by the novelist, Dave Eggers, as "brilliant and much needed."  The editor emeritus of Harper's Magazine, Lapham in 2007 was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame.  He is the author of thirteen books, among them Money and Class in America, The Wish for Kings, Waiting for the Barbarians, Gag Rule and Theater of War.  For Bloomberg Radio he produces a weekly podcast, "The World in Time," and his documentary film, "The American Ruling Class" has become part of the curriculum in many of the nation's schools and colleges.  A member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Lapham has lectured at many of the nation's leading universities, among them Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Stanford and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and Oregon. 

Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray's other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), and Real Education (2008). His most recent book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012), describes an unprecedented divergence in American classes over the last half century.

Murray has been an AEI scholar since 1990.  Prior, he was Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Research Scientist at American Institutes for Research, and a Peace Corps Volunteer and US-AID contractor in Thailand.  He received his Ph.D. in political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.A. in history from Harvard University.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President-Elect Obama's transition advisory board. He has written 13 books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet; and his most recent best-selling ebook, Beyond Outrage. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine and Chairman of Common Cause. His commentaries can be heard weekly on public radio's Marketplace. In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclav Havel Vision Foundation Prize, by the former Czech president, for his pioneering work in economic and social thought.

As the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor, Reich implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, led a national fight against sweatshops in the U.S. and illegal child labor around the world, headed the administration’s successful effort to raise the minimum wage, secured worker's pensions, and launched job-training programs, one-stop career centers, and school-to-work initiatives. Under his leadership, the Department of Labor won more than 30 awards for innovation. A 1996 poll of cabinet experts conducted by the Hearst newspapers rated him the most effective cabinet secretary during the Clinton administration.

In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the century. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, his M.A. from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School.