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Alain Bertaud, a former World Bank urban planner and Senior Fellow at the NYU Marron Institute, treats cities primarily as labor markets. His work shows how mobility, housing, and land-use rules shape urban opportunity.
Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago philosopher, studies how people acquire new values and navigate everyday emotional friction. Her account of aspiration—the conscious effort to care about what one does not yet understand—illuminates personal change, relationships, and Socratic inquiry.
Adam Tooze, an economic historian, traces how global systems operate and fail, from the Nazi war economy to modern finance. His “polycrisis” framework examines the collision of climate, finance, and geopolitics—and the political choices driving them.
Abhijit Banerjee, a development economist, replaced sweeping theories of poverty with randomized controlled trials. His work shows that people under severe constraints make sophisticated choices, and that governments must test assumptions against real behavior in education, credit, and migration.
Paul Romer, an economist and Nobel laureate, showed how ideas and innovation drive long-term economic progress. His work on charter cities, institutions, and governing rules asks what conditions allow developing nations and human societies more broadly to improve.
Neal Stephenson writes mathematically dense novels about the physical shape of the internet and virtual reality, and coined the “Metaverse” in Snow Crash. His diagnosis of “innovation starvation” asks why societies struggle to execute civilization-scale engineering and imagine ambitious futures.
Fuchsia Dunlop gave English-speaking cooks a practical vocabulary for regional Chinese food, especially Sichuan cuisine. Her approach to woks, cleavers, flavor, and texture redirects Western home cooking toward technique, authenticity, and vegetable-heavy meals.
David Brooks, an author and longtime New York Times columnist, examines the move from résumé-building ambition toward moral character and community. His observations ask how people deepen connection, shape a meaningful life, and navigate cultural change.