Frank Bruni has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, including more than twenty-five years at the New York Times, the last ten of them as a nationally renowned op-ed columnist who appeared frequently as a television commentator. He was also a White House correspondent for the Times, its Rome bureau chief, and, for five years, its chief restaurant critic. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the school of public policy. He continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times and to produce occasional essays as one of the newspaper’s official Contributing Opinion Writers.

Heather Havrilesky writes the Ask Polly advice column, formerly on New York Magazine, now on Substack. She is the author of Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022), the essay collection What If This Were Enough (2018), the advice book How to Be a Person in the World (2016), and the memoir Disaster Preparedness (2010). She also maintains the Ask Molly newsletter, written by Polly’s evil twin, and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs.