Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, has written numerous works on American and world politics, and has won dozens of awards for his work in print, television, and film. His books include a trilogy on the modern American Presidency: President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993), President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), and President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2006). Reeves is a syndicated columnist and former Chief Political Correspondent of The New York Times, as well as a former National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked as an engineer before becoming a journalist.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of two popular science books for the general public: The Physics of the Buffyverse (2007) and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (2006). She is a contributing editor of Physics Today, and of APS News, the monthly membership publication of The American Physical Society. She also works with the American Institute of Physics' Discoveries and Brea throughs in Science TV project, and has covered science policy issues for the Materials Research Society. Her freelance work has appeared in Discover, Salon, Nature, Symmetry, and New Scientist, among other venues, and she maintains a general science-and-culture blog called Cocktail Party Physics, featuring her avatar altar-ego/evil twin, Jen-Luc Piquant.  She holds a black belt in jujitsu, and has been known to draw upon that expertise from time to time to demonstrate the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics to the general public. From February through April 2008, she was a Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.