Directed by Barry Lam, Associate Director of Marc Sanders Foundation, Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside, and Host/Executive producer of the Hi-Phi Nation Podcast.

Philosophy in Media aims to identify and develop academically-trained philosophers to write, speak to, and produce for the general public in the major media market spaces. We concluded a year-long initial run of the program here with support from the John D. Templeton Foundation. Now, with a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and the Department of Philosophy, we are pleased to share our 2024 Media Fellows. Fellows will be academically-trained philosophers of all career stages who aim to write, speak to, and produce media for the general public in the form of op-eds and short essays, book reviews, long-form essays or journalism, trade-book writing, or podcasting.

Fellows are from all areas of philosophy, but indicated both their professional areas of specialization and competence, as well as the topics or areas they would like to talk about when they speak to the public. Special consideration was given to applicants whose professional or public-facing work focuses on race and racism, social justice, applied ethics of biology, technology, or other special sciences, and to applicants who are affiliated with HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, Tribal colleges/universities, or underserved/under-resourced smaller regional or state schools.

Successful fellows will receive a $3000 stipend, and full room and board at one of our three media workshops, to be held between June 24 – July 2, 2024. Workshops will be held at Tarrytown Estates in Tarrytown, NY, just north of New York City. One workshop will focus on op-ed/short essay and trade books, one on long-form magazine writing, and one on podcast production and distribution. All will be led by esteemed media editors, producers, publishers, and agents.

Confirmed workshop leaders (details below) are:

  • Joshua Rothman, Ideas Editor at The New Yorker
  • Larissa Macfarquhur, Staff Writer, The New Yorker
  • Emily Greenhouse, Editor, The New York Review of Books
  • Latif Nasser, Host, WNYC’s Radiolab
  • Mia Lobel, Former head of content at Pushkin Industries and Executive Producer of Revisionist History
  • Christy Mirabal, Senior Director, Audience Growth at SiriusXM
  • James Ryerson, Opinion Editor at The New York Times
  • Margo Beth Fleming, Managing Director of Brockman, Inc.
  • Kieran Setiya, Professor of Philosophy at MIT
  • Emily Wunderlich, Senior Editor at  Viking
  • Barry Lam, Creator and Host of Hi-Phi Nation

Each workshop will be three days long. Travel to and from the venue will be covered by Media Fellows.

The schedule of the workshops are organized as follows:

  • June 24-June 26, 2024: Long-form Magazine Writing
    Fellows will arrive the evening of June 23 and depart after the workshop concludes on June 26 at noon.
  • June 27-June 29, 2024: Op-Ed/Trade Books
    Fellows will arrive the evening of June 26 and depart after the workshop concludes on June 29 at noon.
  • June 30-July 2, 2024: Podcasting
    Fellows will arrive the evening of June 29 and depart after the workshop concludes on July 2 at noon.

    Learn more about the Philosophy in Media Initiative HERE.

Longform Magazine Writing

Joshua Rothman

Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, has been at The New Yorker since 2012.

Link: The New Yorker

Larissa MacFarquhar

Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. She has written about child-protective services, the battered-women’s movement, dementia, and hospice care, and her Profile subjects have included John Ashbery, Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, Derek Parfit, David Chang, and Aaron Swartz, among many others. She is the author of “Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help.” Before joining the magazine, she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review, and wrote for Artforum, The Nation, The New Republic, the Times Book Review, Slate, and other publications. She has received two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and the Johnson & Johnson Excellence in Media Award. Her writing has appeared in “The Best American Political Writing” and “The Best American Food Writing.”

Link: The New Yorker

Emily Greenhouse

Emily Greenhouse is an American journalist. She has been the editor of The New York Review of Books since March 2021, after being appointed co-editor in March 2019.

Link: The New York Review of Books

Podcasting

Latif Nasser

Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab.

Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab, where he has reported stories on everything from snowflake photography to medieval robots to a polar bear who liked to have sex with grizzly bears. Earlier this year, he hosted the miniseries The Other Latif, about his Moroccan namesake who happens to be Detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay.

In addition to his work in audio, Latif is the host and executive producer of the Netflix science documentary series, Connected. He has also given two TED talks, and written for the Boston Globe Ideas section. He has a PhD from Harvard's History of Science department.

Follow Latif on Twitter.

Link: Website

Mia Lobel

Mia Lobel is the executive producer of Pushkin Industries, overseeing all podcast production including Revisionist History, The Happiness Lab, Against the Rules, and more.

She has been making audio content since 2001 for public radio stations, non-profit organizations, museums, universities, and voice-activated services.

She received a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She has been an adjunct professor at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY since 2010.

Link: Website

Christy Mirabal

Christy Mirabal is Senior Director, Audience Growth at SiriusXM. She oversees all strategic marketing, including planning, development and execution of initiatives to drive branding and awareness to SiriusXM’S podcast slate. Before SiriusXM, Christy worked for companies such as Sony Music Entertainment, Panoply Media, Frederator Networks Inc., HarperCollins Publishers, and Bloomsbury.

Christy is also vice chair and co-founder of The Podcast Academy, and treasurer for the Women’s Media Group.

Link: Website

Op-ed and Trade Books

James Ryerson

James Ryerson has been an editor at The New York Times since 2003, first at the Sunday magazine and now at the Op-Ed page. Before that, he was an editor at Legal Affairs, Lingua Franca, and Feed. He has written introductory chapters for Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, by David Foster Wallace, and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. In 2012-2013, he was awarded a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman fellowship from the New York Public Library. In 2018, he was awarded the Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He writes the Ivory Tower column for The New York Times Book Review and is at work on a book about the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser.

Link: NYT

Margo Beth Fleming

Margo Beth Fleming is a Literary Agent and Managing Director of Brockman, Inc., where she seeks out and supports authoritative voices who change the way we see the world. The natural home for authors of serious nonfiction, Brockman represents 11 Nobel Laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, and over 45 bestsellers in the last decade alone.

Before she became an agent, Margo was an editor. In over a decade at Stanford University Press, she developed a young book program into one of the press’s flagship lists. Margo began her publishing career at SAGE, signing and developing titles on research methods and across the social sciences.

Follow Margo on Twitter @WordNerd Margo

Link: LinkedIn

Kieran Setiya

Kieran Setiya teaches philosophy at MIT, where he works on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide and Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, which was selected as a Best Book of 2022 by The Economist and The New Yorker. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the LA Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, Aeon, and The Yale Review. He also writes a Substack newsletter, Under the Net.

Link: Substack

Emily Wunderlich

Emily Wunderlich is a senior editor at Viking, where she acquires a broad list of nonfiction books, seeking out strong voices, fresh takes, and new arguments that recast our understanding of the world around us or even help us live better. She has published a number of bestselling, award-winning, and critically acclaimed books from authors with a wide range of expertise and backgrounds, from journalists to biologists to historians to social scientists, activists, philosophers, politicians and paleontologists, and more. She ran a nonfiction literary reading series in Manhattan and prior to Viking, she worked at Gotham Books, Macmillan, and The Missouri Review.

Link: Website

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