Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, has been honored with virtually every award in the video game industry.  Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world’s most popular video games, including Sid Meier’s Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier’s Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry. He is a member of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame and founder of Firaxis Games.

The legendary comedian, actor, and writer of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda fame shares his key ideas about creativity: that it’s a learnable, improvable skill. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a writer, Cleese shares his insights into the nature of the creative process and offers advice on how to get your own inventive juices flowing.

An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and author of The Soul of America. Meacham is a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor of Time magazine, he is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Hope of Glory, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston. Meacham, who holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, lives in Nashville.

BRIAN STELTER is the chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide and anchor of Reliable Sources, which examines the world’s top media stories every Sunday. Prior to joining CNN in 2013, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times. His first book, the New York Times bestseller Top of the Morning, inspired the Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show. Stelter is a consulting producer on the series. He is also the executive producer of the HBO documentary After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News.  In Hoax, Stelter tells the twisted story of the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News. 

REVISIONIST HISTORY, Malcolm Gladwell’s groundbreaking podcast now in its fifth season examines a diverse new slate of topics that its millions of fans have come to expect.  Gladwell turns his revisionist eye to everything from museums to elections to hiring to our collective memories of war in 10 episodes that will a season that fans will love—and possibly totally disagree with, all at the same time.  It’s a journey through the overlooked and misunderstood. Every episode re-examines something from the past—an event, a person, an idea, or even a song—and asks if we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.

In Yes I Can Say That, comedy veteran Judy Gold argues that “no one has the right to tell comics what they can or cannot joke about…. Laughter is a unifier. It’s the best medicine. It’s also the most palatable way to bring up seditious, subversive topics.” For Gold, nothing is more insidious than enforcing silence and repressing jokes—the job of a comedian is to expose society’s demons, and confront them head-on, no prisoners allowed. In ten impassioned polemics, she frames comedy as a tool of empowerment, a way to reclaim hateful rhetoric and battle the democracy-crushing plight of censorship. Uninhibited and bold, Gold is as skilled at making readers laugh as she is at exposing uncomfortable truths about our culture and society. In this era of partisan politics and gaping inequalities, Yes I Can Say That is the refreshingly candid, wickedly funny and deliciously blunt manifesto we need. 

Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Square, shares an inspiring and entertaining account of what it means to be a true entrepreneur and what it takes to build a resilient, world-changing company. He is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, philanthropist and artist. He is the cofounder of Square, was chairman of its board until 2010, and still serves on the Board of Directors. McKelvey’s fascinating and humorous stories of Square’s early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable.

SUZANNE NOSSEL is the CEO of PEN America, the foremost organization working to protect and advance human rights, free expression and literature. As CEO, Nossel has led campaigns for free expression in Hong Kong and China, Myanmar, Russia, Eurasia, and the United States. JENNIFER EGAN is the author of several novels and a short story collection.  Her most recent novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. She is President of PEN America. Nossel’s book, “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All” is avital, necessary playbook for navigating and defending free speech today and provides a pathway for promoting free expression while also cultivating a more inclusive public culture.

COLSON WHITEHEAD is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2020, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Nickel Boys.

Charlie Kaufman is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of films including Anomalisa; Synechdoche, New York; Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Being John Malkovich. He won an Oscar for his work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has been nominated three additional times. He is also a three-time BAFTA winner for screenwriting, and he has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, among many other film honors. “Antkind” is his bold and boundlessly original debut novel.