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Tahir Amin
Intellectual Property Law Expert, Economic and Health Justice Advocate, and Author of Pharma Monopoly: The Battle for the Future of Medicines (Polity | 2026)
Topics Tahir Amin can discuss:
- Why the United States pays the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs
- The impact of drug tariffs and how they affect drug supply chains during global conflicts
- How pharmaceutical companies game the patent system to create drug monopolies that deprive millions of people access to affordable medicines
- How philanthropy from billionaires like Bill Gates reinforce the inequities and injustices of global health systems
- How AI policy will shape the future of medicines and could create a system that is even more unjust than the current one
- The connection between drug costs and racial disparities with the rising maternal/infant health crisis in low-income communities
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Ph.D.
Presidential Historian and Author of Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic (Oxford University Press | 2024), The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Harvard University Press | 2020)
Topics Lindsay Chervinsky can discuss:
- Impeachment in history, as well as current methods, norms, and protocols
- John Adams’s role in protecting the nation from foreign attacks and promoting fair elections
- The importance of a smooth presidential transition
- The purpose of impeachment and its use in this current political moment
- The history of government institutions and how they come to bear on the present
- The purpose of the Presidential Cabinet and why it is still vital today
Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D.
Author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood (St. Martin’s Press | 2024)
Topics Gretchen Sisson can discuss:
- Why adoption is not a valid alternative to abortion, and how adoption may change during the post-Roe era
- The role religion, race, and class play in pregnancy decision-making and adoption
- The history of adoption and family separation in the United States
- Debunking the feel-good narrative surrounding adoption, and the coercive messaging pregnant women receive
- The representation of abortion and adoption in American film and television
- Examples include The Handmaid’s Tale, This is Us, and Grey’s Anatomy
- The debate around transnational adoption
Corinna Barrett Lain
Death Penalty Expert, Law Professor, Former Prosecutor and Author at University of Richmond and Author of Secrets of the Killing State (NYU Press | Pub Date: April 22, 2025)
Topics Corinna Barrett Lain can discuss:
- What Donald Trump’s executive order on “Restoring the Death Penalty” means, and what it can and cannot do both legally and as a practical matter.
- Why lethal injection is not, as people think, like putting down a beloved pet.
- What the problems with lethal injection are, how they came about, and why they matter.
- How lethal injection came to be, and what that tells us about the real work it is doing.
- What prison officials have done behind closed doors: broken state and federal laws, falsified prescriptions, injected the wrong drugs, and more.
- What we know about the newest execution innovation—nitrogen gas.
- Why states are turning to the firing squad, and why prisoners may choose it.
- How executions impose trauma on the prison personnel forced to conduct them, and the implications of that phenomenon.
- How states use secrecy—including but not limited to secrecy statutes—to hide the reality of lethal injection from the American public.