Muskism: Who Builds the Future?

Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. His books include Globalists, Crack-Up Capitalism, and Hayek’s Bastards. The last won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. In April 2026 he published Muskism, with co-author Ben Tarnoff Muskism. He has written for New York Times, New York Review of Books, Financial Times, Spike, and others. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has also been a fellow at Chatham House, Harvard, and FU Berlin.

Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, and the co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It, and—with Quinn Slobodian—Muskism. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, among other publications.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, best-selling author, documentary producer, and publisher of a substack on politics called American Freakshow. A contributing editor at The New Republic and frequent contributor to the New York Times and New York Magazine, her journalism has been published widely including in translation in the Norwegian and Italian press. She’s the author of eight books on an array of topics including archaeological forgery, scientists in 18th Century Egypt, James Smithson, Amanda Knox in Italy, and the Trump women, which were reviewed, excerpted or covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, New York Magazine, BBC, ABC, MSNBC, and other media outlets. She was born and educated in the Midwest, has been based in Washington, D.C., New York, Norway, Paris and Italy, traveled and reported extensively in the Middle East.