Daily Briefing - Wednesday September 1, 2010

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M.J. Rosenberg is Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. Previously he served as the Director of Policy Analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, and prior to that, he served as Chief of Staff to the head of the Eastern Europe/NIS Bureau of USAID. In addition, he spent eighteen years within the United States government, fourteen on Capitol Hill as a congressional aide to Representatives Jonathan Bingham, Edward Feighan, Nita Lowey and Senator Carl Levin. From 1982 to 1986, he was editor of Near East Report, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC's) biweekly publication on Middle East Policy.

William Cohan is a contributing editor at Fortune and a writer for Vanity Fair and The New York Times who covers a variety of financial issues. His acclaimed book, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, details the last days of Bear Stearns & Co. He began his career as a journalist, winning awards as an investigative reporter in Raleigh, North Carolina. He then went on to work on Wall Street for over a decade and a half, both at Lazard Frères and JP Morgan Chase. In 2007 he published, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. He is currently working on a book about Goldman Sachs.

Naomi Oreskes is a history professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she focuses on the history of science. She started her career as a field geologist before getting her doctorate in history. She received the Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, served as a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and sat on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Her books include Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth and The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. This year she and her co-writer, Erik M. Conway, came out with a new book called Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.