Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won three National Magazine Awards for essays and criticism and is the author of numerous bestselling books, including Paris to the Moon, Through the Children’s Gate, The King in the Window, Angels and Ages, Winter: Five Windows on the Season, and A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. Additionally, Gopnik has collaborated on the musical projects The Most Beautiful Room in New York, Sentences, and Sing the Silence. His most recent book, The Real Work, was published in March 2023.

Steve Martin is one of the most well-known talents in entertainment. His work has earned him an Academy Award, five Grammys, an Emmy, the Mark Twain Award, and a Kennedy Center Honor. He began his career on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and in the mid-1970s, shone as a stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Martin’s films include The Jerk; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; Roxanne; Parenthood; L.A. Story; Father of the Bride; and Bowfinger. He is also an accomplished Grammy Award–winning, boundary-pushing bluegrass banjoist and composer. The song “California” is Martin’s newest collaboration with Steep Canyon Rangers following the release of their albums The Long-Awaited Album and Rare Bird Alert. He has released five albums of original American roots music since 2009 and collaborated with Edie Brickell on So Familiar and Love Has Come For You, which won a Grammy for Best American Roots Song for the title track and inspired their Tony-nominated musical Bright Star. As an author, Martin’s work includes the novel An Object of Beauty, the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel, a bestselling novella, Shopgirl, and his memoir, Born Standing Up. His play Meteor Shower premiered on Broadway in 2017 in a production starring Amy Schumer, Keegan-Michael Key, Laura Benanti, and Alan Tudyk, directed by Jerry Zaks. Martin’s 2018 Netflix special with Martin Short titled An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life received four Emmy nominations and led to the international tours Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t tour, which visited major venues across the U.S. and Australia for the first time, and The Funniest Show in Town at the Moment. Martin and Short also star together in the true-crime comedy series on Hulu, Only Murders in the Building, along with Selena Gomez. A collection of cartoons written by Martin and drawn by The New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss, A Wealth of Pigeons: A Cartoon Collection, was released this past November by Celadon.