David Rieff (” Goodbye, New World Order“) is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of several books on international affairs. His most recent book is A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.

Gershom Gorenberg (” At What Price?“) is a senior editor for the Jerusalem Report. His September/ October 2002 article for Mother Jones, “The Thin Green Line,” focused on Israeli army reservists who refuse to serve in the occupied territories.

Charles Bowden (” Keeper of the Fire“) drove across Ohio and New York state with sweatshop activist Charlie Kernaghan and noted, “He’s never off and he’s never onÑhe simply is.É He focuses with the same intensity on a deer standing in a snow-covered field by the road as he does on a question tossed at him in a union hall.”

Julia Whitty (” All the Disappearing Islands“) is the author of A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga, a finalist for last year’s pen Hemingway Award. Also a film-maker, she has made more than 70 nature documen-taries for channels such as pbs and Discovery.

Contributing writer Robert Dreyfuss (” The Watchful and the Wary“) wrote Mother Jones’ March/ April cover story, “The Thirty-Year Itch,” about Wash-ington’s plans for the Persian Gulf.

Suketu Mehta (“Too Beautiful for Death”) is a New York-based writer whose nonfiction book Maximum City: Bombay Stories will be published next year. “The garden vale of Kashmir is the South Asian idea of paradise,” he says. “But it could turn out to be the portal to hell.”

Dennis McNally (” The Beat Goes On“) is the Grateful Dead’s official historian and author of the band’s history, A Long Strange Trip, as well as Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America.