Peter Bergen ("Backdraft") is the author of the New York Times best-seller Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. He is CNN's terrorism analyst and has written for such publications as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. A fellow at the New America Foundation, Bergen is also an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Jack Hitt ("The Diddly Awards") first bestowed our Diddly Awards in the May/June 2000 issue. "Sadly, this is the first Diddlys without Dan Quayle," says Hitt, a contributor to public radio's "This American Life" and the New York Times Magazine. "These nominees don't reach as high as Quayle in terms of intellectual curiosity."

Dashka Slater ("Keepers of a Lost Language") received a 2004 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is the author of the novel The Wishing Box. She is also a contributor to such magazines as Sierra, Legal Affairs, and San Francisco.

Daniel Duane ("Meadow's End") is the author of the memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast and the forthcoming novel A Mouth Like Yours. He is working on a book about walking the 211-mile John Muir Trail through the Sierra Nevada.

David Case ("The Crude Doctrine") writes on the environment, international affairs, and adventure travel for such publications as Men's Journal, Wired, and Rolling Stone. He lived in Asia for five years during the 1990s and first traveled to the Caucasus in 1998 as a fellow of the Pew International Reporting Project.

Chris Hedges (Dispatch) is a reporter for the New York Times and spent more than 15 years as a foreign correspondent. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and What Every Person Should Know About War.