Contributors

From the October 2011 issue

In “Bummer” (page 22), Senior Editor Jacob Sullum considers President Barack Obama’s broken drug policy promises. Sullum, 45, started as an assistant editor with reason in 1989. He remembers having “no blogging duties then, but lots of meetings.” Then as now, his chief focus was the war on drugs. So was it reasonable for reformers to expect something different from Obama? “Given Obama’s public criticism of the war on drugs and his explicit promises to change things,” Sullum says, it was. But now, he adds, Obama has little incentive to follow through, since he “probably assumes that reformers who supported him have nowhere else to go.”

Lucy Steigerwald is reason’s Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern for summer 2011. Steigerwald, 24, has a communications degree from Chatham University, where she was the managing editor of the school publicationCommuniqué as well as the resident editor in charge of “complaining about cops and writing about how it’s OK not to vote.” She has also interned at the Pittsburgh City Paper, where she was “sent to see terrible art installations one week and terrible bands the next.” For now, she is happy to be in reason’s D.C. office, which she says is “the nicest on Earth, except for the occasional necessity of making phone calls in the supply closet.”

Hannah Burak, 20, is also a reason summer intern. A native of Portland, Oregon, she is working toward a degree in government from Claremont McKenna College, where she is “one of those annoying kids with the perfect GPA who gets a bunch of academic awards that don’t mean anything except that I turn in my work.” In addition to writing for reason’s blog and print edition and transcribing numerous interviews, she has had a practical impact on the office. “My lasting contribution,” she says, “is duct-taping the broken freezer door.”