Contributors
Since 1999, Jeff A. Taylor has tallied Reason's "Balance Sheet," a monthly accounting of gains and losses for freedom. (See page 15.) Though his career began in South Carolina's alternative newspaper scene, he hit the Beltway in 1990 and has been dissecting D.C. politics ever since. Today, the Maryland-based Taylor is a part-time journalist and a full-time house dad, a job he compares to retail: "The hours are long, the pay is bad, and your customers are always cranky." Taylor also pens Reason Express, our popular weekly e-newsletter. Visit reason.com for details on signing up.
"What's killing us these days is our own behavior," says Reason Associate Editor Brian Doherty. As his story on the World Health Organization's odd priorities (see "WHO Cares?" on page 46) makes plain, that's real progress: It used to be that infectious diseases killed us, not fatty diets and too much fun. Doherty is part of Reason's Los Angeles crew and runs a small indie music label, Cherry Smash Records, in his spare time. Which helps explain his piece in the November Reason, "The Free-Floating Bob Dylan: The Wonderfully Inauthentic Art of America's Most Vital Singer-Songwriter."
Michael Moses provides a new reason to despise the baby boomers in "Virtual Warriors," his critique of that generation's recent foray into war cinema. (See page 54.) Ironically, the 44-year-old Moses, an associate professor of English at Duke University and author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), is himself a boomer. But he likes to underscore that while he may technically be a member of that club, he has little sense of generational solidarity: "I feel more like the generation after the boomers–and far less confident in the powers of government or authority to do good in the world," he says. As for war films, he's unabashedly a fan and his top picks include John Ford's They Were Expendable and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.