Contributors

Oddly enough, SUV defender Hans Eisenbeis prefers two wheels to four ("Four Wheel Drive Fantasies," page 26). "My primary mode of transport is the bicycle," says Eisenbeis, who commutes 20 miles daily to the offices of The Rake, the glossy new Minneapolis monthly that he edits. Still, he relies on his adored Toyota RAV to cart around his three children and to brave the Minnesota winters. Eisenbeis is a former senior editor at Spin and was a frequent contributor to the late webzine Suck during the dot-com heyday, a time he describes as the "summer of love for my generation."

If only Jerry Jesness had had a teacher like Jaime Escalante, the legendary calculus instructor featured in "Stand and Deliver Revisited" (page 34). "I say with some shame that I bailed out of math after high school geometry," says Jesness, a veteran teacher whose previous stories for reason include "Why Johnny Can't Fail" (July 1999), "Workshop Wonderland" (August/September 2000), and "Texas' Big Test" (November 2000). Currently a special education teacher in Los Fresnos, Texas, about 30 miles from the Mexican border, Jesness also has taught on Native American reservations. A fluent Spanish speaker, he has just finished a book, tentatively titled How Am I Supposed to Teach These Kids to Speak English?

Freelance writer Melinda Ammann swears she's been to jail only once -- and that was to research "Breast Men," her article about illegal immigrants working in a Tennessee chicken plant (page 40). While she may not know much about prisons, she's more familiar with factories and the people who work there. "In Marshaltown, Iowa, where I grew up," she explains, "one of the three main employers is a pork packing plant. My mother started working there on the assembly line, alongside mostly Mexican immigrants." Ammann is something of a migrant herself. First, she left rural Iowa for Washington, D.C., where she worked for the Institute for Justice, a nonpr