Contributors

"I'm a little fashion-forward on technology," says reason Contributing Editor Mike Godwin, who reports on the regulatory debacle surrounding digital and high-definition TV ("Prisoners of Digital Television," page 44). "HDTV means less to me if I can't watch it on my laptop." Godwin, who just signed on as senior technology counsel to the digital rights advocacy group Public Knowledge, is best known for serving as co-counsel in Reno v. ACLU, the landmark case that struck down federal attempts to regulate Net content. He is also the author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (1998).

Writer and self-styled "New Wave guy" Todd Seavey takes a critical look at a new book that argues pollution is a dire and immediate threat to the American population ("Killer Fog," page 52). Seavey, who edits HealthFactsandFears.com for the American Council on Science and Health, has worked as a writer for DC Comics and as an associate producer for John Stossel at ABC. He's also writing a book called Conservatism for Punks, dedicated to the proposition that "we ought to live in a world where it's OK to like Mozart, Johnny Rotten, tax cuts, guns, and lesbian performance artists all at the same time."

Contributing Editor Michael Young considers the influence of great statesmen on war in his review of Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command ("Command Performances," page 57). Young, who lives in Lebanon and writes two columns a week for Beirut's Daily Star, says he has two favorite "great men," neither of whom made Cohen's book: French President Charles de Gaulle and Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. "Charles de Gaulle because by sheer force of will he turned a nothing hand into leadership of Free France," says Young. And Mastroianni? "Because he's the man we all want to be. He would represent grace under pressure -- but pressure never had a chance."