Contributors

For 10 years Reason's Web editor, Tim Cavanaugh, has been hearing horror stories about pre-Giuliani New York. "Denying that Giuliani was an effective mayor is just cant," he admits, "but whenever people talk about how terrible the Dinkins era was, I can't help thinking that's my New York they're running down." Having lived and worked in the Big Apple under both mayors (and briefly during the Koch years), he brings a nondisgruntled perspective to Fred Siegel's highly regarded new bio of Rudy G., Prince of the City–and asks what Giuliani's successes mean for civil libertarians and good-government skeptics. Cavanaugh and his family live now in San Francisco, a less aggravating but more annoying city with nicer weather.

Chris Lehmann can't remember much about being taught evolution in high school biology class. That's one reason he thinks the whole debate about which side of the culture wars wins the classroom is overwrought. "Unless you're a total science nerd, your science teacher might as well be speaking to you in Coptic," he says. In a review of Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial, Lehmann tries his best to decipher a heated defense of "intelligent design." Formerly a senior editor at The Washington Post Book World, Lehmann is a now an editor at CQ Weekly. He has written for Harper's, Slate, The New York Observer, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications.

Having landed her first job with a New Orleans advertising agency in the 1940s, Murielle Schulze brought decades of financial experience to Reason when she joined the staff in 1996. But she was still surprised to find a place where "people seemed a lot more interested in ideas than profits." As Reason's chief financial officer, Schulze keeps an eye on the bottom line when the rest of the staff is busy, as she puts it, "eating, sleeping, and breathing their work." At 82, Schulze has been crunching numbers since before most of the staff was born–and says she has no plans to abandon Reason's Los Angeles HQ anytime soon.