Contributors

Anthony Randazzo, 23, is a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine. In "Turning Japanese?" (page 20), he and two colleagues, Michael Flynn and Adam B. Summers, find troubling parallels between Japan's financial situation in the 1990s and the current American crisis. The U.S. economy, they warn, may soon be overrun by the inflexible "zombie businesses" that plague Japan. While writing the article, Randazzo polled the reason staff for tips on the most effective way to kill a zombie. The consensus: "a stake to the head," Randazzo reports, relishing "one of the few times that zombie research will overlap with financial research."

The Oregon-based freelancer Nancy Rommelmann, 46, has written for publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to the L.A. Weekly. In "Anatomy of a Child Pornographer" (page 30), she chronicles some of the fallout from the hysteria over "sexting," in which teenagers send naked photos of themselves over their mobile phones. The kids can be brought up on child porn charges, ruining their lives. "The people who are in the toughest position here are the D.A.s," says Rommelmann. "I believe that so far they are remembering what it was like to have been a teenager. But that law is tough to get around."

Katie Hooks, a communications specialist for the Reason Foundation, is also the self-described "den mother" for this magazine's Washington, D.C., office. Hooks, a 22-year-old native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, keeps reason on the forefront of social media, promoting reason.tv videos, maintaining reason's Facebook page, and attracting more than 100 new subscribers a week to reason's Twitter feed. Her job, she says, is to keep reason "in tune with the new technologies, and what the kids these days are into."