Contributors

Steven Greenhut, the author of Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives, and Bankrupting the Nation (Forum), was a columnist for The Orange County Register for 11 years. "A lot of the book is set in California," he says, "because we seem to be in a lot sillier shape than other states." In an article drawn from the book, "Class War" (page 18), he writes about pension fraud, preferment scams, and other follies in his home state and around the nation. Greenhut is now the director of the Pacific Research Institute's nonprofit investigative journalism project in Sacramento.

Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). In "P.C. Never Died" (page 26), he refutes the notion that political correctness went out with the grunge era by documenting the thriving world of student censorship. "If one thing genuinely frightens me, it's students leaping to the defense of speech codes that limit their own speech," he says. "And they don't seem to understand what's wrong with it." Lukianoff is a graduate of Stanford Law School, where he studied constitutional law, including "six credits of independent study on censorship in the Tudor dynasty." He blogs at The Huffington Post.

Since May 2008, Sylvia Ohlrich has been digging up the photographs that fill this magazine's pages. The New Haven–based researcher has been in the photo industry since the mid-1980s, working primarily for educational publishers such as The Weekly Reader and Houghton Mifflin. Finding images can be like "solving a mystery," Ohlrich says. When she searched for a picture to adorn a short review of the documentary Presumed Guilty (page 56), the usual sources weren't yielding anything useful. She ended up speaking on the phone with the movie's director, who she found to be "a very nice person who was very thrilled that we were going to be featuring his film."