Contributors

"Whenever I read about someone I find fascinating, I can't help but imagine scenes from their life in comic strip form," says the Seattle-based cartoonist Peter Bagge, who continues his three-part biography of the Canadian journalist and critic Isabel Paterson on page 52. Bagge, 52, has been creating comics for 30 years and contributing to reason for a decade. He sees a connection between libertarians and the comics industry. "We seem to be less of a minority than in most professions," he says. "Unfortunately, like most artistic professions, comics are still dominated by infantile communists."

With "Public Employees vs. the Public Will" (page 82), columnist Tim Cavanaugh returns to reason's staff as a senior editor, a position in which he will focus on California's dysfunctional politics with an emphasis on the power of public-sector unions. Cavanaugh, 43, lives in Los Angeles, where he recently sold his first screenplay. He has never been in a union himself, but as a teenager he tried to organize a group of beach lifeguards. The idea, he says, was that "we'd all be able to sit on the beach, do nothing, and get paid a lot. I was totally on board with that."

Jesse Kline's duties as reason's Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern have included transcribing Drew Carey and Nick Gillespie's attempt to present libertarian ideas to a skeptical Cleveland City Council (page 34). Kline, 29, recently received a master's degree in journalism from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He previously interned at The Western Standard, a right-of-center Canadian political magazine, where he looked into online privacy legislation and "ways that people can surf the Internet without the government tracking them." Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Kline says there's one thing he likes better about the U.S.: "Beer is a lot cheaper."