Contributors

Associate Editor Mike Riggs started out as a reason Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern in 2008.  After stints at the Washington City Paper and The Daily Caller, he returned to reason's Washington, D.C., office as a full-time writer. In "Obama: Transparently Disappointing" (page 30), the native Floridian explains the "impressive lengths to which Obama has gone to preserve Bush-era secrecy." When he's not writing about law enforcement and drug policy for reason, Riggs, 27, enjoys lifting weights and avoiding direct sunlight.

In "Deadly Colonialist Fables" (page 53), Amy H. Sturgis reviews In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press), an academic exploration of American origin myths. Sturgis says these stories have ongoing relevance to "U.S. policy toward Native America, a policy that remains deeply flawed and problematic today." Sturgis, 40, is the author of four books on American Indians and presidential history; she also has edited several books about fantasy and science fiction. She was raised in Oklahoma, earned a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Vanderbilt University, and now lives in North Carolina, where she teaches interdisciplinary studies at Lenoir-Rhyne University.

reason's fall 2012 intern is John K. Ross, who is fresh off a six-year stint as a research associate at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia. Ross, 30, grew up in Baltimore and now lives in Arlington. He was a libertarian late bloomer, introduced to the philosophy when he took a comparative economics course "as a lark" during his senior year as an international studies major at Towson University. After reading F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and other Austrian greats, Ross says he "was hooked about two weeks into it." Ross is particularly passionate about fighting government overreach in eminent domain, asset forfeiture, and occupational licensing.