Contributors

Jonathan Rauch is the author of Kindly Inquisitors, a 1993 book being republished in an expanded electronic edition by the Cato Institute and the University of Chicago Press. "Kindly Inquisitors, Revisited" (page 67) is adapted from a new afterword written for the expanded edition. Rauch, 53, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a 2005 National Magazine Award winner. Looking back on his book after two decades, he says, "the arguments have held up amazingly well." In general, he thinks things have gotten better for free thought. "Twenty years ago there were two vigorous new intellectual movements demanding to regulate debate and criticism," he says. "Today there are none."

"The Futility of Digital Censorship" (page 76) is an excerpt from Nexus, a science fiction novel by Ramez Naam about a drug that links groups of human beings mind-to-mind. Naam, 40, is a former Microsoft staffer who now speaks and writes-both fiction and nonfiction-full time. He is sometimes compared to science-thriller writer Michael Crichton, which he says is "flattering in a way." But he thinks of himself more as "an anti-Crichton. In his books, arrogant scientists are usually at the root of the problem, and science is portrayed as perhaps a bit more than humans can handle. In my books, it's largely the other way around."

Zenon Evans, 21, is reason's Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern for fall 2013. Before working at reason, the Cleveland native was editor-in-chief of The Rubicon, Ohio State University's quarterly libertarian publication, where he "exposed self-described militant socialists in the English and Women's Studies Departments." Evans also wrote several poems for Mosaic, the college's undergraduate arts and lit magazine. Evans says the most memorable thing about his time at reason is getting to interview a wide range of people "from congressional staffers to lawyers to Russian activists."