Contributors

In "Stifling Commerce" (page 44), Sonny Bunch takes on the smothering bureaucracy of the Department of Commerce. Bunch, 31, is the managing editor of The Washington Free Beacon, and has previously worked at Roll Call, The Weekly Standard, and The Washington Times, where he was a film critic. Bunch, who still writes regularly about movies for the Free Beacon, says he's "not sure if there are any great movies about the Department of Commerce, but the recently departed Harold Ramis wrote a great little film about a commercial entity fighting the bureaucratic fatheads at the Environmental Protection Agency called Ghostbusters."

Reason TV Producer Jim Epstein, 37, delves into the long history of failure and corruption at the New Jersey Port Authority in "Port Authoritarians" (page 26). Before joining Reason TV, Epstein was a PBS producer covering local issues in New York City. A Brooklyn resident, he's also been a self-proclaimed "New York City history and transportation nut" for years. "I wrote my undergraduate American history thesis on mass transit in 19th-century New York City and the political battle to build a subway system," he says.

Alyssa Hertig is reason's Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern for the spring of 2014. Hertig, 23, grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of Chanhassen and has a degree in history and global studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. While in school, she wrote her thesis on Russian journalism, and in the process she decided she wanted to become a journalist herself. Previously she was an intern at History News Network, where she says she wrote about "history from a libertarian point of view-I think to my manager's dismay."