Contributors

In "Windbags of War" (page 19), Contributing Editor Cathy Young focuses on campus outrage about U.S. military action after September 11. Young is intimately familiar with the ire of politically correct students and faculty members from her experiences as a Rutgers undergraduate in the 1980s. As a regular at the Daily Targum, she was voted "the columnist you'd most like to see taken out and shot." Young was more thrilled than intimidated. "I saw it as a badge of honor," she recalls. Young, who writes regularly for The Boston Globe and other publications, is the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (1999) and Growing Up in Moscow, a 1989 memoir of her childhood in the Soviet Union.

In "The Politics of Dead Children" (page 52), Matt Welch cuts through partisan fog to tackle the tough question of how many people are starving or dead due to U.N. sanctions against Iraq. The answer is grim—and as unsettling as Welch's discovery that "the anti-sanctions camp has approached the issue with a complete hostility to facts." Based in Los Angeles, Welch has written for the Online Journalism Review, Wired, and the lefty Web site WorkingForChange.com, where he was hard-pressed recently to convince some readers that "on balance, we're not the evil empire."

Longtime Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin reflects on the appeal of his childhood hero Barry Goldwater in "He Was Right" (page 60), a review of a recent biography of the failed 1964 presidential candidate. Garvin spent 18 years covering Latin American politics for The Washington Times and The Miami Herald. Along the way, he wrote Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (1992) and co-authored, with Ana Rodriguez, Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women's Prison (1995). In January, Garvin took a new path professionally, leaving the Herald's foreign desk to become the paper's TV critic. "I concluded Latin America was not going to get fixed in my lifetime," he says.