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Fred Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist and is currently the magazine's environment and development consultant. Pearce has also written for Audubon, Popular Science, Time, The Boston Globe, and Natural History. His books include Confessions of an Eco Sinner, With Speed and Violence, When the Rivers Run Dry, Keepers of the Spring, Turning Up the Heat, and Deep Jungle.

Barbara K. Bodine, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, was Diplomat in Residence at the University of Southern California, Santa Barbara. She last served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen. During her posting in Sanaa, the U.S.S. Cole was bombed in a terrorist attack. In 1999, she negotiated for hours to release three Americans kidnapped in Yemen. Following Kuwait, Ambassador Bodine was the Associate Coordinator for Operations and later served as the Acting Coordinator for Counterterrorism. She went on to serve as the Dean of Professional Studies at the Department's Foreign Service Institute. She has worked on the secretariat staff of Secretaries Kissinger and Vance, and as a Congressional Fellow in the office of Senator Robert Dole. Ambassador Bodine was born in 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Asian Studies, and graduated magna cum laude from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She received her Master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts. She also studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Department of State's Language Training Field Schools in Taiwan and Tunisia. She was the recipient of the UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Alumni Award in 1991.

Feldman is a doctoral candidate in the modern Jewish studies program at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where she is researching the literature of Jewish diaspora communities.

Mark Singer has been a staff writer at *The New Yorker* since 1974. He has contributed hundreds of Talk of the Town stories and scores of Profiles and reporting pieces. In the fall of 2000, he revived the U.S. Journal column in the magazine, a monthly feature that was written by Calvin Trillin from 1967 to 1982. Singer's account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in *The New Yorker* in 1985 and was published as a book, *Funny Money*, that same year. In 1989, he published *Mr. Personality*, a collection of his reporting from *The New Yorker*. In 1996, Singer published *Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin*, which originated as an article in the magazine. His most recent books, *Somewhere in America*, (2004) and *Character Studies*, (2005), are collections of articles that originally appeared in *The New Yorker*.