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Christopher Caldwell ("The Crescent and the Tricolor") is the senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for New York Press. He writes regularly on books for Slate.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) ("There Was Earth Inside Them") was born in Romania to German-speaking parents. John Felstiner is the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), and the editor and translator of Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, to be published by Norton this month.

Francis Davis ("Our Lady of Sorrows") is a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

Gregg Easterbrook ("Hybrid Vigor") is a contributing editor of The Atlantic and a senior editor of both The New Republic and Beliefnet.com.

E. Marla Felcher ("Children's Products and Risk") is the author of It's No Accident: How Corporations Sell Dangerous Baby Products (forthcoming).

David C. Holzman ("New Life for Old Cars") writes about science, medicine, and cars. His work has appeared in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, and Science.

Robert D. Kaplan ("Where Europe Vanishes") is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His article in this issue will appear in somewhat different form in his book Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, to be published this month.

Christoph Niemann (cover art) is an illustrator who lives in New York and Germany. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker. A book of his illustrations, The Good Portrait, was published in 1998.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang ("Mongrel Capitalism") is a historian and a Web developer for the Stanford University library.

Rémy Rougeau ("Cello") is a monk and a beekeeper in the upper Midwest. His first novel, All We Know of Heaven, will be published next spring.

Francine Russo ("From Iron Age to Our Age") is a theater critic for The Village Voice.

Richard Slotkin ("The Fall Into Guns") is the Olin Professor of English at Wesleyan University. His books include Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992).

Jeff Tietz ("In the Event of Flight") is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn.

John Updike ("Rainbow") is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of nineteen novels. His latest work, Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered," will be published this month.

Barbara Wallraff ("What Global Language?") is a senior editor of The Atlantic and the author of the book Word Court (2000), which grew out of her bimonthly Atlantic column of the same name.