BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT is a contributing editor at Esquire and Reader’s Digest and is the nonfiction editor at the Journal of Military Experience. Since leaving the U.S. Army in 2005, he has written extensively on military and veteran affairs, reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, hometowns and hospitals. “The Living and the Dead” won the 2013 Michael Kelly Award.
MAGGIE PALEY is a writer, editor, and editorial associate of The Paris Review.
FRANK RICH joined New York in June 2011 as writer at large, writing monthly on politics and culture and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. He is also a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.
Rich joined the magazine following a distinguished career at the New York Times, where he had been an op-ed columnist since 1994. He was previously the paper’s chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the Times introduced in the Sunday “Week in Review” section in 2005. From 2003 to 2005, Rich had been the front-page columnist for the Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served as senior adviser to the Times’s culture editor on the paper’s overall cultural-news report. From 1999 to 2003 he was also senior writer for the New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for the Times.
He has written about culture and politics for many national publications. His books include Ghost Light: A Memoir and, most recently, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Rich is also a creative consultant to HBO, where he is an executive producer of two projects, Veep, a comedy series written and directed by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a documentary on Stephen Sondheim.
A native of Washington, D.C., and graduate of Harvard, he lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist and journalist Alex Witchel.
MIMI SWARTZ, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failue: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk from April 1999 to April 2001 and a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Before joining The New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the Public Interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of Public Interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women’s health care in Texas.
Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.
MICHAEL WOLFF is the author of five books, including The Man Who Owns the News and Burn Rate. He is a long-time writer for New York and Vanity Fair as well as numerous other publications. His work has won many awards and is widely anthologized. He lives in New York City.
ROBERT F. WORTH is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. He first moved to the Middle East in 2003 to cover the Iraq war and remained in Baghdad until 2006. He then became the paper’s Beirut bureau chief, reporting from across the region. Since 2011, he has written narrative accounts of the ongoing upheavals in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen for the Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books. He was born and raised in New York City and now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons.
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