Contributors

Why We Take Time to Read

Writers at TIME are aware that their work is often used by teachers as an educational tool. That's one reason we created TIME FOR KIDS. A number of our journalists have become dual purpose. They donate a couple of hours every Tuesday during the school year to a program called Time to Read. Since its launch in 1985, TIME staff members, as well as those from other Time Inc. publications, have served as reading tutors to local public school students. The pupils read from a variety of our magazines, from SPORTS ILLUSTRATED FOR KIDS to TEEN PEOPLE, enhancing their learning skills and perhaps developing into discerning interpreters of the news. Staff writers Karl Taro Greenfeld, Joel Stein and Romesh Ratnesar and writer-reporters Michele Orecklin and Jodie Morse are current TIME tutors. Stein, Orecklin and Ratnesar have been working with eighth-grader Jovon Lee since last September. It didn't take long to discover they had a voracious reader on their hands, even if his tastes did tend to lean more toward stories about sports and music than national politics--although long before Jesse Ventura's election as Governor of Minnesota, Jovon had become an expert on The Body's campaign high jinks. But the most harrowing moments for Joel, Romesh and Michele come when Jovon turns a critical eye toward their own pieces in the magazine. "He can be brutal," says Stein. "After Jovon, I'm not afraid of any of my editors here."

Our Silicon Valley Summer

Given the summer off from tutoring duties, Orecklin, Ratnesar and Stein were sent packing. The three left TIME's New York City office for two weeks to report our cover story: the remarkable business revolution under way in California, where a second wave of entrepreneurs is colonizing Silicon Valley. Why there? Because no place on earth is better equipped to set new businesses into motion than the Valley. And as the Internet has become more developed, the Valley's original generation of techies has given way to M.B.A.s looking to launch their business plans online. Many of them schooled at nearby Stanford University, as did Ratnesar and Stein, who plied their connections and met some of this year's Stanford Business School graduates in mid-launch process. They set up camp in San Francisco and made regular reconnaissance trips into the Valley, meeting major players as well as ancillary characters. Ratnesar and Stein got rare access to start-ups so new they are still hiding behind fake names. And our reporters did not neglect the Valley's peculiar social scene."What was most striking was how consuming the start-up life is for many of these people," Ratnesar says. "They can't--won't--talk about anything else."

J. MADELEINE NASH has spent the past 15 years at TIME chasing hurricanes and other science stories. This week the senior correspondent, based in Chicago, reveals why Hurricane Floyd, a huge storm at its height, will pale compared with those that lie ahead. Climate and weather are of particular interest to Nash, who is currently writing a book on those subjects. "Hurricanes," she says, "are one of the great forces of nature. We keep trying to bend them to our will, and we keep trying to make them conform to our own preconceived ideas about how nature should behave. But nature, in my estimation, rules."

JAMES PONIEWOZIK watches six hours of TV a day. In most fields that would qualify him as a slacking underachiever. But since he's our new television critic, it means he's on the job. Since joining the magazine in July, he has been busy screening pilots for the new fall season. "I like shows that aim high. They're more interesting if they are either outrageously bad or outrageously good, as opposed to competently reliable," he says. This week, in addition to reviewing the new show Once and Again, he writes about personal video recorders, which some analysts maintain may change the way we watch TV and the way television pays for itself.

SAM GWYNNE usually operates from Texas as TIME's Austin bureau chief, but for the past few weeks he's been stationed in New York City reporting on laundered Russian money and its alleged appearance at the Bank of New York. An international banker before joining the magazine in 1988, Gwynne brings rare insight into the world of global finance. And he needs it to follow the tangled trail of tainted cash as it trundles through the world's banks. Of the current situation he says, "I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg of how much illegal Russian money moved through American banks."

DAVID VAN BIEMA, TIME's religion writer, this week reports on the fatal shootings at a church in Fort Worth, Texas, and its similarities, from at least one perspective, to other recent tragedies, such as that at Columbine. "While trying to tell the story of this horrible event, we wanted to address the fact that Evangelical Christians seem to make up a larger proportion of victims of mass killings," Van Biema says. "Evangelicals are used to seeing other minorities described as the targets of discrimination and hate crimes. Now they are beginning to wonder, given these recent sets of murders, whether they themselves shouldn't be seen this way."