Contributors

CHRISTINE GORMAN has covered the medical beat for 15 years, and initiated TIME's personal-health column in 1998. She candidly acknowledges that "nobody likes to talk about colon cancer--including editors. I've written a couple of columns about this second-leading cause of death due to cancer, but I knew that it was unlikely we'd ever put a colon on the cover. Then Katie Couric came along, and I thought that with the combination of her compelling story plus some of the latest research results, we could do a much longer piece on research and treatments that would help a lot of people." Gorman jumped at the chance to push the idea. Couric, the writer says, was open and candid about all aspects of the story--just the prescription for educating our readers about a disease that has a cure rate of more than 90% when detected early.

JONATHAN MARGOLIS is a British journalist and author who has written bios on subjects from John Cleese to Uri Geller. One of his journalistic sidelines, however, is writing about gadgets and high tech. It was this technological bent, in fact, that led directly to his powerfully affecting story on how telemedicine played a key role in giving hope to a young Albanian man whose face had been shattered by a bullet in Kosovo. Digital cameras, laptops and Internet links transmitted the photos that touched the hearts of the team of volunteer doctors who offered the war victim not just a new face but a new life as well. The transforming role that technology is playing in our world is a theme dear to Margolis and one that he explores further in his forthcoming book, A Brief History of Tomorrow, to be published this fall.

SARAH VOWELL, a columnist for Salon.com and a contributing editor to This American Life on Public Radio International, is usually grabbed by topics that, as she puts it, are not very girly: guns, the Godfather movies and goth culture. Yet in reviewing Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, she was surprised by the strong reactions the book provokes, which range from worshipful to wary. "The book's strength is basically how sane it is," says Vowell, who adds, however, that reading the 884-page manual had her "completely, overly aware of the state of my bathroom." Vowell comes to a commonsensical compromise: "I like sad stories and tough topics, but I want my living quarters to show some sense of joy." Vowell's own book, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, will be out in April.

ROGER ROSENBLATT, as a Time Inc. editor-at-large, writes for several of the company's magazines, digesting and illuminating a wide range of topics. His particular interest in this week's tale of a six-year-old murdering a classmate, he says, stems from an article he wrote for TIME in 1982 that later became a book, Children of War, a story of children in war zones around the world, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. Rosenblatt, a regular essayist on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, says he was caught up in this story "not only because of the horrific situation of a child killing another child but also because the larger context of the story seems to connect to so many other problems in the country." The prolific Rosenblatt wrote this week's Essay as well, on our winner-take-all society's lost appreciation for the beautiful loser.

MOLLY IVINS, who writes a column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that is syndicated to more than 200 newspapers, is often a sharp critic of her state's Governor. But in a piece for TIME this week drawn from her new best seller, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, she writes knowingly and even admiringly of Bush's ability to handle the Christian right. The slang-slinging Ivins and her co-author, Lou Dubose, editor of the Texas Observer, write in Shrub that there are three ways to judge a politician: "The first is to look at the record. The second is to look at the record. And third, look at the record." By doing so, they show how Bush learned, through years of experience in Texas, to keep Christian conservatives happy by making largely symbolic gestures, a strategy that produced unintended results on the national stage when Bush made his fateful pilgrimage to Bob Jones University.