3quarksdaily

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contact
Site
    About 3 Quarks Daily
    About the Name
    Comments Policy
    About Mondays at 3QD
    About Our Prizes: The Quarks
    Winners of The Quarks
    Letters to 3QD readers
    3QD by Email
    Facebook Fan Page
About the Editors
About Our Current Guest Columnists
About Our Occasional or Former Contributors

CONTACT

Email: S. Abbas Raza, Founding Editor

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ABOUT 3 QUARKS DAILY

On this website, my fellow editors and guest authors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating. We want to provide you with a one-stop intellectual surfing experience by culling good stuff from all over and putting it in one place. In other words, we are what has come to be known as a "filter blog". And we try not to be afraid of challenging material. Please leave comments or send me an email with any comments/criticism. Thanks.

ABOUT THE NAME

When Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of three new subatomic particles in 1964, Gell-Mann decided to name them "quarks", an unusual word meaning "croak" or "caw" which James Joyce had used in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" In present-day physics, there are more than three quarks, and some are said to have properties named strangeness and charm, which, we think, describe this weblog as well. We have also used the name to symbolize our connections to science, art, and literature; and because we mistakenly thought it short and memorable.

COMMENTS POLICY

We don't really have a strict comments policy but reserve the right to delete any comments (without explanation—we do not have the time) that we find either abusive or obscene or threatening or offensive or inappropriate in some other way or even just irrelevant to the post itself. Repeat offenders will be blocked from commenting. In general, we tend to agree with Sean Carroll's sentiments at Cosmic Variance which you can see here. Also, please read a note to our readers about comments here.

ABOUT MONDAYS AT 3QD

Though we are a filter blog on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. All the Monday columns are conveniently collected by author's last name here for your browsing pleasure.

Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and there are no length restrictions. Look for these on Mondays.

There is much more information about each of the editors and current columnists below, and also about former and/or occasional columnists.

ABOUT THE 3QD PRIZES: THE QUARKS

In the summer of 2009, we decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Philosophy, Politics, and Arts & Literature for the best blog post in those fields. Here's how it works:

Starting in June, 2009, the prizes are awarded on the two solstices and the two equinoxes every year. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the philosophy prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the arts & literature prize on March 20, 2010.

About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The nominating period will last approximately one to two weeks. At the end of this time, we will open up the process to voting by our readers. After this period, we will take the top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. And finally, a well-known intellectual from the field will pick the winner, runner up, and third place finisher from these finalists, and will write some short comments on the winning entries.

Just for fun, the first place award will be called the "Top Quark," and will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the "Strange Quark," will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the "Charm Quark," along with two hundred dollars.

WINNERS OF THE 3QD PRIZES

2012 Philosophy Prize
—judged by Justin E. H. Smith
2012 Science Prize
—judged by Sean Carroll
2012 Arts & Literature Prize
—judged by Gish Jen
2011 Politics & Social Science Prize
—judged by Stephen M. Walt
2011 Philosophy Prize
—judged by Patricia Churchland
2011 Science Prize
—judged by Lisa Randall
2011 Arts & Literature Prize
—judged by Laila Lalami
2010 Politics Prize
—judged by Lewis H. Lapham
2010 Philosophy Prize
—judged by Akeel Bilgrami
2010 Science Prize
—judged by Richard Dawkins
2010 Arts & Literature Prize
—judged by Robert Pinsky
2009 Politics Prize
—judged by Tariq Ali
2009 Philosophy Prize
—judged by Daniel C. Dennett
2009 Science Prize
—judged by Steven Pinker

Details, including lists of the semifinalists and finalists for each prize, can be found by clicking on the appropriate prize logo near the bottom of the right-hand column.

LETTERS TO 3QD READERS

On the occasion of the 1,000th post at 3QD, I wrote a letter to our readers which you can read here. And on the occasion of the 10,010th post at 3QD, I wrote another letter which you can read here.

3QD by Email

To have all the posts from 3QD delivered to your inbox by email once a day (between 1 and 2 AM NYC time), look for "3QD by Email" in the right-hand column and sign up there.

3QD ON FACEBOOK

3 Quarks Daily on Facebook

EDITORS

	S. Abbas Raza Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, Abbas has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering & computer science from Johns Hopkins University, and a graduate degree in philosophy from Columbia University. He lives with his wife, Margit Oberrauch, and their feline friend, Frederica Krueger, in the small, very beautiful city of Brixen in the Italian Alps. Email: s.abbas.raza.1 [at] gmail.com
	Robin Varghese Robin Varghese lives in New York City and is failing at his ambition to become a self-sufficient slacker, working instead on information policy issues. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, where he studied Western European political economy. Email: robinvar@yahoo.com
	Morgan Meis Morgan has a Ph.D. in philosophy. He was supposed to specialize in the Greeks and Romans but managed to write a dissertation on Walter Benjamin. Also, he is the president of an arts collective in Queens called Flux Factory. Also, he writes regularly for The Smart Set. Also, he is a senior consulting editor for the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. Also, he wins things. Email: morganmeis [at] gmail.com
	Azra Raza Azra was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and is an oncologist and research scientist by profession. She lives in Manhattan with her daughter Sheherzad. In these scoundrel times, she is convinced that the best way "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world" is by promoting and publicizing the achievements of humanity in science, art, and literature. She is specially moved by fine poetry. Email: azra.raza [at] columbia [dot] edu
	Sughra Raza Sughra grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, along with siblings Abbas and Azra (above), and several others. She studied fine arts as an undergraduate, later shifting gears to become a doctor of medicine, specializing in diagnostic radiology. Sughra lives in Boston, Massachusetts, working and teaching at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She feels most excited in a world of images, invention, art and music; and inspite of Fenway Park floodlights lighting up the sky in her windows, she remains oblivious to the Red Sox battling the Yankees a stone’s throw away. Email: sraza1 [at] partners.org
	Jim Culleny Jim Culleny is the Poetry Editor of 3 Quarks Daily. After a stint in the navy, Jim received a BA in Art Education from William Paterson University and did graduate work in art at NYU. He taught art for several years in NJ public schools in Newark and Bergen County. Taught a little bit of everything else during two years at a remote residential community school in New York's Adirondacks. Was a social worker in Lower Manhattan before Soho was Soho. Made a living most of his life as a carpenter, designer, and builder. Did regular radio commentary for about 10 years during Morning Edition on WFCR.FM in Amherst, Mass. and some for NPR on All Things Considered. Played and sang his way from rockabilly to jazz in numberless band permutations over a period too long to believe. Came to poetry through songwriting. Has had work published in The Third Muse Poetry Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Penthouse Journal, and in 5-Minute Pieces, a chapbook published in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. He's also been writing a regular op-ed column for the past 12 years for the Greenfield Recorder along the beautiful Connecticut River, and is presently making a living as project manager for an Architectural firm. Jim lives with his wife, Pat, of 31 years, and his 17 year old granddaughter. He has three daughters and four other grandchildren. Email: jimculleny [at] comcast.net
	Zujaja Tauqeer Zujaja is a DPhil student researching military power and medical aid in Pakistan at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. A graduate of Brooklyn College, she will study medicine at Harvard Medical School after completing her DPhil. Born in Lahore, Zujaja left Pakistan with her family to escape persecution against Ahmadi Muslims, and someday, when she's finally out of the classroom, she hopes to return there and work to create an equitable and sustainable healthcare system. Email: zujajatauqeer [at] gmail.com

CURRENT GUEST COLUMNISTS

In alphabetical order by last name:

	Scott F. Aikin Scott F. Aikin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Epistemology and the Regress Problem (Routledge 2010). He is also co-author, with Robert B. Talisse, of Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus 2011). Email: scott.f.aikin [at] vanderbilt.edu
	Omar Ali Omar Ali MD is a Pakistani-American academic physician with a research interest in the genetics and epigenetics of obesity. He is also interested in peace in South Asia and moderates the Asiapeace discussion group. Other interests include history and the public understanding of science. In a previous life, Dr Ali was also a book reviewer for the Pakistani magazine "Herald". Email: omarali502000 [at] yahoo.com
	Hasan Altaf Hasan Altaf, a graduate of New York University and Johns Hopkins University, is a writer currently based in Washington, DC. Email: hasan.altaf [at] gmail.com
	Namit Arora A travel photographer, writer, and Internet technologist, Namit was raised in India in the cow-belt city of Gwalior. His training at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bengal led him to Louisiana, precipitating his great escape to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has since worked at three failed startups and three big corporations. At least his profession has afforded him opportunities to live, work, or play in scores of countries. During a two-year break, he created an extensive photojournal on India and has recently finished his first novel. Contact him via his blog or website.
	Kevin Scott Baldwin Kevin Scott Baldwin is an Associate Professor of Biology at Monmouth College in Western Illinois, where he lives with his wife and three children. He has written previously for The Evolutionary Review. Email: kbaldwin [at] monm.edu
	Rishidev Chaudhuri Rishi was born in Colombo, and grew up in Bangalore before going to college in Massachusetts, where he had a suitably unfocused liberal arts education. Afterwards, he drifted about India, and briefly worked as a journalist for a paper in Calcutta, interviewing local celebrities and struggling artists. He is now working towards a Phd in Applied Mathematics at Yale. In the meanwhile, he tries desperately to keep his literary and scientific interests away from each other, and to shield his worldview from the tentacles of modern science. Email: rishidev.chaudhuri [at] yale.edu
	Evert Cilliers Evert is a writer-performer. He grew up in apartheid South Africa and was raised to be an elite Afrikaner fascist. However, something went terribly wrong in his choice of teenage reading material, and between Darwin, Freud and Bertrand Russell, he ended up rejecting his nation, his religion and his family. When a riot of white cops vs. black protesters sent a teargas canister rolling into the lobby of an ad agency heʼd just started, he thought about emigrating. Then the apartheid regime banned his first play A Very Butch Libido, and he took off for the freedom of America. He continues writing plays, novels, poetry and songs, and attended the OʼNeill Playwrights Conference in 1993 with a play about torture. In advertising, his work on the Absolut Vodka campaign rocketed the brand from nowhere to the #1 import in four years; it's now the longest-running campaign in advertising history. He performed his one-man show How to Cook a Man on three continents. His rock group, the Dingbots, created the rock opera Kidd Radar, available on iTunes and CDBaby.com; their video The Obama Karma Song is on YouTube. A semi-legend on the 1990s slam poet scene, he won the 1997 National Poetry Slam, and starred in the PBS documentary Slammin'. His poetry is anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and collected in Suck My Poem from Lulu.com. He's working on his first musical, Cinderella and the Empire of Chocolate. Email: evertcilliers [at] yahoo.com
	Sarah Firisen Sarah Firisen was born in London, England, lived for a number of years in New York City and now lives in Upstate New York with her husband Michael, two daughters Anya and Sasha, a dog Treetree and a cat Ernie. She has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Nottingham and a graduate degree in Philosophy from Columbia University. She has been working as a software developer for the past 15 years and is now working in the field of, and thinking and writing about, corporate Innovation. Sarah is, as of yet, an unpublished fiction writer and occasional freelance journalist who is currently finishing up her first novel. Email: sfirisen [at] syllogism [dot] com
	Julia Galef Julia Galef is a New York-based writer and public speaker specializing in science, rationality, and design. She serves on the board of directors of the New York City Skeptics, co-hosts their official podcast, Rationally Speaking, and co-writes the blog Rationally Speaking along with philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. She has moderated panel discussions at The Amazing Meeting and the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, and gives frequent public lectures to organizations including the Center for Inquiry and the Secular Student Alliance. Julia received her B.A. in statistics from Columbia in 2005. Email: julia.galef [at] gmail [dot] com
	Sousan Hammad Sousan Hammad is a writer and translator residing in Paris. Website: www.sousanhammad.com
	Shadab Zeest Hashmi Shadab Zeest Hashmi is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry for Baker of Tarifa— a book based on the history of interfaith tolerance in Al Andalus (Muslim Spain). Her work has been included in the Seeds of Peace concert with the award-winning Al Andalus Ensemble, in the film Cruzando Lineas: Crossing Lines, and has been translated into Urdu by Pakistan Academy of Letters. She has presented her series of poems and photographs titled “Across the Windowsill” at San Diego Museum of Art. She has served as an editor for the annual Magee Park Anthology and the online journal MahMag World Literature and has taught as a visiting professor in the MFA program at San Diego State University. She has published her poetry and prose in numerous journals worldwide and represents Pakistan on UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry. Email: shadabzh [at] gmail.com
	Liam Heneghan Liam Heneghan, a Dubliner, is an ecosystem ecologist working at DePaul University in Chicago where he is a Professor of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture. His research has included studies on the impact of acid rain on soil foodwebs in Europe, and on inter-biome comparisons of decomposition and nutrient dynamics in forested ecosystems in North American and in the tropics. Over the past decade Heneghan and his students have been working on restoration issues in Midwestern ecosystems. Heneghan is co-chair of the Chicago Wilderness Science Team. He is also a graduate student in DePaul University's philosophy program, a part-time model, and an occasional poet. Email: lhenegha [at] gmail [dot] com
	Sue Hubbard Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, short-story writer and freelance critic living and working in London.Variously an antique dealer and a small holder she has written about the visual arts for twenty years for such publications as Time Out, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent and The New Statesman. She has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt) and appeared in the Oxford Poets series (Carcarnet). She was the Poetry Society's first ever Public Art Poet, responsible for London's largest public art poem at Waterloo station, and has published a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and a collection of short stories Rothko's Red (Salt). Her selected art writing is to be published next year by Damien Hirst's Other Criteria. Website: http://www.suehubbard.com Email: info [at] suehubbard.com
	Joy Icayan Joy Icayan is a psychology grad student and human rights research associate for a human rights NGO in the Philipppines. Her interests include evolution, morality, cognitive sciences and literature. She also writes fiction. Email: joy.anne [at] gmail.com
	Tom Jacobs Tom Jacobs is an assistant professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology, where he teaches a range of classes in writing and literature. He received a Ph.D from New York University in American Literature and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Email: tjacob02 [at] nyit.edu
	Mara Jebsen Mara Jebsen is a poet who is deeply marked by oral traditions, and interested in the staging, singing and storytelling of poetry. She studied public policy and African and African-American studies at Duke University, and holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. Mara teaches the craft of essay-writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and at some point during her years of teaching began to learn to write an essay, herself. She was raised in Philadelphia and Lome, and now lives in Brooklyn, where she is a consummate bruncher. Email: marajebsen [at] yahoo.com
	Rafiq Kathwari Rafiq Kathwari is a rebel poet and social entrepreneur who divides his time between his adopted home New York and his native Kashmir, where he empowers artisans. Poke him on Facebook. Email: rafiqkathwari [at] gmail.com
	Misha Lepetic Misha Lepetic is a consultant and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology, energy and social venture, with current interests in urban design and food policy. A BA in Music from Swarthmore College led to several years of professional DJing in South America, whereas an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University has resulted in less exciting but perhaps more productive pursuits. Lately, his idea of an exciting Friday night has been parsing complex compounds in classical Sanskrit. Email: misha.lepetic [at] gmail.com
	Dave Maier Dave Maier spent many years as a radio DJ, but after even public radio turned hostile to esoteric music, he left to study philosophy at Columbia. Now, after earning a Ph. D. in the subject, he spends far too much time reading and not nearly enough time writing. He blogs, or has blogged, at duckrabbit.blogspot.com, where at least there is some good stuff in the archives. Email: duck1887 [at] hotmail.com
	Colin Marshall Colin Marshall writes about film but doubles as the host of a public radio show, triples as a blogger on culture and self-engineering, quadruples as the host of a book club podcast and quintuples as a reviewer of podcasts. He loves tea, old-school R&B and the work of Abbas Kiarostami. Email: colinjmarshall [at] gmail.com
	James McGirk James McGirk is an MFA student at Columbia University. His bylines include TIME Asia, More Intelligent Life, Foreign Policy and The L Magazine. For more information you are welcome to visit his website at jamesmcgirk.com. Email: james.mcgirk [at] caa.columbia.edu
	Vivek Menezes Vivek Menezes is a widely published writer and photographer. He was born in Bombay, went to high school in New York, and holds degrees from Wesleyan University and the London School of Economics. Previous career highlights include driving the safari train at the Bronx Zoo, serving as Jacques Cousteau's personal economic advisor, and building Sachin Tendulkar's first official website. He lives in Goa with his wife and three sons. Email: vmingoa [at] gmail.com
	Maniza Naqvi Maniza Naqvi writes fiction. Her novels are: Mass Transit (OUP, Karachi, 1998); On Air (OUP, Karachi, 2000); Stay With Me (SAMA, Karachi 2004; Tara Press, India 2005); A Matter of Detail (SAMA, 2008; Tara Press, 2008); Sarajevo Saturdays (SAMA, 2009). Her short story "An Impossible Shade of Home Brew" is included in the anthology And then the World Changed (Feminst Press, 2008). Her short story "A Brief Acquaintaince" is included in Neither Night Nor Day (Harper Collins, 2007). Email: manizanaqvi195 [at] hotmail.com
	Leanne Ogasawara Born and raised in Los Angeles, Leanne Ogasawara studied philosophy with the great Hubert Dreyfus at U.C Berkeley and Japanese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Where has the time gone? She spent most of the past twenty years in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan where she worked as a freelance Japanese translator and sometimes writer and student of Tea. Now, back in LA, she still loves traveling –though mostly in her imagination via books, art and music. Blog: www.tangdynastytimes.com Email: leanne [at] gol.com
	Tolu Ogunlesi Tolu Ogunlesi works as a journalist in Lagos, Nigeria. He was awarded a 2009 CNN Multichoice African Journalism Prize, in the Arts & Culture category. Before now he has worked as a pharmacist, a management consultant and a corporate communications executive. In 2008 he was a Guest Writer at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden; and in 2009 a Cadbury Visiting Fellow at the University of Birmingham, England. His work has been translated into Dutch, Latvian, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish. He owns one digital camera, two lenses and plenty of hope for a successful career in photography. When he isn’t travelling he is busy looking forward to travelling. The rest of the time he is to be found contemplating starting a novel. Email: tolu.ogunlesi [at] gmail.com Website: www.toluogunlesi.wordpress.com
	Quinn O'Neill Originally from Nova Scotia, Quinn holds degrees in biology, psychology, dentistry and educational leadership. She currently does research in science education and lives in Montreal, Canada. Email: wqoneill [at] gmail.com
	Jen Paton California born Jen Paton is currently studying Global Media and Post-national Communication at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She holds a BA in History from Yale University, where she wrote about representations of cannibalism during the first crusade. Her interests include historiography, political communication, and popular history – especially where the three intersect. She also volunteers for OpenAir.fm. Email: jenpaton [at] gmail.com
	Alyssa Pelish Alyssa Pelish has studied modernist literature and neuroscience, is an itinerant instructor of literature and writing, a frequent reviewer for Rain Taxi, and is currently at work on a novel. Email: alyssa.pelish [at] gmail.com
	Gautam Pemmaraju A Hyderabad native, Gautam has been a Bombay based writer/director since his return to India 14 years ago from NYC. With a couple of Masters degrees, in Communication from the University of Hyderabad and Television-Radio- Film from Syracuse University, he worked as a producer for three and half years at the music TV station Channel[V] during the height of its influence. As an independent since 2000, he works in Broadcast Design, Promotion & Brand Identity as well as in non-fiction TV shows & documentary. Contributing off and on to a few publications, post-colonial India and its strange cities is a primary interest of his, amongst several unrelated, excursionary ones. Email: gautam.pemmaraju [at] gmail.com
	Edward B. Rackley Trained as an academic philosopher, Ed works in conflict and post conflict countries, mostly in Africa. His work involves setting up emergency aid programs, running them, or evaluating them. He keeps a blog on issues related to whatever country he happens to be working in, called 'Across the Divide: Analysis and Anecdote from Africa'. Blog: http://rackleyed.blogspot.com
	Jalees Rehman Jalees is a German with Pakistani roots. He currently lives in the USA and spent some of his childhood in Nigeria. He lives in a state of perpetual confusion and enjoys talking to people who are also confused. When he is not reading books, Jalees works as a stem cell biologist and as a physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He regularly blogs about science at The Next Regeneration and about a variety of topics on his personal blog Fragments of Truth. Email: jalees.rehman [at] gmail.com
	Akim Reinhardt Akim Reinhardt is an associate professor of History at Towson University in Maryland. Born and raised in the Bronx, he has also lived in Michigan, Nebraska, and Arizona. He currently resides in a Baltimore row home that he shares with a very old but surprisingly resilient cat. He is the author of Ruling Pine Ridge (2007) and blogs regularly at ThePublicProfessor.com. Email: yankeeslim [at] gmail.com
	Ryan Sayre Ryan is currently out east finishing a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology. He works on security and seismicity in Tokyo and posts intermittently on architecture, earthquakes, and anthropology at www.architectonictokyo.com. Email: ryan.sayre [at] yale.edu
	Olivia Scheck Olivia was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and will graduate this spring with a BA in Cognitive Science from Yale University. In the past four years, she has conducted research on the cognitive abilities of capuchin monkeys, volunteered with an eye-health organization in Accra, Ghana, and edited the school's satirical tabloid. She has many marketable skills, and would be a tremendous asset to your business or organization. Email: olivia.scheck [at] gmail.com
	David Schneider David Schneider is a writer, media analyst and student of culture in New York City, with published criticism on – among other things – film, architecture, photography, fine dining, and music. He is the founder and editor of boybedlamreview.com, an online magazine of arts and ideas for the 21st century. He has an MA in English Literature from Oxford University, studied creative writing at Middlebury College, and spent seven years in Chicago. You can find out more about him, and read more of his work, at daschneider.wordpress.com Email: schneiderdavid73 [at] gmail.com
	Evan Selinger Evan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Program Faculty at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology. When he's not engaging issues concerning expertise and the ethics of science and technology, Evan enjoys spending time with his wife Noreen and daughter Rory, making the most of life in the world's imaging capital. Although Evan is a prolific researcher with numerous academic books and articles, he also cares deeply about public engagement. He writes for popular magazines and blogs, including Slate, The Atlantic, and The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. Email: eselinger [at] gmail.com
	Haider Shahbaz Haider is a Pakistani. An undergraduate. At Yale. All these things baffle him. He spends most of his time trying to cope with his bafflement at these and other things. He copes with it by talking to things and people around him and taking various colorful intoxicants. When sane, Haider enjoys South Asian History, English Literature and Film because they allow him to read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies and then act painfully pretentious about them. He, also, tries very hard not to eat cute furry animals and his dream is to obliterate their suffering. That is not his only dream though. Since having spent two years in the countryside in Wales he wants to live atop a mountain with lots of sheep and secretly wants his cottage to become a pilgrimage site after he dies. Email: hshahbaz [at] gmail.com
	Justin E. H. Smith Justin E. H. Smith is an American essayist, journalist, and satirist based in Montreal. He doesn't want to write satire, but, as Juvenal said, the world leaves him no choice. He is a regular contributor to Counterpunch, and has written for numerous other online publications, including N+1. His work has been linked or cited in the online editions of the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly, the Stranger, the Washington Post, and (probably a mistake) the National Review. His archive, www.jehsmith.com, brings together writing of his available on the Internet. Quite apart from all this, Smith is also a professor of philosophy and a specialist on the life and work of G. W. Leibniz. To see his academic profile, please visit www.jehsmith.com/philosophy. Email: jehsmith@gmail.com
	Aditya Dev Sood Aditya is a left-handed architect who writes better than he can draw, and talks better than he can write. He expended his youth pursuing doctorates in Sanskrit Philology and Cultural Anthropology. Inspired by a vintage clothing store in NoHo that no longer exists, he started the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS) as an extended performance art piece. However, CKS was soon hijacked by corporate interests to advance their own capitalist agendas. Having wandered the world for a number of years, he has recently returned to New Delhi, the city of his childhood, where he is currently shacked-up with his girlfriend. Aditya's futile efforts to intellectually comprehend the unyielding abundance of the world provide the pathos and humor characteristic of his writings and reflections on everyday life. [Photo: Joi Ito] Email: aditya [at] cks.in
	Jeff Strabone Jeff Strabone is a native New Yorker and professor of English. He also holds degrees in history and political science. Besides his scholarship and activism, he holds a U.S. patent for a voting system. His writing alternates between British and American spelling in the hope that others will share his deeply ambivalent relationship to standardization. Email: jeffstrabone [preposition] gmail
	Robert B. Talisse Robert B. Talisse is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge 2009). He is co-author, with Scott F. Aikin, of Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus 2011). Email: robert.talisse [at] vanderbilt.edu
	Randolyn Zinn Randolyn Zinn is a writer and choreographer (original Broadway production of Sunday In The Park with George) residing in NYC. Her fiction and poetry have been published by Carve, Best of Carve, Maisonneuve, South Dakota Review, Rhapsoidia, Driftwood, Naugatuck River Review and Vox. One story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Having earned an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, the opening chapters of her just-completed novel The Giselle Room won the program's first Chapbook Competition. This past year she spent a month in Spain on a travel grant from the Jerome Foundation for a collection of prose poems she's writing about flamenco. Zinn has taught actors at Juilliard, Circle In The Square Theatre School and most recently undergrad literature and writing at Pace University. Email: rzinn [at] mac.com

OCCASIONAL OR FORMER CONTRIBUTORS

In alphabetical order by last name:

	Marko Ahtisaari Marko Ahtisaari was born in Helsinki, Finland and grew up in Helsinki, Dar es Salaam and New York. He studied economics, philosophy and music at Columbia University in the City of New York where he subsequently lectured in logic, philosophy of economics and the history of thought. He went on to be the leader of the mobile practice at the design consultancy Satama Interactive. Currently Marko works as the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia. In the in-between moments he makes music. Blog: Marko Ahtisaari
	Kelly Amis Kelly Amis is the founder and president of Loudspeaker Films, a new independent film production company focused on social justice and education equity issues. Its first project, TEACHED, exposes disparities in the American public education system, especially as they impact urban minority youth. After graduating magna cum laude from Georgetown University, Amis taught fourth and fifth grades in South Central, Los Angeles as a charter corps member of Teach for America. This experience inspired Amis to earn a master's degree in Education Policy Analysis from Stanford University and to research local school governance as a Fulbright Scholar at the Australian Council for Educational Research in Melbourne. Since then, Amis has worked as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein—handling education, labor and foreign policy issues—and for a variety of education reform organizations, including: the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, where she launched one of the nation’s first charter school incubators; the Sallie Mae Fund, where she helped design and start-up Building Hope, a charter school facilities fund; and Fight For Children, where she devised the "three sector strategy" that helped increase educational options for low-income District of Columbia students. Amis is the co-author of “Making it Count: A Guide to High-Impact Education Philanthropy,” and numerous articles on education reform.  She lives in Northern California. Email: k_amis [at] yahoo.com
	Saifedean Ammous Saifedean Ammous lives in New York and is a candidate for a PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He grew up in Ramallah in Colonized Palestine and has a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut and a Master's in Development Management from the London School of Economics. He supports Liverpool FC rabidly, cooks the undisputed best shrimp pasta in the world, and blogs at TheSaifHouse.wordpress.com Email: Saifedean.ammous [at] gmail.com
	Robert P. Baird Robert P. Baird lives in Kampala, Uganda and recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His website is robertpbaird.com and he's on Twitter (@bobbybaird). Email: bobby.baird [at] gmail.com
	Hartosh Singh Bal Hartosh has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from BITS Pilani, India and a graduate degree in mathematics from New York University. None of this was meant as preparation for a career in journalism but he is now political editor of the weekly magazine Open that comes out of New Delhi. He is also co-author of a A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel brought out by Princeton University Press. Email: hartoshbal [at] gmail.com
	Jason Socrates Bardi Jason graduated from the University of Hartford with degrees in physics, math, and English, and he obtained graduate degrees in molecular biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University and in science writing from JHU's Writing Seminars program. He has worked as a professional writer for a number of companies, government agencies, and private institutions, including a year as a writer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, five years as the senior science writer at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, and two years as a senior writer at the National Institutes of Health. He is author of "The Calculus Wars" (Avalon, 2006) and "The Fifth Postulate" (Wiley, 2008). He lives in College Park, MD. Email: jsbardi [at] gmail [dot] com
	Michael Blim Michael Blim teaches anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He writes about equality and global justice and is the author of Economy and Equality: The Global Challenge (2005). Email: mblim [at] gc.cuny.edu
	Mark Blyth Mark Blyth is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has also been a visiting professor in the UK, France, Germany, and Singapore. He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century and is currently working on three projects: a book on party politics and political economy in advanced welfare states called The New Political Economy of Party Politics, an edited volume on constuctivist theory and political economy entitled Constructivist Political Economy, and a series of papers on probability, randomness, and epistemology in the social sciences, which may or may not end up a book. His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative European Politics. Email: mark.blyth[at]jhu.edu
	Simon Boas Simon worked for development NGOs for several years before selling his soul to the United Nations, for which he currently manages a small office in the Gaza Strip. He has a Master’s degree in Policy Analysis, having first pretended to study English at Oxford. Like every other idiot who did so, he suspects he has a great book in him; the woeful state of his Arabic after six years in the Middle East testifies that he’s probably too lazy to find out. Simon enjoys singing, shooting and carousing. Happily he is married to Aurelie. Email: bobboas [at] hotmail [dot] com
	Beth Ann Bovino Beth Ann works as a senior economist at Standard and Poor's in Manhattan. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University. Email: bethann_bovino [at] standardandpoors.com
	Norman Costa Norman teaches graduate and undergraduate psychological research methods at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. He also runs his own social science research and consulting firm, eXpert Survey Systems Inc. He has a PhD in Psychology from The Graduate School and University Center, CUNY. Among his interests are epistemology and the philosophy of science. His love is his students, and his passion is the training of the next generation of social scientists and researchers. Email: norman.costa1 [at] marist.edu
	Descha Chakravaka Daemgen Descha Chakravaka Daemgen is a writer in Berlin, Germany. He is currently engaged in a project on the relation between aesthetics and finance in late nineteenth century literature. Email: descha@gmail.com
	Gabe DiNicola Gabe DiNicola graduated from the University of New Haven with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. He is currently on a long hiatus from his Master of Science degree in Information Technology. He lives with his beautiful, college sweetheart wife and their two adorable children in Connecticut. He enjoys math, science, cooking, wine and beer making, and writing. Email: gabedinicola [at] gmail [dot] com
	Timothy Don Timothy Don is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is editor of Radical Society, a quarterly journal of politics and culture. He is currently at work on a novel and can be reached at info@radicalsociety.com.
	Gerald Dworkin Gerald Dworkin is a philosopher teaching at the University of California, Davis. He has taught at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls, Oxford as well as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University. From 1990-97 he was the editor of ETHICS. When not thinking about How to Live, What to Do he is thinking about Where to Eat, How to Cook. He divides his time between Sacramento and Chicago (where his two daughters and five grand-children live) and thinks the best four word sentence in English is Ring Lardner's: "Shut up he explained." Email: gdworkin [at] ucdavis.edu
	Jennifer Cody Epstein Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of The Painter from Shanghai, an imaginative retelling of the life of Chinese prostitute-turned-post-Impressionist Pan Yuliang. Her fiction has also appeared in several literary magazines She has lived and worked in the U.S., Japan, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Italy for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Mademoiselle, Self and Parents, as well as for the NBC and HBO networks. She has a Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she is an adjunct professor in the School of the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, filmmaker Michael Epstein, and their two daughters. Website: www.jennifercodyepstein.com
	Richard Eskow Richard (RJ) Eskow is a consultant and writer who has worked as a Fortune 500 executive, a software designer, a professional rock musician. He’s been a consultant in health policy, technology, and medical issues for public and private clients, domestically and in over 20 foreign countries. Richard has conducted interviews with politicians such as John Kerry and Russ Feingold, musicians like Richard Thompson and Billy Joe Shaver, and figures in the worlds of religion and science. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and is an occasional co-host for “The Young Turks” radio show, despite being neither Turkish nor particularly young. Email: reskow [at] att.net
	Wayne Ferrier Wayne Ferrier has been freelance writing since 1991. He started out with an interest in natural history and expanded that interest to popular science. He specializes in finding out what scientists and researchers are up to and translating those findings to a general audience. He also works as a corporate trainer, teaching English to employees of global companies from Tokyo to Madrid. He currently lives in Johnson City, New York. Email: wayneferrier [at] rocketmail.com
	Shiban Ganju Shiban is the chairman of a biotechnology company in India and a practicing gastroenterologist in the USA. He travels between these two spaces frequently but lives in them simultaneously. He has been a passionate theater worker, reluctant army officer, ambitious entrepreneur, successful CEO and an active NGO volunteer. Still, he is does not know what he wants to be when he grows up; but he wants his epitaph to be "He tried." Email: skganju [at] aol.com
	Jonathan Halvorson Jonathan has degrees in Philosophy from Columbia University and Reed College. After teaching at Washington University, he left academia, made an abortive foray into campaign politics, then hit on the obvious choice to join a health insurance company, where he presently serves as a Director. Jonathan splits his time between New York City and Easton, PA, with his exemplary wife and two superlative children. Email: jonathan.halvorson [at] gmail [dot] com
	Elatia Harris Elatia Harris is a personal chef and cooking teacher in Cambridge, Massachusettes. Website: http://www.lucysmomcuisine.com Email: elatia [at] lucysmomcuisine.com
	Christopher H. Heaney Born in West Australia and raised in New Jersey, Christopher H. Heaney has an undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies from Yale University. He's hacked his way through journalism and oral history up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and his work has appeared in The New Republic and Legal Affairs Magazine. He's fondest of his articles for his hometown newspaper, however. He recently spent a year working in Peru, where he was able to indulge his mild obsession with pre-Columbian ruins, dusty archives and museum dioramas. Email: chrisheaney [at] gmail.com
	Bill Hooker Bill Hooker was born in Papua New Guinea but had his schooling, second grade through PhD, in Australia. (His education, a different matter entirely, is ongoing.) Being interested in roots and beginnings, he is a molecular biologist by trade; but having not ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air, he is also interested in photography, poetry, community and social justice. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife Cat Connor, likes cheese and rain and late afternoon light, and can be got at through his own website, Open Reading Frame. Email: sennoma [at] fastmail.fm
	Sam Kean Sam Kean grew up in South Dakota, which means more to him than it probably should. He went to college in Minnesota, studied physics, taught for a few years, tried to move to Spain (it didn't take), and ended up in Washington, D.C. His book, The Disappearing Spoon: And other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements is available from Little, Brown in July 2010. Email: samkean [at] gmail.com
	Ruth Kikin-Gil Born and raised in Israel, Ruth studied visual communications at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and later lectured there. She also co-founded an interactive design consultancy, Max Interactive, and in 2003 moved to Italy with her husband, Erez, to pursue a Masters degree at Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, from which she is about to graduate in a few months. She is interested in the interplay between social behaviors and technology. Email: ruth@ruthkikin.com Website: www.ruthkikin.com
	Alan Koenig Alan Koenig resides in Queens, New York with his wife, Anna Slatinsky, where they often associate with the Flux Factory. He has a Master’s degree in political science from the New School for Social Research and is pursuing a Ph. D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. His essays have appeared in Radical Society and The Believer and he served as a co-editor for Old Town Review. Email: akynikos [at] gmail.com
	Jaffer Kolb Jaffer Kolb is a writer based in London, where he is finishing a master's in regional and urban planning at the London School of Economics. He writes regularly about architecture and urban planning for The Architects' Journal, Blueprint, and The Architect's Newspaper. In addition, he has contributed to Metropolis, Architectural Lighting, and The Real Deal. Email: jafferkolb [at] gmail.com Website: www.jafferkolb.com
	Krzysztof Kotarski Krzysztof was born in Warsaw in 1981 and moved to Canada at age 11, where he was first exposed to citrus fruit, the cult of Ayn Rand and Sonic the Hedgehog. After numerous attempts to get Anglophones to pronounce his name, Krzysztof became Kris, and eventually earned a Master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the University of Calgary where he researched arms control programs in the former Soviet Union. During the past four years, Kris has written about the world as often as he could, briefly worked for the UN, and has lived Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Geneva, Paris, Washington and Warsaw. Needless to say, he hopes to nail down a permanent address sometime soon. Email: kkotarski [at] gmail.com
	Affinity Konar Affinity Konar grew up in California. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and now lives in New York City. Her first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things, will be released next spring, and she's presently working on another, about silent films and psychic frauds. Email: affinity.konar [at] gmail.com
	Jonathan Kramnick Jonathan Kramnick is an English professor at Rutgers University. He lives in Manhattan. Email: kramnick[at]rci.rutgers.edu
	Alon Levy Alon Levy was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, went to college in Singapore, and is now studying mathematics at Columbia's graduate school. He lives in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, and considers it more a home to him than any of the countries he used to live in. When he doesn't try to solve problems in abstract algebra, he blogs about politics and occasionally mathematics at Abstract Nonsense. Email: alon_levy12 [at] hotmail.com
	Alex de Lucena Alex de Lucena is a New York based fiction writer. Email: adelucena [at] gmail.com
	Ram Manikkalingam Ram Manikkalingam is currently a visiting professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam. He has been a physicist, a radical activist, a political analyst, a political theorist, a presidential advisor, a beggar, a funder, and of course a slacker. He speaks four languages badly (and none of them are Urdu, Hindi or Punjabi). He likes to think he is a black New Yorker and a leftist Sri Lankan, but his friends and enemies say he is really a WASP from Boston.
	Katherine McNamara Katherine McNamara has lived as a writer for longish times in Paris, Alaska, New York, and Charlottesville, Virginia, and traveled frequently to Ireland. Although her academic work was in European intellectual history, she has always been more curious about how ideas work their way through the world. In 1997, she founded Archipelago, an international journal of literature, the arts, opinion, and politics. She is the author of Narrow Road to the Deep North, A Journey into the Interior of Alaska, and is at work on a book of memoirs about three persons now gone who were well-known in their parts of the world and also important to her. Website: web.me.com/katherinemcnamara Email: katherinemcnamara.writer [at] gmail.com
	Henry Molofsky Proudly hailing from Washington, DC, Henry now lives in Connecticut where he studies philosophy and music at Wesleyan University. He has previously worked at the nationally syndicated public radio program Afropop. He has also spent time studying and being a middle-school English teacher's assistant in Israel. He writes a lot of essays, which sometimes he'll admit he enjoys, but he also enjoys running in the woods, playing crazy parties with his top-40 cover band, and banging on West-African drums with nearly-correct technique. And he is a pianist. Email: h.molofsky [at] gmail.com
	Tauriq Moosa Tauriq Moosa is contributing editor to Secular Humanist Bulletin, the newsletter for the Council for Secular Humanism. He is also a contributor to Skeptic magazine and Butterfliesandwheels.com. He has been published and translated for a number of European humanist organisations, including the Swedish Humanist Association and the Polish Rationalist Association. He has appeared on radio and local media. He obtained a B.Soc.Sci from the University of Cape Town. He is currently doing a Masters in Philosophy, specialising in Bioethics, at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Stellenbosch University. Email: tauriq.moosa [at] fsi.org.za
	Dave Munger Dave Munger is a writer living in Davidson, North Carolina. He is a columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM and editor of ResearchBlogging.org. Dave co-founded ResearchBlogging.org, which collects blog posts about peer-reviewed research, in 2007. The site now has over 1,500 registered blogs and features over 16,000 posts in six languages. For five years, Dave and his wife Greta maintained the psychology blog Cognitive Daily, which was chosen three times to appear in the Open Laboratory, an annual anthology of the top science blog posts on the web. It has appeared on numerous top ten lists including ranking seventh on Nature’s 50 popular science blogs list. The site has had over 2.5 million visits. Dave is the author of several college textbooks. Email: dsmunger [at] gmail.com
	Feisal H. Naqvi Feisal Naqvi is a partner at the firm of Bhandari, Naqvi & Riaz based in Lahore, Pakistan. He studied Islamic history at Princeton before going on to study law at Yale. Other pieces written by him are archived at www.monsoonfrog.wordpress.com Email: laalshah [at] gmail.com
	Husain Naqvi Husain Naqvi is a lecturer in literature and creative writing at Boston University. Before his incarnation as an academic, he was an investment-banker who worked on Wall Street and I.I. Chundrigar Road. During his undergraduate career, he was the recipient of the Lannan Fellowship, the Phelam Prize and served as editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Journal. He has read his poems on National Public Radio, and at Lollapalooza and the Nuyorican Poets Café. Husain fancies himself a renaissance man who has his finger on the pulse of the great global dialectic. He smokes Dunhills. Email: greatglobaldialectic@hotmail.com
	Dhiraj Nayyar Dhiraj was born in New Delhi, India in 1978. He has lived, at various times, in New Delhi, Brighton, Calcutta, Washington, DC, Geneva, Oxford, and Cambridge. Convinced, at an early age, and beyond reasonable doubt, that he was unfit for the world of work, Dhiraj decided to pursue a career as a perpetual student in the field of Economics. He is still ‘working’ on his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. While doing so, he divides his time inhaling the fresh air of Cambridge, exhaling the chaos of Delhi, and whiling away time in the serenity of the Himalayan foothills, in Dehradun. Email: dn234 [at] cam.ac.uk
	Peter Nicholson Australian poet and writer Peter Nicholson lives in Sydney. He is a graduate of Macquarie University and is interested in cinema and music, especially the music dramas of Wagner. He has published three volumes of poetry, A Temporary Grace, Such Sweet Thunder and A Dwelling Place. There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au [Peter's photo by David Moore]. Email: poetnic@yahoo.com
	Jennifer Ouellette A former English major turned science writer, Jennifer Ouellette is the author of Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, and the forthcoming The Physics of the Buffyverse, both published by Penguin. Her work has also appeared in Discover, Salon, and New Scientist, among other venues, and she maintains a populist Weblog called Cocktail Party Physics, along with avatar/alter ego "Jen-Luc Piquant." She has covered such varied topics as the acoustics of Mayan pyramids and New York City subways; fractal patterns in the paintings of Jackson Pollock; and the precarious pitfalls of pseudoscience. She holds a black belt in Niseido jujitsu, and lives in Washington, DC. On the Web: www.jenniferouellette-writes.com Weblog: www.twistedphysics.typepad.com
	Alan S. Page Alan Page currently lives in Mexico City. He teaches English literature at UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico,) is studying Lacanian psychoanalysis at Dimensión Psicoanalítica, and is a Doctoral Candidate at the New York University English Department. His doctoral dissertation is on Anthropomorphism and the Vortex in William Blake's poetry. He works as a screenwriter, most recently on the forthcoming Mexican Tv series XY, and has been a translator for longer than he can remember. These days he tries to stick to translating only film and poetry. He is currently translating Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red into Spanish and a book of poems by the Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda into English. Alan Page has spent a lifetime being from neither here nor there. Email: alans.page [at] gmail.com
	Jedediah Palmer Jed was born and bred in New York City. He's traveled a lot, lived for short periods of time in many different cities, and worked a variety of jobs (Circulation Manager, Bookseller, Foreign Rights Assistant, First Press Editor). Currently he lives in Brooklyn and seeks work as a copyeditor and proofreader. Email: jedediahpalmer [at] yahoo.com
	Abhay Parekh Abhay Parekh grew up in Bombay, India, and attended Cathedral School and St. Xavier's College there before moving to the U.S. He holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematical Sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT. His papers in data networking have won international awards, and one was selected as among the 16 best papers in networking in the last 50 years. Abhay lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children, is a partner in a silicon valley venture capital firm, and is an adjunct professor at Berkeley. Website: www.tecknowbasic.com
	Jonathan Pfeiffer As an undergraduate, Jonathan studied a combined curriculum of biomedical engineering, politics, philosophy, and global studies at California Lutheran University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. After living in Arlington, Virginia and working on Science Progress for a while, he returned for global studies graduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Email: jonathan [at] multivoiced.com
	Robert Pichler Robert Pichler lives in the South Tyrol and works as a caricaturist/cartoonist and illustrator. His drawings are published in newspapers in the German-speaking parts of Europe. Email: rob.pic [at] alice.it
	Laray Polk Laray Polk lives in Dallas, Texas. She is a multi-media artist and writer. Interests include media, language, and politics. Email: laraypolk [at] earthlink [dot] net
	Steven Poole Steven Poole is the author of Unspeak and Trigger Happy. He reviews books for the Guardian and gets annoyed with technology.
	Alta L. Price Educated in the so-called fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, Alta L. Price is currently acting as editor, translator, and draftswoman from her Long Island City studio. Early work in Icelandic geology and printing history inspired her incessant habit of being interested in just about everything. She practices certain obsolescent arts, including watermark making and carving signs in stone; in other words, her current work deals with the presence of the past. Email: alprice[at]textuality[dot]org
	S. Asad Raza Asad Raza was born in Buffalo, New York and studied literature and film at Johns Hopkins and NYU. He writes about art, literature, and tennis. In 2010 he produced the artist Tino Sehgal's exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum, New York. He is currently at work producing Sehgal's 2012 commission for the Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern. Email: s.asad.raza at gmail
	Daniel Rourke Daniel is a PhD researcher with a confusing thesis title (something about art and writing). His time in London is split between eating Japanese food and starting new projects. Daniel’s website, MachineMachine, contains a portfolio of his work. Email: text [at] machinemachine.net
	Jane Renaud Jane is an administrative assistant living in Brooklyn. She was born in Palo Alto in 1983. Her grandmother grew up in Nebraska next door to a little boy who sat depressed on the porch report card in hand and said, "Damn teacher knows I can't read." He called his big sister "Old Bev," and for her Jane's column is named. Email: janerenaud at gmail dot com
	Josh Smith Josh is currently an undergraduate at the University of Maryland in College Park, anchoring one major in English Literature, and leaving the other open for consideration. He has been a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has worked at two different art galleries, and has published a volume of poetry through his own arts collective. His heroes are Leonardo da Vinci and Elliott Smith. He can be found on the internets at thecolorofinfinity.com. Email: huhwhatduck@gmail.com
	Meghan Rosen Meghan Rosen earned her B.S. in biology from Northern Arizona University, and recently graduated with a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California at Davis. When not writing articles for a local newspaper in Davis, or columns for 3QD, she enjoys composing short biographies about herself. You can follow her on twitter (user name: aliquots), or check out her blog: wwww.aliquots.wordpress.com. Email: msdukerich [at] gmail.com
	P. D. Smith P. D. Smith is a British writer and independent researcher whose work explores the links between science, literature and popular culture. His most recent book is Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, a cultural history of science, superweapons and other strangeloves. This was published in 2007 by St Martin’s Press in the US and Penguin in the UK. In 2003 he wrote a brief biography of Einstein. His PhD thesis was a study of science in German literature, and this was published in 2000 as Metaphor and Materiality. He writes a regular round-up of science and cultural history books for the Guardian Review, as well as reviewing for The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement. PD Smith can be contacted through his blog and website, Kafka’s mouse (http://www.peterdsmith.com/).
	Ahila Sornarajah Ahila is a lawyer, and resides in London. She lives downstairs from an escort agency, and upstairs from a Morrocan restaurant. After living in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong, she is relieved to have found a crazy, messed up place to call home. She likes her work, but likes going to the cinema, and pretending to speak Spanish more. Because she loves it, she thinks it worth saying that her favourite book is “When Memory Dies” by A Sivanandan. Email: ahilasorn [at] hotmail.com
	Ker Than Ker Than is a graduate student at New York University's Science and Environmental Writing Program and a staff writer for LiveScience.com and Space.com. He has an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of California, Irvine and did neuroscience research in the field of learning and memory. He is interested in science in general, but also in its intersection with culture and the arts. Email: kerthan@gmail.com
	Terrance Tomkow Tomkow holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge University and blogs on philosophical topics at www.tomkow.com. He lives in Los Angeles. Email: tomkow [at] tomkow.com
	J. M. Tyree J. M. Tyree helped edit 3QD during its first year. His essays appear in various periodicals. Email: ocra coke post g mail com
	Frans de Waal Frans de Waal is a Dutch/American primatologist with a Ph.D. in biology from Utrecht University. In 1981, he moved to the USA, where he teaches at Emory University and directs the Living Links Center for the Study of Ape and Human Evolution, in Atlanta, Georgia. He is known for his popular books, such as “Chimpanzee Politics” (1982), “Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape” (1997), and his latest, “The Age of Empathy” (2009). His interests include animal cooperation as well as the evolution of morality and justice. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. Also see: http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/
	Bryant Urstadt Bryant Urstadt is a writer living in New York. He's written for Harper's, Outside, New York, and others. He often writes about energy, finance, and the environment, but that would be pretty boring to do all the time, now wouldn't it? Email: bryant.urstadt [at] gmail.com
	Nick Werle Raised in modern-day East Egg, Nick has watched two boom-bust business cycles up close. After concentrating in physics and modern critical philosophy at Brown, he has begun studying the history of modern physics and political economy. Currently an Affiliated Scholar at the Pembroke Center studying the history of physics and political economy, he teaches economics at The Wheeler School, in Providence, RI, and works as a writing tutor at the Brown University Writing Center. In addition to reading and writing, Nick enjoys long distance backpacking, cooking, and arguing. Email: nickwerle [at] gmail.com Website: www.runningthezoo.com
	Jenny White Jenny White is an associate professor of social anthropology at Boston University and author of the prize-winning Islamist Mobilization in Turkey (University of Washington) and Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (Routledge). She also writes mystery/thrillers set in nineteenth-century Istanbul: The Sultan’s Seal (W. W. Norton, 2006), The Abyssinian Proof (2008), and The Winter Thief (2010). The Sultan’s Seal was translated into fourteen languages and shortlisted for the 2006 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. Jenny grew up in Germany and New York, spent eight years in Turkey, and now lives in the Boston area. She also writes a blog about contemporary Turkey: http://kamilpasha.com. Email: jennywhit [at] gmail.com Website: http://jennywhite.net
	George Wilkinson George Wilkinson is an assistant professor of Pediatrics at a college in the Midwest. His blogging interests include development, neuroscience, genomics, and evolution. Email: g3.wilkinson [at] gmail.com
	Frederick William Zackel Fred Zackel has taught literature and the humanities for twenty years at Bowling Green State University. He has written several novels and more than 90 short stories and essays. His darker works are available through Kindle, smashwords and the Nook. Email: fzackel [at] bgsu.edu

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