William Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times. He also writes a Sunday column, "On Language," which has appeared in The New York Times Magazine since 1979. This column on grammar, usage, and etymology has led to the publication of 13 books and makes him the most widely read writer on the English language. Safire has also authored a number of novels, a dictionary on political language, and three quotation anthologies.

Before joining The New York Times, Safire was a senior White House speechwriter for President Nixon. He had previously been a radio and television producer and a U.S. Army correspondent, and began his career as a reporter for a profiles column in The New York Herald Tribune.

Barry Bearak is a visiting professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Bearak, who is on a one-year break from The New York Times, was most recently a staff writer for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malawi and Brazil. Before that, he and his wife, Celia Dugger, were the newspaper's co-bureau chiefs for South Asia, based in New Delhi.

Bearak has won numerous awards for his writing, including the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award for his reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001.

Henry Bienen is president of Northwestern University, a post he has held since 1995. Before his appointment at Northwestern, Bienen spent 28 years at Princeton University, most recently as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Bienen has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, the National Security Council, the World Bank, the Agency for International Development and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was formerly a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

David M. Crane was appointed the chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in April 2002. With the rank of undersecretary general, Crane is mandated to prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international human rights committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s. The Office of the Prosecutor is located with the Special Court in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Prior to his appointment as the chief prosecutor, Crane served more than 30 years in the U.S. federal government, mainly with the Department of Defense. He has more than 20 years of experience as an officer and lawyer in the U.S. Army.

James Fallows is the national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and has worked for the magazine for more than 20 years. He has written seven books and been published in most of the major magazines in the United States, including most recently in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect. Fallows also has appeared frequently as a commentator on National Public Radio.

Fallows won the American Book Award for "National Defense" and the National Magazine Award for his Atlantic Monthly article "The Fifty-First State?" about the consequences of victory in Iraq.

Margaret (Peg) Hermann is the Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs and director of the Global Affairs Institute at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Her research focuses on political leadership, foreign policy decision-making and the comparative study of foreign policy.

Hermann has served as president of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the International Studies Association (ISA), as well as editor of the journal Political Psychology. She has authored numerous books and articles focusing on political psychology.

Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since November 2001, writes op-ed columns that appear each Wednesday and Saturday. Previously, he was associate managing editor of The New York Times, responsible for Sunday editions.

Kristof joined the newspaper in 1984, initially covering economics. He then served as a business correspondent based in Los Angeles, Hong Kong bureau chief, Beijing bureau chief and Tokyo bureau chief. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a New York Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

The Rev. Darius Oliha Makuja joined Le Moyne College in 2003 as a visiting assistant professor in the Religious Studies Department. A native of Sudan, Makuja holds a master's degree in historical theology from St. Louis University and is a doctoral candidate there. His research focuses on historical theology and philosophy.

Makuja recently presented a session on "Church, Mission, Inculturation and Conversion in the Late Antiquity and Medieval Ages" at the Thirty-Eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies. He is a member of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, the Southern Conference on African American Studies and the Medieval Academy of America.

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs, specifically the relationship between media and political powers in crisis and war regions. A recent article, "Now They Tell Us," published in the New York Review of Books, investigated why the U.S. media failed to report properly on the Bush Administration's pre-war preparations.

Massing's articles have also appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly and Rolling Stone.

Samantha Power is a lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her recent book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book on U.S. foreign policy.

Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002). From 1993-96, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe and The Economist.

Laurence Thomas is a professor of philosophy and political science in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Thomas is the author of three books: "Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character"; "Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust"; and "Sexual Orientation and Human Rights," with Michael Levin.

Among his recent writings are the chapters "Upside-Down Equality: A Response to Kantian Thought" in the book "Racism in Mind" and "Forgiving the Unforgivable" in "Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust."

David G. Winter is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching interests include human motivation, in particular power motivation and responsibility; political psychology, including measurement of personality at a distance and psychological factors in war and peace; and authoritarianism and its relation to threat and aggression.

Winter has also taught at Wesleyan University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Peking University (Beijing, China).

Robert B. Zajonc is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and a faculty member of the Stanford Brain Research Institute. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1955 and remained there 39 years, retiring in 1994. At Michigan, Zajonc served as director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics and the Institute for Social Research.

Zajonc is the author of "The Selected Works of R.B. Zajonc; Emotions, Cognition and Behaviour," with C.E. Izard and J. Kagan, among other books. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.