Robert B. Reich

Berkeley, California

Robert B. Reich, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, busts the myths of corporate responsibility. "Our society has become confused about what to expect from corporations," says Reich, who served as secretary of Labor under President Clinton. "Our desire to make them virtuous is distracting us from the question of what should be required of them by law." Reich is the author of Supercapitalism and a regular contributor to the American Public Media radio program Marketplace.

Amy Wallace

Menlo Park, California

This fall, Amy Wallace toured the West with the rock band Moonalice, which happens to be fronted by Roger McNamee, a partner (along with Bono) at a private equity firm that owns big stakes in Forbes and Palm. "My first show was on an outdoor stage in Big Sky, Montana, where the temperature dropped to 40 degrees," says Wallace, a former business editor at the Los Angeles Times. "The drummer had to use glove warmers. But Moonalice still played for three hours."

Sacha Waldman

New York

Sacha Waldman shot this month's cover for a story about former spies infiltrating the corporate world. Waldman, raised in Johannesburg, says, "I grew up in a country where I wasn't aware of what was going on." Living in the U.S., he says, feels similar. "Nobody knows what the powers that be are doing." A book of his photos comes out this spring.

Joshua Kurlantzick

Beijing

Joshua Kurlantzick explores an escalating clash between China's Olympic ambitions and its strategy of seizing land from urban professionals. "I learned the scope of this story after reading about one couple, living in a tiny shack, who took a stand against a construction project excavating all around them," says Kurlantzick. "But even before that, I'd been hearing from Chinese friends for years about cases of land-grabbing, so it's definitely an explosion brewing."

Douglas Frantz

Washington

A longtime investigator of investigators, Douglas Frantz examines how ex-C.I.A. agents are being lured into the private sector and taking corporate espionage in unsettling directions. "I was eager to see how that world has changed with the influx of so many former intelligence agents who have fled government since 9/11 and the end of the cold war," says Frantz, who has been a foreign correspondent and editor at the New York Times and a managing editor at the Los Angeles Times.