Sophia Banay

Rancho Santa Fe, California

"I couldn't leave without hearing her sing," Portfolio.com's Sophia Banay says of Natalie Bancroft, the newest and unlikeliest board member of News Corp.—and a budding mezzo-soprano. When Banay appealed for a private concert from Bancroft, scion of the family that sold the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch, the two retreated to a deserted corner of a parking lot, where Bancroft sang an operatic piece by Rachmaninoff.

Katherine Eban

Las Vegas

In reporting on medical outsourcing, Katherine Eban was shocked to learn that the death of a child at a Las Vegas hospital occurred after an error by a pharmacy that had practically been run by temps. "When you go into a hospital, you think of it as a single entity that's going to help heal you," says Eban, author of Dangerous Doses, an exposé of the deadly counterfeit-drug epidemic. "When the hospital is outsourcing vital services, it should come with a warning label."

Denis Johnson

Erbil, Iraq

Before Denis Johnson left for Iraqi Kurdistan to report on its economy, he had anticipated the possibility of being kidnapped. But once there, he found luxurious hotels, a friendly populace, and a feeling of safety. "It was actually just a really nice kind of vacation," says Johnson, who won the 2007 National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke. Kurdistan, Johnson says, could eventually emerge as an Iraqi Dubai: "All it takes is a lot of oil."

Michael Lewis

New Orleans

Like many traders in the 1980s, contributing editor Michael Lewis used a mathematical model called Black-Scholes to price options. But today, a hard look at its now-widespread use has convinced Lewis that the model has exposed the economy to major risks in everything from mortgage-backed securities to employee stock options. "People are putting themselves in the position of being vulnerable to crashes," Lewis says. "They've got this false sense of security from financial theory."

Jay McInerney

Miami Beach

When Jay McInerney attended the contemporary art fair Art Basel Miami Beach, he found that the milieu resembled Manhattan's 1980s club scene, where "artists and rockers and jaded European aristocrats and bohemians and slumming Upper East Siders converged in one place. I hadn't seen some of them in 20 years, and I saw them in Miami," he says.

The art world, he adds, "seems to be even more fashionable now than it ever was."

Susan Meiselas

Erbil, Iraq

Fourteen years after she last photographed Kurdistan, MacArthur fellow Susan Meiselas returned to find that a weight had been lifted. "Their dreams are coming true," she says. "The thing they were hoping for in 1991 is assured by the kind of autonomy they now have." Above all, she says, the Kurds are focused on the potential profits beneath their feet: "Business drives the culture more than we ever imagined it would." Her 1997 book about the regional diaspora, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, will be reprinted this spring.