Mimi Swartz
London
Mimi Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, traveled to London to investigate the missteps of John Browne and BP, the energy giant he headed. She was surprised at how quickly Browne went from being front-page fodder for British tabloids to a relative nobody. Swartz, who has written for the New Yorker and National Geographic, thinks that wouldn’t have happened in the U.S., where business has permeated the culture. “Business just means more here,” she says. “The English aren’t as infatuated.”

Ben Schott
London
The challenge of creating Condé Nast Portfolio’s Calendar page is “to fit as much as you can inside such small confines,” says Ben Schott, author of the bestseller Schott’s Original Miscellany. The Londoner, who had a four-month career in advertising before he turned to photography and then trivia, relished the task: “Sometimes, one derives real pleasure from thinking inside the box.” But he won’t join your Trivial Pursuit team; he “never, never, never” plays.

Kevin Gray
Beirut, Lebanon
As a writer and editor at Details, Kevin Gray specialized in stories about wild, often troubled places—drug-war-plagued Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; South Dakota’s blighted Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; the world of Vin Diesel. So his first story as a Condé Nast Portfolio senior writer naturally took him to Beirut to profile the son of assassinated Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri. What Gray found was a family whose fate is tied with that of its homeland, and whose fortunes may have fallen with its patriarch.

Nancy Hass
Paris
Contributing editor Nancy Hass, who interviewed François-Henri Pinault in Paris, found her subject to be the personification of the world’s fashion capital in its heyday. “Pinault epitomizes the elegance of Paris and the discretion of the French,” says Hass, who has also written for the New York Times. “Watching him is like returning to an era when the deadliest sin you could commit was to flash your money and power.”

Kevin Maney
Silicon Valley, California
Contributing editor Kevin Maney, whose essay this month looks at the East Coast-West Coast split in the U.S. economy, leads a divided life himself. A former tech columnist for USA Today, he’s based near Washington, D.C., but often flies to California to report. To Maney, that lets him have the best of both worlds. “Technology means I can have a complete life with the San Francisco crowd even without being there all the time,” he says. “And there’s an advantage to not being in the soup. I see things from a different perspective.”

Jeremy Floto and
Cassandra Warner
Warren, Michigan
Hire Jeremy Floto and Cassandra Warner and you’ll get, in Warner’s words, “the all-inclusive Floto-Warner package.” After their April wedding, the pair, who have shot for Travel & Leisure and House & Garden, were sent by Condé Nast Portfolio to photograph the Eclipse 500 jet, and they definitely needed each other for backup. “We were cantilevered 40 feet above the plane,” Floto says. “If you drop anything on a $2 million plane, it’s sort of a big deal.” In July, they traveled to Warren, Michigan, to shoot a truck assembly line for the cover.

Franz Lidz
Tampa, Florida
Franz Lidz, who scored face time with George Steinbrenner at his Florida home, has a history with the Yankees boss. As a college senior, Lidz—a native New Yorker whose idol was Roger Maris—wrote to Steinbrenner asking for a job. “I asked if he had any place for someone with flamboyant wit, flashing charm, and a killer instinct. He didn’t,” says Lidz, who instead went to grad school for journalism and spent 27 years at Sports Illustrated. He also wrote Unstrung Heroes, a memoir about growing up with four zany uncles, which became a 1995 film directed by Diane Keaton and starring John Turturro and Andie MacDowell.

Alexandra Wolfe
Miami
As staff writer Alexandra Wolfe was flying to Miami to visit art-fair impresario David Lester’s floating gallery, her mind filled with visions of sailing down the Intracoastal Waterway. Hours later, she was dripping with sweat in the engine room of the vessel, which was still under construction in a shipyard. The barge was more massive than she’d imagined. “It looked as big as a cruise ship,” says Wolfe, formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Observer. “And it struck me as a huge gamble.”

John Grimwade
New York
As a youngster in England, graphics director John Grimwade was fascinated by “a British comic called The Eagle that had a center spread with a fabulous graphic every week,” he recalls. Now all grown up, Grimwade has created his own fabulous graphics for the Times of London, Popular Science, Condé Nast Traveler, and now Condé Nast Portfolio. “Sometimes it’s easier to make complex things clear through images rather than text,” he says.

Duff McDonald
New York
When contributing editor Duff McDonald began investigating the legal battle between Dick Snyder and Edgar Bronfman Jr. over the 2004 sale of Warner Music Group, he expected mudslinging that would befit their strong personalities. He was surprised by Snyder, who is often called a tyrant but, during an interview in New York, showed less anger than sadness. The conversation reminded McDonald, who has written for Vanity Fair, New York, and Wired, that “at the end of the day, even big-time corporate deals are composed of human participants.”

Daniel Roth
New York
In our first issue, senior writer Daniel Roth wrote about the buying and selling of Thoroughbreds. This month he focuses on the buying and selling of Chrysler. Roth’s goal was to shed light on the ailing carmaker’s buyer, Cerberus Capital Management, and its reclusive C.E.O., Stephen Feinberg. “Chrysler is used to having big egos at the helm. But you wouldn’t catch Feinberg leading a pep rally,” says Roth, who spent weeks investigating how Cerberus works, and how Feinberg thinks his firm can make money from Chrysler.

 
Jesse Eisinger
New York
For many years, senior writer Jesse Eisinger examined financial crises for the Wall Street Journal—where he created the Long and Short column—and now he analyzes them for us. His two articles this month explore a pair of messes—one at Citigroup and one in the credit-ratings system, both rooted in what Eisinger calls “excesses in our culture.” It’s one of his favorite topics. “This is an incredibly speculative era, where people live on borrowed money and borrowed time,” he says. “But speculation leads to decadence.”