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.”