John Cassidy
New York
In his column this month, contributing editor John Cassidy muses on how former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s memoir deals with the central banker’s own “inconvenient truth”: “Greenspan was largely responsible for two of the biggest boom-and-busts in American history: first, the internet-stock bubble and now the great credit bubble,” says Cassidy, a New Yorker staff writer and author of Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era.

Julie Teninbaum
New YorkGraphic designer Julie Teninbaum’s specialty is expressive typography, visual play with words and typefaces. Her work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, Martha Stewart’s Blueprint—which she helped found as a senior art director—and now Condé Nast Portfolio. Check out her handiwork in Brief as well as Matthew Cooper’s Washington column.

Christopher S. Stewart
Orlando
If there’s a theme to the subjects contributing editor Christopher S. Stewart chooses, it’s “people whose dealings aren’t really transparent,” he says. “I spend a lot of time in the shadows.” For this issue, he examines the life and work of gun entrepreneur and potential Unification Church heir Justin Moon, whom he met at an Orlando gun show. Stewart, who has written for GQ and Harper’s, as well as the New York Times Magazine, has a book called Hunting the Tiger coming out in January; it’s about a feared Serbian warlord in the 1990s. 

Jacob Hale Russell
Salt Lake City
Serendipity brought sex, a symphony, and Jacob Hale Russell together. Russell, who spent two years covering culture for the Wall Street Journal, discovered the seemingly innocuous Utah Symphony and Opera while reporting on mergers and acquisitions in the arts. “I was in its offices in Salt Lake City and saw a framed copy of one of its ads,” he says. He asked questions, as reporters do. The answers led to this month’s piece on the Utah institution’s surprisingly racy marketing campaign.

Gabriel Sherman
Caesarea, Israel
“For an entrepreneur, selling a product is about faith,” says staff writer Gabriel Sherman. He went to Israel to investigate Texas-based Zion Oil & Gas, whose faith and business are even more intermingled than usual. The company’s goal of striking oil to help Israel—which they see as the land of God’s chosen people—may be atypical. But Sherman, who says he hasn’t thought so much about the Bible since his pre-bar-mitzvah days, doesn’t find it that surprising: “There’s nothing more American than praying to God and making money at the same time.”

Seth Meyers
New York
Seth Meyers, a head writer for NBC’s Saturday Night Live, had to do some research before writing his spoof memo on the debut of a 17-blade razor. While poking fun at the business world is nothing new to him—he spent two years penning corporate-themed sketches for Amsterdam’s Boom Chicago comedy troupe—he admits to being unfamiliar with that form of professional communication. “I had to google ‘memo,’ ” Meyers says. “In the comedy world, we don’t use memos. We use dirty looks.” 

Robert Polidori
São Paulo, Brazil
For this month’s photo portfolio on financial markets, photographer Robert Polidori went to 11 countries over the course of a year. One of his most memorable stops was Brazil. “Emotional” isn’t how most people would describe a futures-and-commodities exchange. But in São Paulo, “there was yelling like at a sporting event,” says Polidori, whose work appears regularly in the New Yorker. He attributes the frenzy to the exchange’s old-school ways; all the traders are men and almost all of the action still happens on the overcrowded floor. 

Amy Wallace
Los Angeles
As senior writer Amy Wallace investigated the legal battle for control of the Superman franchise, she found that everyone had a strong opinion about Marc Toberoff, the lawyer for the heirs of Superman’s co-creator. “The plaintiffs told me they see Toberoff as their Superman. Others call him an opportunist,” she says. “Either way, he occupies a unique niche, made lucrative by the traditions of modern Hollywood, where the rights to a hit property that can be remade are more valuable today than ever before.”

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
Detroit
Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, who writes this month about alternative-fuel technology, has always loved cars. His first was a two-tone blue 1978 Chevy Malibu with fuzzy dice. For the past 10 years, Vaitheeswaran, a correspondent for the Economist, has traveled the carmaking world to research his new book Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, which he wrote with Economist colleague Iain Carson. So what does he drive now? “Ironically,” Vaitheeswaran says, “living in Manhattan, I have no car today.”

Michelle Leder
Peekskill, New York
In 2003, Michelle Leder started Footnoted.org, a blog about the fine print in companies’ Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Her impetus: a bad investment in Qwest Communications. “If I had spent time reading its filings, I would have seen enough questionable transactions to keep me from drinking the Kool-Aid,” says Leder, who shares her antidotes monthly in the Proxies and Quarterlies column in Brief.

Art Streiber
Nantucket, Massachusetts
Art Streiber has photographed Sumner Redstone, George W. Bush, and Nicole Kidman, so he thought he knew what to expect from hotel king Barry Sternlicht. “Shooting C.E.O.’s is more terrifying than shooting celebrities,” says Streiber, whose work has run in Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly. “They have less interest in being photographed, have less time to be photographed, and are less inclined to do something ‘interesting.’ ” Sternlicht “broke all those rules,” Streiber says.

Max Vadukul
New Orleans
Kenya-born, London-raised photographer Max Vadukul has shot such diverse figures as Mother Teresa, Justin Timberlake, and Rudy Giuliani, for magazines including the New Yorker, Interview, and Rolling Stone. We sent him to photograph Rita Benson LeBlanc, executive vice president of the New Orleans Saints. The team’s music-loving home city was an apt destination for Vadukul, who describes himself as an aspiring drummer.