Catherine Arnold ("Land, Love, and the City") is a freelance writer who focuses on plants, ecology, and urban planning. She likes fermenting wild berries into gin fizzes and getting advice from people who "learned that stuff in the old country."
John-Patrick Thomas ("Don't Try This," illustration) is a freelance illustrator and designer working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Past clients include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Penguin Books, and GQ.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson ("Snake in the Garden") is a Baltimore-based writer whose work focuses on architecture, design, and cities. She has written for The New York Times, Architect, Metropolis, Slate, and others.
Michael Blanding ("The Resilient Species") is an investigative researcher who has written for The Nation, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and others. He is a senior fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Reporting.
Hye Jin Chung ("The Resilient Species," illustration) is a New York–based Korean artist who has done work for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Converse, and the Chicago Reader.
Christopher Myers ("Who Is ... Jon Weingart," photography) has traveled to Russia, to Iceland, and throughout the United States on assignments for such clients as the United States Olympic Committee, National Geographic, and The New York Times.
On the cover
Baltimore-based photographer Jonathan Hanson cites early street photography as his inspiration for getting into the field. In groups of works with titles like "These City Streets," "Baltimore Hip-Hop," and "Queens of Baltimore," he captures a few of the city's many voices. On this issue's cover, we are introduced to Dwight "D." Watkins, a writer whose autobiographical essays about life in Baltimore have gone viral several times over. Hanson chose to shoot Watkins in-studio, saying, "I wanted to create a set of images that were true to him that didn't lean on clichés and resemble other images he's appeared in."
