CONTRIBUTORS

LEON JAROFF has covered science and medicine since the 1950s for both TIME and LIFE magazines, so he is well aware of the problem of prostate cancer. But it wasn't until a friend developed the malignancy and he started to research the disease in depth that Jaroff learned it is reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. To help prepare for this week's cover, he traveled to Santa Monica, California, for a three-hour interview with former junk-bond wizard Michael Milken, whose disease was diagnosed in 1993 and who has pledged $25 million for prostate-cancer research. "Men don't like to talk about or even think about their own health," Jaroff says. "But this is one illness they had better pay attention to, because if it doesn't strike them, chances are it will strike someone they know."

MARGOT HORNBLOWER returned to the U.S. in 1994 after six years at TIME's Paris bureau and was astonished to see how much gambling was going on in America. Back in 1988, Nevada and New Jersey were the only two states where casinos were permitted. Since then they have been legalized in 24 others. Hornblower's report this week examines gambling's hidden costs and often illusory benefits. Just how pervasive wagering has become was driven home for Hornblower when she flew back to Los Angeles from her reporting assignment and found a letter from her son's parochial school waiting on the table. "Dear Eighth Grade Parents," it read. "We have a fabulous idea for a graduation party: a teen casino night!"

DOUGLAS WALLER got interested in reporting on covert operations seven years ago when he covered the U.S. invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War. He quickly learned that ferreting out secrets calls for equal parts of patience and perseverance. It can take years to gain the trust of intelligence officers and months to verify the information they provide. Such was the case with this week's story about the CIA's efforts to block construction of an underground chemical-weapons plant in Libya. "This kind of story never gets dumped in your lap," says TIME's national-security correspondent. "The information is always shrouded in secrecy and comes in tiny bits that have to be pieced together like a puzzle."

MASSIMO CALABRESI has seen more than his share of brutality. As Central Europe bureau chief, he has spent much of the past year reporting on the vicious Bosnian war. But little in that conflict prepared him for the acts of human kindness he uncovered last week in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Grbavica. For the past three years a group of Serbs has hidden and protected a Muslim family from "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of fellow Serbs. "Despite years of isolation and hardship, the family maintained extraordinary compassion and dignity," Calabresi says. "Meeting them proved to me that small pockets of sanity can survive in even the most suffocating environment of hatred and bigotry."