CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID VAN BIEMA, who wrote the story about Deepak Chopra and other New Age healers that makes up part of this week's cover package on faith and healing, has a rare gift for writing about spirituality without cynicism or gushiness. "Faith and matters of the spirit are as important to understanding America as politics," says Van Biema, whose last cover story was about Billy Graham's son Franklin. "They're a little tougher to track, but they're immensely rewarding." Religion is by no means Van Biema's only interest. Since he came to TIME three years ago from our sister publication Life, he has written about everything from natural disasters to Forrest Gump. "I think it was the most unpopular essay TIME ever published," says Van Biema of his anti-Gump manifesto. "I'll have to write another soon."

JAMES NACHTWEY is one of those people who go looking for trouble--in war zones, through famines and global catastrophes--and then capture in photographs what he calls the "human bond" between his subjects and the readers back home. For this week's issue he traveled to Afghanistan because, he says, "I thought it had dropped out of America's consciousness." Driving around Kabul in a beat-up Toyota taxi, he was astounded by the devastation Afghanistan's long civil war has wrought on its capital. "More has to be done about the humanitarian situation," says Nachtwey. "Those people should not be forgotten."

BONNIE ANGELO, who has written for TIME for more than 25 years, including eight as London bureau chief, returned to that city to interview the maverick chairman of Virgin, Richard Branson. She flew Virgin Atlantic Airways, naturally. She also drank Virgin Cola--for research purposes only--and hung out on Times Square at odd hours to see how the new Virgin megastore was doing. "To do a business story that's fun is such a marvelous experience," says Angelo, who was inducted last year into the Journalism Hall of Fame in her home state of North Carolina. "There's a larkiness about Branson I really enjoyed."

JOSHUA QUITTNER has the kind of job William Gibson might have foreseen. Every weekday in cyberspace, Quittner produces an irreverent column called the Netly News that appears on TIME Warner's Pathfinder Website http://pathfinder.com/Netly/) Then, in the physical world, once a month he rides a few floors down in the elevator to write a story for TIME's more traditional vehicle. Having aggressively covered the progress of the Communications Decency Act for Netly, Quittner was well positioned to write about the landmark court decision this week that found the law "profoundly repugnant" and unconstitutional. "This is a story that had a lot to do with the life or death of the Web," Quittner says. "Without free speech, the Internet would have been little more than an interactive Yellow Pages."