CONTRIBUTORS

MARGARET CARLSON, who writes the political column "Public Eye," left her regular post this week to take a longer view of the 1996 presidential campaign. "It was time to step back and think about what lessons we can draw," she says. A veteran political analyst who came to TIME from the New Republic, Carlson is a familiar face to many TV viewers--she can be seen Saturday nights on cnn's Capital Gang--and she shares the public's general disenchantment with this race. "It's been a dispiriting campaign," she says. "We've learned that education is good and drugs are bad, and not much else. But while the debate may be meaningless, the choice in a presidential election never is."

ELAINE SHANNON, who has been covering the FBI and the Department of Justice for TIME since 1987, was furiously reporting the TWA Flight 800 crash story last July when a pipe bomb blew up in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in the middle of the Summer Games. As suspicion fell on Richard Jewell, the security guard who had at first been considered a hero for spotting the bomb, Shannon enjoyed an insider's view of a criminal investigation that ended up going wrong in a painfully public way. "The FBI is a remarkable institution that often gets its man or woman, but not always," says Shannon. "The agency has some tough questions to answer for the way it handled Jewell." And as this week's story makes clear, so does the press.

JEFFREY KLUGER is well qualified to write about the new breed of smaller, simpler Mars ships set to begin launching this week. He was the co-author, with former astronaut Jim Lovell, of Lost Moon, the book that served as the basis for the popular 1995 film Apollo 13. Kluger knows that when it comes to designing spacecraft, less is indeed more. "NASA engineers who worked in the old lunar program liked to point out that an Apollo spacecraft had 5.6 million individual parts," he recalls. "Even if the ship functioned with 99.9% efficiency, you could still expect 5,600 breakdowns every time you tried to fly it." Kluger, who teaches science journalism at New York University, comes to TIME's science department after nine years at Discover magazine.

ROBERT HUGHES, TIME's art critic, knows the artist Jasper Johns only slightly, but he has followed Johns' work closely for decades. "He is unquestionably the most famous--and high priced--artist in America," says Hughes, who appraises a new Johns retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in this week's issue. "The question is whether his work over the past 20 years will be seen as the equal of the paintings--like the flags and the targets--that made his reputation 40 years ago. I wonder if it will be." Hughes' own reputation, meanwhile, continues to grow. His new TV series, American Visions, is now airing in Britain to boffo reviews. In the U.S., it is set to debut on PBS in May.