CONTRIBUTORS

BRUCE HANDY, who wrote this week's Star Wars cover story, was a 12-year-old growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area when he saw his first George Lucas film, the 1971 science-fiction feature THX-1138. So when the story called for spending a day at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, he jumped at the chance to interview his boyhood hero and watch him put the finishing touches on the "special edition" rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy. Handy remembers well when the original film came out in 1977. "I must have seen it five times that summer," he says. And how does the experience of viewing the movie today compare with his memories? "The beginning seems a bit slow now, perhaps because we're already familiar with the world it's introducing," he says. "But it still has that speedy kick at the end."

KAREN TUMULTY knew when she was named our White House correspondent that she was in for a big change. On Capitol Hill, where she has covered Congress for TIME for the past two years, reporters have access aplenty. "You run into Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich in the halls," she says. The White House, by contrast, is tightly controlled. So to report this week's profile of Franklin Raines, the man behind Clinton's new budget, Tumulty had to find out what goes on inside by going outside--getting to Raines through the people who knew him before he went to Washington. Her challenge in the months ahead: keep finding those fresh angles.

DAVID VAN BIEMA, TIME's religion writer, was looking for a way to write about the state of atheism in America when he became intrigued with an even more fascinating story: the bizarre disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, America's best-known nonbeliever. No one has seen O'Hair since, as legend has it, she walked away from an unfinished breakfast in August 1995. Van Biema's pursuit of the missing activist took him to Austin, Texas, where her organization has its headquarters. The mystery deepened when his sources starting contradicting one another. "Those discrepancies roused my curiosity," he says, and formed the basis of this week's exclusive piece.

CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY, our pop-music critic, knows the angst of passing judgment on artists like his subject this week, singer Erykah Badu. So he was much relieved when his own debut novel, My Favorite War, won favorable reviews last year. "Fast, funny and furious," is how the Boston Globe described his satirical yarn of a young African-American journalist (not unlike Farley) laboring for a national publication (not unlike USA Today, his previous employer) in Washington during the Gulf War. Now HBO has optioned My Favorite War for a made-for-cable movie, a prospect that can make even a veteran critic a bit starstruck. In Farley's dream cast, his part is played by Will Smith (Independence Day). "But with my luck," says Farley, "I'll get Dom DeLuise."