CONTRIBUTORS

DOUGLAS WALLER, our State Department correspondent, left Foggy Bottom last week to get a closer look at diplomacy--or the lack of it--in action. He flew to the U.S.S. Nimitz, somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Waller knows his way around carriers, having recently completed a book on Navy pilots that will be published by Simon & Schuster next June. Still, getting to the ship required some doing, between getting permission to board and rousting out a groggy Bahraini official in the middle of the night to obtain a visa. Waller's efforts result in a rare glimpse of the intricate workings of both the aircraft carrier and the mind of an F/A-18 Hornet jet pilot poised for combat.

CHARLOTTE FALTERMAYER has been following the trail of Anne Marie Fahey since the secretary, who worked for Delaware Governor Thomas Carper, disappeared 17 months ago. Last May, Faltermayer traveled to Fahey's Wilmington home and scouted out the posh neighborhood of her lover--and accused killer--Thomas Capano. After Capano was arrested, Faltermayer staked out O'Friel's pub, unofficial headquarters of the hunt for Fahey--or her murderer. For Faltermayer, detective stories are becoming familiar territory. She reported on a 1977 Philadelphia slaying and on the 1990 art heist at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Says she: "I feel as if I've taken a crash FBI course at Quantico."

JAMES COLLINS is our newly appointed television critic. It sounds cushy, but think of all the awful programming he has to watch. O.K., so maybe Ally McBeal had a few redeeming moments. This week Collins examines the prevalent notion that TV must be bad for preschoolers. Surprisingly, he found children's experts in favor of toddlers' watching TV--in moderation. Good news for Collins, father of two girls--Elizabeth, 2, and Virginia, 11 months. "Now that I know that TV won't rot my kids' brains, I may be a little less strict about it," he says. That may not matter to Elizabeth, who seemed to be equally uninterested in all the shows.

FRANK GIBNEY JR., our Tokyo bureau chief, evaluates the impact of turmoil in Japan and South Korea on the U.S. economy. Gibney, who recently wrote about the turnaround at Sony, is accustomed to looking at the big picture. He learned young: his father, Frank Gibney Sr., ran the Tokyo bureau from 1949 to '51. This week Gibney--Junior, that is--draws on dispatches from Rahul Jacob in Seoul, Adam Zagorin in Washington and Jane Van Tassel in New York City to put into perspective the problems in Tokyo and Seoul. "You can't turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper in Japan without being hit by a flood of bad news," says Gibney. "The only statistics that are up are suicides and bankruptcies."