Contributors

ROGER ROSENBLATT and ANDREW CARROLL contributed to our Memorial Day cover stories. Rosenblatt, a TIME editor-at-large, writes about how the U.S. memorializes its dead, focusing on the new monument to the Oklahoma City bombing victims. "Over the years memorials have changed from generals on horseback to public places designed to affect feeling," says Rosenblatt. Carroll provides us with the final letters written by American soldiers who were later killed in combat. He began collecting such memorabilia after his parents' Washington home burned down, and now heads the nonprofit all-volunteer Legacy Project, which collects and preserves war letters. "These were ordinary people," he says, "in the front row of history."

TAMALA EDWARDS, a TIME political writer, appears in this week's TIME/MTV Choose or Lose documentary, The Gun Fight, airing on MTV Monday, May 22, at 10:30 p.m. (check local listings) and several later dates. "They couldn't have picked a better time for this," says Edwards of the gun issue. "There's a major battle over gun control brewing in the Senate, which was largely spurred on by the Million Mom March. These forums are important for acquainting younger people with the major political issues of the day." She was also a panelist at a TIME/MTV forum on gun control last week at UCLA. For Edwards, whose reporting often takes her among Washington's most powerful figures, it was an opportunity to connect with the next generation of voters, whose influence will increase in the next decade. TIME and MTV and will be working together on stories and polling throughout the election season.

ROBERT HUGHES, TIME's art critic, will be presented with the London Sunday Times Writer of the Year award June 4 at Britain's Hay-on-Wye literary festival. An announcement in the Times said Hughes was selected for changing "the way we think about art, history and culture." Hughes has written such provocative books as The Shock of the New and The Fatal Shore and has made more than 25 TV documentaries on the visual arts. Following a near fatal car crash in Australia last year, Hughes is back in full swing for TIME and is in the final stages of completing a six-part series on his native country that will run there as well as on PBS and the BBC. The series, he says, "is meant to get past all that Crocodile Dundee garbage and show what Australia is actually like." He is also working on a book about his car accident and ensuing battles with Australia's legal system and its press.

TIME DIGITAL MAGAZINE, which began as a periodic supplement for TIME subscribers to help guide them through the panoply of developing technologies, is in its second month as a freestanding magazine. "The need for a regular monthly guide became apparent in the past year," says TIME DIGITAL staff writer Maryanne Murray Buechner, pictured on the June issue's cover, drowning in a sea of broadband cables. "We've had a host of digital products available to us in the past decade, but it's really only in the past year that there have been so many competing products. That's created the need for a road map to help people figure out how these products affect their lives." Buechner stresses that neither the magazine's staff members nor its contents are geeky. The June cover story on broadband services is a great example of what TIME DIGITAL is designed to do well--explain the technology, steer the reader and cut through all the technical stuff to what's important on a practical level."We're looking at these products with the same eye as the consumer," she adds. Says TIME DIGITAL editor Joshua Quittner: "There's really no magazine like this that serves the average consumer in such a practical way." TIME DIGITAL is available online at Timedigital.com at newsstands and through subscription by calling 800-444-3404.