Contributors
Peter Yang
You’d never know it by looking at this month’s cover, but Peter Yang admits that he isn’t a lake person. “My friends have dragged me out on the water, and I end up loving it,” he says, “but I’m more of a city guy.” Yang, who is based in New York but grew up in Plano, is best known for his portrait photography, so this project (“Water, Water Everywhere,”) challenged him to handle changing conditions, such as natural light. “I’d get on a boat at five in the morning and wait for sunrise to shoot,” he says. “Then I’d wait around for evening. But I got an image that puts you there.”
Virginia Postrel
She may be the hardest-working woman in media. Virginia Postrel is a former editor of Reason magazine; has written two books (The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies); has contributed to the New York Times and Forbes; maintains a widely read blog (dynamist.com); and has signed on to be a columnist at the Atlantic Monthly. Her interests range from glamour to economics, but Postrel, who has lived in Dallas since 2000, wrote about a far more personal topic for her first piece for this magazine: “Here’s Looking at You, Kidney”, about donating an organ to a friend.
Evan Smith
Last November, when Texas Monthly published executive editor Mimi Swartz’s story about tort reform called “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too bad!” the piece famously drew the ire of Texans for Lawsuit Reform and sparked a spirited exchange between the organization’s publicist, Ken Hoagland, and the magazine’s editor, Evan Smith. But there was another, unexpected result: Hoagland and Smith came to trust each other. So last month when Republican power broker James Leininger decided he wanted to grant a rare, exclusive interview (“Money Talks,”, his publicist—the very same Ken Hoagland—called Smith. “He knew I’d be fair,” says Smith, who met with the pair in Leininger’s San Antonio office. “Life is long. When you give people a fair hearing, it comes back to benefit everybody.”
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