George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of two novels and three works of nonfiction including The Assassins' Gate, which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in November 2005, and Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mike Shuster is a diplomatic correspondent and roving foreign correspondent for NPR. He is based in NPR's Los Angeles bureau. When he is not traveling outside the U.S., he covers issues of nuclear non-proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the Pacific Rim. Shuster took up his current post in 1994, using New York as a base. He moved to Los Angeles in 2000. In the past two years, he has contributed many reports to NPR's extensive coverage of the Middle East, traveling four times to Israel since September 2000. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Shuster's reports have also focused on India and Pakistan, the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, and the Congo.