staff: Who we are.

Who We Are

David Plotz is editor of Slate. Before joining the magazine in 1996, Plotz was a senior editor and staff writer for the Washington City Paper. Plotz has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Rolling Stone, GQ, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, among other publications. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. His book based on his "Blogging the Bible" series for Slate will be published in 2009.

John Alderman is general manager of the Slate Group and publisher of Slate. In addition to his leadership role at Slate, Alderman is vice president of business development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. He was previously vice president of business and product development at the Away Network, a Cendant Company, and served various roles in editorial and business development at Outside magazine. Alderman received his MBA at Columbia Business School and an A.B. from Harvard College.

Jacob Weisberg

Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, a unit of the Washington Post Co. devoted to developing Web-based publications. Weisberg joined Slate shortly after its founding in 1996 as chief political correspondent. He succeeded Michael Kinsley to become Slate's second editor from 2002 until 2008, when he handed the job over to David Plotz. Before joining Slate, Weisberg wrote about politics for magazines including the New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. His most recent book, The Bush Tragedy, was a New York Times bestseller in 2008. He is the co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World (2003). He is also the author of the 1996 book In Defense of Government, the 2000 eBook The Road to Chadville, and the Bushisms series.

Staff (scroll down to read biographies of other Slate staffers)

Michael Agger (Senior Editor), John Alderman (Publisher, Slate; General Manager, Slate Group), Holly Allen (Web Designer), Jamon Bailey (Web Developer), Emily Bazelon (Senior Editor), Christopher Beam (Political Reporter), Torie Bosch (Copy Editor), Andy Bowers (Editor of Slate V), Emily Calderone (Slate V Video Producer), John Dickerson (Chief Political Correspondent), Daniel Engber (Associate Editor), Jim Festante (Web Designer), Jing Gu (Director of Technology, Slate Group), Nathan Heller (Copy Editor), Juliet Lapidos (Assistant Editor), Rachael Larimore (Copy Chief), Josh Levin (Associate Editor), Chadwick Matlin (Big Money Staff Writer), Dahlia Lithwick (Senior Editor), Chad Lorenz (Copy Editor), Noreen Malone (Executive Assistant), Melonyce McAfee (Copy Editor), Timothy Noah (Senior Writer), Meghan O'Rourke (Culture Critic), Chantay Osborne (Web Developer), Jill Hunter Pellettieri (Managing Editor), David Plotz (Editor), Daniel Pozmanter (Web Developer), William Saletan (National Correspondent), Vivian Selbo (Design Director), Jack Shafer (Editor at Large), Bill Smee (Slate V Executive Producer), Patrick Stack (Web Developer), John Swansburg (Associate Editor), Ellen Tarlin (Copy Editor), June Thomas (Foreign Editor), Julia Turner (Deputy Editor), Jacob Weisberg (Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, Slate Group), Chris Wilson (Editorial Assistant).

Contributors

Geoffrey Andersen (Fray Editor), Anne Applebaum, Christopher Benfey, Paul Boutin, Constance Casey, Adam Christian (Fray Editor), Bryan Curtis, Maggie Dietz (Assistant Poetry Editor), Rob Donnelly, Mia Fineman, Amanda Fortini, Nina Frenkel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Bonnie Goldstein, David Greenberg, Daniel Gross, Christopher Hitchens, Ann Hulbert, Mark Jordan Legan, Fred Kaplan, Mickey Kaus, Brendan I. Koerner, Steven E. Landsburg, Jacob Leibenluft, Michael Lewis, Stephen Metcalf, Robert Neubecker, Charlie Powell, Troy Patterson, Robert Pinsky (Poetry Editor), Daniel Politi, Moira Redmond (Fray Editor), Jody Rosen, Amanda Schaffer, Sydney Spiesel, Mark Alan Stamaty, Dana Stevens, Seth Stevenson, Emily Yoffe.

Staff Biographies

Michael Agger is a senior editor at Slate. He writes "The Browser" column.

Holly Allen is a Slate Web designer. Before joining Slate, she worked as an interactive designer for weather.com and as a design manager for washingtonpost.com. She earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Georgia. Holly lives in Atlanta with her husband, Tripper, and their golden retriever, Ed.

Geoffrey Andersen is co-editor of Slate's "Fray." Before coming to Slate, he served for three years as technical editor of the California Physician's Legal Handbook. He is currently studying law in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Deep Springs College.

Jamon Bailey is a software engineer at Slate. Before joining Slate, he did software development at Northrop Grumman and ChoicePoint. He has a bachelor's degree in information systems from American University.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate. She edits the magazine's health and law columns (Medical Examiner and Jurisprudence) and writes about law and family. Before joining Slate, she worked as an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and Mother Jones, among other publications. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

Christopher Beam is a political reporter for Slate. His e-mail is .

Christopher Benfey is an art critic for Slate. He is the author of The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Degas in New Orleans, and The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. He is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, where he specializes in American literature. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, TLS, and the New York Times Book Review.

Torie Bosch is a Slate copy editor. She also edits the magazine's religion column. A Penn State graduate and former Seventeen columnist, she previously worked as an editorial assistant with a health-care consulting firm.

Andy Bowers is the editor of Slate's video magazine, Slate V. He also oversees the magazine's radio and podcasting projects. Before joining Slate, he was a longtime correspondent and producer for National Public Radio; among other postings, he served as NPR's bureau chief in both London and Moscow and covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. He is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Los Angeles.

Emily Calderone is a video producer for Slate V. Before joining Slate, she worked as a video editor and shooter for Sprig.com in New York. She got her start working in post-production with the Coen Brothers and later on films at Twentieth Century Fox. She is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz and currently lives in Hollywood, Calif.

Constance Casey is Slate's gardening columnist. In her indoor working life, she was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News and the Washington Post, and a national correspondent for Newhouse News Service. As a 1988-89 Nieman fellow at Harvard, she studied Japanese art and architecture. In her outdoor working life, she apprenticed with Washington, D.C., garden designer Patrick Thevenard, earned a Brooklyn Botanic Garden horticulture certificate, and worked for five years as a gardener for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. She can be reached at .

Bryan Curtis, a contributing writer, writes the "Middlebrow" column. Curtis is also a contributing writer for Play, the New York Times sports magazine. He has written for New York magazine, the Times, Outside, and the New Republic. Write him at .

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. Previously, he worked for Time magazine in New York and Washington, finishing his stint as a White House correspondent. He is the author of On Her Trail, a biography of his late mother, the television newscaster Nancy Dickerson. He graduated from the University of Virginia. He can be reached at .

Maggie Dietz is Slate's assistant poetry editor. Her first book of poems is Perennial Fall.

Rob Donnelly began illustrating for Slate early in 2006. His work has been featured in American Illustration and the Society of Illustrators. Rob is also a regular contributor for the artists' collective Meathaus Comics. He lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Daniel Engber writes about science, culture, and sports for Slate and edits the Science and Explainer columns. He has a graduate degree in neuroscience and has worked in research labs at Columbia, UCSF, and the National Institutes of Health.

Jim Festante is a Slate Web designer. He was a freelance designer and actor before joining the Slate team. As a designer, he's created numerous print and web projects, as well as several installations for LEGO's themepark in California. As an actor, he's appeared in commercials and television projects for Comedy Central, Broadway Video, and MTV. Currently, he's developing an online series for NBC and a cartoon for Comedy Central.

Mia Fineman is an art critic for Slate. She works as a senior research associate in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has curated numerous exhibitions, most recently "On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag." She is author, with Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, of When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times.

Nina Frenkel has been illustrating for Slate since 1996, when she got her start doing editorial work. She has a B.A. in studio art from Carleton College and has studied at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle and the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. She recently illustrated a book for Starbucks.

Bonnie Goldstein is a former special investigator to the U.S. Senate and investigative producer for ABC News. She writes Slate's "Hot Document" column. E-mail her at .

David Greenberg writes Slate's "History Lesson" column and other occasional features. Previously, he worked as an editor of Slate's culture section. Now a professor at Rutgers University, he received his Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University in May 2001. He has served as acting editor and managing editor of the New Republic and has written for, among other publications, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and Foreign Affairs. His first book, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image won the Washington Monthly's Annual Political Book Award for 2003. He lives in New York City.

Daniel Gross writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. He is also a senior editor at Newsweek, for which he writes the "Money Culture" column. Gross is the author of several books, including Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy. He attended Cornell University and studied American history at Harvard University.

Jing Gu is the director of technology for the Slate Group. A veteran in software development and IT management, Jing held various positions prior to joining Slate, including five years as chief technology officer for StarCompliance, a leading provider for SEC regulatory compliance solutions. Jing Gu received his graduate degree in computer sciences from Johns Hopkins University. He also holds a bachelor's degree in Chemistry.

Ann Hulbert, Slate's books editor, also writes the "Sandbox" column. She is the author most recently of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, as well as of The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford. A longtime editor and writer at the New Republic, she is now a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, TLS, and elsewhere.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate as well as occasional pieces on music and consumer electronics. He is the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008) and The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), as well as a former staff reporter for the Boston Globe, having been its military correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and New York bureau chief. A regular writer on jazz and hi-fi for Stereophile, he has also written on a variety of subjects for the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Scientific American, and others. A long time ago, he was the foreign and defense policy adviser to Rep. Les Aspin. He graduated from Oberlin College and has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mickey Kaus writes "Kausfiles." He has written about public policy for Newsweek and several other publications, including the New Republic and the Washington Monthly, where he remains a contributing editor. Kaus published The End of Equality in 1992. The book was co-winner of the 1992 Washington Monthly Political Book Award. Kaus currently lives in Los Angeles.

Brendan I. Koerner writes Slate's "Green Lantern" column. He is also a contributing editor at Wired, a columnist for Gizmodo, and a former columnist for the New York Times Sunday Business section. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Mother Jones, Spin, Details, the New Republic, the Village Voice, Legal Affairs, the Washington Monthly, and Food & Wine. His first book, Now the Hell Will Start, is out now.

Steven E. Landsburg writes "Everyday Economics" for Slate and is the author, most recently, of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.

Juliet Lapidos is a Slate assistant editor. She is a graduate of Yale and Cambridge universities.

Rachael Larimore is Slate's copy chief. A graduate of Ohio University's journalism school, she was a sportswriter for various newspapers and Web sites before coming to Slate.

Jacob Leibenluft contributes to the "Explainer" column. A graduate of Yale University, he has also worked for the South China Morning Post and Foreign Policy.

Josh Levin, an associate editor in Slate's Washington, D.C., office, edits the sports and technology sections. Before coming to Slate, he wrote for the Washington City Paper. Levin, a native of New Orleans, graduated from Brown University.

Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor at Slate. She writes "Supreme Court Dispatches" and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. Before joining Slate as a free-lancer in 1999, she worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nev. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, Elle, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Washington Post. She is co-author of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World, a legal humor book. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.

Chad Lorenz is a Slate copy editor. He previously worked at the Washingtonian magazine and the Washington Post.

Noreen Malone is Slate's executive assistant. She is a native of Cleveland and a graduate of Georgetown University.

Chadwick Matlin is the staff reporter for The Big Money, Slate's business site, which will launch later this year.

Melonyce McAfee is a Slate copy editor. She landed an editorial assistant position at Slate after working as a community news writer at the San Diego Union-Tribune. She is a graduate of San Francisco State University.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic-at-large and writes the "Dilettante" column. He is working on a book about the 1980s. He lives in Brooklyn.

Robert Neubecker graduated from Parsons School of Design and has worked as an illustrator for 30 years. He has drawn for nearly everything in print, notably the New York Times, Time, and Business Week. He is currently a regular contributor to Slate and has won many awards from American Illustration, Print, Communication Arts, and the Society of Illustrators. Hes' the author of Wow! City!, a children's book. Robert lives in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah with his wife, Ruth, and their two daughters, Isabel and Josephine.

Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Previously, he was an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, and an editor of the Washington Monthly.

Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor (and was the magazine's culture editor from 2002-2006). Before joining the magazine, she worked as an editor at The New Yorker. She is the author of Halflife, a book of poems, and her writing and poetry have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and other publications. A graduate of Yale University, she holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up.

Chantay Osborne is a Web developer for Slate. She received her bachelor's degree in information technology from American Intercontinental University. Before joining Slate, she worked for the U.S. State Department and the National Institutes of Health.

Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic. He also writes the movies column for Spin and contributes to publications including the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Men's Vogue. At Princeton, he was an editor of the Nassau Weekly.

Jill Hunter Pellettieri is Slate's managing editor. Jill previously worked at Legal Affairs magazine in New Haven, Conn., and before that was an editor at the now-defunct Silicon Alley Reporter. A native of the Bay Area, she is a graduate of Dartmouth College.

Robert Pinsky edits Slate's poems. His most recent book of poems is Jersey Rain. He is a contributor to PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer and from 1997-2000 was U.S. poet laureate.

Daniel Pozmanter is a software engineer for Slate. He has a BS in cognitive science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Charlie Powell has been contributing illustrations to Slate since 1996. He graduated from the California College of the Arts and has been an illustrator for 20 years. His work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, and Forbes. He recently illustrated a book for Scholastic, published in 2007. He lives in the mountains near Santa Cruz, Calif., with his wife, Jessica; daughter, Corrina; and son, Owen.

Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He is the author of White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The Nation.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent. He writes about science, technology, politics, and society. He is the author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, which argues that pro-choice and pro-life activists have lost the abortion debate to a third constituency: libertarian conservatives.

Amanda Schaffer writes on science, medicine and health for Slate. Previously, she worked at Mount Sinai Medical Center and taught in the chemistry department at NYU. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, Boston Review, Ploughshares, JAMA, and the New York Times. She is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in history of science.

Vivian Selbo is the design director of Slate. Before joining Slate, she was an independent Web site developer, creating sites and Web works for clients such as MoMA, SFMoMA, the Walker Art Center, Cal Art's Center for Integrated Media, the Visual Arts Dept. at UCSD, PBS/POV, Visual Understanding in Education, and Eyebeam, among others. She began working online as the interface director of the multiple-award-winning site adaweb.com, now part of the Walker Art Center's permanent collection. Her art work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center and SFMoMA. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, the Banff Center for the Arts, and at New York University. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Jack Shafer is a Slate editor at large. He edited two city weeklies, Washington City Paper and SF Weekly, before joining Slate prior to its 1996 launch. Shafer has written on new media, the press, and drug policy for publications big (New York Times Magazine) and small (Inquiry). His "Press Box" column appears several times a week in Slate.

Bill Smee is the executive producer of Slate V. He joined Slate after 20 years in television news and documentary, having garnered multiple Emmys as a producer and network executive at CNN and the Discovery Times Channel. He is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Washington, D.C.

Sydney Spiesel writes for Slate's "Medical Examiner" column and appears regularly on NPR's Day to Day. He is a practicing pediatrician in Woodbridge, Conn., and an immunologist, and he teaches pediatrics as an associate clinical professor at Yale's School of Medicine. A graduate of Shimer College, he holds a Ph.D. and an M.D. from Yale University and has worked as a public health microbiologist, a software developer, and a museum designer. Dr. Spiesel also appears in a question in the game Trivial Pursuit.

Patrick Stack is a web developer for Slate. He previously worked as an editorial and technical producer for TIME.com, the online edition of Time magazine. He graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and is a native of Pittsburgh.

Mark Alan Stamaty has been a regular contributor to Slate since its inception. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, GQ, Esquire, etc. He is the creator of numerous comic strips: MacDoodle St., Washingtoon, Doodlennium, Boox, and others. He is the author-illustrator of 10 books, among them, the cult classic Who Needs Donuts? His newest book is Alia's Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq.

Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic. Previously, she wrote the Slate television and pop-culture column "Surfergirl" for two years. She has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post Book World, Bookforum, and the Atlantic. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from UC-Berkeley and lives in Brooklyn.

John Swansburg is an associate editor in Slate's New York office. Before joining Slate, he was the deputy editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section and a senior editor at Legal Affairs magazine. His writing has appeared in the Globe, the New York Times, and other places.

Ellen Tarlin is a Slate copy editor. Her essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix, Brooklyn Bridge, and Bark magazine.

June Thomas is Slate's foreign editor. Before joining the magazine, she was an editor and foreign rights manager at Seal Press and managing editor of Women in Translation, a publishing company specializing in women's writing from around the world. She was born and raised in Manchester, England.

Julia Turner is Slate's deputy editor. Working from Slate's New York office, she oversees the magazine's culture coverage and edits the "Spectator" and "Drink" columns as well as pieces on advertising, fashion, language, and media. She also writes regularly for the magazine. Before joining Slate, she worked at Time Inc.—first in magazine development and later at Sports Illustrated Women.

Blake Wilson is a Slate contributor and former Slate editor. Previously, he worked at the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books.

Emily Yoffe writes Slate's "Human Guinea Pig" column, in which she tries things readers have too much dignity to do themselves (entering the Mrs. America Contest, making her singing debut). She is also "Dear Prudence," answering questions on manners and morals. And she contributes to Slate's Heavy Petting column. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O the Oprah Magazine, Texas Monthly, the Washington Post, among other publications. She is the author of the book, What the Dog Did: Tales from a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner.