LIZA FEATHERSTONE is a contributing writer to The Nation magazine. She also writes for Slate, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications, and is the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic Books, 2004), and co-author of Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002). Featherstone has been a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University, and now teaches at City University of New York and New York University. She is married to the journalist Doug Henwood, and is an editor on his newsletter, Left Business Observer. The couple lives in Brooklyn with their four-year-old son, Ivan.

DOUG HENWOOD is editor and publisher of Left Business Observer, which he founded in September 1986. Convinced that the 1980s experiment with free-market economics was a financial and social disaster and that much "left" writing on economics was usually dry and dated, Henwood decided that there was room for a newsletter addressing both these deficiencies. Almost from the first issue, the newsletter was a critical success. LBO covers economics and politics in the broadest sense. Recent and persisting obsessions include the meaning of Bushism; income distribution and poverty in the U.S. and elsewhere in the First World; the globalization of finance and production; the worldwide attack on pensions; the 1990s boom and its gloomy aftermath; the economics of energy. Every issue includes a report on the world's financial markets and central banks. Besides editing LBO, Henwood is a contributing editor of The Nation, and hosts a radio weekly program on WBAI (New York). His book Wall Street was published by Verso in June 1997; it went out of print in 2005 and is now available for free download. His social atlas of the U.S. (in the Pluto atlas series), The State of the USA, was published by Simon & Schuster in the fall of 1994. His latest effort, After the New Economy, was published in late 2003 by The New Press. He's now in the early stages of a book on the current American ruling class, whoever that might be.

ROBERT BRENNER (Ph.D. Princeton) is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, and an editor of New Left Review and Against the Current. His intellectual work has focused mainly on: (1) the rise of capitalism and the problem of economic development more generally; (2) English politics, economy, and society in the early modern period and the interpretation of the English Revolution; (3) the evolution of the postwar world economy; and (4) US politics since the 1930s. Representative studies in each of these areas can be found, respectively, in (1) The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985) and “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong” in Chris Wickham, ed. Marxist History-writing in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); (2) Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton and Cambridge, 1993); (4) The Boom and the Bubble. The US in the World Economy (Verso, 2002) and The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn (Verso, 2006), along with “What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America. The Origins of the Current Economic Crisis”; and (4) Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and US Politics in the Long 1970s, co-editor, (Verso, in press) and  “Structure vs. Conjuncture: The 2006 Elections and Rightward Shift” New Left Review 43 (Jan/Feb 2007).

NOAM CHOMSKY is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." He also established the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual. Beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the war with the publication of his essay, "THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS," in the The New York Review of Books. This was followed by his 1969 book, AMERICAN POWER AND THE NEW MANDARINS, a collection of essays that placed him at the forefront of American dissent. A prolific author, Chomsky has written dozens of books, including THE FATEFUL TRIANGLE: THE UNITED STATES, ISRAEL, AND THE PALESTINIANS (1983), MANUFACTURING CONSENT: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE MASS MEDIA, with E. S. Herman (1988), NECESSARY ILLUSIONS: THOUGHT CONTROL IN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES (1989), 9-11 (2001), UNDERSTANDING POWER: THE INDISPENSABLE CHOMSKY (2002), HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL: AMERICA'S QUEST FOR DOMINANCE (2003), and HOPE AND PROSPECTS (forthcoming, 2010). His far-reaching criticisms of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power have made him a controversial figure: largely shunned by the mainstream media in the United States, he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets worldwide. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source. He is also a self-declared adherent of libertarian socialism, which he regards as "the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society."

JOEL ANDREAS is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, where studies political contention and social change in contemporary China. His recent book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (2009), analyzes the contentious process through which old and new elites coalesced during the decades following the 1949 Communist Revolution. He is currently investigating changing relations between managers and workers in Chinese factories between 1949 and the present. 

KANISHKA GOONEWARDENA was trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and now teaches urban design and critical theory at the University of Toronto. He co-edited Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2008) and is working on a book on the late capitalist appropriations of critical theory by urban studies entitled The Future of Planning at the End of History. The broad counters of his research--published in journals such as Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, Radical History Review--are marked by the making of cities, the modes of imperialism and the production of ideology.