Email: pb75@nyu.edu

Paul Berman is a writer on politics and literature whose articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic (where he is a contributing editor), the New Yorker, Slate, the Village Voice, Dissent, and various other American, European and Latin American journals. He has reported at length from Europe and Latin America. He has written or edited eight books, including, most recently, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, with a new preface by Richard Holbrooke for the 2007 paperback edition; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction, published in 2006 by the American Poets Project of the Library of America; and Terror and Liberalism, a New York Times best-seller in 2003. His writings have been translated into fifteen languages. Berman received a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Columbia University and has been awarded a MacArthur, a Guggenheim, the Bosch Berlin Prize, a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Writers & Scholars, and other honors.

Available Syllabi:

• G54.1019.05 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

Email: ted.conover@nyu.edu

Ted Conover is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York's Sing Sing Prison. Newjack won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College (1981) in anthropology, Conover spent two years at Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar (1982-84). In 2001, he received an honorary doctorate from Amherst and in 2003, a Guggenheim Fellowship. In recent years he has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the University of Oregon. He contributes to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many others. His new book, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today will be published early next year by Knopf.

Photo by Ralph Gabriner

Pete Hamill is a veteran New York journalist and novelist. He's the author of numerous books, including Downtown: My Manhattan, Diego Rivera and A Drinking Life. His nine novels include Snow in August and Forever, both of which were New York Times bestsellers.

Hamill was born in Brooklyn, the eldest son of Irish immigrant parents. After service in the U.S. Navy, he attended Mexico City College in 1956-57, as a student on the G.I. Bill. He began his journalistic career in 1960 at the New York Post. He has covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, as well as the domestic disturbances in American cities in the 1960s. His work appeared in the Post, Daily News, and Village Voice. In addition to his many years as a columnist, he has served as editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

At the same time, he wrote for many magazines: the Saturday Evening Post, New York (where he was a contributing writer for 25 years), Esquire and others. He has two daughters and one grandson. He and his wife, writer Fukiko Aoki, divide their time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Robert Lee Hotz is the science columnist at the The Wall Street Journal. A longtime science writer at the Los Angeles Times, Professor Hotz was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1986 for his coverage of genetic engineering issues, and again in 2004 for his coverage of the space shuttle Columbia accident. He also shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for articles about the Northridge Earthquake. He is the author of Designs On Life, Exploring The New Frontiers of Human Fertility, and a contributor to several books on research issues. He has received many honors, including national awards from The Society of Professional Journalists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Geophysical Union. He is an elected Fellow of the AAAS; an honorary life member of Sigma Xi, The Research Society; and is president of the National Association of Science Writers. His career has included stints as a reporter and editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Pittsburgh Press and The News-Virginian. He has traveled three times to the South Pole under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. Professor Hotz received his B.A. in English and M.A. in Theater History from Tufts University.

Email: stevenberlinjohnson@earthlink.net

Steven Johnson joins the Department of Journalism as a Distinguished Writer in Residence. He is the author of the bestselling book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (Scribner, 2004) and the author of the widely-acclaimed books Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (Scribner, 2001) and Interface Culture: How Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (Harper Collins, 1997). Emergence was named a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. His newest book is the bestseller Everything Bad is Good For You: Why Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2005). The work illustrates the complexity in contemporary video games, television shows and movies and the educational value of them. Professor Johnson's writing has also appeared in numerous publications, such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper's, The London Guardian, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He writes the monthly "Emerging Technology" column for Discover magazine and is a Contributing Editor to Wired. Professor Johnson has made numerous television and radio appearances as a technology commentator. He earned his B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1990) and his M.A. (1991) in English from Columbia University.

Available Syllabi:

• G54.1019 CURRENT PROBLEMS: NEW MEDIA ECOSYSTEMS

James McBride is a writer and composer. His memoir, The Color of Water (Riverhead/Putnam), is an American literary classic. It rested on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, and is read in colleges across America. His latest book is Miracle At St. Anna (Riverhead 2003), a novel. He is a former staff writer for The Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The Washington Post (Style Section). His work has appeared in The New York Times and Rolling Stone. He holds several awards for his work as a composer, including The American Music Theater Festival's Stephen Sondheim Award. He has written songs for Anita Baker and Grover Washington, Jr., among others. He attended Oberlin College (1979 BM Communications), Columbia University (MSJ, Journalism,1980), and Sidewalk University (everybody graduates). He holds several honorary doctorates and has lectured at various venues across America.

Available Syllabi:

• V54.0202.01 POINT OF VIEW

Email: lw48@nyu.edu

Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been, since the early Eighties, a staff writer for The New Yorker, where his work has shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was recently granted a Lannan Literary Award. His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998), and the forthcoming Vermeer in Bosnia. His "Passions and Wonders" series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney's Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998); and Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999). He has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence, and is a contributing editor of McSweeney's and Threepenny Review.