We are pleased to note several additions to our masthead. Barbara Crossette, our new UN correspondent, has been the New York Times‘s UN bureau chief as well as its chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia. She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas and The Great Hill Stations of Asia. Crossette won a George Polk Award in 1991 for her coverage of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. She is a consulting editor for the United Nations Association of the United States and is on the board of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Kristina Rizga, who will be joining our editorial board, is editor and publisher of the Webby-winning WireTap, a national news and culture magazine for the progressive youth movement. Before WireTap, she worked as an organizer and editor at the Media Alliance, a coalition of progressive reporters working for media reform, and at AlterNet as an associate editor. Rizga’s writing has appeared in a variety of alternative weeklies and magazines, including thenation.com, AlterNet, YES! Magazine and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, among others.

William Deresiewicz, who joins us as a contributing writer, has been reviewing fiction for The Nation since 2004. This year he was nominated for a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. His work is distinguished not only by its range of subjects (from Michael Chabon to Stefan Zweig; Zadie Smith to Cormac McCarthy) but also by its rigor, passion and eloquence.

Finally, we welcome Miriam Markowitz, our new assistant literary editor. Markowitz has previously been an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine and an editor at the Vietnam News in Hanoi.