CONTRIBUTORS

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, whose striking portraits of America's aspiring Olympians appear in this week's issue, spent four years crisscrossing the U.S. to find just the right setting to showcase her subjects--posing a group of child gymnasts against the backdrop of a vast, dry lake bed, for example, and shooting synchronized swimmers from under water. Leibovitz, a Vanity Fair contributing photographer and arguably the world's leading portraitist, describes herself as "more interested in what people do than in the way they look." In these exclusive pictures from her upcoming book, Olympic Portraits (Bulfinch Press), Leibovitz offers images as kinetic and graceful as the athletes themselves.

RICHARD STENGEL, after working at TIME as a staff writer and associate editor, became an occasional contributor in 1989. It was a happy accommodation that gave us the benefit of his talents while freeing him for larger projects--like the two-year collaboration with Nelson Mandela that produced Mandela's 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Now Stengel is back as a senior writer, traveling with the presidential candidates and taking the nation's pulse. This week's contribution: a retort to Robert Putnam's 1995 essay "Bowling Alone" called "Bowling Together." But Stengel hasn't lost his appetite for outside projects; starting this week he will be a regular political commentator on the new MSNBC Cable news network.

LARA MARLOWE, TIME's Beirut bureau chief, gets plenty of opportunities to write about wars, assassinations and bombings. So her occasional cultural excursions--like this week's archaeology story about the reopening of the pyramids of "Good King" Snefru--bring her particular pleasure. "You can't compare the dangers of covering a war with those of exploring ancient Egyptian monuments," she acknowledges. But Dahshur's 4,600-year-old pyramids and tombs did provide a few eerie moments. "Snefru's Bent Pyramid is unsettlingly majestic. In nearby tombs the grave shafts are so deep you can't see the bottom," she says. "It may be a cliche to talk about Egypt's timelessness, but there is a great deal of truth in it. The country lends itself to reflection."

MICHAEL DUFFY scores a small coup this week with a behind-the-scenes story from the presidential campaign. He describes how Bob Dole, pressured by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, missed a crucial opportunity to blunt one of the Democrats' favorite wedge issues, gun control, first dropping his plan to promise a repeal of the unpopular assault-weapons ban, then changing his mind again, but too late to reap the political reward. "I wanted to autopsy one moment in a very difficult time for Dole," says Duffy, TIME's national political correspondent. "You get the feeling he believes this campaign doesn't begin until Labor Day. Many Republicans hope that's not too late."