TO OUR READERS

C.F. PAYNE, who gently satirizes Bill Gates' bellicose business tactics in an illustration for this week's cover story, is on all art directors' (very) short list of favorite illustrators. "He can do incredibly richly detailed pieces of art in one day," says TIME art director Arthur Hochstein. "He's considered a modern-day Norman Rockwell because he can poke fun without being meanspirited." Now folks in Payne's hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, can see what the art directors are raving about. The Cincinnati Art Museum is holding an exhibition of 30 of Payne's drawings, including three of the five covers he has done for TIME.

JIM WILDE is a legendary figure at TIME. "Wilde lives up to his name," says senior editor Howard Chua-Eoan of the white-haired foreign correspondent. "He's the quintessential gonzo reporter." A longtime Nairobi bureau chief, Wilde was based in Istanbul during the Gulf War, during which he covered the plight of the Kurds. This week he delivers that story's next chapter, slipping into Kurdistan to report on Saddam Hussein's attack on the town of Erbil. The report includes an exclusive interview with Massoud Barzani, the head of the Kurdish faction allied with Iraq. "He had to negotiate for the interview," says an amazed Chua-Eoan of Wilde. "But the Kurds remembered his story from five years ago, so that probably clinched it."

DAVE JACKSON has interviewed his share of computer industry titans in his five years as TIME's San Francisco bureau chief, but they don't get much more, well, titanic than Microsoft's Bill Gates and Netscape's Jim Barksdale. To report this week's cover story on their David-and- Goliath struggle to control the Internet, Jackson journeyed to the companies' respective headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and Mountain View, California, for first-hand views of the enemy camps. "Digital technology has always been a battleground of innovation and competition," says Jackson, "but rarely does it break into the open in the kind of high-stakes drama we're seeing now.

DAN GOODGAME first met Bill Bennett while covering the Bush White House. "He was working on a chaw of Nicorette," Goodgame recalls of the then drug czar, "as he struggled--successfully--to overcome his addiction to cigarettes." This week Goodgame, now TIME's Washington bureau chief, profiles the Republican commissar of virtue. Traveling with Bennett, he reports, "is like a very good graduate seminar. When Bill finds something he likes to read, he's like Abe Lincoln, rereading the best parts until he's able to declaim them from memory. He has the same memory for anecdotes, including jokes at his own expense." A rare trait for politicians of any stripe.