DURRELL BOWMAN, email: <db@durrellbowman.com>, url: <http://durrellbowman.com>, completed his Ph.D. in musicology at UCLA in 2003, with a dissertation entitled "Permanent Change:  Rush, Musicians' Rock, and the Progressive Post-Counterculture."  In 2003-04 he teaches as a part-time sessional instructor in popular music and culture at Barrie, Ontario's Georgian College.  He also sings semi-professionally as a choral singer and works as a choral librarian, writer, editor, and computer consultant in the administration of the Elora Festival and Singers.  In 2002-03 he served as a visiting instructor in the Department of Music at the University of Alberta, where he taught cultural musicology, popular music, film music, and music theory.  His article "Let Them All Make Their Own Music:  Individualism, Rush, and the Progressive/Hard Rock Alloy, 1976-77" appears in the book Progressive Rock Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2002).  His paper "Textu(r)al Undercoding and the Music of the Rock Band Rush:  String Quartets, Death Metal, Trip-Hop, and other Tributes" (presented in 2002-03 in Edmonton, New York, and elsewhere) argues that certain music facilitates an inversion of normative expectations concerning "progressive rock."   Among his other publications and conference papers, an article on "Art Rock" appears in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a review article on South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut appears in echo: a music-centered journal, and he also presented a paper at the 2003 IASPM-International conference in Montreal, Quebec. 

DEAN BROOKS, email: <dean@ekaros.ca>, is founder and president of Ekaros Analytical Inc. <http://www.ekaros.ca>, a Canadian company specializing in mathematical tools and training. He has written professionally for numerous publications, as well as editing and publishing several books including Fraud Detection and Digital Analysis Using Benford's Law. His past writing on Ayn Rand includes an essay defending TV's The Simpsons and outlining problems in the Objectivist approach to comedy, that appeared in Reality magazine in 1993.

STEVEN HORWITZ, Associate Dean of the First Year and Professor of Economics, St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York 13617, email: <sghorwitz@stlawu.edu>; url: <http://it.stlawu.edu/shor>, is the author of two books, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective (Routledge, 2000) and Monetary Evolution, Free Banking, and Economic Order (Westview, 1992). He has written extensively on Austrian economics, Hayekian political economy, monetary theory and history, and macroeconomics. His work has been published in professional journals such as History of Political Economy, Southern Economic Journal, and The Review of Austrian Economics. Horwitz currently serves as the book review editor of The Review of Austrian Economics and is the president of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. He is also a long-time Rush fan, with a web page at: <http://it.stlawu.edu/shor/Rush/rush.htm>.

DAVID J. JILK, email: <djilk@jilk.com>, has had a longtime interest in Objectivism and in epistemology in particular. He has an extensive business background as an entrepreneur, investor, and executive in software and Internet companies. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently studying computational models of cognitive systems at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

ED MACAN, Professor of Music, Art Department, College of the Redwoods,7351 Tompkins Hill Road, Eureka, California 95501, e-mail: <goodvibes@hermeticscience.com>, url: <http://www.hermeticscience.com>, is the author of Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 1997). He is also keyboardist, mallet percussionist, and principal composer of the band Hermetic Science, whose three albums, Hermetic Science (1997), Prophesies (1999), and En Route (2001) have won much critical acclaim in the worldwide progressive music community.

ERIC MACK, Tulane University, Department of Philosophy, Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, email: <ericmack123@hotmail.com>, is also a faculty member of Tulane's Murphy Institute of Political Economy. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and anthologies and lectured widely on topics in moral, political, and legal theory—especially on moral individualism and the agent-relativity of value, the philosophical foundation of moral rights, property rights, the legitimacy and authority (if any) of coercive institutions, the defense of classical liberalism against Marxist and egalitarian challenges, and classical liberal themes in the history of political philosophy.

BILL MARTIN, Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, Byrne Hall, 2219 N. Kenmore Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614, is the author of seven books in the fields of social theory, contemporary continental philosophy, and music. At present, he is completing a book under the title, Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Communism. He is also an avid cyclist and chessplayer, and he has played the bass guitar for over thirty years.

KIRSTI MINSAAS, University of Oslo, Department of British and American Studies, P. O. Box 1003 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway, email: <k.b.minsaas@iba.uio.no>, is senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Oslo. Receiving her doctorate in 1998, her dissertation topic was on the role of Aristotelian catharsis in Shakespearean tragedy, and she is currently working on a project on the "exemplary hero" in English literature from 1590 to 1820. She has also lectured extensively on Ayn Rand's fiction, both in Europe and in the United States.

ROBERT M. PRICE, email: <Criticus@aol.com>, is the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism and Director of the Institute for Higher Critical Studies, affiliated with the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary. He is the author of Beyond Born Again (1983), The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny (1996), Deconstructing Jesus (2000) and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003). He holds a Ph.D., Theology (1981) and a Ph.D., New Testament (1993) from Drew University.

PETER SAINT-ANDRE, email: <peter@saint-andre.com>, URL: <http://www.saint-andre.com/>, is an independent scholar living in Denver, Colorado. When not working as Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation, he is also active as a poet, musician, translator, and essayist.

CHRIS MATTHEW SCIABARRA, Visiting Scholar, Department of Politics, New York University, 726 Broadway, 7th floor, New York, New York 10003, email: <chris.sciabarra@nyu.edu>; url homepage: <http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra; Not a Blog>, is the author of the "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy,"  which includes Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (SUNY Press, 1995), Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State Press, 1995), and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State Press, 2000). He is also co-editor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (Penn State Press, 1999). His articles and letters on popular culture and music have appeared in publications as diverse as the New York Daily News, Billboard, Film Score Monthly, Just Jazz Guitar, Jazz Times, and The Free Radical.

LOUIS TORRES, email: <torres@aristos.org>, url: <http://www.aristos.org>, is an independent scholar and critic. He is co-author of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (2000), and is co-editor of Aristos, an online review of the arts---successor to the print journal of the same name, which he founded in 1982, and co-edited until its discontinuation in 1997.  A graduate of Rutgers University, where he majored in Psychology, he earned an M.A. in the teaching of English at Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to founding Aristos, he taught English and arts appreciation in public and private high schools. He is a specialist in the neglected fiction of Jack Schaefer, author of Shane.

THOMAS WELSH, email: <welshtr5@bpsolar.com>, a technical writer and database administrator, supports BP SOLAR's global engineering product development efforts. He has reviewed Neil Peart's book, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road (2002) for various online and print publications. Past and present forays have included stints as a small business owner and working for the oldest university press, The Johns-Hopkins University Press.