plenty Issue 20 Feb/Mar 2008 | Page 12

plentycontributors Tracy Toscano is Plenty’s creative director and redesigned our magazine in the span of two months. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and spends her weekends at her off-the-grid, watercatchment-outfitted, solar-powered cabin in the Adirondack Mountains. Tracy is very grateful to her associate art director, Lindsay Kurz, for all her hard work on the redesign. Dan Barber is the executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. He kicks off a new column for Plenty this issue called “Farm to Fork” (page 50). Barber, who received Bon Appétit magazine’s Chef of Merit Award for 2007, will appear in each of our issues this year to offer up recipes that will cook readers through the seasons. If he had to choose a favorite midwinter meal (on penalty of death-by-chocolate, say), he’d go with something root-vegetable based. Rick Moody is the author of four novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir. The Ice Storm (1994) was made into a critically acclaimed film in 1997. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Harper’s. On a recent hike through Sabino Canyon, Rick survived an imaginary mountain lion attack. The attack made for less dramatic tension than the real thing might have, but it left his limbs intact, allowing him to file a humorous account for Plenty’s back page (“Take a Hike,” page 96). Liz Galst is determined to know why many Americans talk the green talk but don’t go any further. She recently set out on an odyssey through schools, ad campaigns, and retail stores nationwide to see if she could find an answer (“Monkeying with the Message,” page 66). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Salon .com. At the moment, Liz is engaged in a classic apartment-temperature war. She sees no reason to raise the heat above 63 degrees and thinks complainers (read: partner and kids) should just put on a sweater. Steven Kotler (“Way Beyond the Science,” page 78) is the author of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief. His essays and articles have appeared in GQ, Wired, and Outside. He recently moved to a one-acre farm in New Mexico, where he grows herbal medicines for his fifteen disaster-prone dogs, and a lot of people food, too. “I’ve spent a lot of time outside, but it’s been in rainforests and hiking through mountains and shit like that,” he says. “I’ve never just tried to live off the land. It’s hard.” Josh Cochran has drawn squirrels and wolves for Plenty, and was excited to draw some bees this time around (“New Bees on the Block,” page 38). He wishes they’d stop disappearing already. Josh’s illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and GQ. He lives in Los Feliz, California, and works on the edge of Koreatown and Silverlake in Los Angeles, surrounded by furniture designed and built by his studio-mates.