February's Employees of the Month

MARIA GRUZDEVA

In spite of the post–Cold War thaw and increased news coverage of the recent re-freezing-over of East-West relations, it's still all too easy to see Russia as one big, snowy country made up of bearskin hats and Gazprom pipelines. Thankfully, Maria Gruzdeva has been documenting the country's borders for the last four years. From the islands off North Korea to balmy, palm-scattered Abkhazia in the south, she covers the inhabitants of the largest country on Earth. The earlier stages of her project, The Borders of Russia, won Maria the IdeasTap & Magnum Photos Photographic Award and made her a finalist for the LensCulture Exposure Award.

See SHOOTING THE EDGES

JONATHAN DIXON

Jonathan's writing has appeared in the Milan Review, Sleeping Fish, Post Road, the Boston Phoenix, and the New York Times, among others. He is the author of Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (Random House 2011), which he wishes were described more often as the "Jesus' Son of cooking-school memoirs." He spent seven demoralizing years as a staff writer at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where his pieces on getting yellow stains out of the armpits of white T-shirts and how to make homemade decongestants were deemed too controversial for publication. Jonathan's profile of the screenwriter and novelist Rudy Wurlitzer is his first article for us.

See THE INTERIOR FRONTIER

ROBERT MELEE

Robert Melee is a multidisciplinary artist creating installations that include sculpture, painting, photography, and video. He's currently working on a solo exhibition for David Castillo Gallery in Miami (to debut in September) and will show his new gilded-bottle-cap paintings in the Andrew Kreps booth at the upcoming New York Armory Show. We're pleased to publish a selection of photographs he took of his dear mother. He's put together a book proposal that includes many of the hundreds of portraits he's made of her over the years, and he's looking for a brave publisher to help him foist it on the world. To see more of his work, visit RobertMelee.com.

See the cover and MOMMY

MIMI DWYER

In middle school, Mimi Dwyer briefly worked as a reenactor at a colonial tenant farm in Virginia. Visitors routinely attacked her character's historical accuracy, mostly by pointing out the anachronism of her braces. One grown man called this her lack of "colonial viability." Mimi no longer has braces, but she still felt out of place eating fried chicken and other Southern treats with Civil War reenactors in Brazil, where we sent her to report on a community of Confederate descendants living there. In New York, Mimi works for a wire service, writes for the New Republic, and should never, ever, be trusted to drive your car.

See WELCOME TO AMERICANA, BRAZIL

COLE STANGLER

Cole Stangler is a Washington, DC–based writer, covering labor, trade, and environmental issues. His work has been published in the Nation, In These Times, the New Republic, and the American Prospect and cited in the New York Times. For this month's issue, Cole traveled to the oil fields of western North Dakota on a Grindr-fueled search for the gay men of the Bakken. While cruising for rustabouts and roughnecks, he discovered just how small the gay community up there is. The trip proved fatal for his once vegetarian diet. A native of suburban Connecticut—The Stepford Wives was filmed in his hometown—Cole likes coffee, baseball, and maps.

See THE BOYS ARE BAKKEN TOWN

ADAM THIRLWELL

Adam Thirlwell is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape, and the novella Kapow! His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Le Monde, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the Believer, the Guardian, and Esquire. He has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and he received the Somerset Maugham Award for an essay collection. He held the same fellowship that Wittgenstein had at Oxford. He's also a fox, but before you try Facebooking him you should know that he's happily married to and in love with a beautiful human rights lawyer who works in a swanky, old-fashioned office.

See UNPLANNED VIOLENCE

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli