January's Employees of the Month

HAISAM HUSSEIN

Haisam Hussein's longtime interest in maps and visual art led him to the graphics department at Condé Nast Traveler (after a brief stint at a bridal magazine). He spent 13 years there honing his infographic chops and drawing hundreds of maps. More recently, he's been putting his skills to use freelancing for magazines like the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic and as a regular contributor to Lapham's Quarterly. His work has covered topics as varied as crime, love, food, terrorism, revolutions, and drugs. When he's not clicking away at his desk, he's either building things for his new home, experimenting with the laser cutter in his basement, or traveling.

See FUCKONOMICS

DANIEL HERNANDEZ

After years of reading Daniel's amazing articles about Mexico, we finally persuaded him to work full-time for VICE in May 2013. He edited our Mexican edition of the magazine for a year and later became the bureau chief of VICE News in Mexico City. Daniel grew up in California, graduated from Berkeley, where he edited the school newspaper, the Daily Californian, and later joined the Los Angeles Times as a reporter before moving on to LA Weekly. In 2007 he moved south of the border to write his book Down & Delirious in Mexico City. Although he has dual citizenship and says he loves both of his countries, he chose to stay in Mexico for the food.

See THE LOST BOYS

SPENCER WOODMAN

Spencer Woodman is a journalist living in New York City. His work focuses on labor issues, private-sector corruption, and voting rights. His investigations have been published by the Guardian, the Nation, Slate, and the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund. If Uber's opposition researchers ever attempt to dig up dirt on him, they will enjoy finding a wealth of crude banjo solos and off-key harmonies for which he is directly responsible. In September, he traveled to Coffeyville, Kansas, to get to know some of the RV-borne migrant workers who provide Amazon warehouses with temporary labor in the busy holiday season.

See IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES

JAIMIE WARREN

Jaimie Warren has been a regular VICE contributor since we first published her work in 2005. For the past ten years we've been filling these humble pages with her weird and hilarious photos, but she somehow never shot a cover for us, so we decided it was time for that to happen. We told her she could do whatever she wanted, and what Jaimie wants usually involves costumes and sets and sometimes horror movies. That's how we ended up with the beautiful face that slapped you in the eyeballs before you picked up this magazine. Jaimie's portfolio of B-movie photos will premiere as animated GIFs this month on VICE.com.

See the cover and JAIMIE WARREN'S HORRORFEST 2015

GEMMA SIEFF

Gemma Sieff was born in London to South African Jewish parents and has a green card. She has worked on the editorial staff at the New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and the new and improved Town & Country and has written for n+1 and the Paris Review. She lives alone in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, after accidentally harboring three minor criminals. She'd like to be in the middle rather than always laughing or crying. She's going to stop with the e-cig thing any day now. For this issue, she contributed a story about meeting and falling for a baseball player, driving high-end cars around the US and Europe, and wrecking one of them.

See GONE IN 60 SECONDS

JACOB Z. GROSS

We found Jacob buried in a pile of centuries-old newspapers and obscure scientific journals outside the Harper's Magazine office on Broadway. "Help me. Please help me," he whimpered. "I'm an editor at a storied New York magazine, and my life is pretty good, but they make me read all these articles from the 1800s and dry data sets and repurpose them into pithy content for a modern audience, and goddammit, I can't take it anymore! It's a great magazine and a pleasant place to work, but I'm wasting my youth reading old issues of Farmers' Almanac. Do you know of a magazine that's hiring and won't make me do all that?" Jacob is our new senior editor.

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli