The December 2015 issue of the (new) New Republic features some rather unique contributor bios next to the masthead. We've listed them below, and mixed in some fake examples. See if you can tell which is which.
1. Gavin Francis is a doctor, writer, and the author of three books. His latest, Adventures in Human Being, connects health and medicine with philosophy, art, and other cultural contexts. "As an enthusiast of life, and in particular our lives as human beings," he said, "I'm interested whenever medicine, philosophy, and culture converge."
2. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian was born in Canada to Iranian parents living in Switzerland. She has been writing about citizenship and statelessness ever since being denied a U.S. green card in 2010 for listing the wrong country on her application. Her article is excerpted from her book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, published in November by Columbia Global Reports.
3. Finn Clephane, an associate editor of the New Republic, is a graduate of Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, where he majored in creative writing and sustainable farming. His thesis on "Food Justice and the Dawn of the Agri-Corporation" claimed second prize in the Sierra Club's annual "Eat Green" competition. He brings his own lunch to the office.
4. Alexander Chee, a contributing editor at the New Republic, is a creative writing lecturer at Princeton and author of the forthcoming novel, The Queen of the Night. If Chee were in charge of the North American Society of Hoteliers and Innkeepers, the fictional society in Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, the book he would place in every room, like the Bible, would be Chris Kraus's I Love Dick.
5. Ejiro Jelani is a policy analyst at the Better Africa Institute in Washington, D.C. She has reported on women's health and East African affairs for The Nation, The Guardian, and Buzzfeed since 2011. Her article is excerpted from The Queen of Air and Darkness, a memoir of her childhood and early adolescence as a transwoman in the suburbs of Nairobi, to be published in December by Virago. Her favorite cookies are gingerbread.
6. Greg Sargent is an opinion blogger and reporter for The Washington Post. It took having two children to persuade him that his concern about the climate should go a bit deeper than getting annoyed by the air conditioning at the local Starbucks.
7. Stan Cox and Paul Cox have reported together from the locations of cyclones, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, and, most relevantly, floods. Paul, who is Stan's father, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, 30 feet above sea level, and Stan lives in Salina, Kansas, 640 miles from the nearest coast. Their piece is drawn from their forthcoming book, How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia, to be published in June 2016 by The New Press.
8. Grażyna Pasternak immigrated to the United States as a child in 1993. She edits the popular vegan food blog In the Raw, and is the author of the forthcoming poetry cookbook Much Depends on Dinner. Though fluent in English, she can never remember the word for "scaffolding." She is the great-grandniece of former Czechoslovakian president Antonín Novotný.
9. Topaz Florence, a staff writer at the New Republic, is a Capitol Hill veteran who served three years as a legislative assistant to Senator Al Franken, specializing in healthcare policy and urban development. Having a former comedian as a boss, she said, was "funnier than watching Donald Trump claim to support women's rights, but it's a close call."
10. Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, grew up just 22 miles north of Salem, Massachusetts, where her mother was born. Her most lasting memory of visiting the town is the giant witch painted in black on the bottom of the community pool.
11. Jeffrey Ball is a scholar-in-residence at Stanford's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. He and his family live on campus in an undergraduate dorm retrofitted to withstand earthquakes. These days, he said, "the disasters that typically befall the dorm are of a sort for which, shall we say, insurers don't offer coverage."
12. Sheila Jackson Lee is the U.S. Representative for Texas's 18th congressional district, and ranking member on the House Subcommittee on Transportation Security. After serving in Congress for more than two decades, she credits "spa weekends" for helping to maintain her sanity.
13. Lalage Clegg-Norris and Griffin Schroeder met while teaching English to high school students in Battambang, Cambodia, where they founded Land of Smiles, an animal orphanage and educational center for disabled victims of the Khmer Rouge. Lalage, a British citizen, was awarded an MBE for her achievements in charitable service.
14. Zhong Pan is a professor of neurobiology at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He lives with his family in Durham in an EPA-certified townhouse complex made of 90 percent reclaimed wood and recycled materials. His piece is drawn from his research into the "partisan brain," which been has recognized for outstanding achievement by the National Academy of Sciences.
15. Rebecca Leber, a staff writer at the New Republic, frequently reports on environmental issues, a job which comes with its own occupational hazards: She once dreamed a massive drought—the global version of California's current crisis—had plunged the world into anarchy. During waking hours, and in these pages, she's a bit more optimistic.
(Scroll down to find out)
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(Answer: 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14 are fake) How did you do?