Taking pictures of Marilyn Wann, an activist who considers fat “flabulous,” was an inspiration for barbara Ries. “In my work, I find beauty in the many forms of the human body. Marilyn is a beautiful, vibrant person with a real message for women,” says Ries, 45, whose joyous portraiture in “Living Large” drives that message home. A freelance photographer living in San Francisco with her husband and their two children—Harry, 14, and Ellie, 9—Ries got her start at USA Today after studying photojournalism at the University of Missouri. She has worked on assignment for national publications like Time and Newsweek, winning key awards and becoming a Pulitzer finalist. Recently, she was among a select group of photojournalists chosen to chronicle A Day in the Life of the U.S. Armed Forces (HarperCollins, May 2003). A frequent contributor to STANFORD, in this issue she captures not only Wann’s ebullience but also the individuality of six Stanford thinkers in “America and the Paradox of Power.”

Like Monte Hellman, the filmmaker he profiles in Showcase, raymond hardie knows well the quirks of the arts world. It has given him a richly serendipitous acting and writing career, with Shakespearean drama, soap opera, a seven-month Broadway run—and seven years as senior editor of STANFORD—just part of the mix. Born in Northern Ireland, Hardie received his BA in English from Queen’s University Belfast in 1968. After graduate work at the University of Connecticut, he studied acting at the Bristol (England) Old Vic Theatre School, performed with the Liverpool Playhouse, co-founded a touring company and spent six years with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. His roles have ranged from the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Lenin in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties to Cliff, opposite Malcolm McDowell, in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Hardie also has written plays produced in Ireland and England; his most recent were workshopped last year at the Ashland (Ore.) Theater Festival and the Director’s Company in New York. He has sold numerous TV scripts to the BBC, turning one series (which the BBC failed to produce) into his second published novel. Settled in California for more than a decade, Hardie is now working on a play set in a Maryland hunting lodge.

Freelance writer Brian Eule, ’01, says he’s learned to use his imagination in chasing down a story. He has driven his junker right up to a pit crew at an auto race and asked for a checkup, and one time he competed against a pregnant woman in a triathlon (she won). But venturing into the Star Trek universe for his latest assignment brought him up short. Geoff Mandel’s illustrations revealed “more than I ever could have imagined” about the fantasy domain, he says. A former STANFORD intern, Eule recently resettled in the Bay Area after a stint in Boston reporting for the Patriot Ledger on topics ranging from prescription drugs and the elderly to his first-person impressions as a Californian facing his first New England winter.