Lynn Cheney has been characterized as a "right-wing warrior who used her post at the NEH to fight the Republican culture wars of the eighties; the ideologue who, after continuing to serve as head of the NEH through the Bush years, resigned following Clinton's election and moved to the American Enterprise Institute to write Op-Ed hit pieces, and later co-hosted the now-defunct CNN show Crossfire Sunday--she was the one "on the right." In her heyday Lynne Cheney was not just a conservative gadfly; after she targeted the National History Standards in 1994, the Senate voted 99 to 1 in support of her call to defund the project. Very few opinion writers ever experience that kind of triumph"

John Edgar Wideman's life is as dramatic as any of his brooding, Faulknerian novels. Born in Pittsburgh to a black working-class family, he became an African-American golden boy — a Rhodes scholar and basketball star, as talented on the court as he was brilliant in the classroom, and the subject of a 1963 Look magazine article titled "The Astonishing John Wideman." As a boy, he planned to leave his background behind for a dazzling future as a novelist, academic and intellectual, but family and politics intervened. Wideman came to see the complex problems of African-American life as inescapable. His brother, Robby, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison (the victim was killed by Robby's partner in a robbery) in 1976. Wideman's struggle to come to terms with his brother's deeds and their consequences became the subject of his memoir, "Brothers and Keepers." Then, in 1986, his own 16-year-old, mixed-race son stabbed and killed a classmate during a field trip. Articles that subsequently appeared in Vanity Fair and Esquire indicated the boy had long been emotionally troubled and characterized Wideman as filled with controlled racial anger.

American screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote the films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Affliction. In an online interview, he talks about his self-destructive and edgy heroes, his relationship with Martin Scorsese and his Dutch Calvinist upbringing. Former critic of renown whose contributions to American cinema include three striking screenplays for Martin Scorsese and a directorial output that has unrelentingly and inventively examined both true-life stories and controversial social issues, Schrader began his career as a film critic in Los Angeles and published a still-influential study, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, in 1972. His first produced screenplay, co-written with his brother Leonard (who later scripted Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1985) and Robert Towne, was for the Japanese underworld thriller, The Yakuza, (1975). Schrader collaborated with Scorsese for the first time on Taxi Driver, (1976), a classic study of urban alienation, and made his directorial debut with Blue Collar (1978), a gripping, muckraking account of autoworker exploitation in Detroit. After several flawed but interesting films, he attracted attention with the ambitious, multi-layered biopic, Mishima (1985), a portrait of controversial Japanese author Yukio Mishima. The film took the "artistic merit" prize at Cannes for "John Bailey's visual conception, Eiko Ishioka's designs and the music of Philip Glass." Schrader's subsequent work has encompassed controversial subjects ranging from the life of Jesus, in the Scorsese-directed The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), to terrorism, in 1988's Patty Hearst. Returning to a favorite theme of the damaged macho man, he fashioned a minor masterpiece from Russell Banks' novel Affliction (1998), offering actors Nick Nolte and James Coburn meaty roles as a son and father struggling to connect. Schrader, who was formerly married to production designer Jeannine Oppewall, married actress Mary Beth Hurt in 1983.

Columnist Katha Pollitt is well known for her sharp and provocative analyses of popular culture and politics. Her "Subject to Debate" column, which The Washington Post called "the best place to go for original thinking on the left," began in January 1994 and appears every other week in The Nation; it is frequently reprinted in newspapers across the country. Pollitt counts Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf among her many vocal fans and Camille Paglia--who wrote recently that she hopes Pollitt "burns in hell" for her analysis of Katie Roiphe's The Morning After--among her critics. A superb stylist, Pollitt can always be relied on for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. In the past, her Nation essays have targeted "family values," surrogate mothers and "difference feminism," among other topics. More recently, her column has tackled teenage motherhood, welfare "dependency," abortion's place in health care reform, the Million Man March, the French strikes of fall 1995 and Shakespeare in the canon.

A noted American playwright, David Alan Mamet, was born in Chicago on November 30, 1947. He studied at Goddard College in Vermont and at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. He has taught at Goddard College, the Yale Drama School, and New York University, and regularly lectures to classes at the Atlantic Theater Company, of which he is a founding member. David Mamet is a leading American playwright whose spare, gritty work reflects the rhythms of Harold Pinter and the tough attitudes of his native Chicago. Noted for his strong male characters and their macho posturings, Mamet's knack for creating low-key yet highly charged verbal confrontations in a male-dominated world has consistently made his work fodder for discussion and deconstruction.

PBS, Bob Doles’ Acceptance Speech

CNN, "Dole to Hollywood: Don’t Hurt Our Families"

The Washington Post, "Dole’s Blast at Hollywood Resonates"

CNN, "Lawmakers, Health Professionals Blast Entertainment for Marketing Adult Material to Children."

CNN, "America moved toward family-friendly entertainment in 1996"