The masthead

Carter Vance writes the magazine's deepest narrative profiles. His pieces typically run between four and six thousand words, and he tends to sit with his subjects across multiple sittings rather than try to extract a profile from a single afternoon. He is unhurried in voice and unsentimental in posture; he treats the reporting process less like an interview and more like a slow patient watch.

Before joining Frontier Bylines he wrote for a string of small independent literary quarterlies and a regional weekly that no longer exists. He keeps a list, taped to the wall above his desk, of the writers whose sentences he steals from on bad days: Joan Didion, John McPhee, Janet Malcolm, Ta-Nehisi Coates. He thinks of the list as an obligation rather than a compliment to himself. He has never owned a press badge with a lanyard on it.

Vance works from a small apartment in a quiet college town in the Pacific Northwest. He prefers the kind of subject who has been doing the work for a long time without much noise around it. He is uninterested in covering people who appear regularly on conference stages, and he says, without irony, that the best profiles are the ones the subject is mildly embarrassed by.

Imogen Reilly is the magazine's culture critic. She writes about music, books, the visual arts, and the places where they collide with technology and capital. Her pieces sit at the intersection of criticism and reportage, and they tend to ask harder questions about taste, scene formation, and authorship than the field is generally comfortable with. She is suspicious of consensus and patient with ambivalence.

She came to writing after a decade working in and around the independent music industry, first as a publicist and later as a label A&R. That history gives her work a specific texture: she knows the economics underneath the art, and she does not romanticize either side. She writes about records the way someone who has watched a hundred album cycles writes about records — with both reverence and skepticism, often in the same sentence.

Reilly is based in Edinburgh and travels often. She is a fast writer and a slow editor, and she has a habit of holding pieces back for weeks if she does not yet trust their ending. She is the writer most likely on the masthead to file a piece about a record that does not yet exist, because she thinks the conversation around the artist is more revealing than the music itself.

Soraya Halim covers the founders, scenes, and ecosystems of Asia for Frontier Bylines. Her dispatches range from Chiang Mai to Seoul to Singapore to Bangalore, and she tends to write the kind of feature that begins with a long scene in a specific room and slowly widens out into something structural about the region. She speaks four languages and writes in two of them.

Before joining the magazine, Halim worked as a stringer for several international publications and as a producer on a long-running radio documentary series about labor and migration in Southeast Asia. That documentary background shapes her writing. She is unusually patient with pacing, and her profiles tend to give the subject room to talk before the writer interprets. She is wary of the foreign-correspondent posture and refuses to take the position of the visiting expert.

Halim is based out of Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur in equal measure. She is the writer on the masthead most likely to argue, in editorial meetings, that the most important AI story of the next decade will not be written from the United States or Europe. She is patient about that argument. She has been making it, in print, since long before most of the field was paying attention.