Volume 57, Number 3 · February 25, 2010
In the World of Facebook
Charles Petersen
What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them.
Port-au-Prince: The Moment
Mischa Berlinski
My chair was on casters and began to roll. A large earthquake starts as a small earthquake. I saved my novel: Control+S. The horizon swayed at an angle. I had time to think many things—that's how long the quake lasted. I thought that I should stand under the lintel of the doorway. I took my laptop and started to leave. Then, unsteady on my feet, I wondered whether the laptop wouldn't be safer where it was. I put it back on the table. I went outside.
A Deal With the Taliban?
Ahmed Rashid
The war in Afghanistan now faces a pivotal moment: at stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Taliban. General Stanley McChrystal has a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives to Taliban fighters who put down their arms. Senior Pakistani officials now say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. For their part, the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, following secret talks in Saudi Arabia last year. But talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes. What can be done?
A Knife at the Door
Francine Prose
Believers and nonbelievers have long been drawn to confessions, like Saint Augustine's, that read like dispatches from the knock-down drag-out encounter between God and the stubborn sinner. Mary Karr's Lit, which probably takes its title from the notion that Karr's salvation—and her sobriety—comes both from her love for literature and her spiritual enlightenment, is one of those.
The "Devastating" Decision
Ronald Dworkin
Against the opposition of their four colleagues, five right-wing Supreme Court justices have now guaranteed that big corporations can spend unlimited funds on political advertising in any political election.
The Google Books Settlement
The Authors Guild and Robert Darnton
The Warhol Foundation on Trial
Paul Alexander, Michael Findlay, Joel Wachs, and Richard Dorment
What Andy Warhol Really Did by Rainer Crone
What Is a Warhol?: A Second Exchange
'What Is an Andy Warhol?': An Exchange
What Is an Andy Warhol? by Richard Dorment
Plus: Freeman Dyson on Paul Dirac, Steve Coll on Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Charles Baxter on Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, three more memoirs by Tony Judt, and more.
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