Table of Contents

Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009

Hilton Als, Michael

Charles Wright, Sentences II (poem)

Roger Cohen, Iran: The Tragedy & the Future

Martin Filler, Up in the Park

Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street edited by Friends of the High Line, with forewords by James Corner and Ricardo Scofidio

Freeman Dyson, When Science & Poetry Were Friends

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes

Adam Hochschild, Rape of the Congo

Robert L. Herbert, Godfather of the Modern?

Cézanne and Beyond an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 26–May 17, 2009

Cézanne and the Dawn of Modern Art an exhibition at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, September 18, 2004–January 16, 2005

Cézanne und die Moderne an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen bei Basel, Switzerland, October 10, 1999–January 9, 2000

J.M. Coetzee, From 'Summertime': Notebooks 1972–1975

Joan Acocella, Pure Gold

The Golden Legend a dance piece by Christopher Williams

Michael Massing, The News About the Internet

Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press by Eric Boehlert

Michael Goldfarb: weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/

Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post: huffingtonpost.com/the-news/reporting/ryan-grim

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish: andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

Yves Smith: nakedcapitalism.com

M.J. Rosenberg: tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/mjrosenberg

Kevin Pho, KevinMD: kevinmd.com

Ezra Klein at The Washington Post: voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein

Mark Kleiman, The Reality-Based Community: samefacts.com

Mickey Kaus, kausfiles: www.slate.com/kausfiles/

Ron Kampeas, CapitalJ: blogs.jta.org/politics/

Joanne Jacobs: joannejacobs.com

Ross Douthat at The New York Times: nytimes.com

"Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" by Clay Shirky

"The State of the News Media, 2009: An Annual Report on American Journalism" by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism

"Why Are Bankers Still Being Treated As Beltway Royalty?" by Arianna Huffington

Talking Points Memo: talkingpointsmemo.com

ProPublica: propublica.org

Matthew Yglesias: yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel at FireDogLake: emptywheel.firedoglake.com

Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss: philipweiss.org/mondoweiss

Tanta at CalculatedRISK: calculatedriskblog.com

Glenn Greenwald: salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

Jeffrey Goldberg: jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com

And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture by Bill Wasik

Rob Browne at Daily Kos: rbguy.dailykos.com

Brad DeLong, Grasping Reality with Both Hands: delong.typepad.com/sdj

Juan Cole, Informed Comment: juancole.com

John Ashbery, 'Love Is Like Park Avenue'

Jason Epstein, New York: The Prophet

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint

Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch

Elaine Blair, I Am Not Steve Martin

Out of My Skin by John Haskell

J.H. Elliott, A Question of Coexistence

The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture by Jerrilynn D. Dodds

All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World by Stuart B. Schwartz

Brian Urquhart, Blundering in the Mideast with Prince Bandar

A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East— from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Patrick Tyler

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi

Michael Dirda, Messing About with 'The Wind in the Willows'

The Annotated Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, edited with a preface and notes by Annie Gauger

The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer

Michael Kimmelman, Bad Bargains for Russian Music

The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years by Simon Morrison

The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin

On Russian Music by Richard Taruskin

Max Hastings, A Very Chilly Victory

Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 by Andrew Roberts

Mary Beard, Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery

Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere

Charles Simic, The Toad (poem)

Fintan O'Toole, Oblomov in Dublin

The Complete Novels: At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien, with an introduction by Keith Donohue

Theodore R. Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander, Health Reform: The Fateful Moment

Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis by Senator Tom Daschle, with Scott S. Greenberger and Jeanne M. Lambrew

Shlomo Avineri, Zeev Sternhell, Avishai Margalit, et al. 'Israel: Civilians & Combatants': An Exchange

Pacho Lane, Timothy Snyder, 'Holocaust: The Ignored Reality': An Exchange

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Letters

Zhang Zuhua, China's Repression of Liu Xiaobo
More than 100 Signers of Charter 08, Sharing a Responsibility for History with Liu Xiaobo: A Statement by Signers of Charter 08
Mo Shaoping, Liu Xiaobo In Prison: A Letter From His Lawyer
Doug Ireland, Malise Ruthven, Ahmadinejad's Brutal Campaign Against Gays
Mahmood Mamdani, Dissent On Darfur
Thomas J. Donnelly, Anthony Lewis, 'Life Without Lawyers'
Max Page, Andrew Delbanco, Should Higher Education Be Free?
Michael Williams, Conor Cruise O'Brien & Dr. Johnson

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Contributors

Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mark Morris, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She also edited the recent, unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Hilton Als is a staff writer for The New Yorker. (August 2009)

John Ashbery is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, which won the Wolfson History Prize for 2008. (August 2009)

Elaine Blair is the author of Literary St. Petersburg. (December 2009)

J. M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, is currently Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. His new work of fiction, Summertime, from which the piece in this issue is drawn, will be published by Harvill Secker in October. (August 2009)

Roger Cohen is a columnist for the The New York Times and International Herald Tribune and author of Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo. (August 2009)

Michael Dirda is the author of two collections of essays, Readings and Bound to Please, the memoir An Open Book, and, most recently, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his reviews and essays in The Washington Post Book World. Before drifting into journalism, Dirda earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University, concentrating on medieval studies and European romanticism.

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson's books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

J. H. Elliott is Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He has just published a new volume of essays, Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1800. (August 2009)

Jason Epstein was for many years editorial director of Random House. He is chairman of On Demand Books, maker of the Espresso Book Machine. His latest book, Eating: A Memoir, will be published in October. (August 2009)

Martin Filler was the longtime architecture critic of House & Garden until it ceased publication in 2007. He is the co-author, with Olivier Bossiere, of The Vitra Design Museum: Frank Gehry, Architect, and author of Makers of Modern Architecture, based on essays from the New York Review.

Max Hastings has been an editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Evening Standard. His new book, Winston's War: Churchill as Warlord, 1940–45, will be published in the spring. (August 2009)

Robert L. Herbert, after a long career at Yale, is now Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has been named Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Among his books are Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the Decorative Arts, and Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. His most recent book is Seurat and the Making of –?La Grande Jatte.–?

Adam Hochschild's most recent book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2005. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. (August 2009)

Michael Kimmelman is chief art critic of The New York Times. He is based in Berlin, writing the Abroad column for the Times on culture and society across Europe. (November 2009)

Theodore R. Marmor is Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Political Science at Yale. The author of The Politics of Medicare (2000), his most recent book is Fads, Fallacies and Foolishness in Medical Care Management and Policy. (August 2009)

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist and critic with The Irish Times. His new book, Ship of Fools: How Corruption and Stupidity Killed the Celtic Tiger, will be published in the fall. (August 2009)

Jonathan Oberlander is a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and an associate professor of Social Medicine and Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Political Life of Medicare. (August 2009)

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He has published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. Voice at 3 A.M., his selected later and new poems, was published in 2003 and a new book of poems My Noiseless Entourage came out in the spring of 2005.

Brian Urquhart is a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. His books include Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War, and Ralph Bunche: An American Life. (August 2009)

Charles Wright is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Sestets: Poems. (August 2009)

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