Contents

March 6, 1997 • Volume 44, Number 4

LETTERS

Contributors

J. M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, is currently a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Adelaide. His newest book, *Summertime*, was published in 2009.

Richard C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin).

Robert Conquest, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of The Great Terror. (March 1997)

Jared Diamond, a Professor of Physiology and Public Health at UCLA and winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Medal of Science, is the author of, among other books, Guns, Germs, and Steel. (March 2004)

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), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). 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.

James Fenton is a visiting fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
 (March 2012)

Jeff Madrick teaches at Cooper Union. His latest book, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, was published in May. Frank Partnoy is the George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego. His most recent book is The Match King: The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals. (November 2011)