Contents

April 11, 2002 • Volume 49, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

Sanford Schwartz’s reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers. (May 2013)

Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, won the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics. His most recent book is Work and Welfare. (May 2009)

John Lanchester is the author of five books including, most recently, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. In 2008 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 (December 2011)

Christian Caryl is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and the Editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab website.
 His book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century was published in April 2013.

Fintan O’Toole is Literary Editor of The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Prince­ton. His latest book is A History of Ireland in 100 Objects.
 (June 2013)

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art, in New York, and at the University of Michigan. Along with In the Freud Archives, her books include Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She wrote about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the mother of Michelle, in her book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, just out in paperback. Her collection Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers will be published in the spring of 2013.


She lives in New York.

Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA, is the author most recently of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (June 2012)

James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2007 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s recent works include Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

Howard Gardner teaches psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, is Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. (April 2002)

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.


John Bayley is a critic and novelist. His books include Elegy for Iris and The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.

Thomas Nagel is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at NYU. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos, was published in September. (December 2012)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of The Death of Conservatism.
 (May 2012)

Andrew Hacker teaches political science at Queens College. He is currently working on a book on mathematics with Claudia Dreifus.
 (January 2013)

Perry Link is retired from Princeton and now teaches at the University of California at Riverside. He translated China’s Charter 08 manifesto, published in these pages, and recently 
co-edited No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo. His latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics, will be published in January 2013.

Peter Holland holds the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He wrote the entry on Shakespeare in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (December 2004)

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at Princeton. His latest book is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

 (November 2012)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.


Michael Frayn is a playwright and novelist. His new novel, Spies, will be published in April. (March 2002)

Alan Ryan teaches at Princeton. His recent works include The Making of Modern Liberalism and On Politics: A History of Political Thought.

Rosemary Dinnage’s books include The Ruffian on the Stair, One to One: Experiences of Psychotherapy, and Annie Besant.