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Contents

March 28, 2002 • Volume 49, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Frederick Crews is a fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine. His most recent book is Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. (October 2011)

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. The article in the Review‘s November 24, 2011 issue is drawn from his new book, Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (Viking).

Owen Chadwick is the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and the author of The Reformation, The Victorian Church, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, and The Popes and European Revolution. (March 2002)

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

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.

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

Michael Tomasky is Special Correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He is also Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
 (February 2012)

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

John Russell was formerly Chief Art Critic of The New York Times, to which he continues to be a contributor. He is at work on a short history of the museum since 1800. (March 2003)

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. His latest collection of poems, White Egrets, will be published next year. (November 2009)

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of six books, including How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of critical essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. He is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard.

Jack Flam is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Brooklyn College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship, has just been published. (March 2003)

Joyce Carol Oates is Roger S. Berlind Professor of Humanities and the Arts at Princeton. Her most recent books are A Widow’s Story: A Memoir and the forthcoming The Corn Maiden: Novellas and Stories. (September 2011)

Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics and the National Medal of Science. His latest book for general readers is Lake Views: This World and the Universe.

Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator. He has translated nine books by Joseph Roth and was awarded the PEN translation prize for String of Pearls. He lives in London.

James Chace is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law at Bard College. He is the author of Acheson and, most recently, 1912: The Election That Changed the Country. He is now working on a biography of Lafayette. (October 2004)