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Contents

July 3, 2003 • Volume 50, Number 11

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.

Edward R. F. Sheehan is a former US diplomat in the Middle East, a novelist (Cardinal Galsworthy), and the author of The Arabs, the Israelis, and Kissinger. He is a former Fellow of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. (April 2004)

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. A Death in Summer, a novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, was published in July 2011.


Max Rodenbeck is The Economist‘s Mideast Correspondent. He lives in Cairo. (October 2011)

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His latest books are The Fall of the House of Walworth and Early Autumn. 
(September 2011)

Clifford Geertz is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of, among other works, The Social History of an Indonesian Town and Negara: The Balinese State in the Nineteenth Century. (March 2006)

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

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.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

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)

Adam Shatz is the literary editor of The Nation. (September 2005)

Joseph Lelyveld is a former correspondent and editor of The New York Times. His latest book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, was published in April.
 (December 2011)