Contents

May 15, 2003 • Volume 50, Number 8

Contributors

Brady Kiesling was from 1983 until 2003 a career US diplomat, with service in Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Athens, and Yerevan, as well as three tours in the State Department. His letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell was published in the April 10 issue of The New York Review. (May 2003)

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.

Ronald Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006), Justice in Robes, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, and Freedom’s Law. He is the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact.”

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.


Christopher Logue is the author of All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer’s Iliad Rewritten, of which the poem in this issue is a part. The new book, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is the latest installment of War Music, an adaptation of the Iliad. His other works include several volumes of poetry, a pornographic novel, and a memoir, Prince Charming. (May 2003)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the author of numerous books on American history, served as adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He died this year. His Journals: 1952– 2000, from which an excerpt appears in this issue, will be published in October by Penguin. (October 2007)

Lorin Stein is Editor of The Paris Review. (December 2011)

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of *Animal Liberation*, the editor of *In Defense of Animals: The Second Wav*, and, with Paola Cavalieri, co-editor of *The Great Ape Project*.

Gordon A. Craig is J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford. His latest book is Politics and Culture in Modern Germany. (December 2003)

Al Alvarez’s most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

Jean Starobinski is Professor Emeritus of French literature at the University of Geneva. Blessings in Disguise and Largesse are among his works in English. A translation of his recent Action et réaction is to appear later this year. (May 2003)

Arthur Goldhammer has translated more than a hundred books from the French. (October 2007)

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.


Bernard Knox is director emeritus of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. Among his many books are The Heroic Temper, The Oldest Dead White European Males, and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. He is the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

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. (April 2011)

Tim Judah is the Balkans Correspondent of TheEconomist. He is the author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, a new edition of which has just been published. He is also the author of two books on Kosovo and one on the Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila. He has reported on the Balkans, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Sudan for The New York Review.
 (March 2010)

Peter Dailey is a New York attorney and writer. For much of the Nineties he worked on Haitian human rights and political cases. (March 2003)