Contents

October 25, 2007 • Volume 54, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Michael Kimmelman is chief art critic of The New York Times. He is based in Berlin, writing the Abroad column for the Times on culture and society across Europe.
 (January 2011)

Rory Stewart is Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the former Coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces in Iraq and the author of The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq and The Places In Between. He lived for several years in Kabul and is the Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation there.
 (January 2010)

Sanford Schwartz is the author of Christen Købke and 
William Nicholson. (December 2011)

Patricia Meehan is a historian and former BBC documentary producer. She is the author of A Strange Enemy People: Germans under the British, 1945–50. (October 2007)

Charles Rosen’s recording The Romantic Generation, which contains a performance of Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, was recently reissued. (February 2012)

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.

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.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. (November 2010)

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 most recent works are 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.

Jeremy Waldron is University Professor at New York University School of Law and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House.
 (January 2012)

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.

Richard Bernstein was Time‘s bureau chief in China and has been a correspondent in France and Germany for The New York Times. His books include The Coming Conflict with China and, most recently, A Girl Named Faithful Plum: The True Story of a Dancer from China and How She Achieved Her Dream.
 (February 2012)

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic.
 (February 2012)

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial-page columnist for The Guardian. He is a past winner of the David Watt Prize for Journalism. (February 2012)

John Gross’s most recent book is A Double Thread, a memoir. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Parodies, which will be published in September. (April 2010)

Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award, was published in 1991. Mortals is his second novel.

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. He lives in Tehran with his wife and two children.

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.”

Frank J. Sulloway is Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author most recently of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. (November 2006)

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and Folk Photography. He has translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and written the introduction to George Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (both available as NYRB Classics). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.