Contents

October 23, 2008 • Volume 55, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Max Hastings has been the editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Evening Standard. His most recent book, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945, was published in November.
 (February 2012)

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956.
 (June 2013)

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East.
 (May 2013)

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His recent works include Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth. His new book Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012 will be published in 2013.


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

Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories. His play, The Testament of Mary, is now being staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

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.

James Oakes’s most recent book is The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. (April 2009)

John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. The article in this issue is drawn from the afterword to the paperback edition, which has just been published. (December 2010)

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, which has worked in Iraq. His new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened Americaå?s Enemies, has just been released. (October 2008)

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of several books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications and his most recent book is The Man Within My Head.

John Updike (1932–2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit: Angstrom, he two of which, Rabbit is Richand Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.

Diane Johnson is a novelist and critic. Her books include Lulu in Marrakechand Le Divorce. Her new book, Flyover Lives, will be published in January 2014.

John F. Murray is the author of Intensive Care: A Doctorå?s Journal. (October 2008)

Julian Bell is a painter and writer living in Lewes, England. He is the author of What Is Painting? and Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. (June 2013)

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

Adam Kirsch is a Senior Editor at The New Republic and a Contributing Editor to Tablet. His most recent book is Why Trilling Matters.
 (May 2013)

Pankaj Mishra lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. Mishra’s recent books include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia and author of The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. His article in the April 25, 2013 issue will appear as the introduction to Against the Current by Isaiah Berlin, to be published in a new edition by Prince­ton University Press in May 2013.

William Dalrymple was the curator of “Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857,” an exhibition for the Asia Society in New York in 2012. His new book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42, is published this month. (June 2013)

George Friedman is Founder and CEO of Stratfor, a private intelligence company publishing geopolitical and security analysis at www.stratfor.com. He is author of America’s Secret War. His new book, The Next Hundred Years, will be published in January 2009. (September 2008)

Hugh Eakin is a senior editor of The New York Review and edits the NYRblog. (January 2013)

Mark Harman is Professor of English and Modern Languages at Elizabethtown College. The paperback edition of his translation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person appeared in August. (September 2011)

Edmund White has written biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. He has also written several novels; the most recent is Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel. He teaches creative writing at Princeton.

G.W. Bowersock is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His latest book, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, was published in April. (May 2013)