Contents

March 26, 2009 • Volume 56, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of fourteen books, including one of the first books on the role of money in modern US politics, from 1983.


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.

Cass R. Sunstein, who is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is on leave of absence and working in the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration. His essay in this issue, written before he began work for the government, will appear in different form in the John Harvard Library edition of The Federalist to be published in October; parts of the essay draw on his article –?Interest Groups in American Public Law,–? Stanford Law Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1985). (March 2009)

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.

Richard Dorment is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph. Among the exhibitions he has organized is “James McNeill Whistler,” seen at the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(February 2012)

Lorrie Moore teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She has won the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Her most recent book is A Gate at the Stairs.
 (December 2011)

Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and general editor of The Norton Shakespeare. His book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern received the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
 (March 2012)

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His most recent book is The Idea of Justice. (May 2011)

H. Allen Orr is University Professor and Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. He is the author, with Jerry A. Coyne, of Speciation.
 (August 2010)

Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Her most recent book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, was published last year.
 (November 2011)

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)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 1996, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! (June 2011)

Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune and author of Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo. (September 2010)

Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W.H. Auden and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Early Auden, Later Auden, and many essays on (and editions of) nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard. His latest book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
 (November 2011)

James M. McPherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Among his other books are For Cause and Comrades, Drawn with the Sword, What They Fought For, Gettysburg, and Fields of Fury. A professor at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

David Cole is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the award-winning author of several books, including The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (2009), Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (with Jules Lobel, 2007) and Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (2003).

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)