Contents

August 19, 2010 • Volume 57, Number 13

LETTERS

Contributors

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. His article in this issue draws on his essay in Tyringham Topics.
 (February 2013)

George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC and the Open Society Foundations. (September 2012)

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at NYU. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here?, Justice in Robes, Freedom’s Law, and Justice for Hedgehogs. He was the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact” and he was recently awarded the Balzan Prize for his “fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence.”


Joost Hiltermann is Deputy Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group and Research Affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies. (May 2012)

Frank Rich is writer-at-large for New York magazine. His books include Ghost Light, a memoir, and The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America.

Tony Judt (1948–2010) was the founder and director of the Remarque Institute at NYU and the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land, and The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, among other books.

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)

Stephen Breyer is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. (August 2010)

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.

Wisława Szymborska, who died on February 1, 2012, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. (March 2012)

Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. (March 2012)

Stanisław Barańczak is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He won the 2007 Nike Award for the best work of Polish literature published in the previous year and the 2009 Silesius Poetry Award for lifetime achievement. He is a professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard University.

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, is now out in paperback.
 (March 2013)

Sue Halpern is the editor of NYRB Lit and scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Her new book, A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, will be published in May.
 (March 2013)

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

Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. (July 2013)

David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Author, Author and A Man of Parts. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

Jonathan Oberlander is Professor of Social Medicine and Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Political Life of Medicare.
 (August 2010)

Theodore R. Marmor is Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Political Science at Yale. His most recent book is Fads, Fallacies and Foolishness in Medical Care Management and Policy. (August 2010)

Joseph Lelyveld is a former correspondent and Editor of The New York Times. His latest book is Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.

 (June 2013)

Mark Ford teaches in the English Department at University College London. His anthology London: A History in Verse was published last July.
 (June 2013)

Martin Filler was the longtime architecture critic of House & Garden, until it ceased publication in 2007. He is the co-author, with Olivier Bossiere, of The Vitra Design Museum: Frank Gehry, Architect, and author of Makers of Modern Architecture, which is based on essays from The New York Review. A second volume of his writings on architecture is forthcoming from New York Review Books.


Tim Parks, a novelist, essayist, and translator, is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan. His books include Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing and The Server.

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

Fulton Armstrong is a former National Intelligence Officer. Thomas Powers’s new book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, will be published in November.
 (August 2010)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.


Daniel Wilkinson is Deputy Director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch. (June 2011)

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic. Her book A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction will be published this fall.
 (August 2010)

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.

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) He has been awarded an Open Society Foundation Fellowship for 2012–2013 to write his next book, on the role of civil society in enforcing constitutional rights.


Malise Ruthven is the author of Islam: A Very Short Introduction, Islam in the World: The Divine Supermarket (a study of Christian fundamentalism), A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam, and several other books. His latest book is Encounters with Islam: On Religion, Politics and Modernity.

Michael Pollan is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and, most recently, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.
 (June 2010)

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.