Contents

November 11, 2010 • Volume 57, Number 17

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian of China. Until 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times of London. (October 2011)

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

Diane Ravitch won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2011 for her “careful use of social science research for the public good.” (March 2012)

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

George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC and the Open Society Foundations. The article in this issue is based on a talk he gave at the 2012 Davos World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.
 (February 2012)

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.

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.


Cathleen Schine is the author of several novels, including Rameau’s Niece, The Love Letter, She is Me, The New Yorkers, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Anthony Lewis, a former columnist for The New York Times, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.

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)

Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish poet and critic, is the Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Literature emeritus at Harvard.
 (March 2012)

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.

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.

Ian Jack has edited Granta since 1995. He began his career in journalism on a weekly newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s. Between 1970 and 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent (mainly in the Indian Subcontinent). He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited that newspaper between 1991 and 1995. His awards in Britain include those for reporter, journalist and editor of the year. A book of his writing about Britain, Before the Oil Ran Out, was published by Secker and Warburg in 1987 and republished by Vintage in 1997. He lives with his family in London.

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)

Colin McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He was recently awarded an honorary degree by the University of Kent and has three books forthcoming. (March 2011)

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.

Arnold Relman is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. His latest book is A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care.
 (October 2011)

Michael Tomasky is Special Correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He is also Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
 (February 2012)