Contents

November 25, 2010 • Volume 57, Number 18

LETTERS

Contributors

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. His latest book is The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. (November 2010)

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches and the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic.
 (January 2013)

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, was published in September.

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso, Volume Three, was published in 2007. Volume One won the Whitbread Prize in England in 1991.

James McPherson is George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. His most recent book is War on the Waters: The Union and Confederates Navies, 1861-1865.

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.


Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggles for Poland, The Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.


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.


Giles Harvey is on the editorial staff at The New Yorker. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
 (May 2012)

Michael Dirda, a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure. His most recent book, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award for best critical/biographical work of the year.
 Dirda graduated with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature (medieval studies and European romanticism) from Cornell University. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the online Barnes & Noble Review, and several other periodicals, as well as a frequent lecturer and an occasional college teacher.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

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)

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Eliot Weinberger’s most recent book is the essay collection Oranges & Peanuts for Sale.

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)

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

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.


Roger Alcaly, who formerly taught economics at Columbia, is a hedge fund manager and author of The New Economy.
 (March 2010)

Charles Baxter is the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. His latest book, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, was published in paperback in February. (December 2012)