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Contents

April 7, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art, in New York, and at the University of Michigan. Along with In the Freud Archives, her books include Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She wrote about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the mother of Michelle, in her book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, just out in paperback. Her collection Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers will be published in the spring of 2013.


She lives in New York.

Julian Barnes has written eleven novels, three books of short stories, and four collections of essays. His latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Kabir (c. 1440–1518), the North Indian devotional or bhakti poet, was born in Benares (now Varanasi) and lived in the fifteenth century. Next to nothing is known of his life, though many legends surround him. He is said to have been a weaver, and in his resolutely undogmatic and often riddling work he debunks both Hinduism and Islam. The songs of this extraordinary poet, philosopher, and satirist, who believed in a personal god, have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millennium.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four books of poetry, the editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, and the translator of The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry. A volume of his essays, Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History will be published in 2011. He is a professor of English at the University of Allahabad and lives in Allahabad and Dehra Dun.

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.

Nicolas Pelham has reported on the Arab world for twenty years and currently writes for The Economist. He recently wrote a report about Sinai for the Royal Institute for International ­Affairs entitled “The Collapse of a Regional Buffer.”
 (December 2012)

Steve Coll is President of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.
 In July he will become Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. (February 2013)

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.

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. 
(June 2013)

Haleh Esfandiari is the Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the author of My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran. She was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison in Iran for 105 days in 2007. (April 2011)

Graham Robb is the author of The Discovery of France. His 
latest book is Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris. (April 2011)

James Salter is a novelist and short-story writer whose books include A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and Dusk and Other Stories. His novel All That Is will be published in April.
 (January 2013)

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.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

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)

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. Her latest novel, Fin & Lady, will be published in July 2013. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Jonas Gahr Støre is the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs. (April 2011)

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)

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.

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

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.

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His most recent book is Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, published in September. (December 2012)

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.

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.

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.


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.

John Golding (1929–2012) was a British painter and art historian. He taught at the Courtauld Institute and the Royal College of Art. Among his many books was Cubism: A History and an Analysis, which refuted the notion that Cubism represented a break with the realist tradition. Golding also curated exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, including Picasso: Painter/Sculpter and Matisse Picasso.

Andrew Delbanco is Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies at Columbia. His new books, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be and The Abolitionist Imagination, will be published in April.
 (February 2012)