Contents

May 12, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 8

LETTERS

Contributors

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at Princeton. His latest book is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

 (November 2012)

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.

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)

Colin Thubron is the president of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his books are Mirror to Damascus, The Hills of Adonis: A Quest in Lebanon, Jerusalem, In Siberia, and, most recently, To a Mountain in Tibet. 
 (January 2012)

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)

Ian Frazier is the author of ten books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia. 
(March 2013)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

Lorrie Moore is the Distinguished Writer in Residence for the 2013 spring semester at NYU.

 (February 2013)

Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton and author of The Rise of American Democracy. (February 2013)

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

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States.

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.

 (February 2013)

Jenny Uglow’s most recent book, The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, was published in January. (June 2013)

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)

Helen Epstein is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries, and an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She has advised numerous organizations, including the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, Human Rights Watch, and UNICEF. She writes frequently for various publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta, and is the author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa.

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.

John Summers is editor of The Baffler.

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.

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.