Contents

November 24, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 18

LETTERS

Contributors

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.

Ezra Klein is a columnist for The Washington Post, where he edits the Wonkblog, and a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg View.

 (September 2012)

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.


Helen Vendler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. Stone at Delphi: Seamus Heaney’s Poems with Classical References, Selected and Introduced by Helen Vendler has just appeared in a limited edition. (March 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.


Brent Staples writes editorials on politics and culture for The New York Times. He is the author of a memoir, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White. (November 2011)

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.


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.


Thomas Nagel is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at NYU. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos, was published in September. (December 2012)

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.

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)

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.


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.

John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Among his recent books are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, and The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. His latest book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, will be published in June 2013.

Eyal Press is a 2011 Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing writer at The Nation. His book Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times will be published next February. (November 2011)

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)

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.

Willibald Sauerländer is a former director of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. His latest book, Manet malt Monet: Ein Sommer in Argenteuil (Manet Paints Monet: A Summer in Argenteuil), has just been published. David Dollenmayer is Emeritus Professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is currently working on a translation of Martin Walser’s novel A Gushing Fountain.
 (February 2013)

David Dollenmayer is Emeritus Professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
 (December 2012)

Michael Greenberg is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. From 2003 to 2009 he wrote the Freelance column in the TLS.
 (April 2013)

William Pfaff was an editor of the lay-Catholic Commonweal magazine from 1949 to 1955, and remains a contributor. His latest book is The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy. (May 2013)

Paul Volcker was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan from 1979 to 1987, and the Chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Obama during 2009 and 2010. (December 2012)

Peter Singer is the Ira W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of *Animal Liberation*, the editor of *In Defense of Animals: The Second Wav*, and, with Paola Cavalieri, co-editor of *The Great Ape Project*.

Roderick Macfarquhar is Leroy B. Williams Research Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard. His most recent book is the edited volume The Politics of China: Sixty Years of the People’s Republic of China. (April 2013)

Pankaj Mishra lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. Mishra’s recent books include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her new book, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, will be published in the US in 
September. She has just been appointed Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. (May 2013)