Contents

January 12, 2012 • Volume 59, Number 1

LETTERS

Contributors

Edward Jay Epstein is an investigative journalist. His new book, The Annals of Unsolved Crime, was published in March 2013. His Web site is edwardjayepstein.com.

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.

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)

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

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.

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.

Yasmine El Rashidi is the author of The Battle for Egypt: Dispatches from the Revolution, and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun. She lives in Cairo.

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)

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.

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)

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author, among other books, of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. His latest book is The Crimean War: A History. (January 2012)

Lee Siegel is the author of four books, including Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce—and Why It Matters and Are You Serious: How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly. He is also the author of the essay “Harvard Is Burning,” just published as an e-book. He has written essays and reviews for many publications, including Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. In 2002, he received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.

Jeremy Waldron is University Professor at the NYU School of Law and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Harm in Hate Speech.
 (February 2013)

John Ashbery is the author of several books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Dan Chiasson’s latest book of poetry, Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, is out in paperback. He teaches at Wellesley.

 (June 2013)

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College. His latest book, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations, was published in May.
 (June 2012)

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East.
 (May 2013)

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.

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)

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954 in Gloucestershire, England, and attended Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Spell, The Line of Beauty, as well as of a translation of the play Bajazet by Racine. A former staff member at The Times Literary Supplement, Hollinghurst is a frequent contributor to that and other publications, including The Guardian. Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and his fifth novel, The Stranger’s Child, was published last October. He lives in London.

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.

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)

Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is President of the Open Society Institute. He is the author of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.

Kenneth Roth is the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. (April 2013)

Joel Simon is the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. (January 2009)

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.

Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has also published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture and a history of Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome.

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)

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.