Contents

July 12, 2012 • Volume 59, Number 12

LETTERS

Contributors

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. (June 2013)

Robin Wells is the coauthor, along with Paul Krugman, of Economics and has taught economics at Princeton, Stanford Business School, and MIT.
 (July 2012)

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

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.


Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. (July 2013)

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.

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)

Christian Caryl is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and the Editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab website.
 His book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century was published in April 2013.

Hilary Mantel is an English novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her novel, Wolf Hall, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

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)

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.


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.

Diane Ravitch won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2011 for her “careful use of social science research for the public good.”
 (July 2012)

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s recent works include Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

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

 (February 2013)

Michael Chabon is the author of several books, including The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son and most recently, Telegraph Avenue.

Amit Majmudar’s latest collection of poetry, Heaven and Earth, won the Donald Justice Prize in 2011. His second novel, Abundance, will be published next year.
 (July 2012)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.


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.

R. J. W. Evans is a Fellow of Oriel College and Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Oxford. His books include Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, c. 1683–1867. (July 2012)

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play, Pastorale.
 She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in New York City.

Caleb Crain is the author of American Sympathy, a study of friendship between men in early American literature. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and n+1. His novel Necessary Errors will be published in 2013.

Charles Petersen, an associate editor at n + 1, has written for The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wall Street Journal. (December 2010)

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.


David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. His latest book is More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India.

 
(October 2012)

Jeff Madrick writes an economics column for Harper’s Magazine, is editor of Challenge Magazine, and is director of the Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Roo­sevelt Institute. His most recent book is Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America.

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)

Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography and Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
He is Professor Emeritus of Writing and Translation at Columbia.
 (March 2013)

Michael Kimmelman is chief architecture critic of The New York Times, a 2012 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
 (April 2012)