New Podcast: David Hare performs his monologue Wall.
Forthcoming in the May 28, 2009 issue
A Black and Disgraceful Site
By Jonathan Freedland
In the early 1970s, Britain quietly handed over Diego Garcia, one of its furthest-flung territories, to the US military. In the process, a remote island idyll was simply emptied of its people, allowing for the creation of a place so secret that no journalist has been allowed to visit—a place that became a key staging post in George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a crucial node in the CIA's rendition system, a "black site" through which at least two high-value suspected terrorists were spirited, far from the prying eyes of international law.
Making It
By Sue Halpern
Warren Buffett's apparent disregard for the money he so excessively accumulates—an Omaha address, a five-bedroom house where he's lived for fifty-two years, an annual $100,000 salary, and a phone he answers himself—reinforces his credibility: he's not greedy, he's just good at what he does. But if Malcolm Gladwell is right, his success has little to do with genius.
Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
Patera with Chariot Hunt,
fifteenth–fourteenth century BC
(Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Who Should Own the World's Antiquities?
By Hugh Eakin
Some critics have viewed James Cuno's Who Owns Antiquity? as so partisan that they have not bothered to scrutinize its arguments. This is a pity, because whatever one makes of Cuno's thesis, it brings into focus some urgent questions—for museums and for archaeology—that have yet to be given much attention.
The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs
By Senator Arlen Specter
Since September 11, the United States has witnessed one of the greatest expansions of executive authority in its history, at the expense of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers. President Obama may be more likely to respect the separation of powers than President Bush was. But rather than put my faith in any president to restrain the executive branch, I intend to take several concrete steps, which I hope the new president will support.
How to Understand the Disaster
By Robert M. Solow
No one can possibly know how long the current recession will last or how deep it will go. Whenever the US economy returns to some sort of normality, or preferably before then, it will be necessary to improve and extend the oversight and regulation of the financial system. The main goal should be to make another such episode much less likely, and to limit the damage if one occurs. To make progress in that direction requires some understanding of the origins of the current mess.
- Podcast: Robert Solow on the economic crisis
The Universities in Trouble
By Andrew Delbanco
Last year, politicians and pundits were complaining about the unseemly wealth of elite colleges and universities. This year, alumni are getting emails from beleaguered presidents assuring them that Alma Mater will ride out the storm. But if we step back from the troubles of students, faculty, and staff already inside the academic world, there comes into view the most disturbing effect of the economic collapse: young people hoping to attend college will not be able to do so.
Israel: Civilians & Combatants
By Avishai Margalit and Michael Walzer
The point of just war theory is to regulate warfare, to limit its occasions, and to regulate its conduct and legitimate scope. Wars between states should never be total wars between nations or peoples. The crucial means for limiting the scope of warfare is to draw a sharp line between combatants and noncombatants.
A Silly, Very Cultured Club
By Ingrid D. Rowland
The first Dilettanti gathered together in a London tavern in the bleak December of 1734, to relive their experiences of the Grand Tour. Drowning the miseries of English winter in wine-soaked memories of Italian sunshine, they dressed in exotic costumes, bantered about sex, and exchanged the refined opinions about art that they had acquired during their sojourns in Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice.
Plus: John Gross on Hitler's Private Library, Christopher Benfey on Margaret Fuller, Michael Wood on Irvine Welsh's Crime, Garry Wills on Anne Carson's Oresteia, and more.
Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
- The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means by Mark Danner
- The ICRC Report (PDF)
- The Making of Samuel Beckett by J.M. Coetzee
- Wall: A Monologue by David Hare
- Maman's Boy by Martin Filler
- Knock on Wood by Tim Parks
- The War Against Women by Hilary Mantel
- Putin vs. the Truth by Orlando Figes
- Plus: Ronald Dworkin on Cass Sunstein's constitutional philosophy, Adam Kirsch on Philipp Blom's Vertigo Years, Andrew Hacker on making America smarter, Michael Dirda on Jayne Anne Phillips, Michael Massing on Thomas Ricks's The Gamble, poems by W.S. Merwin and Gottfried Benn, and more.
Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
- US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites by Mark Danner
- The Parables of Flannery O'Connor by Joyce Carol Oates
- How Mbeki Failed by Joseph Lelyveld
- Skirmishes in the Family Garden by Cathleen Schine
- Shall We Get Rid of the Lawyers? by Anthony Lewis
- 'A Hell on Earth' by Pico Iyer
- The Way of All Debt by John Gray
- The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian by Ingrid D. Rowland
- Plus: Michael Tomasky on Robert Kaiser's So Damn Much Money, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro on Bob Marley, James Oakes on Abraham Lincoln, Freeman Dyson on particle physicist Frank Wilczek, Dan Chiasson on John Ashbery, and more.
Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009
- Transgression by Daniel Mendelsohn
- The Thirty Days of Barack Obama by Elizabeth Drew
- The Enlarged Republic—Then and Now by Cass R. Sunstein
- How He Wrote His Songs by Lorrie Moore
- Capitalism Beyond the Crisis by Amartya Sen
- What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr by Brian Urquhart
- Metronatural America by Jonathan Raban
- From Shtetl to Château by Richard Dorment
- Plus: Stephen Greenblatt on The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, Helen Vendler on W. S. Merwin, Richard Bernstein on Beijing, Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Conor Cruise O'Brien, and more.
