upcoming in Volume 55, Number 15 · October 9, 2008
After the Conventions
John & Sarah in St. Paul
By Joseph Lelyveld
“A week is a long time in politics,” Harold Wilson’s old maxim, needs updating for the Internet age. Make it seventy-two hours. In that perspective, the former fighter pilot’s seemingly impulsive gamble on Sarah Palin was a brilliant success.
Obama & the Conquest of Denver
By Michael Chabon
The gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies, and goths—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain.
- Podcasts
Our correspondents report from St. Paul and Denver.
Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008
Obama: The Price of Being Black
By Andrew Hacker
We can see how being a farmer or a bond trader or a gun collector might influence your vote. And we understand why black Americans would want a person of their race in the Oval Office. But just what is there about being white that might incline someone toward one candidate instead of another?
Georgia and the Balance of Power
By George Friedman
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted.
The Perilous Price of Oil
By George Soros
The rising cost of oil, coming on top of the credit crisis, has slowed the world economy and reinforced the prospect of a recession in the US. The principal question is whether the sharp oil price increase is a speculative bubble or simply reflects fundamental factors such as rapidly rising demand from developing nations and an increasingly limited supply, caused by the dwindling availability of easily extractable oil reserves. The second question is related to the first. If the oil price increase is at least partly a result of speculation, what kind of regulation will best mitigate the harmful consequences of this increase and avoid excessive price fluctuations in the future?
Official American Sadism
By Anthony Lewis
Since the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was exposed, in April 2004, the Bush administration has maintained that any mistreatment was the work of a few "bad apples." No action has been taken against any higher-up, military or civilian. But a steady accumulation of disclosures, capped in June by a Senate committee report and hearing, has made it clear that abusive treatment of prisoners was a deliberate policy that came from the top—the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the White House.
A Summer of Madness
By Oliver Sacks
"On July 5, 1996," Michael Greenberg starts, "my daughter was struck mad." No time is wasted on preliminaries, and Hurry Down Sunshine moves swiftly, almost torrentially, from this opening sentence, in tandem with the events that it tells of.
The 'Mash of Myriad Sounds'
By Michael Kimmelman
On The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.
The Woman in White
By Joyce Carol Oates
On A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple.
'The Question of Global Warming': An Exchange
with William D. Nordhaus, Dimitri Zenghelis, Leigh Sullivan and Freeman Dyson.
Plus: Andrew Butterfield on George Inness, Edward Mendelson on Frank O'Hara, Adam Michnik on Bronislaw Geremek, Alan Hollinghurst on Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Jeff Madrick on the American worker, G. W. Bowersock on the Byzantine empire, poems by Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), and more.
Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008
- China: Humiliation & the Olympics by Orville Schell
- The Devastation of Iraq's Past by Hugh Eakin
- The Democrats & National Security by Samantha Power
- The Battle for a Country's Soul by Jane Mayer
- E.M. Forster, Middle Manager by Zadie Smith
- Bondage by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
- Scandal in Africa by Joshua Hammer
- Plus: John Updike on J.M.W. Turner, Ronald Dworkin on a great victory in the Supreme Court, Christian Caryl on North Korea, Cathleen Schine on Tim Winton's Breath, Orville Schell on China and the West, Benjamin Moser on the "Jewish" Rembrandt, Helen Epstein on the history of birth control, and more.
Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
- F. Kafka, Everyman by Zadie Smith
- From 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel
- Blood Relations by Claire Messud
- Embedded in Iraq by Michael Massing
- Iran: The Threat by Thomas Powers
- In the Night Kitchen by Stephen Greenblatt
- Isn't It Funny? by Mary Beard
- Obama & the Black Church by Darryl Pinckney
- Plus: Jonathan Mirsky on the Dalai Lama, Sanford Schwartz on the art of Peter Doig, Jonathan Freedland on Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, Madison Smartt Bell on Haitian authors, Deborah Eisenberg on Péter Nádas, and more.
Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008
- The Reign of Thuggery by Joshua Hammer
- The Jim Webb Story by Elizabeth Drew
- 'The Clarity of Things' by John Updike
- How the Mind Works: Revelations by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff
- India: The Place of Sex by William Dalrymple
- In Love with Duras by Edmund White
- Ghosts by Ian Buruma
- Plus: Pico Iyer on James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief, David Gilmour on Giuseppe Garibaldi, Christopher Benfey on Herman Melville, Francine Prose on Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, a poem by Anne Carson, and more.
