By George Soros

The following is adapted from testimony given by George Soros before the US Senate Commerce Committee Oversight Hearing on June 3, 2008.

By Michael Kimmelman

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross

For several weeks this spring, a sculptural installation by Richard Serra--five slender, soaring steel monoliths, fifty-six feet high and seventy-five tons each, spaced evenly apart and differently tilted just so--occupied the emptied nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. The work was called Promenade. Large cranes were required to install it, and viewers were expected to traverse the expanse, a length of more than a football field. The subtle ways each slab played off against the others, the shifting effects of sunlight through the great, paned ceiling, shadows moving about--all this unfolded during the process of walking around, over time. For Serra, art that occupies large spaces enlists temporal effects, nudging sculpture a little bit toward film or music.

By Anthony Lewis

Guantanamo: Beyond the Law
a series of five articles by Tom Lasseter

Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact
a report by Physicians for Human Rights, with a preface by Major General Antonio M. Taguba

The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power
by Jonathan Mahler

Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan accused of throwing a grenade at a convoy of American soldiers in Kabul in late 2002, wounding two, was brought to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in February 2003. He was then seventeen years old. In December 2003 he attempted suicide. The following May he was subjected to what Guantánamo officials called the 'frequent flyer program.' Every three hours, day and night, he was shackled and moved to another cell--112 times over fourteen days.

By Oliver Sacks

Hurry Down Sunshine
by Michael Greenberg

Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic
by John Custance

Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression
by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
by Kay Redfield Jamison

Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
by Kay Redfield Jamison

The Seduction of Madness: Revolutionary Insights into the World of Psychosis and a Compassionate Approach to Recovery at Home
by Edward M. Podvoll

Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry
by Emil Kraepelin

Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia
by Emil Kraepelin

'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 onset of mania is sudden and explosive: Sally, the fifteen-year-old daughter, has been in a heightened state for some weeks, listening to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations on her Walkman, poring over a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets till the early hours. Greenberg writes:

By Joyce Carol Oates

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

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
by Brenda Wineapple

A mysterious 'confluence of hummingbirds' is the starting point for Christopher Benfey's engagingly impressionistic work of literary and cultural criticism, focusing on the summer of 1882 when Americans as gifted and temperamentally disparate as Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, and Mabel Todd and Martin Johnson Heade seem to have become 'fanatical' about hummingbirds:

By William D. Nordhaus

The New York Review received many letters concerning 'The Question of Global Warming' by Freeman Dyson [NYR, June 12]. Following are comments by William D. Nordhaus, whose book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, was reviewed in the article, as well as letters from two other readers, along with a reply by Freeman Dyson.

By Dan Kurzman

By Perez Zagorin

By Bruce Fetter

By Andrew Hacker

Restoring the Right to Vote
by Erika Wood

Crawford v. Marion County [Indiana] Election Board


Florida State Conference of the NAACP v. Browning


In May, Hillary Clinton described many of her core supporters as 'hard-working Americans, white Americans.' Primary voting in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia confirmed her surmise. Her remark seemed, without saying so, to claim an advantage over Obama that was due to his race. But there's more we need to know. 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?

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 United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This has opened an opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that on August 8.

By Joshua Hammer

With his ruthless seizure of power in the June 27 runoff election in Zimbabwe, following a well-organized campaign to intimidate and murder members of the opposition, Robert Mugabe joined Myanmar's military junta at the top of the list of the world's most despised dictators. Both the Burmese generals and Mugabe's inner circle have enriched themselves while reducing their people to near starvation. They have jailed, tortured, and killed supporters of democracy, and shrugged off years of international condemnation. Moreover, unlike Myanmar's secretive regime, Mugabe and the cabal that supports him have seemed to enjoy flaunting their contempt for democracy and their easy embrace of violence.

By Zadie Smith

The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929–1960
edited by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, with a foreword by P.N. Furbank

In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Still, there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was free of many vices commonly found in novelists of his generation--what's unusual about Forster is what he didn't do. He didn't lean rightward with the years, or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the Pope or the Queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin, or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a hand-basket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum, or foreigners swamping the cities.

By Ronald Dworkin

Boumediene v. Bush is one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in recent years. The Court held by a 5-4 vote that aliens detained as enemy combatants in Guantánamo have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in American courts. The decision frees none of them, some of whom have been held without trial for six years, but it makes it possible for them to argue to a federal district court judge that the administration has no factual or legal ground for imprisoning them. If that judge is persuaded, he must order their release. American law has never before recognized that aliens imprisoned by the United States abroad have such rights. The disgrace of Guantánamo has produced a landmark change in our constitutional practice.

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond


Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
by Ben Macintyre

The Spy Within: Larry Chin and China's Penetration of the CIA
by Tod Hoffman

ZigZag: The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman
by Nicholas Booth

Devil May Care
by Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond
by Ben Macintyre

Fifty years ago, a fictional spy who had gradually become famous suddenly became notorious. Dr. No was the sixth of the books that had been appearing since 1953 when Ian Fleming, a restless, cynical English newspaperman, published Casino Royale, and with the words 'The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning,' James Bond first appeared. Fewer than five thousand copies were initially printed, but sales rose with each book, Bond entered the national consciousness, and his adventures began to travel, notably to America. Then in 1958 academic and journalistic critics began to look hard at this phenomenon, and did not like what they saw.

By Orville Schell

Dark Matter
a film directed by Chen Shi-Zheng

China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society
by Daniel A. Bell

China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy
by Peter Hays Gries

China's Great Leap: The Beijing Olympic Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges
Edited by Minky Worden, with an introduction by Nicholas Kristof

Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008
by Xu Guoqi

On a snowy winter day in 1991, Lu Gang, a slightly built Chinese scholar who had recently received his Ph.D. in plasma physics, walked into a seminar room at the University of Iowa's Van Allen Hall, raised a snub-nose .38-caliber Taurus pistol, and killed Professor Christoph Goertz, his thesis adviser; Robert A. Smith, a member of his dissertation committee; and Shan Linhua, a fellow Chinese graduate student and his rival.

By Benjamin Moser

Rembrandt's Jews
by Steven Nadler

De "joodse" Rembrandt: De mythe ontrafeld [The "Jewish" Rembrandt: The Myth Revealed]
an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, November 10, 2006–February 4, 2007.

Rembrandt in de propaganda 1940–1945


'J'aime les juifs!' Holland's foremost painter shouts as he moves through seventeenth-century Amsterdam's busy streets. The scene, in Charles Matton's 1999 film Rembrandt, unwittingly recalls another, from the film of the same name made fifty-eight years before by German director Hans Steinhoff. Already well known for his Hitlerjunge Quex, about a Hitler Youth murdered by Communists, Steinhoff had arrived in Amsterdam in 1941, bringing with him the German actors, set designers, cameramen, and costume directors supplied by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. No expense was spared. Rembrandt's purpose, after all, was nothing less than to show the freshly conquered 'Land of Rembrandt' that the artist who represented its highest achievement was, in Hitler's words, 'a true Aryan and German.'

By Hugh Eakin

Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past
an exhibition at the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, April 10-December 31, 2008.

The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq
edited by Peter G. Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly

Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War
edited by Lawrence Rothfield

Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
by Patrick Cockburn

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh
by David Damrosch

American Hostage
by Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton

Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq
by Magnus T. Bernhardsson

In May 2003--some eight weeks after the American invasion had begun-- Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the archaeology inspector of Dhi Qar province in southern Iraq, traveled to Najaf to call on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He had an urgent request. 'We needed his help to stop the pillage,' Hamdani recalled. The province, which is midway between Baghdad and Basra, covers much of what was once the land of Sumer. In the third millennium BC, it was a fertile plain densely populated by such cities as Ur, Lagash, Girsu, Larsa, and Umma; today, the shifting course of the Euphrates and Saddam Hussein's brutal campaign to drain the marshes, to the southeast, have left it in large part an impoverished wasteland. With the fall of the Baathist regime, hundreds of poor farmers and villagers--often backed by armed militias--were turning to archaeological plunder; in some Dhi Qar towns, such as al-Fajr, the black market trade in antiquities was accounting for upward of 80 percent of the local economy.

By Jane Mayer

Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.

By Samantha Power

Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security
by J. Peter Scoblic

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias

Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call 'issue ownership.'