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.

The Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg is the playground of the new Germany. But unless you fit in, life can be tough among the beautiful creatives of a gated community that needs no wall. By Henning Sußebach

Jungle World investigates academic anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred with Theodor Lessing. It also looks at Gaussian distribution as an instrument of suppression. Christoph Schlingensief talks about his stay in the first station of hell. The feuilletons are relieved to finally close the chapter on the Bayreuth war of succession. And Andreas Dresen's film "Cloud 9" ushers in the grey phase of the sexual revolution.

The legendary German poets, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, met and fell in love in Vienna 1948. Their electric and torturous correspondence, which continued until 1961, has now been collected in book form for the first time. Ina Hartwig on what was probably the most complicated love story in post-war Germany.

"There is only one way to turn signals into information, through interpretation", wrote the computer critic Joseph Weizenbaum. As Google's hegemony over online content increases, argues Geert Lovink, we should stop searching and start questioning.

The conflict in South Ossetia has produced a cloud of rhetoric that seems to have grown in inverse proportion to the intensity of fighting on the ground. Once the outcome became clear - a crushing Russian military victory - Cold War imagery flooded the Western press. Far more than the status of a tiny mountainous enclave in the South Caucasus was said to be at stake: not only was Georgia's territorial integrity imperilled by Russian tyranny, but the future of democracy was under threat. In the Washington Post of 11 August, Robert Kagan asserted that the conflict will be seen as 'a turning point no less significant' than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given this 'much bigger drama', 'the details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important.'

"Fear" is the punchy title of book about Polish anti-Semitism whose recent publication in Poland has sparked an emotional debate. Very few people have come to the defence of its author, Jan Tomasz Gross, who has taken on the difficult task of making uncomfortable facts known to a wider audience and removing blind spots in Polish history. By Jakub Kloc-Konkolowicz

'The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,' J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards,is that the frontiers of 'Europe' towards the east are everywhere open and indeterminate. 'Europe', it can now be seen, is not a continent - as in the ancient geographers' dream - but a subcontinent: a peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, like India in being inhabited by a highly distinctive chain of interacting cultures, but unlike it in lacking a clearly marked geophysical frontier. Instead of Afghanistan and the Himalayas, there are vast level areas through which conventional 'Europe' shades into conventional 'Asia', and few would recognise the Ural mountains if they ever reached them.But, he went on, empires - of which in its fashion the European Union must be accounted one - had always needed to determine the space in which they exercised their power, fixing the borders of fear or attraction around them.