In the October 14, 2010 issue
Joanne Mariner/Human Rights Watch/Contact Press Images
What to Do About Guantánamo?
David Cole
More than a year and a half after President Obama took office, Guantánamo remains open, with no end in sight. One hundred seventy-six men remain imprisoned there, without trial and in most cases without criminal charges. Many if not most have been the victims of torture and cruel and degrading treatment at US hands. Some six hundred have been released, many because there was not sufficient evidence to justify their detention in the first place. Yet not a single inmate has received an apology, or an accounting, or justice for his brutal mistreatment.
Our Man in Palestine
Nathan Thrall
Cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces has reached unprecedented levels under the quiet direction of a three-star US Army general, Keith Dayton, who has been commanding a little-publicized American mission to build up Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.
In the Life of 'The Wire'
Lorrie Moore
Ideas are no good without stories. Stories are no good without characters. In drama, characters are no good without actors. If the integrity of The Wire derives from the integrity of its creators, its power lies, in an old-fashioned way, in the brilliant acting of a varied and charismatic cast.
The Way Out of the Slump
Paul Krugman and Robin Wells
We've already argued that a rise in government deficits played a key role in preventing the crisis of 2008 from turning into a full replay of the Great Depression. Why not use more deficit spending to push for a full recovery? That's a question that deserves more serious consideration than it has received so far.
- The Slump Goes On: Why? (September 30, 2010)
Jeremy Bernstein: Chamonix to Islamabad: A Road Trip
Can Yeginsu: Turkey Packs the Court
Harold Bloom: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Revisited
Charles Simic: America's Front Page
Richard Bernstein: Booming China, Migrant Misery
Iraq: The Ignored Victims
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick
The Divine Sarah
Graham Robb
"No temperament more histrionic than Mme Bernhardt's has, perhaps, ever existed," wrote the obituarist of the London Times. "To read her memoirs is to live in a whirl of passions and adventures—floods of tears, tornadoes of rage, deathly sickness and incomparable health and energy." As Robert Gottlieb warns in his appropriately lively biography, "She was a complete realist when dealing with her life but a relentless fabulist when recounting it."
The Hard Truth About the Foreign Legion
Max Hastings
On Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The Foreign Legion in France's Colonial Conquests, 1870-1935 by Martin Windrow and Voices of the Foreign Legion: The History of the World's Most Famous Fighting Corps by Adrian D. Gilbert.
The Pirates Are Winning!
Jeffrey Gettleman
Abshir Boyah is one of Somalia's pirate chieftains. Last spring, he took me to lunch at a small restaurant directly across the street from the presidential palace of the Puntland semiautonomous regional government.
On Tony Judt
Timothy Snyder
Plus: Jonathan Spence on Pearl Buck, Andrew O'Hagan on E.M. Forster, Jonathan Raban on Flaubert, Ingrid D. Rowland on Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Time for Everything, Samuel Freeman on Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice, and more.
