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January/February 2010

Nir Rosen leads a forum on U. S. strategy in Afghanistan; Andrew Bacevich, Helena Cobban, Andrew Exum, Aziz Hakimi, and others respond.

Dean Baker on too-big-to-fail; Nasser Hussain on counterinsurgency as colonialism; Islamophobia in Europe; Vladimir Nabokov‘s The Original of Laura; a poem by Cathy Park Hong.

 

Forum 

Something From Nothing: U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan 

Nir Rosen — with responses from:

ANDREW BACEVICH, HELENA COBBAN, ANDREW EXUM, AZIZ HAKIMI, SYED SALEEM SHAHZAD, J. ALEXANDER THIER, RICHARD W. MILLER, RAJAN MENON.


Essays

State of the Nation: The State of Boston
Stephen Ansolabehere
The Big Bank Theory: How government helps financial giants get richer
Dean Baker
Counterinsurgency’s Comeback: Can a colonialist strategy be reinvented?
Nasser Hussain
Nothing to Fear: Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe
John R. Bowen
All Bark, No Bite: The Decline of Germany’s Social Democrats
Clay Risen
Civilizing Haiti
Colin Dayan
Whitewashing Haiti’s History
Sidney W. Mintz
Fine By Me: Geoff Dyer’s unlikely terms of engagement
James Wallenstein
Last Wishes: Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura
Leland de la Durantaye

Fiction

Wednesday Nights: A Memoir
Vestal McIntyre
Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone
Taryn Bowe

On Film

The Jewish Question: Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man
Alan A. Stone

On Poetry

Poet’s Sampler
Christopher Kondrich, introduced by Mark Strand
Smothered to Smithereens: The poetics of motherhood
Stephen Burt
Lord, Hear My Voice: Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind
Craig Morgan Teicher
Microreviews

Poems

Description of a Badly Drawn Horse
Daniel Johnson
Vault
Alice Jones
Idyll
Alice Jones
Prometheus
William Wadsworth
Squill
Ange Mlinko
A Brief History of Ghost Hunting
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
A Brief History of Spying
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
My Herculaneum
Jennifer Franklin
The Cake
Mark Irwin
The Engineer of Vertical Frontiers
Cathy Park Hong
Martin Luther King Day
William Varmer

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