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October/November 2002

Elaine Scarry compares the stories of two airplanes hijacked on 9/11 to question our traditional, “top-down” defense structure; Richard Falk, Antonia Chayes, Charles Knight, Ellen Willis, and others respond. Vivian Gornick takes a fresh look at feminist literary icons Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras, and finds they haven’t aged well. Susan F. Hirsch on her experience in the U.S. embassy bombing trials and why she didn’t testify; Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold on American Jews’ protest and support of Israeli policy. John D’Agata reviews Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. Plus: new poems by Matthew Zapruder, Ethan Paquin, contest winner Max Winter, and Katy Lederer in our Poet’s Sampler. Plus, a lively exchange on intelligent design with William Dembski and H. Allen Orr.

 

Forum 

Citizenship in Emergency
CAN DEMOCRACY PROTECT US AGAINST TERRORISM?
ELAINE SCARRY
RESPONSES FROM RICHARD FALK, PAUL W. KAHN, STEVEN M. WALT, CHARLES KNIGHT, ANTONIA CHAYES, CATHERINE LUTZ, EUGENE A. CARROLL, RANDALL FORSBERG, AND ELLEN WILLIS. ELAINE SCARRY REPLIES.
Essays
Why a survivor of a terrorist bombing refused to testify
Susan F. Hirsch
Must American Jews support Israeli policy?
Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold
A moral defense
F.M. Kamm
Fiction
Scott Blackwood
New Fiction Forum
Why Colette, de Beauvoir, and Duras don’t age well
Vivian Gornick
Paul LaFarge’s Haussmann, or the Distinction and Susan Daitch’s L.C.
Richard A. Kaye 
Nonfiction Reviews
Charles Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today
Richard Eldridge
Steven Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation
Brenda Wineapple
Poetry Reviews
Anne Carson’s new translations
John D’Agata
Jorie Graham’s Never
Bin Ramke
Jennifer Moxley’s The Sense Record and Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s The Guns and Flags Project
Cole Swensen
Poetry
Introduced by Gillian Conole
Introduced by James Tate
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Don Hymans
Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry
Ethan Paquin
Kerri Webster
Matthew Zapruder
Karen Zusman
On Film
The Sprecher sisters’ Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
Alan A. Stone
Exchange
A debate about the latest defense of intelligent design
William A. Dembski and H. Allen Orr

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