Unfit to Print?
By Michael Massing
On May 26, The New York Times published a lengthy editors' note belatedly acknowledging that the paper's pre-war coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been." According to the note, accounts of Iraqi defectors were not analyzed with sufficient skepticism, and "articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display" while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question "were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all." The Times deserves credit for running a detailed mea culpa. Yet the note seems less than forthright.
The Logic of Torture
By Mark Danner
Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability, lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States, at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners.
The Good Bad Boy
By Alison Lurie
Today, many people have the illusion that they know who Pinocchio is. They think that he is a wooden marionette who becomes a human boy; that he was swallowed by a huge fish; and that when he told lies his nose grew longer. These people are right, but often in a very limited way. They know Pinocchio only from the sentimentalized and simplified Disney cartoon, or the condensed versions of his story that are thought more suitable for children. The original novel by Carlo Collodi, which today survives mainly in scholarly editions, is much longer, far more complex and interesting, and also much darker.
Minding the Brain
By Ian Hacking
Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century. There are bad reasons for this. (Among them are human narcissism and the fear, on the part of the older people who hand out research grants, of the grim reaper popularly called "Alzheimer's.") A good reason is that a flourishing new technology is leading to new understandings of the brain right down to the level of cells and molecules.
The Awful Truth
By Thomas R. Edwards
On Nothing Lost, John Gregory Dunne's last novel.
A Little Iliad
By Daniel Mendelsohn
On Troy, a film directed by Wolfgang Petersen.
The David Levine Gallery contains over 2,500 illustrations by the Review's inimitable staff artist, from 1963 to the present.