By Paula Fox

A Meaningful Life
by L.J. Davis, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem

One Manhattan mid-morning in the spring of 1967, I heard the crack of a gun going off below, along the broad reach of Central Park West. I jumped up from the table where I was working on my second novel and looked down five stories to the street, on the other side of which breathed the quiet greenery of Central Park. What I saw was a man lying in the middle of the street attempting to raise himself up from the waist, like a seal, collapsing, trying again, then falling flat.

By Ingrid D. Rowland

It is a measure of the ineptitude--or is it a death wish?--of Italy's major opposition party, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), that it has spent the entire season of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's discontent wrangling over the election of its own party secretary--only to be caught, on the eve of the October 25 vote (its winner was Pier Luigi Bersani, a sensible former minister in several left-wing administrations), by a veritable Vesuvius of erupting bimbos. The day before, Piero Marrazzo, the Democratic governor of the region of Lazio (approximately equivalent to a state in the US, and the region that contains Rome), confessed to having been blackmailed by a gang of four corrupt carabinieri who had tracked his wild times with transgendered Brazilian prostitutes (filming an encounter with a certain 'Natalie'). His sexual tastes were of no juridical importance, but the same could not be said about his use of an official car for these appointments, or his payment of outrageous sums of money (whose?) for ministrations laced with cocaine and silicone curves. He resigned on October 27.

By Claire Messud

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran
by Haleh Esfandiari

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

By Garry Wills

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic--that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

By Elaine Blair

The Humbling
by Philip Roth

One of the rare funny moments in Philip Roth's recent novel Everyman (2006) takes place when the unnamed hero visits his parents' graves in Newark. His health has been poor, his colleagues and friends have been dying, and though he has no reason to think that his own death is imminent, he can no longer pretend to himself that he will never die. In this frame of mind, he finds himself talking to the buried bones of his parents. 'I'm seventy-one, your boy is seventy-one,' he tells them. In his mind, he hears his mother reply: 'Good. You lived.'

By Michael Tomasky

A crucial fact about today's Congress, and one that even many politically astute observers may not fully appreciate, rests in the vast ideological differences between the two congressional parties. I don't mean by this that the Democrats have become uniformly liberal and the Republicans uniformly conservative, which is the standard grievance issued by the press, but rather that only the latter has happened--and that it has happened with surprising speed.

By Robert Malley

The idea of Israeli-Palestinian partition, of a two-state solution, has a singular pedigree. It has been proposed for at least eight decades. Jews first accepted it as Palestinians recoiled; by the time Palestinians warmed to the notion in the late 1980s, Israelis had turned their backs. Still, its proponents manage to portray it as fresh, new, and capable of leading to peace. International consensus on a two-state agreement is, today, stronger than ever. Meanwhile, interest among the two parties most directly concerned wanes and prospects for achieving it diminish.

By Timothy Garton Ash

In the autumn of 1989, the term 'velvet revolution' was coined to describe a peaceful, theatrical, negotiated regime change in a small Central European state that no longer exists. So far as I have been able to establish, the phrase was first used by Western journalists and subsequently taken up by Václav Havel and other Czech and Slovak opposition leaders. This seductive label was then applied retrospectively, by writers including myself, to the cumulatively epochal events that had unfolded in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, as in 'the velvet revolutions of 1989.'

Michael Greenberg A refugee camp in Gori, Georgia, 2009; photographs by Alex Majoli from Georgian Spring, to be published by Magnum Photos and Chris Boot in December

More than fifteen months have passed since war broke out between Georgia and Russia. The war lasted five days, the amount of time it took for the Russian army to rout Georgia’s tiny, American-trained defense forces. It was the most serious military conflict in Europe since the Balkans. And yet, although tens of thousands of people are still displaced, and Russia is posing an increasing threat to Georgia’s oil pipelines, both the EU and the US may be powerless to prevent further threats to the country.

At home, the war has played well for Russian President Dimitry Medvedev. It marks Russia’s first unequivocal military victory since World War II. Russian troops have seized control of the disputed provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, assigning them the status of breakaway independent republics. (For the Abkhazians, long suspicious of the Georgian government, this has not been entirely unwelcome.) Russia has asserted its control over what Medvedev has called its “zone of privileged interest.” The most pro-West state on its border has been humbled, sending a message to the Ukraine and other West-leaning former Soviet Republics that Russian hard power is once again to be feared. More important, the war has demonstrated that neither the European Union nor the United States will risk seriously damaging relations with Russia in order to protect a state in Russia’s backyard, no matter how liberal and democratic that state claims to be.

Georgia, for its part, which was at the time of the war half the size of North Carolina with a population of 4.7 million, has seen its territory shrink by twenty percent. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s hope of joining NATO has receded into the remote distance, a development that, in any event, Russia would never have abided.

An international aid official in Tbilisi, with whom I talk frequently, reports a general feeling of pessimism in the capital. A completely deregulated, free-market ethos continues to hold sway, but with the ending both of the war and the global economic expansion, Tbilisi is dotted with half-finished high-rises, empty nightclubs, and stalled development projects. Yet paradoxically, Saakashvili faces less popular opposition than before the war. His most prominent challenger is the moderate former UN Ambassador Irakli Alasania, who is almost certain to run for president when Saakashvili’s term ends in 2013. On November 7, the opposition staged a demonstration to mark the anniversary of a government crackdown in 2007, when opposition leaders were arrested and media outlets shut down. Tbilisians were warned it might become violent, but the turnout was modest, barely disrupting traffic.

The European’s Union’s report on the cause of the war was finally made public in September after a series of delays to accommodate a bombardment of putative “proof” about what really happened from both sides. The report takes Georgia to task for throwing the first punch, and reproves Moscow for using “disproportionate force” in responding to the provocation. It is hard to imagine what Saakashvili was expecting to gain when he ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, on August 7, 2008.

The most plausible explanation is that he misunderstood the limits of the Bush administration’s support for his anti-Russian stance. After 9/11 Bush promoted Georgia to the status of a crucial American ally, a steadfast member of “the coalition of the willing” in the US’s “war on terror,” and promised to press for Georgia’s membership in NATO. Emblems of the importance to Georgia of its alliance with the US are everywhere. The major road from the international airport to Tbilisi, for instance, is called “George W. Bush Street.”

A woman waiting to receive supplies from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Znaur, South Ossetia, 2009; from Georgian Spring

Bush’s rhetoric, combined with generous amounts of US military and economic aid, seems to have imbued Saakashvili with an unrealistic sense of Georgia’s strategic importance. In expecting Washington to intervene militarily in support of a border war that he himself provoked, Saakashvili appears to have overlooked the fact that the US needs Russia’s cooperation to help carry out its larger strategies in Afghanistan and Iran.

France and Germany, for their part, are too dependent on Russian energy to risk straining relations with Moscow. The giant Russian company Gazprom supplies Europe with 28 percent of its natural gas. In a joint venture with Germany, Gazprom is in the process of building the $10.7 billion Nord Stream pipeline, which would run 750 miles under the Baltic Sea, directly from Russian to Germany, bypassing existing routes through Ukraine and other parts of East Europe for the first time. With the new pipeline Russia will be able to shut off energy supplies to the Ukraine for instance, without interrupting flow to its customers in the West.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder brokered the deal for the pipeline, later becoming chairman of Nord Stream. The German government guaranteed $1.46 billion for the project shortly before Schroder lost his bid for reelection in 2005. Wary of losing out to the Germans, Gaz de France is now seeking to join the consortium. Under the circumstances, one can expect Western Europe to become even more muted in its criticism of Russia’s actions in its so-called privileged zone.

Georgia, in the meantime, becomes increasingly irrelevant. It is in the unenviable position of having no valuable natural resource to leverage other than the oil and gas pipelines that pass through its territory from the Caspian basin, supplying Western Europe with its only alternative to Russian energy. In the future, Nord Stream will weaken the importance of those pipelines. To make matters worse, having gained control of South Ossetia and Abhkazia, the Russian army is within easy striking distance of the Caspian pipelines should it decide to disable them.

Saakashvili himself often seems to behave more like a CEO than a head of state—drumming up foreign investment in an attempt to make up for the country’s steep losses. Since the end of the war Georgia has received $4.5 billion in international aid, an enormous amount for a country of its size. Recently, Saakashvili has sent troops to Afghanistan, and the US (Vice President Biden, for one, is an enthusiastic supporter) is actively helping Georgia rebuild its defense forces.

The unequivocal losers are the ethnic Georgians that formerly lived in the breakaway provinces. About 850 people died in the war, including 132 South Ossetians, quite a different number from the 1,500–2,000 victims the Russians originally claimed. But 138,000 people fled the occupied provinces, many of them into Georgia, and about 30,000 ethnic Georgians have failed to return.

South Ossetia, with forty percent of its capital destroyed, seems condemned to a future of poverty and civil unrest; and Abkhazia faces the certainty of a second invasion in the form of rich Russians buying up its coastland to build resorts and second homes. The legal status of the provinces remains ambiguous, providing a ready-made pretext for another war, one that neither the United States nor Western Europe would seem to have the will or political interest to prevent.

Alex Majoli’s photographs appear in the new book Georgian Spring, a travel journal by ten Magnum photographers who visited Georgia during the spring of 2009 at the invitation of Georgia’s Ministry of Culture. The book features work by Antoine D’Agata, Jonas Bendiksen, Thomas Dworzak, Martine Franck, Majoli, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mark Power, and Alec Soth. It also includes archive photographs by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, an essay by Wendell Steavenson, and a foreword by Dworzak. It will be published by Magnum Photos and Chris Boot in December. Further photographs and multimedia projects related to the book are available here.

Colm Tóibín The three gossips from The Ghosts of Versailles at the Wexford Opera Festival, Ireland, 2009 (wexfordopera.com)

Wexford is a small town on the sea in the south-east of Ireland and an unlikely place to host an opera festival. Yet since 1951 in late October the town has organized what has become for many opera-lovers an essential date in the calendar. The reason why it has remained important is not merely the intimacy of the setting, the general air of welcome and the strange sea-washed beauty of the old town, but the policy since the early 1970s to program three operas that have fallen beneath the radar, that are seldom or never performed.

Thus if you wanted to see Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad, you had to come to Wexford in 1974; so too with Tiefland by d’Albert (1978) or Edgar by Puccini (1980) or Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame by Massenet (1984). The opera house, down a side street, was old and uncomfortable, but that seemed only to add to the general specialness of the occasion. Last year however, a brand new opera house, built on the same site, was opened. The seats are more comfortable, the acoustics are wonderful, and the building itself has managed to lose nothing of the old intimacy.

Usually, there is much debate about the quality of the operas. Since many people from the town work as volunteers and extras who are involved in rehearsals, rumors spread each year that one of the three productions is way ahead of all the others, a lost jewel perhaps, or a production with a great young singer. This year, while there was much talk about some of the beautiful moments in Donizetti’s Maria Padilla, the view in the town was that there was something very special coming on the opening night, that an opera was about to performed which would be remembered for many years. This proved to be true. It was The Ghosts of Versailles by the contemporary American composer John Corigliano, which was first performed at the Met in New York in 1991, put on in Wexford in a new scaled-down version suitable for a smaller stage.

The plot, which centers on the relationship between Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette, is ingenious and intricate and would have pleased John Barth and Pirandello. The libretto by William Hoffman is brilliant and clever, but does not show off to the detriment of the music; there is a beautiful way in which it allows scenes their full dramatic import, without cutting across them with too much knowing interjection. While the libretto is full of knowingness, there is a lightness about how this is presented. The opera allows the audience, aware of the games between played on the stage between fantasy and reality, between real figures from history and figures from opera, to do the knowing rather than being distracted by being told that it is coming soon.

The music includes references to earlier music from grand opera to opera buffa, but these references are haunting or funny rather than mere pieces of pastiche. Some of the music is unashamedly beautiful, but there is also a thrilling contemporary edge to some of the singing and orchestration, and there was something wonderful, even novel, about the arrival of moments of percussive, exquisite atonality in a small Irish town. (I went to high school in Wexford and don’t remember atonality being a regular part of the fare.)

It was clear to the audience on the opening night in Wexford that this opera belongs in a central position in any repertoire. The self-consciousness in the scoring works wonders against a sort of musical innocence in the piece, and then that very innocence is constantly wrong-footed and usurped. This made us all sit there amused and amazed that a work from the past twenty years could have a sense of classic completion while never allowing us relax or get lazy as we listened. It was the great revelation at the Wexford Opera Festival this year.

Christian Caryl Obama as Chairman Mao

Some China watchers believe that China’s dramatically rising prosperity will inevitably make the country more open and democratic. President Barack Obama’s highly-scripted trip this week provided little to support that claim. As The Washington Post noted, in contrast to 1998, when Bill Clinton, standing in the Great Hall of the People, criticized the Tiananmen Square crackdown and “traded spirited jibes with President Jiang Zemin,” Obama and Hu Jintao held a “Chinese-style news conference of read statements, stares, and no questions.” Nor did the Chinese government make any concessions on the major issues—the valuation of China’s currency, pressure on Iran, action on climate change—that the White House was hoping to see addressed.

Most onlookers attribute the new Chinese intransigence to the comparative shift in the two countries’ positions. China today holds some $1 trillion of U.S. public debt, and American consumers are hooked on cheap Chinese goods. China, meanwhile, has continued to post impressive growth statistics despite the Great Recession.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. If the Communist Party feels that it’s now attained a position of dominance, why would it prevent ordinary Chinese from watching Obama’s town hall session—something that earlier Chinese leaders were secure enough to allow? If the Chinese are confident in their own economic success, why would they go to such enormous lengths to stage-manage Obama’s visit?

What strikes me about the visit is precisely the lack of any overtly triumphalist note on China’s part. Sure, the Chinese have been rebuffing US calls for a more realistic evaluation of the renminbi, and lecturing the Americans on getting their own financial house in order. But they haven’t been trumpeting the advantages of the Chinese system. One commentary from the state-run Xinhua news agency, for example, gave a remarkably positive gloss on Obama’s visit, praising the Americans for taking care to manage the important relationship between the two countries. And then this quote:

Many westerners do not realize China’s gigantic internal gap in wealth, regional development and public utilities. Some take Shanghai and Beijing for what the whole China is like, others think the Chinese only refer to the Han nationality.

Or take this piece from The People’s Daily, highlighting premier Wen Jiabao’s statement in his meeting with Obama that China doesn’t subscribe to the talk of a “G2”:

China is still a developing country with a huge population and has a long way to go before it becomes modernized, Wen said, stressing “We must always keep sober-minded over it.”

This could be window-dressing, of course. But I think it’s for real: it’s increasingly clear that China’s leaders are perfectly aware of the fragility of their own nation-building exercise. Little acknowledged, is that, as The Financial Times recently pointed out, China’s economy is still “less than a third of the size of the US” and its GDP per capita is “roughly the same as Angola’s.” If you were to ask me what the Chinese fear most, it’s the asset bubble now building in the Chinese real estate and stock markets that are being buoyed up by low interest rates and the artificially low renminbi. Hu Jintao and most of the people beneath him are aware that this bubble could pop just as disastrously as the one that did here—and the result would be profound, destabilizing social unrest.

To be sure, China’s leaders are proud of what their country has achieved. But they’re not idiots. It will take years before lasting status as a Great Power is more or less assured, and they know it.

By Joel Wachs

By Tim Flannery

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James Lovelock

James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia
by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin

The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
by Peter Ward

The idea that Earth is a living thing goes back at least as far as Plato, who according to Francis Bacon believed that the planet 'was one entire, perfect, living creature.' But it was James Lovelock and his colleague Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed a testable scientific hypothesis aimed at investigating Earth's lifelike properties. Known as the Gaia hypothesis, it states that life on Earth works to keep conditions at the planet's surface favorable to life itself. In 2006 this led to Lovelock joining the likes of Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin in receiving geology's most prestigious prize--the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal. In presenting the award the society's president acknowledged that the Gaia hypothesis had 'opened up a whole new field of Earth Science study.'

By David Cole

Race, Incarceration, and American Values
by Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loïc Wacquant

Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
by Paul Butler

Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics
by Anthony C. Thompson

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world--by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors--Russia and Belarus.

By Pico Iyer

The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely

Istanbul, with its many signs of the time when it was the center of the world, becomes something of a museum in the work of Orhan Pamuk, a writer clearly in love with memory itself, and his hometown, and everything that's been lost there. In his 2003 memoir, Istanbul, the five-story Pamuk Apartments in which he spent nearly all his first five decades are described as a 'dark museum house,' cluttered with sugar bowls, snuffboxes, censers, pianos that are never played, and glass cabinets that are never opened. The people inside the rooms have something of a neglected and left-behind quality, too; they're devoutly attentive to the fashions and perceived habits of Europe, and yet they know (or at least their sharp-eyed chronicler does) that Europe is spending very little time thinking of them.

By Peter Brooks

Dominique-Vivant Denon: L'oeil de Napoléon
an exhibition at the Louvre, Paris, October 20, 1999–January 17, 2000

Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris
by Andrew McClellan

No Tomorrow
by Vivant Denon, translated from the French by Lydia Davis, and with an introduction by Peter Brooks

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, pried off just under one half of the Parthenon frieze (some 247 feet) and added to it fifteen metopes and seventeen of the great sculptures from the east and west pediments, then shipped them to England, eventually to repose in the British Museum, where they remain as the clamor from the Greek government to return them to Athens grows ever more intense. Lord Elgin acquired a vast store of antiquities during his ambassadorship to the Sublime Porte--the Ottoman court in Constantinople--from 1799 to 1803, and after. He seems to have had some sort of a sales contract (now lost) with the Ottoman rulers of Greece (who had no interest in pagan monuments) that conferred some legitimacy on his removing sculptures from the world's most famous temple (then a storehouse) and giving them refuge in London, where they were certainly better preserved.

By Andrew Delbanco

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools
by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose

When Mike Rose, who teaches in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, made some positive remarks about public schools on a call-in radio show a few years ago, one listener phoned in with disbelief: he said he 'didn't know one seventeen-year-old who could make correct change.' Others followed with 'assaultive' anger that 'did not, in any way, invite engagement, or mutual analysis, or thinking through a problem together.'

By Jonathan Raban

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
by Linda Gordon

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field
by Anne Whiston Spirn

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a 'puzzling form' and a 'queer business' in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied 'a beautiful relation between the rich and poor' by making 'simple people express strong feelings...in learned and fashionable language.' From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare's complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.

By Sue Halpern

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
by Muhammad Yunus, with Karl Weber

This past July, a little over a year after the United Nations Security Council finally declared rape a crime of war, the parents of Taraneh Mousavi, a twenty-eight-year-old beautician from Tehran, received a call from an anonymous stranger. The young woman had been missing for weeks, ever since she'd attended a post-election rally at the Ghoba mosque; it was rumored that she was being held by Basiji militiamen. The caller said that Mousavi had had 'an accident,' and was in the hospital with 'tears in her womb and her anus.' Mousavi's parents rushed to the place where she was supposed to be, but she wasn't there. They still have not found her--or her body.

By Joost R. Hiltermann

For the occasional visitor such as myself, various methods exist to measure America's standing in Iraq, Iraqi suspicions and aspirations, and progress in the transfer of power, but none prove as illuminating as the checkpoints into and throughout Baghdad's Green Zone, that diminishing symbol of the Bush administration's ambitions.