Vol. 78 Nbr. 2, March 2009

Index

• Updike at rest.
• Causality and contingency.
• Naming names.
• Savage legacy.
• Censorship in France.
• Directions.
• Literary encounters.
• A Twombly ceiling.
• The sound of laptops.
• Life in Venice.
• Locks for lettuces.
• A Stein is a Stein is a Stein.
• E pluribus unum.
• Smarter than dirt.
• Who was hall? And just what was his connection to hedgehogs?
• The terminator comes to Wall Street: how computer modeling worsened the financial crisis and what we ought to do about it.
• Purpose-driven life: evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. It also makes possible our own capacity for creativity.
• Second chances, social forgiveness, and the Internet: we need the means, both technological and legal, to replace measures once woven into the fabric of communities.
• The man who shot the man who shot Lincoln: the hatter Boston Corbett was celebrated as a hero for killing John Wilkes Booth. Fame and fortune did not follow, but madness did.
• Belmont Park.
• Snowglobe.
• Laika.
• Visions and revisions: writing On Writing Well and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years.
• Dawn of a literary friendship: in 1969 the writer Robert Phelps first wrote to the novelist James Salter. Here are the letters that forged a bond of two decades.
• I wanted to be Robert Phelps.
• The dowser dilemma: how a town in Vermont found water it desperately needed and an explanation that was harder to swallow.
• Without Wendy.
• Promises, promises.
• The potency of Breathless: at 50, Godard's film still asks how something this bad can be so good.
• Vibrato wars: Elgar, served neat: and unshaken, stirs up the Brits.
• The peacock problem: does sexual selection really explain enough?
• The peacock problem: what does evolution say about why we make art?
• Founding portraitists: Peale, Trumbull, and Stuart: inventing icons of the new republic.
• Dark mysteries: in her masterly stories, Flannery O'Connor found redemptive grace.
• At liberty to divulge: one student's perspective from inside Jerry Falwell's university.
• Circular bread line: through the centuries, with lox and cream cheese.
• Literary cubs, canceling out each other's reticence: letters between Federal Writers' Project cohorts Richard Wright and Nelson Algren depict a mutual admiration rare among young novelists.
• Debt.
• Biographer Stacy Schiff reflects on Franklin in Paris.