To the Editors: In his—as always—thought-provoking review of Akhil Reed Amar’s essays on the US Constitution, Jeremy Waldron suggests the possibility of reading the Fourth Amendment disjunctively, so as to permit warrantless searches so long as these are reasonable—something only capable of being decided ex post facto.
bookreview
Saving Lives in Endless Wars
To the Editors: In his review of Rosa Brooks’s How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything [NYR, March 9], Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth focuses on the current use of the “law-enforcement standards” that US President Barack Obama laid out in 2013 on the use of aerial drones for killing terrorist suspects. Mr. Roth highlights how difficult it is for many such raids to meet Mr. Obama’s rigorous standards, but he astonishingly does not venture anywhere near the fundamental question of whether US exercise of “law-enforcement” practices to launch attacks in a mounting number of countries might contradict international laws on sovereignty and armed conflict.
Should Humans Colonize Space?
To the Editors: In “The Green Universe: A Vision” [NYR, October 13, 2016], Freeman Dyson considers topics from the costs of space exploration to the propagation of life in outer space. We take issue with some of Professor Dyson’s assumptions and assertions.
Playing Cards with Pushkin
To the Editors: In Gary Saul Morson’s amusing article on Pushkin [NYR, March 23] there are a few inaccuracies. When they ridiculed biographical criticism, Russian Formalists did not imagine an article entitled “Did Pushkin Smoke?” as Professor Morson states, but made fun of the old school Pushkinist Nikolai Lerner who published a notorious short piece under this very title in 1913.
Iran: The Miracle That Wasn’t
Iran’s presidential election on May 19 will in all likelihood be won by the incumbent, the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani. In 2015, two years after he came to power, Rouhani pulled the country back from the brink of confrontation with the West when he guided Iran toward the historic nuclear deal with the Obama administration. But the economic miracle that was promised by the Rouhani government hasn’t happened, and the sense of anti-climax is palpable—a disillusionment that has broadened into a general contempt for politics, politicians, and promises that aren’t kept.
In the Horrorscape of Aleppo
Dawn breaks to a daily chorus of artillery and mortar fire in two of humanity’s most ancient settlements that today are Syria’s two largest cities, Damascus and Aleppo. Projectiles rain on their rural peripheries, where opposition groups still fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad shelter in tunnels below mountains of rubble. Muezzins wake the faithful to prayer, and warplanes deliver the day’s first payloads just after 5:00 AM. The rebels respond with desultory mortar rounds fired at cities they once dreamed of ruling. In Damascus, their shells explode in the Christian neighborhoods closest to the eastern front lines. In Aleppo, artillery batters opposition bases along the western frontier with Idlib province. Both cities’ exhausted citizens have cause to fear for their country’s uncertain future.
The Puzzle of Irving Penn
Whether longstanding editorial director of Condé Nast Alexander Liberman’s harsh assessment of Irving Penn was spurred by poisonous envy or contained a kernel of truth, the Penn show now at the Met suggests that the master photographer’s commercial work laid the foundation for his deeply original contribution to the medium. Indeed, the Met’s splendid overview of this grand obsessive proves that his supposedly Faustian bargain was not such a bad deal after all.
A Man Alone in a Comic Book
Guy Delisle’s new book, Hostage, is his first nonfiction graphic narrative in which he is not a character. Christophe André’s first-person voice, matched to Delisle’s drawings tells the story of André’s nearly four months as a hostage after being abducted while on his very first mission as an administrator for Doctors Without Borders. He begins in the past tense but soon switches to the present, narrating day by day the moments and events that structure his experience.
The Painter and the Novelist
The Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, lived most of her life (1879–1961) in the chilly, concealing shade of her younger sister, Virginia Woolf—the last twenty years following Virginia’s suicide in 1941. Though the attention paid to the Bloomsbury Group seems to be waning on both sides of the Atlantic, there is currently a surge of interest in Bell.
Should the Chinese Government Be in American Classrooms?
While the rapid spread of Confucius Institutes in the US has been impressive, in recent years their unusual reach in the American higher education system has become increasingly controversial: these institutes are an official agency of the Chinese government, which provides a major share, sometimes virtually all, of the funds needed to run them. The National Association of Scholars, a conservative group whose members are mostly American university professors, has recently issued the most complete report on the CIs to date; they recommend that the institutions either be closed or reformed.
Sig Nordal 