Contents

NEW DEMOCRACY FORUM
What's Hurting the Middle Class
The myth of overspending obscures the real problem    Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi

With Jacob S. Hacker , Jonathan Gruber, G. Marcus Cole, Jeff Madrick , Stephen Brobeck, David Crockett, Chuck Collins , A. Mechele Dickerson, Tamara Draut, Jared Bernstein , Robert D. Manning, and Juliet Schor

Response by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi

ESSAYS
A Witness to Murder
Looking at photographs of the condemned    Susie Linfield

Do the Right Thing   ON HUMAN NATURE
Cognitive science's search for a common morality    Rebecca Saxe

SPECIAL SECTION: 30 Years of Boston Review
Jerzy Kosinski, Gary Snyder, Daniel C. Dennett, John Kenneth Galbraith, Adrienne Rich, John Loftus, Rita Dove, Adam Hochschild, Todd Gitlin, Seamus Heaney, David Mamet, Eugene Rivers, Ralph Nader, Christopher Hitchens, George Scialabba, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Neil Gordon, Stephen Lerner, Emily Fragos, H. Allen Orr, Susan Moller Okin, Martha C. Nussbaum, G.M. Tamás, Stewart O'Nan, Deborah Meier, Philippe Van Parijs, Alan A. Stone, Khaled Abou El Fadl, James Galvin, and Elaine Scarry

NEW FICTION FORUM
Summer of Nene  FICTION     Ivelisse Rodriguez

An American Prophet
Marilynne Robinson's vision     M.K. Chakrabarti

ON POETRY
Earthbound
James Richardson's Interglacial    John Koethe

Disappearing Acts
Frank Bidart's Star Dust     Jacob Edmond

Object Relations
Mary Jo Bang's The Eye Like a Strange Balloon and Debora Greger's Western Art     Barbara Fischer

Microreviews

ON FILM
Explaining Love Away
Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen    Alan A. Stone

POEMS
I Wanted the Screen Door of Summer     Peter Gizzi
The Quest    Peter Gizzi
Pliny I & II    Dan Chiasson
"There Is a Star in the Sea"     Dan Chiasson
The Caedmon Room    Allen Grossman
Abandon Yourself to That Which Is Inevitable     C.D. Wright
I Know of No Better World    Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Peter Filkins
Sonnet     Karen Volkman
Sonnet    Karen Volkman
Poet's Sampler: Charlotte Boulay     introduced by Thomas Lynch