Editor’s Note

Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen

State of the Nation

Early and often

Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan Hersh

Essays

The War for Drugs

How Juárez became the world’s deadliest city
Sarah Hill

Sharing Liberally

Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus
Evgeny Morozov

Clear and Hold

Roberta Brandes Gratz’s The Battle for Gotham
Casey Walker

Mind the Gap

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level
Claude S. Fischer

New Fiction Forum

How Do I Explain?

The winner of Boston Review’s 17th annual fiction contest
Adam Sturtevant

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Samuel R. Delany

The Gentleman Thief

Sidebar: “My Two Worlds,” Goli Taraghi’s Bita Prize lecture
Goli Taraghi
translated by Faridoun Farrokh

On Film

Curtain Call

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere
Alan A. Stone

On Poetry

Poetry Hot and Cold

Myung Mi Kim’s Penury and Leland Hickman’s Tiresias
Calvin Bedient

Before History

Harry Clifton’s Secular Eden
Alissa Valles

Without End

Ann Lauterbach’s Or To Begin Again
Richard Deming

Microreviews

Edward Hirsch
Catie Rosemurgy
Jennifer Moxley
Zach Savich
Richard Greenfield

Poems

Poet’s Sampler: Arlo Quint

Introduced by Anselm Berrigan

Zero Hour

Kristine Ong Muslim

In The Golden Age of Counterfeiting

Christopher Salerno

Love Poem

Sophie Cabot Black

In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys

Mary Austin Speaker

What If There Is a Person

Steve Healey

False Documents

Nicole Walker

Psyche

Gustaf Sobin

Everlasting Life and Particular Flight

John Deming

Anniversary

Joseph P. Wood

Warhol / Blue Jackie

Peter Balakian