Editors’ Note

Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen

State of the Nation

Urban Legends

William Rankin

Essays

Sturdy Green Thread

Sara Irani

Iraq’s Lost Generation

Nir Rosen

Karlan’s Court: Acting Out

Pamela S. Karlan

The Worst of the Worst

Lance Tapley

Making Muslim Democracies

Jan-Werner Müller

Books After Amazon

Onnesha Roychoudhuri

Suppose You’re an Idiot

Roger Boylan

A Question of Character

Claude S. Fischer’s Made In America
David M. Kennedy

The Miners

Sara Irani—Web only

Cutting Deficits? Start With Defense

46 experts demand cuts in defense spending
Joshua Cohen et al.—Web only

Midterm Postmortem

An analysis of the 2010 midterm elections
Eric McGhee, Brendan Nyhan, and John Sides—Web only

The Debt Commission’s Parallel Universe

The failings of the Simpson-Bowles report
Dean Baker—Web only

Fiction

Hitting Budapest

NoViolet Bulawayo

On Film

All Of Humanity

King Lear On Screen
Alan A. Stone

On Poetry

The Raw and the Cooked

Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path
and Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat
Christopher Schmidt

Catch the Dying Light

Mary Jo Bang’s The Bride of E
Lindsay Turner

The Side Of Love

Dan Chiasson’s Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon
Piotr Florczyk

Microreviews

Aaron Belz
Ish Klein
Dara Wier
Mark Bibbins
Michael Earl Craig

Poems

Poetry Contest Winner

Anthony Caleshu
Selected by Peter Gizzi

Visitation

Eamon Grennan

Pursuit of Happiness

Peter Cooley

One Dispensation

Elizabeth Whittlesey

The Four Questions

Seth Landman

This Is Serious Business

Jason W. Selby

From Which Mortar Cities Rise

G.C. Waldrep

The Breakfast in Heidelberg Series

Caitlin Doyle

Instantly I Was Love

Amanda Nadelberg

How the Other Half Files Its Teeth

Dan Pinkerton