Katherine C. Epstein is a professor of history at Rutgers University. 

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. This essay was translated by Adrian Nathan West.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and is the author, among other books, of This is Not Normal.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Unwelcome Guest: The Super-Ego in the Age of the Internet.

James Wolcott is the author of Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahs.

Elliot Ackerman is the author most recently of Halcyon.

Moshe Halbertal is the author, among other books, of The Birth of Doubt: Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature. This essay was translated by Daniel Tabak.

Noga Arikha teaches philosophy and the history of ideas in Florence. Her book The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind appeared last year.

Carlos Fraenkel is the James McGill Professor of Philosophy and Religion at McGill University.

Daphne Merkin is an American critic and novelist.

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Emeritus, Harvard University.

Robert Alter is professor emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at University of California at Berkeley, and the author of a forthcoming biographical study of Amos Oz.

Rachel Connolly is the author of Lazy City

Helen Vendler now writes from Laguna Niguel, California, where she is inventing a new life near her son and his family in Laguna Beach.

Leslie Williams is the author of Even the Dark.