Selected Letters, Volume 2

Recent News

• George Andreou, currently vice president and senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, has been named Director of Harvard University Press.
• Jack Schneider, author of Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality, wrote at the Atlantic about the perception gap between parents’ high opinions of their own children’s schools versus their often-withering assessments of the American school system at large.
• At Slate, Brandon Garrett, author of End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, examined the growing reluctance of American jurors to impose the death penalty.

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July 13: Liu Xiaobo and the Responsibility of Being Alive

The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo died today, a few short weeks after the Chinese government revealed that he was suffering from cancer that had progressed beyond treatment during his political imprisonment. The course of his life was forever altered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, and, as Perry Link notes at NYR Daily, Liu felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, “the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died.” His widow Liu Xia reports that he dedicated his Nobel Prize to them in 2010, as he’d done in 2003 after receiving an award from the Chinese Demo…