The Conversation

The second issue of The Conversation, for the academic year 2009-10, has a new, more fluid format than the first issue. Our policy will be to continue to accept new work throughout the year and post it when we think it is fit for consumption. We will collect material for the third issue over the summer of 2010, and when it is ready to appear in the fall, everything published in the previous year will be archived as No. 2. You can refer to the previous issue, No. 1, under “Archives.”

Several pieces in the current issue consider death from different perspectives. In a personal essay, “After Aging,” Walter Cummins considers the difficulty of comprehending his own death despite its inevitability. William Warner, in “Philosophy and Death,” questions whether philosophy is of any use in coming to terms with death. Daniel D’Arezzo reflects, in “Body Count,” on the prevalence of murder in America and the ways in which people suppress knowledge of it. He has also contributed a portfolio of watercolors painted on postcards from the Republic of Korea, “Natura Morta.”

It has been thirty years since the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, which finalized Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, captured during the Six-Day War in 1967. Sara Reef, in “Land for Peace,” reviews how, through gradual stages, something like a lasting peace was achieved in one part of the Middle East. 

Kirn Wachter-Grene adapted her master’s thesis for an article, “Charles W. Chesnutt and the Engendering of a Post-Reconstruction Multiracial Politics,” that revives the work of an early proponent of a color-blind America and critiques contemporary ideas of multiracialism.

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