Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This issue sponsored by Duke University Press

This week on nybooks.com: A podcast with poet Henri Cole, literary criticism and its critics, an American writer who's famous in China while unknown at home, the Mormon Constitution, NATO’s exit from Afghanistan, Philip Larkin’s complete poems, and a sneak preview from our forthcoming June 21 issue, on Rupert Murdoch. A quiz: As a student at Oxford, Rupert Murdoch kept a bust of whom in his room? As always send your answer to web@nybooks.com; two people chosen at random from the correct responses will win a New York Review t-shirt.
Corruption What Rupert Hath Wrought Geoffrey Wheatcroft However lurid and squalid the revelations about phone hacking have been, most frightening of all is what we have learned about the almost symbiotically intimate relationship between Rupert Murdoch and successive British governments.
Audio When Poetry Gets Under the Skin Henri Cole The poet reads from his recent book Touch and talks about his search for what he calls the “essentialness of emotion.”
China Finding Zen and Book Contracts in Beijing Ian Johnson Several of Bill Porter’s books humorously thank the US Department of Agriculture for providing food stamps that have kept him and his family going. Yet he is a celebrity in China, where his book on spiritual hermits sold 100,000 copies.
Criticism In the Chloroformed Sanctuary Tim Parks Is Geoff Dyer correct that while original literature throbs with life, literary criticism is the work of cloistered drudges who suffocate the very creature that provides them with a living?
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Religion and Law The Mormon Constitution Garry Wills Mormon scripture holds that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are divinely inspired. But what about the amendments?				Exit Strategy Why Are We Abandoning the Afghans? Ahmed Rashid What will Afghanistan look like in 2014, after a dozen years of occupation, more than 2,800 NATO soldiers killed, and an expenditure of $1 trillion?
Poetry Philip Larkin: Desired Reading Christopher Ricks Those of us who have often invoked the great phrase of Keats—“the true voice of feeling”—have no less often been told that we are naive, since social and political contingencies mean that there is no such thing. Nevertheless, the true voice of feeling was what Philip Larkin sought and found, or rather the true voices.