Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: Maurice Sendak, Burma, drone strikes, John Irving, child welfare, new fiction, and how the bankers got away with it. Also Bruce Chatwin, lying politicians, the Catholic Church, the Greek mess, and the Dalai Lama. There will be no newsletter for the next several weeks as the Review takes a short break. But we’ll continue to post new material on our site, and you can (should, really) follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Politics Getting Away with It Paul Krugman and Robin Wells Why has the Obama adminstration’s response to the financial crisis been so lopsided and inadequate?
Reportage Burmese Days Christian Caryl Burma is a changed country. A little over a year ago, Aung San Suu Kyi was still an unperson; merely mentioning her name was to invite trouble with the authorities. Today she is a member of the country’s highest lawmaking body.
Counterterrorism Obama and Terror: The Hovering Questions David Cole How should we assess President Obama’s first term as a national security president from the standpoint of civil liberties and the rule of law? Unlike his predecessor, has steered clear of the politics of fear. Yet he has also steered clear of the politics of defending our ideals.
Appreciation ‘Something Wonderful Out of Almost Nothing’ Alison Lurie Only a few people have been both great writers and great illustrators of children’s books. In the nineteenth century there was Edward Lear, and in the twentieth Dr. Seuss and—perhaps the most gifted of them all—Maurice Sendak.
Story Cross Off and Move On Deborah Eisenberg I was preparing to eat. I’d plunked an omelet onto a plate, sat down in front of it, folded the paper in such a way that I could maneuver my fork between my supper and my mouth and still read, and up fetched Cousin Morrie’s picture, staring at me.
					Instead of a quiz this week, we present a contest: How many words have been published in The New York Review of Books since its founding in 1963? Send your answer to web@nybooks.com before July 1 with the subject line “word count.” If your guess is closest to the actual number you’ll win a year’s subscription to the online edition.
Fiction Brute Force...Humanism Charles Baxter John Irving doesn’t mind assaulting his reader with full-frontal sentiment until that reader finally gives up or capitulates. Reading his novels is like spending the night in a bed-and-breakfast filled with Victorian furniture and being mugged in the middle of the night.				Child Welfare New York: The Besieged Children Helen Epstein Troubled families are found everywhere, but 95 percent of all children in foster care in New York are black or Hispanic. In 1996, over 10 percent of all black children in central Harlem were in foster care, a rate of child removal thirty-six times higher than in white neighborhoods, even though the most frequent reason for child removal—drug use—is similarly common among blacks and whites.
Also in the July 12 Fiction issue Christopher Benfey on Toni Morrison, Michael Dirda on Richard Ford, Charles Simic on Steven Millhauser, Michael Chabon on Finnegans Wake, John Gray on Slavoj Žižek, Martin Filler on the Barnes Foundation, Thomas Powers on Gail Collins, and more.
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Footsteps Walking with Chatwin Rory Stewart The publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines in 1987 transformed English travel writing; it made it cool.
Religion Keller to Nuns: Get Out Garry Wills In the New York Times, Bill Keller praised William Donohue’s new book, Why Catholicism Matters. What he particularly liked is the way Donohue argues that half of Catholics should just leave the church they pretend to believe in.
Culture and Ethics Downing Street Liars’ Club Geoffrey Wheatcroft The last few weeks of the Leveson inquiry have been notable for utterly contradictory testimony from different witnesses, several of them present or former leaders of Britain.
The Euro Crisis Greece and the Rest of Us: A Discussion Paul Krugman, Edmund Phelps, Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros How did Greece get into its current mess? Are other countries at risk of falling into the same predicament? These questions were explored in a panel discussion at the Metropolitan Museum earlier this year.
China Why the Dalai Lama is Hopeful Jonathan Mirsky “I told President Obama the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are missing a part of the brain, the part that contains common sense,” the Dalai Lama said to me during our conversation in London last week.