Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks: What the NSA knows about you, Brazil’s violent favelas, the language of cinema, the new German question, Edmund Wilson, justice for Trayvon Martin, a historian’s tangle with the FBI, a lecture by Borges, and the crackdown on Chinese activists. Plus Beirut’s ghosts, a Burmese memoir, Indonesian killers, Charles Rosen’s lost masterpiece, and the funny, disturbing work of cartoonist C.F.
Surveillance What the NSA Really Knows James Bamford The NSA has access to virtually everyone’s phone records, and can store, data-mine, and keep them indefinitely. Edward Snowden’s documents show that the agency is also accessing the Internet data of the nine major Internet companies in the US, including Google and Yahoo. These documents add greatly to an understanding of just how the NSA goes about conducting its eavesdropping and data-mining programs, and just how deceptive the NSA and the Obama administration have been in describing the agency’s activities to the American public.
Reportage In the Violent Favelas of Brazil Suketu Mehta We walked up to a taxi outside the hotel. My friend asked me to Google the restaurant menu. I was doing so when I saw a teenage boy run up to the taxi and gesticulate through my open window. I thought he was a beggar, asking for money. Then I saw the gun, going from my head to the cell phone.
Movies The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema Martin Scorsese Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.
Europe The New German Question Timothy Garton Ash There is a new German question. It is this: Can Europe’s most powerful country lead the way in building both a sustainable, internationally competitive eurozone and a strong, internationally credible European Union?
					More in this Issue David Bromwich on the photography of the Civil War, April Bernard on Frank Bidart, Nathaniel Rich on Amanda Knox, John Banville on Hugh Trevor-Roper, Paul Volcker on the Fed and big banking, Freeman Dyson on Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Carey on Benjamin Britten, Charles Hope on art forgery, and more.
Personal History How the FBI Turned Me On to Rare Books Natalie Zemon Davis My passion for history has been life-long. I’ve had several turnings as I tried to give voice to people often ignored in historical narratives. Let me take as an example an event that seemed at first like a downturn.				Tribute On Edmund Wilson Robert B. Silvers He wrote an astonishing variety of books. And he was astonishing as well in his willingness to take on difficult subjects—learning Russian to write about Russian literature and politics, learning Hebrew to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls, learning Hungarian to write about Hungarian poetry.
Rediscovery A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell Jorge Luis Borges Now, in the same way that we have seen how Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson: a sometimes stupid and loyal companion. There are characters whose role is to bring out the hero’s personality.
Human Rights What’s Behind the New Chinese Crackdown? Li Xiaorong Since late March, when China’s new president Xi Jinping took power, nearly one hundred Chinese human rights activists have been detained. What all the detained activists seem to have in common is that they are accused of organizing actions that would take place not just in cyberspace but in the physical space of city streets.
Justice and the Law Trayvon Martin: What the Law Can’t Do Steven H. Wright On the day a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman, my mother phoned me, distraught. She asked me, based upon my experience as a former Justice Department civil-rights attorney, whether federal hate-crime charges or a civil suit would stand a chance of holding Zimmerman accountable. My answer didn’t give her much comfort.
More on the NYRblog: Robyn Creswell: Chasing Beirut’s Ghosts on Rabee Jaber’s The Mehlis Report Jonathan Mirsky: The Despots and the Laughter on Wendy Law-Yone’s memoir of Burma Francine Prose: Indonesia’s Happy Killers on Joshua Oppenheimer’s disturbing new documentary
Music Charles Rosen’s Lost Masterpiece Jim Holt It was in the folk-infused Mazurkas, the late pianist and author Charles Rosen observed, that Chopin’s skill at classical counterpoint, his ability to create a play of inner voices, “is paradoxically most marked.” And what a revelation Rosen’s performance proved to be.					Comics The Joys of ‘Mere’ Gabriel Winslow-Yost The cartoonist C.F.’s new collection is a tour through a wide variety of familiar comic book genres that manages to make each seem more alien and nonsensical than the last.
Events David Bowie on screen, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, a series of Simenon film adaptations, the Cyrus Cylinder and ancient Persia, El Anatsui’s monumental works, and more in the calendar.