Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Will defeating Obama advance the progressive agenda? Garry Wills doesn’t think so. A trash dump next to Hadrian’s Villa? Very likely, Ingrid Rowland laments from Rome. Who wants to hear your boring dreams at the breakfast table? Not Michael Chabon. Chinese dissident Bao Tong is followed by secret police wherever he goes; Ian Johnson interviews him. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is not about the existence of monsters, writes Geoffrey O'Brien, but the “monstrousness of existing.” Plus a preview from our July 12 issue: John Gray on the violent visions of Slavoj Žižek.
2012 ELECTION The Curse of Political Purity Garry Wills One of the recurring comedies of American politics is the rapture with which people elect a shining prince, and then collapse into self-pitying cries of betrayal when the shine comes off once the candidate is in office. A refrain of dismay runs the fairy tale in reverse: “We elected a prince and he turned into a frog.” Obama was never a prince. None of them are.
ITALY Trashing Hadrian’s Villa Ingrid D. Rowland If local and regional officials get their way, Hadrian’s Villa, the incomparably beautiful rural residence of that most cultured of all Roman emperors, may soon be remembered less for its ancient pleasures than for the stench of modern refuse wafting through its ruins.
INTERVIEW ‘In the Current System, I’d Be Corrupt Too’ Ian Johnson Bao Tong is one of China’s best-known political dissidents. Once director of the Communist Party’s Office of Political Reform, he later served seven years in prison for revealing state secrets and making counter-revolutionary propaganda. I recently met Bao at a McDonald’s in Beijing, after secret police refused me permission to enter his apartment building.
EVENT CALENDAR Challenges to Multiculturalism: A Public Conference The New York Review of Books Foundation and Fritt Ord invite the public to a conference with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ronald Dworkin, Timothy Garton Ash, and others, June 25–26 in Oslo. Los Angeles Meet Up Meet and mingle with New York Review Books staff and fellow NYRB enthusiasts on June 21 at the Library Bar. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović A delightful “opera” based on the life of the performance artist Marina Abramović, starring Abramović and Willem Dafoe, directed by Robert Wilson, June 22–24 in Amsterdam.
					Subscribe Today and Save 50%   “The Reviewwas created to fill a need in the country for a journal of ideas, a mission that it has fulfilled since becoming a must read to many loyal readers.” – The Los Angeles Times
FILM The Sublime Horrors of Ridley Scott Geoffrey O’Brien What is this genre? Call it the speculative science fiction epic willing to flirt with cosmic pessimism; the eternally recurring saga of the space voyage toward our point of origin or ultimate destiny; the proleptic chronicle of a future depicted as so endangered it may not even come to pass, and so unappealing we might well wish it wouldn’t.
AVERSION Why I Hate Dreams Michael Chabon I hate dreams. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off. Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours.
PHILOSOPHY The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek John Gray Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek.