Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: Cool Pop art, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, motherhood, and how Texas messes up our textbooks. Plus a Ukrainian city’s Nazi past, Mitt Romney’s education policy, Spaghetti Westerns made by Marxists, Wisconsin’s recall election, Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine, and the fate of libraries.
Education How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us Gail Collins No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.
Art Real Cool Martin Filler What Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol shared most in common was their inherent Cool—both in the 1960s definition of being hip and happening, but also in the larger sense of emotional inaccessibility.
Motherhood Mothers Beware Diane Johnson As long as children need to be born and taken care of, certain disputes, now renamed “the war on women,” seem irreducible about the woman’s place.
Fiction Bring Up the Bodies Hilary Mantel “I wish you had been here this morning,” Lady Rochford says with relish. “It was something to witness. The king and Anne in the great window together, so everybody in the courtyard below could see them. The king has heard about the quarrel she had with Norris yesterday. Well, the whole of England has heard of it.”
					Also in the June 21 issue Michael Tomasky on swing voters, Sanford Schwartz on Lucien Freud, Steven Mithen on E.O. Wilson’s evolution, Nathaniel Rich on noir novels, Jeff Madrick on health care reform, John Banville on Strindberg, Gordon Wood on James Madison, Nicolas Pelham in Libya, and more.
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Europe Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past Philippe Sands In Lviv, the often bitter struggles between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, combined with the city’s long intellectual and university traditions, led to its playing a special and largely unrecognized part in shaping our modern international system of human rights.
Schools The Miseducation of Mitt Romney Diane Ravitch Mitt Romney’s education plan will thrill those who think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems.
Russia Putin’s Propaganda Man Amy Knight Russia’s new culture minister claims that Ivan the Terrible was a humane leader, and that Soviet troops never invaded Poland during World War II. Why is it so important for Putin’s regime to actively promote its version of history?
Film When Westerns Were Un-American J. Hoberman A reader of Fanon and Gramsci, Italian Communist Franco Solinas invented what might be termed the Third World Western, siding with social banditry and peasant revolt.
Election Which Wisconsin? Lorrie Moore Wisconsin has long been considered a collective of liberal college communities connected by interstates crisscrossing the farmland. But especially with the rise of suburban sprawl, it has become much more unpredictable than that.
Public Space The North West London Blues Zadie Smith People have taken to writing long pieces in newspapers to “defend” libraries. Just saying the same thing over and over again. Defend our libraries. We like libraries. Can we keep our libraries? We need to talk about libraries. Pleading, like children. Is that