Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: From our summer issue, the health care decision, radicals versus liberals, Dickens’s life and work, Obama’s report card on foreign policy, Peter Carey’s new novel, and a quietly revolutionary painter. On the NYRblog, writing and money, a new film about AIDS orphans, the cruelty of refusing Medicaid funding, truth and rumor in China, how Fifty Shades succeeded, a mysterious sculptor, and the bizarre Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal.
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Biography The Mystery of Charles Dickens Joyce Carol Oates If Dickens’s prose fiction has “defects”—excesses of melodrama, sentimentality, contrived plots, and manufactured happy endings—these are the defects of his era, which for all his greatness Dickens had not the rebellious spirit to resist; he was at heart a crowd-pleaser, a theatrical entertainer, with no interest in subverting the conventions of the novel.
The Supreme Court A Bigger Victory Than We Knew Ronald Dworkin The US has finally satisfied a fundamental requirement of political decency that every other mature democracy has met long ago: a scheme of national health care provision designed to protect every citizen who wants to be protected.
Foreign Policy Obama Abroad: The Report Card Joseph Lelyveld Barack Obama can claim two big foreign policy accomplishments: getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s “Global War on Terror” into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the al-Qaeda network.
Political History The Left vs. the Liberals Sean Wilentz Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation
Fiction Grief, Rage, Cognac, and a Computer Alan Hollinghurst Peter Carey is an astonishing capturer of likenesses—not only in the sense of the portrait (the “good likeness”), but of the teeming similitudes with which a sharp eye and a rich memory discern and describe the world.
					Also in the August 16 issue Yasmine El Rashidi on Egypt’s hidden truth, Sanford Schwartz on Giovanni Battista Moroni, Russell Baker on the FBI, Michael Tomasky on the House of Representatives, Roger Cohen on Muhammad Mossadegh, Darryl Pinckney on young Obama, Jeffrey Gettleman on the war against the Nuba in Sudan, Helen Vendler on Robert Frost, Jeremy Waldron on Michael Sandel, Rory Stewart on Afghanistan, and much more.
Appeal How to Support In-Depth Reporting The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, a nonprofit media project, has been invaluable to The New York Review of Books. In recent years, it has supported Alma Guillermoprieto’s report on gangs in El Salvador, William Dalrymple’s article on the effects of the US war on terror in Pakistan, Hugh Eakin's exploration of Qatar, and Peter Matthiessen’s exposé of oil drilling in Alaska. The Fund survives on small foundation grants and donations from readers like you committed to fearless journalism. Please support this important project today.
South Africa AIDS Orphans: Breaking the Silence Helen Epstein Five courageous teenagers from a Cape Town slum have made a short film about what it’s like to lose a parent to AIDS. It’s one of the most powerful films about the epidemic I’ve ever seen.			Writing Does Money Make Us Write Better? Tim Parks Given the decreasing income of writers over recent years—one thinks of the sharp drop in payments for freelance journalism and again in advances for most novelists—are we to expect a corresponding falling off in the quality of what we read? Can the connection really be that simple? On the other hand, can any craft possibly be immune from a relationship with money?
Health Care The Republicans’ Medicaid Cruelty Jeff Madrick The rejection by five state governments of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion suggests a vein of cruelty in America that is deeply disturbing.
China The People’s Republic of Rumor Richard Bernstein People don’t know whether a story circulating on the web has been kept out of the official press because it didn’t happen or because the censors have been instructed to cover it up.
Publishing Grey Area: How ‘Fifty Shades’ Dominated the Market Emily Eakin The staggering success of E.L. James’s trilogy may have less to do with talent, content, or luck than with a peculiarity of her early readership: her work originated as fan fiction, a genre that operates outside the bounds of literary commerce.
Art Recasting the Ancients Andrew Butterfield Although long cherished by collectors as possibly the most sumptuous statuettes in the history of art, the essence of Antico’s work still seems to elude full understanding.
Cambodia Necessary Scapegoats? The Making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Stéphanie Giry Prime Minister Hun Sen has long been keen to go down in history as the man who brought the surviving leaders of the Pol Pot regime to justice. But as a one-time Khmer Rouge battalion commander, he knows only too well that important members of the governing party have complicated ties to the former regime and that more investigations down the chain of command could expose their own shady pasts.