Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: The NYRblog looks at digital images in the movies, China’s happy blogger, the unheard voices of swing-state voters, the crisis of bad jobs, the Supreme Court’s new cases, and gay history in the Times and its newsroom. Plus: money and beauty, and advice on planning a coup.
China ‘Why Aren’t You Grateful?’ Ian Johnson Han Han’s new book is filled with commentary poking fun at officials and nationalists. But Han is careful not to go too far and risk becoming a dissident. He’s a player in the reality of Chinese society today, and wants to remain one
Film Trapped in the Total Cinema J. Hoberman Digital image-making precludes the necessity of having the world, or even a really existing subject, before the camera—let alone the need for a camera. Photography had been superseded, if not the desire to produce images that moved. Chaplin was perhaps but a footnote to Mickey Mouse; what were The Birth of a Nation and Battleship Potemkin compared to Toy Story 3? The history of motion pictures was now, in effect, the history of animation.
Election Coverage What Do Swing-State Voters Think? Michael Massing Most reporters stay inside the bubble. They follow the candidates, speak with their handlers, interview consultants, quote think-tank analysts, pore over polling data. A recent week of coverage in the Times had plenty of stories on PACs, campaign strategy, political operatives and Romney’s tax returns, Only one featured extensive interviews with ordinary Americans.
Law The Roberts Court Takes on Racial Justice David Cole The Supreme Court’s new term promises to be almost as controversial as the last one. Whether the results will be as happily surprising for liberals is a much tougher question.					Personal History When The New York Times Came Out of the Closet Charles Kaiser If you were born after 1970, it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine in January 1971 to discover “What it Means to be a Homosexual.”
The Economy Our Crisis of Bad Jobs Jeff Madrick The reason that the economic recovery is coinciding with middle class decline is increasingly clear. America is creating jobs, but they are bad jobs: retailing, food preparation, and table waiting, for example—in other words, jobs that don’t pay much.
					Subscribe and Save 50th Anniversary Calendar Offer In celebration of our 50th anniversary, the David Levine 2013 Calendar features a selection of classic covers that highlight Levine’s incisive and provocative caricatures from all five decades of The New York Review. The calendar sells for $12.95, but is yours free with your new, renewal, or gift subscription.
Money and Beauty When Bankers Had Splendid Taste Ingrid D. Rowland Money comes in many colors: greenback dollars, Chinese “redbacks,” euros in a range of pastel shades that might have been drawn straight from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But for sheer evocative punch, for money that expresses the very Platonic idea of money, it is hard to beat that mighty and ubiquitous Renaissance coin, the Florentine florin.
From the Archives How to Plot Your Takeover Eric Hobsbawm August 21, 1969: A coup is a game with three players (we omit the dominant foreign power or corporation which may hold an effective veto—or the trump cards). These are the armed forces which can make it, the politicians and bureaucracy whose readiness to accept it makes it possible, and the political forces, official or unofficial, which can check or checkmate it. [Also see: Tony Judt: “The Last Romantic,” November 20, 2003]