Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE

THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY OPEN ROAD MEDIA

This week on nybooks.com: Morality and dignity, the rise of the Sinai Bedouin, a great actor who was bored by acting, Oslo’s modernist architecture, a 130-hour-long play, an exchange over the Khmer Rouge, and Spielberg’s Lincoln. Plus a preview from our holiday issue: is God happy?
SINAI The Uprising of the Bedouin Nicolas Pelham The Bedouin have acquired real power across the Sinai Peninsula. They have launched raids on Israel, hobbled and threatened to oust the multinational force that is supposed to protect the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty, and disrupted the region’s supply of gas.
MORALITY The Taste for Being Moral Thomas Nagel Even if we accept descriptive theories of the different forms of morality based on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, or developmental and social psychology, each of us also holds specific moral views, makes moral judgments, and governs his conduct and political choices partly on the basis of those attitudes. How do we combine the external descriptive view of ourselves provided by empirical science with the active internal engagement of real life?
FAME The Great Actor Who Hated Acting Fintan O’Toole The most striking revelation of Richard Burton’s diaries is that his sense of failure relates not to his unfulfilled potential as an actor, but to his thwarted desire to be a writer. It is literature, not theater or film, that truly absorbs him. He is intoxicated by language.
ARCHITECTURE The Hidden Colors of Modern Oslo Martin Filler Norway is the least populous Scandinavian nation save Iceland, and its architectural output has been commensurately small. While Denmark, Finland, and Sweden have marketed their design cultures as a matter of foreign policy for nearly a century, Norway’s has remained relatively unknown.					FILM ‘Lincoln’: A More Authentic Wonderment Geoffrey O’Brien In Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance—or, more properly, wholesale inhabitation—Lincoln is made more mysterious than ever.
					CAMBODIA ‘The Legacy of Murderous Regimes’ An exchange with Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister Hor Nam Hong and Stéphanie Giry about her blog post, “Necessary Scapegoats? The Making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal” and a responseby Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Koy Kuong.
INDIA Creating and Destroying the Universe in Twenty-Nine Nights David Shulman This summer in central Kerala, I witnessed one of the great compositions of classical Sanskrit drama, which went on for some 130 hours.
READING A Tribute to Mavis Gallant An evening of talks and readings from Lynne Tillman, Francine Prose and others to pay tribute to the extraordinary Mavis Gallant.		THEATER A Celebration of Harold Pinter English actor Julian Sands draws a portrait of the Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter.		LECTURE Blacks and American Democracy Darryl Pinckney delivers the Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library.		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 of Books. The calendar sells for $12.95, but is yours free with your new, renewal, or gift subscription.
QUESTION Is God Happy? Leszek Kolakowski The word “happiness” does not seem applicable to divine life. But nor is it applicable to human beings.