Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Subscribe and Save

Many thanks for your kind attention and support in 2012, and best wishes for the new year from everyone at The New York Review of Books.
Film How Close to Lincoln? David Bromwich Lincoln remains an honorable movie compounded of irresolute but mostly upright intentions; and its strengths are only a little undercut by the synthetic quality of its ambition. But that has always been the price of Steven Spielberg’s energy and his enormous competence.
Same-Sex Marriage Getting Nearer and Nearer David Cole When Billie Holiday promised, “the difficult I’ll do right now, the impossible will take a little while,” she admitted that she was “crazy in love.” But that lyric might well serve as the anthem of the gay rights movement, which has achieved, more swiftly than any other individual rights movement in history, not merely the impossible, but the unthinkable.
Statistics How He Got It Right Andrew Hacker Nate Silver predicted Obama’s total of the popular vote within one tenth of a percent of the actual figure. His powers of prediction seemed uncanny. In his early and sustained prediction of an Obama victory, he was ahead of most polling organizations and my fellow political scientists. But buyers of his book, The Signal and the Noise, now a deserved best seller, may be in for something of a surprise.
Riyadh Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change? Hugh Eakin With three quarters of its own citizens now under the age of thirty, Saudi Arabia faces many of the same social problems as Egypt and Yemen. Can the US-backed regime survive?				Gaza It’s Not Just About Fear, Bibi, It’s About Hopelessness Nomika Zion This wasn’t my war, Bibi, and neither was the previous cursed war: not in my name, and not in the cause of my security.… There are a thousand and one ways to suppress violence by means of violence but not one of them has ever succeeded in annihilating it.
					More in the January 10 issue Cathleen Schine on Alice Munro, Ingrid Rowland on Raphael, Robert Paxton on birds, James Salter on William Styron, John Banville on Rilke, John Searle on consciousness, Zadie Smith on joy, Michael Greenberg on Hurricane Sandy’s victims, Larry McMurtry on Geronimo, and more.
Religion Beijing’s Doomsday Problem Ian Johnson			Public Health The Wrong Way to Fight Polio Helen Epstein			The Nobel Prize Why We Should Criticize Mo Yan Perry Link
The Economy Either Way We’re Going Over the Cliff Jeff Madrick Whichever way the negotiations go, the result will be slow economic growth next year at best, and possibly outright recession. A fair observer might ask why the US is doing this to itself.				Tunisia ‘Did We Make the Revolution For This?’ Christopher de Bellaigue The revolution in Tunisia is starting to unravel. Two years since the self-immolation of a fruit-seller in a depressed provincial town spurred the toppling of the country’s authoritarian president, the goals that animated the revolution no longer seem within reach.
Film Tolkien vs. Technology J. Hoberman There is a good deal to be said about Peter Jackson’s long-awaited and exceedingly long adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, most of it bad.