Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Editors vs. writers, Batman vs. Koolhaas, men vs. wolves. Plus the British Mandate in Palestine, the art of dreaming, Jordan’s elections, and life at the Review circa 1989.
MANDATORY READING Palestine: How Bad, & Good, Was British Rule? Avishai Margalit The British rule over Palestine lasted roughly thirty years, from 1917 until 1948. In a country that has three thousand years of recorded history, thirty years is a tiny fraction. If we conceive of three thousand years on a scale of one day, the period of British rule takes barely eight minutes. Yet the influence of these thirty years was deep and wide-ranging.
ONEIROLOGY Dreams I’ve Had (and Some I Haven’t) Charles Simic The most interesting dreams to my mind have no obvious subject matter. They are like turning on the TV late at night and coming upon a scene from an old black and white film one has most likely never seen, though it seems vaguely familiar.
ELECTIONS AND PROTEST Jordan: Democracy Delayed Nicolas Pelham A new law that was supposed to make last week’s election more democratic has left the kingdom’s carefully choreographed political system largely unchanged. The king’s advisers hope an influx of foreign cash will help stave off social discontent, and that a new parliament will further divide the opposition.
COMICS Batman vs. Koolhaas Martin Filler Among architectural insiders, Batman is likely to cause the most comment for its scathing portrayal of a Netherlandish master builder named Kem Roomhaus, who, as Batman says, “may be an affected, narcissistic creep, but he’s also a genius.”				WRITING In Praise of the Language Police Tim Parks We want to think of our writers as geniuses occupying positions of absolute independence in relation to a tediously conventional society. Conversely, we abhor, or believe we abhor, the standard and the commonplace. Yet nobody requires the existence of a standard and a general pressure to conform more than the person who wishes to assume a position outside it.
					EXTERMINATION The Lost Wolves of New England Christopher Benfey The lost wolves of New England have been on my mind lately, as winter settles into the woods below our house and the lives of the local predators—the hawks and owls and the raucous coyotes—are increasingly exposed among the bare-leafed trees. Wolves have not been welcome in our woods for a very long time.
EVENT Celebrating 50 Years of The New York Review This is the last week to get your tickets to our big celebration at the Town Hall next Tuesday. If you’re going to the event and would be interested in being featured in a forthcoming series of subscriber profiles, please email us at newsletters@nybooks.com.
FILM New Yawk New Wave New York’s scrappy, streetwise, pre-indie, off-Hollywood films		LECTURE Victor Serge and Russia Biographer Richard Greeman on the novelist’s family background		RALLY Students for Gun Control “We think that there is no better time to express our sadness and our disgust.”		ALSO IN THE CALENDAR Daniel Mendelsohn at the Morgan Library, Japanese underground cinema, a new branch of the Louvre, an Iranian version of Argo, Gordon Parks’s “A Harlem Family,” a performance of Raymond Kennedy’s Ride a Cockhorse, a forum on Islamaphobia, and more in our calendar.
REMINISCENCE Rude Mechanicals Revan Schendler When I think of the focused efforts that led nowhere, and the gifts that have fallen in my lap, I have to resist discerning a pattern. I was sleeping on a friend’s floor in New Orleans, running from a heavy heart, when Barbara Epstein offered me a job as assistant editor at the Review. It was the spring of 1989; I was twenty-four.