Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: What if our memories never happened? What if animals are no longer afraid of us? What if your father was a terrible parent but a gifted artist? Is madness sexy? Plus Oliver Stone’s cold war history, the trouble with translation, the battle over teacher evaluation in New York City, adultery and apartheid on stage, and our “irretrievably broken” world, in a box. Fifty years ago this month, The New York Review published its first issue. You can read it here.
TRUTH AND EXPERIENCE Speak, Memory Oliver Sacks It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.
NATURE Visitors Russell Baker Humans are no longer the same dangerous predators who once pushed the beaver close to extinction and reduced the deer population to a trifling number scarcely a century ago. Jim Sterba believes that this human withdrawal from combative relations with woodland animals is one of the major causes of their proliferation: man as killer has undergone a softening change. This kinder, softer American has only a remote relationship with the natural world he inhabits.
REVISIONISM Cherry-Picking Our History Sean Wilentz On The Untold History of the United States, a book and ten-part televised documentary series by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.
TELEVISION Double Agents in Love Lorrie Moore One of the intriguing aspects of Homeland is that it is fearlessly interested in every kind of madness: the many Shakespearean manifestations—cold revenge, war-induced derangement, outsized professional ambition—as well as the more naturally occurring expressions, such as bipolar disease and simple grief.
					PERSONAL HISTORY My Father Brian Urquhart My father was single-minded to a fault. Painting took absolute priority in his life, and his wife and children were all secondary. What he did for money remained a mystery, except that we evidently had very little of it. In 1925, when I was six, my father, carrying his easel and paintbox, rode away on his bicycle and never came home again.
			WRITING AND TRANSLATION Listening for the Jabberwock Tim Parks What is the status of translated texts? Are they essentially different from texts in their original form? There is a natural tendency towards rhythm, alliteration, and assonance when one writes, and editing to conform to the linguistic conventions of a different culture can interfere with this.
			TEACHING Holding Education Hostage Diane Ravitch It is simply wrong to devise a measure of teacher quality based on standardized tests. The tests are not yardsticks. They are not scientific instruments. They are social constructions, subject to human, sampling, random, and other errors.
			THEATER Singing of Adultery and Apartheid Darryl Pinckney Can Themba’s story “The Suit” captures the daily rhythm of the Johannesburg township of Sophiatown in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was the center of black cultural and political life in South Africa. Peter Brook’s elegant adaptation at BAM faithfully retells the story in a musical evening.
ARTIFICE AND AUTHENTICITY Wes Anderson’s Worlds Michael Chabon The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”