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This week on nybooks.com: Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Alma Guillermoprieto on Venezuela, Tim Parks
on translation, Christopher Benfey on divination, and Gabriel Winslow-Yost on a mysterious new film. Plus a preview from June 6 issue, Paul Krugman
on how the case for austerity economics has crumbled, and highlights from our literary journalism discussion at the New York Public Library.
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Pakistan: A New Beginning?Ahmed Rashid
The weeks leading up to Pakistan’s fraught parliamentary vote were
marred by the worst election violence in the country’s history. But the
strong victory by opposition leader Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim
League amid high voter turnout now holds the promise of greater
stability.
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Reading It WrongTim Parks
One of the intriguing aspects when teaching translation is watching
students struggle with sentences that say things they didn’t expect them
to say. If a writer should come up with some perplexing idea, students
will end up reducing the text to something more conventional. Do we as
readers also subconsciously make these “corrections”?
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Chavismo After ChávezAlma Guillermoprieto
What Venezuelans may remember most about last month’s presidential
campaign is the moment right at the start, when Nicolás Maduro Moros,
the late Hugo Chávez’s chosen successor, told a television audience that
the supreme comandante had come back to him in the shape of a little
bird and, chirping, urged him on to victory. There was also the time he
promised that an ancient Indian curse would fall on those who voted for
the opposition candidate.
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Rite of SpringChristopher Benfey
Spring should be a time of portents and premonitions, winged harbingers
(“I dreaded that first Robin, so,” as Emily Dickinson put it with
characteristic ambivalence) and new beginnings. I thought I might follow
Margaret Fuller’s lead, and greet the spring by serendipitously dipping
into a trusted book for guidance.
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A Mind Among PigsGabriel Winslow-Yost
Shane Carruth’s debut, Primer, was a puzzle film with a solution to be worked out in elaborate online flow-charts and exegeses. His second film, Upstream Color,
is something else: a genuine, lasting mystery. The strangeness comes in
part from the very odd movements of the film’s plot, which swerves off
each time it seems to be coming to a recognizable climax.
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‘Something in the Air’
Olivier Assayas follows up on his epic Carlos with another period piece, this one evoking the student milieu of the early 1970s. Selected by J. Hoberman
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Paris: The Thrill of the Modern
The “modernity of art as it was understood by the artists of the last half of the 19th century.” Reviewed by Anka Muhlstein
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A Tale From Baghdad
Egyptian storyteller Chirine Al-Ansary performs tales adapted from the Thousand and One Nights. Recommended by Yasmine El Rashidi
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On April 3 The New York Review and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library celebrated the Review’s 50th anniversary with a event featuring Ian Buruma, Joseph Lelyveld, Zoë Heller, Alma Guillermoprieto, and Andrew Delbanco discussing the future of literary journalism.
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How the Case for Austerity Has CrumbledPaul Krugman
Austerity economics is in a very bad way. Its predictions have proved
utterly wrong; its founding academic documents have become the objects
of much ridicule. None of this should have come as a surprise: basic
macroeconomics should have told everyone to expect what did, in fact,
happen, and the papers that have now fallen into disrepute were
obviously flawed from the start. This raises the obvious question: Why
did austerity economics get such a powerful grip on elite opinion in the
first place?
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