Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Tuesday 14 May 2013


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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.

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.

Reading It Wrong

Tim 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”?

Chavismo After Chávez

Alma 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.

Rite of Spring

Christopher 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.

A Mind Among Pigs

Gabriel 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.

‘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

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

A Tale From Baghdad

Egyptian storyteller Chirine Al-Ansary performs tales adapted from the Thousand and One Nights. Recommended by Yasmine El Rashidi
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.

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled

Paul 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?