Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE

THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

This week on nybooks.com: A new conception of time, fake Warhols, the case against intervention in Syria, the truth of Simone Weil, war, terror, and Obama’s legacy, dreams and literature, and Ibsen’s Master Builder.
What Is a Warhol? The Buried Evidence Richard Dorment Because the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board’s meetings were held in secret, until recently it was impossible to know how the members reached their decisions. But the papers that have now been made public throw light on the board’s deliberations. They also provide documentary evidence that on several occasions the board authenticated works that it had already declared to be fakes.
Time Regained! James Gleick We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist. If time is like a river, are we standing on the bank watching, or are we bobbing along? It might be better merely to say that things happen, things change, andtime is our name for the reference frame in which we organize our sense that one thing comes before another.
Stay Out of Syria! David Bromwich Our rehearsals of our own good intentions, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and now in Syria, have swollen to the shape of a rationalized addiction. What then should the US do? Nothing, until we can do something good. But the situation could not be less promising.
Simone Weil Susan Sontag The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live.
					A Light in the Dark Nathaniel Rich The great Northeast Blackout of August 2003 passed without Robert Silvers’s notice—or at least without him giving the impression of noticing. While I and the other assistants frantically speculated about terrorist attacks, Bob sat at his desk, resolutely editing a manuscript about Mesopotamian art of the third millennium BC.
Obama’s Long Road to Peace David Cole After four years of failing to close Guantánamo, while relying on a drone war whose legality has often been questioned, President Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his National Defense University speech. Instead, he outlined a way out of this “perpetual war,” saying that “our democracy demands it.” Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy.
The Unanswerable Question Alberto Manguel One day in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook: “To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.” Indeed. From the first dream of Gilgamesh on to our time, Hawthorne’s observation proves to be right.					Ibsen’s Broken Homes Martin Filler The Master Builder, currently being given a revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, concerns the complicated relations—professional and personal—of an architect whose high reputation is matched by an all-consuming egotism that borders on, and perhaps crosses over into, the delusional.
“And Now a Word from Our Sponsors” Zach Maher For fifty years, publishers with books to sell and authors with a name to make have announced their arrival with an appearance in The New York Review: though not, at least initially, under a byline.