Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Temple Grandin’s The Autistic Brain, Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork, Nabokov’s secrets, and Iran’s apologists. Plus an extraordinary Dürer exhibition, why Obama is not Nixon, and how more guns don’t make us safer.
How to Succeed in Business Anne Applebaum Sheryl Sandberg has done something new: She has written the first truly successful, best-selling “how to succeed in business” motivational book to be explicitly designed and marketed for women. As part of her pitch to women, she also claims to be telling a larger story about gender and society. But Lean In is not a book that belongs on the shelf alongside Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi. It belongs in the business section.
What Is Autism? Jerome Groopman In The Autistic Brain, Temple Grandin has reached a stunning level of sophistication about herself and the science of autism. Her observations will assist not only fellow autistics and families with affected members, but also researchers and physicians seeking to better understand the condition.
Is Humbert Humbert Jewish? Mark Ford Nabokov felt the artist’s truest and most valuable way of resisting totalitarian modes of thought is to assert his or her independence as thoroughly and as spectacularly as possible. He conceived of writing as a chess match with a razor-keen opponent always looking to predict his next move, and joy and triumph lay in outwitting that reader’s assumptions, and thereby stimulating “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy.”
Ruthless Iran: Can a Deal Be Made? Roger Cohen It often seems in the pages of Going to Tehran as though the authors have drunk the Islamic Republic’s Kool-Aid to the last drop. This is a pity because as across-the-board apologists they undercut a case that needs to be made—that US policy toward Iran has been a failure.					The Saga of the Flaming Zucchini Jenny Uglow Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, a detailed account of apparently everyday tools, is also an account of societal attitudes and indeed philosophies of living.
					in the June 6 Issue Fintan O'Toole on John le Carré, Mischa Berlinski on Haiti, Joseph Lelyveld on George Packer, David Brion Davis on emancipation, James Gleick on time and consciousness, Christopher de Bellaigue on the Kurds, Timothy Garton Ash on free speech in Burma, William Dalrymple on Indian art, Dan Chiasson on Anne Carson, Ray Monk on Wittgenstein, and more.
The Bombers’ World Christian Caryl Those who associated with Tamerlan Tsarnaev recall that he could be charming or considerate when he felt like it—but they also tell of an intensely narcissistic personality whose actual achievements lagged far behind the standards demanded by his intense self-regard.				How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled Paul Krugman Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning. When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process.
Dürer’s Devil Within Andrew Butterfield In the summer of 1494, Albrecht Dürer made a startlingly intimate drawing of his fiancée. In its frank portrayal of an informal moment of unguarded emotion, there had never been a drawing quite like this before. Typically portraiture was meant to represent the exemplary virtues of the person shown; Dürer instead often sought to capture the idiosyncratic and psychological characteristics of the people he portrayed. He was fascinated with the close scrutiny of dark and brooding emotion.
Why Obama Is Not Nixon Elizabeth Drew References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS, Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the Associated Press, don’t begin to rise—or sink—to that level.
Shooting Our Way to Safety Charles Simic As someone who by the age of six was used to hearing gun shots, explosions, and screams and to seeing dead and wounded people during World War II, the German occupation, and the civil war in Yugoslavia, I learned early that the primary purpose of a weapon is to kill people. Anyone who tells you that having a lot of them around will make us safer is either out to make money out of dead children or living in a fool’s paradise.