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This week on nybooks.com: The fate of Afghanistan, how Chinese internet censorship works, notes on summer, the religion of Apple, the origins of Islam, Billie Holiday, Czesław Miłosz, and a real-life office sitcom. Plus a preview from our forthcoming August 15 issue: Justice Stevens on the Voting Rights Act, and a new approach to diplomacy with Iran.
DIPLOMACY For a New Approach to Iran William Luers, Thomas R. Pickering, and Jim Walsh Could this be the year for an engagement with Iran that “is honest and grounded in mutual respect,” as President Obama proposed over four years ago? That goal seems unlikely without a shift in Iranian thinking and without a change in American diplomatic and political strategy. But two developments, one in Iran and one in the region, provide reason to think that diplomatic progress might be possible.
CIVIL RIGHTS The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent John Paul Stevens Gary May’s Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
AFGHANISTAN The War After the War Anatol Lieven Seen from Kabul, there are good reasons to fear that the US will negotiate some sort of face-saving deal with the Taliban and quit Afghanistan entirely. What Pakistan Wants Many Pakistanis view the Taliban as greedy, treacherous, primitive, and fanatical savages. For the Taliban, the Pakistani state and military are decadent, corrupt, brutal, and greedy oppressors. Each side regards the other as inherently unreliable.
NOTEBOOK Summertime Charles Simic To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss.				DIGITAL RELIGION Faith and Works at Apple Edward Mendelson As everyone knows, the world-religion of the educated and prosperous in the twenty-first century is Apple, with its Vatican in Cupertino and its cathedrals in the light-filled Apple Stores that draw pilgrims gripping iPhones and iPads like rosaries.
					CHINA Censoring the News Before It Happens Perry Link Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at Berkeley, leads the world in ferreting out and piecing together how Chinese Internet censorship works. Xiao and his staff have collected and organized a repository of more than 2,600 directives that website editors across China have received during the last ten years.
ISLAM Recovering Submerged Worlds Peter Brown Three recent books, by the supremely accomplished scholars Glen Bowersock and Patricia Crone, deal with the centuries in which a very ancient world suddenly and unexpectedly turned upside down.
READINGS Czesław Miłosz: Intelligence and Ecstasy A selection of the work by and about the late Polish writer, who was a frequent contributor to theReview, including poems, an interview, his Nobel Prize lecture, and essays about him by Helen Vendler and Tony Judt.					REMINISCENCE A Job of Work Luc Sante Note how simple and reasonably tidy everything looks: a telephone, a typewriter, no more than three Rolodexes. It wasn’t always so tidy, because daily life at the Reviewwas ruled by emergency and catastrophe.
PERSONAL HISTORY Dancing Miss Darryl Pinckney Lizzie said that you can listen to opera by yourself, but not certain kinds of jazz. You had to have someone with you when you listened to Billie Holiday, for instance. Otherwise, you might kill yourself.
FILM L’Avventura “This provocative voyage into the void brought Antonioni's style to maturity and reinvented movies in the process,” writesJ. Hoberman.		DESIGN New Models for Housing Cathleen Schinerecommends this “welcome antidote to the McMansion: minute spaces beautifully designed”		PHOTOGRAPHY Japan’s Modern Divide “A world that is now lost forever” still lives in Hiroshi Hamaya's photographs, Ian Buruma writes.		MORE EVENTS Summer music, film, and art recommendations, a discussion about literary life and the small magazine in the electronic age, and more in our calendar. SALE The NYRB Summer Sale is here: 40% off gritty American novels, literary suspense, Kingsley Amis, Nancy Mitford, British short stories, 19th-century Russian masters, historical fiction, picture books for children, and more. Shop now.