Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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In our forthcoming October 24 issue, John Banville finds a different Kafka in three books about him, and Jennifer Homans reveals the unknown young Balanchine. On the NYRblog, an open letter from doctors around the world about the Syrian humanitarian crisis, and Jonathan Freedland examines Washington’s self-induced paralysis. The 50 Years blog features a selection from the Review’s long history of unusual headlines.
Shutting Down the World? Jonathan Freedland With the US government shut down, there is not just bemusement in capitals across Europe and Asia but a growing sense of angst. If the current deadlock extends to October 17, and a congressional refusal to raise the debt ceiling triggers a US default, the impact will be instant and international. What for the Tea Party caucus will be a gesture over excessive federal spending will to the rest of the world be an act of sabotage inflicted on the global economic system.
Let Us Treat Patients in Syria Gro Harlem Brundtland and Elizaveta Glinka The targeted attacks on medical facilities and personnel are deliberate and systematic, not an inevitable nor acceptable consequence of armed conflict. Such attacks are an unconscionable betrayal of the principle of medical neutrality.
A Different Kafka John Banville What are we to make of Kafka? Not, surely, what he made of himself, or at least what he would have us believe he made of himself. In a letter to his long-suffering fiancée Felice Bauer he declared: “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”
The Unknown Young Balanchine Jennifer Homans George Balanchine had a hidden childhood. When he left his native Russia for Europe and the United States in 1924, his entire family stayed behind, and even letters between them were unreliable. Judging from what he later told friends and biographers, he didn’t remember much, though what he did recall fit neatly, perhaps a bit too neatly, in two halves.
					In the next issue Malise Ruthven on terror, Robert Pogue Harrison on Dante’s Inferno, Susan Dunn on Ben Franklin’s sister, Michael Gorra on Jhumpa Lahiri, Tamsin Shaw on Nietzsche, Peter Galassi on Garry Winogrand, Verlyn Klinkenborg on Bill McKibben, and much more.
Yuk! Pshaw! Excelsior! Fifty Years of Distinctive Headlines Matthew Howard Throughout its first fifty years, The New York Review has asked many questions: Tennis Anyone? How Dead is Arnold Schoenberg? Aimez-Vous Rousseau? Is There a Marxist in the House? Do Fish Have Nostrils?