Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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What’s new on nybooks.com: From our forthcoming big 50th anniversary issue, Steven Weinberg on physics, Daniel Mendelsohn on Game of Thrones, Michael Chabon on Thomas Pynchon, and Zadie Smith on her father. Plus Tim Parks on headlines, Janet Hamlin’s sketches from the Guantanamo tribunals, and Charles Simic on punishing the poor.
Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know Steven Weinberg In the past fifty years two large branches of physical science have each made a historic transition. I recall both cosmology and elementary particle physics in the early 1960s as cacophonies of competing conjectures. By now in each case we have a widely accepted theory, known as a “standard model,” that allows us to make numerical predictions of high precision, which turn out to agree with observation.
The Women and the Thrones Daniel Mendelsohn When Game of Thrones, the HBO television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s books, began airing in 2011, many critics and viewers dismissed the series as “boy fiction.” And yet the show has been a tremendous hit. This is, in part, a testament to the way in which fantasy entertainment—fiction, television, movies, games—has moved ever closer to the center of mass culture over the past couple of decades.
The Crying of September 11 Michael Chabon Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is best understood not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge, even at the risk of a melodramatic organ chord, that paradigm’s most painful limitation.
Love in the Gardens Zadie Smith When my father was old and I was still young, I came into some money. Though it was money “earned” for work done, it seemed, both to my father and me, no different than a win on the lottery. We looked at the contract more than once, checking and rechecking it, just like a lottery ticket, to ensure no mistake had been made. No mistake had been made. I was to be paid for writing a book. For a long time, neither of us could work out what to do about this new reality.
					ALSO IN THE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE… Ingrid Rowland on Titian Paul Krugman on climate change Sue Halpern on the Internet Stephen Breyer on Proust Ronald Dworkin on law and morality Adam Shatz on Charlie Parker Helen Vendler on Marianne Moore Claire Messud on Albert Camus Mark Danner on Syria Richard Holmes on John Keats J.M. Coetzee on Patrick White an unpublished essay by T.S. Eliot and more
Headline Headaches Tim Parks Nothing prejudices the way a reader comes to a piece more than its headline. Nothing is more likely to make him or her believe, even after reading the article through, that the author has said something he has not said and perhaps would never want people to imagine he has said.					Sketches from Guantanamo Janet Hamlin Guantanamo tribunals differed from the other court drawings I’ve done. There were faces I was not allowed to draw, and each drawing could not leave the courtroom until a Pentagon official reviewed it.
Bleak House Charles Simic We have forgotten what this country once understood, that a society based on nothing but selfishness and greed is not a society at all, but a state of war of the strong against the weak.