Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Cracking the most important script of prehistoric Greece, defending a Nazi collaborator, rediscovering an underground Soviet writer, the legend of Marlene Dietrich, and the music of Benjamin Britten. Plus two views of the failure of HealthCare.gov, a retrospective of David Croneberg’s cyborg career, and a glimpse of the Indian wars of the 1860s, as drawn by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.
What Was Greek to Them? Mary Beard Stories of code-breaking and decipherment usually end at the moment the code is finally cracked, or the once-mysterious language demystified and translated. The narrative thrill is in the chase, in the rivalries between the various would-be code-breakers. But the later controversies can be just as exciting and bitter as those leading up to the decipherment, and probably more significant.
The Defense of a Jewish Collaborator Mark Lilla The specter of Hannah Arendt haunts every film Claude Lanzmann has made. If his epic Shoah, released in 1985, can be viewed as a cinematic response to Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, Lanzmann’s new film, about Benjamin Murmelstein, is a retort to her unflattering portrait of the Jewish leaders.
The Triumph of an Underground Man Rachel Polonsky Leonid Tsypkin was the authentic underground man of the Soviet “era of stagnation,” leading a hidden life as a writer during the Brezhnev era. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1982 at the age of fifty-six, professionally humiliated and socially isolated, a brokenhearted Jewish refusenik, denied permission to join his only son, who had emigrated. Not a word of his small body of literary work was printed anywhere until just a few days before his death.
The Battle of Britten Leo Carey Benjamin Britten’s music at its best attains a kind of transcendent sparseness, a shimmer of gray seascapes, withdrawal, and loneliness.				Girl from Berlin Gabriele Annan We mourn the death of Gabriele Annan (1922-2013). Annan contributed more than one hundred reviews of books and films to The New York Review, including this 1985 piece about Marlene Dietrich.
					ALSO IN THE DECEMBER 5 ISSUE Graham Robb on life in the clouds Zadie Smith on art and death Cass Sunstein on the environment Jim Holt on Love and Math Christopher Ricks on dirty stories Jonathan Mirsky on Empress Cixi Pooja Bhatia on Edwidge Danticat Charles Glass on Syria’s descent Lincoln Caplan on Learned Hand Stephen Kinzer on Guatemala Alexander Stille on Italy and more.
Obama: The First Term Did It Elizabeth Drew Despite all the lamentations about Barack Obama having second-term blues and bad luck, and the talk about how a painful second term is not atypical, it’s what happened during the first term that matters most. Almost everything that has gone wrong with the health care program was set in motion in the early years of his presidency.					The Flop Sue Halpern Six weeks after the failed launch of HealthCare.gov, President Obama offered a mea culpa that was anything but. True, he did repeat “that’s on me,” but he also said this: “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to.” And so we are left to wonder how it was that he did not make it a point to be informed.
The Book of Little Bighorn Thomas Powers What is remarkable in these drawings is the intensely personal style of each artist, and the attention to identifying detail of weapons, clothing and body paint, allowing the viewer a glimpse of the war from the other side.				Cronenberg’s Visual Shock J. Hoberman David Cronenberg is a filmmaker of ideas, one being the notion that human beings have merged with technology. His protagonists are often cyborgs as, in some sense, he is as well—not a commercial director with artistic aspirations so much as an avant-garde filmmaker who has contrived a commercial career