Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

New on nybooks.com: From the Review’s Fall Books issue, Jed Perl on the emptiness of Jeff Koons, Joseph Lelyveld on Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, Assaf Sharon on Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure in Gaza, and David Cole on Zephyr Teachout’s study of corruption in politics. On the NYRblog, Masha Gessen looks at hopelessness in Russia, and Tim Judah reports on the devastation in southeastern Ukraine.   THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

The Cult of Jeff Koons Jed Perl The Jeff Koons retrospective is a multimillion-dollar vacuum, but it is also a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die.   ADVERTISEMENT   Hillary Joseph Lelyveld The latest installment of Clinton’s memoirs is strewn with clues to the way the odds-makers’ favorite for next president thinks about the world and our place in it. Fond as she is of proclaiming “new eras” and “new beginnings,” little in her approach reflects new thinking.   Failure in Gaza Assaf Sharon The war in Gaza is, fundamentally, not about tunnels and not against rockets. It is a war over the status quo. Netanyahu’s “conflict management” is a euphemism for maintaining a status quo of settlement and occupation, allowing no progress.   ADVERTISEMENT   How Corrupt Are Our Politics? David Cole Zephyr Teachout’s important new book reminds us that corruption—in its more expansive sense of excessive private interest undermining public virtue—poses very real risks to a functioning democracy.   Also in the Fall Books issue: April Bernard on A.L. Kennedy, Ingrid Rowland on Arthur Miller,Dan Chiasson on Boyhood, Max Rodenbeck on Iraq, Anna Somers Cocks on Venice, andmore.   The Dying Russians Masha Gessen Why are Russians dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war?   Ukraine: A Catastrophic Defeat Tim Judah The scale of the devastation suffered by Ukrainian forces over the last week has to be seen to be believed.