Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

New on nybooks.com: How ISIS rules in Raqqa, recovering Poland’s Jewish legacy, a retrospective of David Lynch’s paintings and other art, reading about juries and the legal system, and how Vladimir Putin became “king of the thieves.”   THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Poland’s Jews: Under a New Roof Shelley Salamensky Poland’s complicated postwar history has rendered the recovery of its Jewish legacy a thorny task.   ADVERTISEMENT   How ISIS Rules Sarah Birke How did Raqqa, a dusty, provincial Syrian city with few jihadist or even Islamist tendencies, become capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate?   David Lynch’s Bad Thoughts J. Hoberman Welcome to Lynchland, where bodily fluids and organic matter are the coin of the realm, revulsion merges with delicacy, and austerity is the handmaiden of disgust.   ADVERTISEMENT   Courts Without Reporters Francine Prose I’ve tried to teach my students what language can accomplish: its ability to explicate and complicate in useful and beautiful ways. Or how easily words can do the opposite, if we forget how to read and reason and thus cannot understand what we’re being told.   How Putin and His Cronies Stole Russia Anne Applebaum The most important story of the past twenty years in Russia might have been not the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism.   US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites Mark Danner Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. (2009)