Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday reading on nybooks.com: Vaccines and risk, football’s horror and glory, Miranda July, and Norway’s extremists. Plus American Sniper, Lincoln’s writings, and a Brooklyn story. THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY PLUTO PRESS

There’s No Way Out of It! Jerome Groopman The freedom to exempt oneself from vaccination negates a responsibility not only to society, but to one’s own children who do not have the agency to decide for themselves.   ADVERTISEMENT   The Super Bowl: The Horror and the Glory Nathaniel Rich The question is not why the NFL can’t be safer. It’s why we—why Americans, since football is primarily a national obsession—crave its brand of violence.   Our Date with Miranda Lorrie Moore And so one welcomes the multitalented Miranda July to the land of novel-writing. She is difficult to categorize.   ADVERTISEMENT   Norway: The Two Faces of Extremism Hugh Eakin With the Breivik massacre has come the ominous knowledge that it takes only one jihadist—or counter-jihadist—to change everything, and that right-wing anti-immigration politics and jihadism are mutually reinforcing.   The Great American Shooter J. Hoberman For all its patriotic rhetoric, American Sniperis not a moral lesson but a tragedy.   Lincoln’s War of Words Ted Widmer It is clear that writing was a form of self-therapy for Lincoln. Before he could save the nation, he needed to find the right words, to save himself.   Thirteen Most Luc Sante One night in the 1980s, a low period for me, as I slumped on my regular stool at Farrell’s, in Brooklyn, staring into my fourth or fifth of their enormous beers, the gentleman to my left struck up a conversation. Like nearly everyone in the bar but me, he was a cop, a retired cop to be exact, and unlike most of them he looked like a churchwarden, lean and grave and puckered, definitely on the farther shore of eighty. He had much to say.