Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: Why the new legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act makes no sense, a Oaxaca diary, photographs of a medieval Buddhist masterpiece in the Himalayas, the brilliance of Sybille Bedford, readings on mistrust and medical authority, and a look back at the violence in Ferguson.

Can They Crush Obamacare? David Cole Having lost in the legislature, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents—many of them the very same conservatives who have long decried judicial activism—turned to the courts. Now they are back before the Supreme Court with another challenge to the law.   ADVERTISEMENT   What I Mean by Mexico James Fenton I must have landed in the foothills, for the first impressions I had were of piles of rocks, as if emptied casually from a bag. And among these rocks and cactuses, a leafless tree with yellow flowers, a profuse flowerer, unfamiliar to me. Well, some things have to be unfamiliar; I have never visited this part of the world before.   Inside the Forbidden Temple David Shulman In Tabo—Gods of Light, Peter van Ham, an authority on early Indo-Tibetan art, has given us a splendid photographic record of the mid-11th-century masterpieces of this remote monastery in India’s arid, wind-swept Spiti Valley—the most intact of all early medieval Buddhist artistic sites in the Western Himalaya.   ADVERTISEMENT   The Brilliance of Sybille Bedford Brenda Wineapple She understood firsthand the burdens of survival. Perhaps as a result she developed her remarkable talent for making the inchoate circumstances we retrospectively understand as “historical forces” seem real, palpable, human.   Mistrust and Medicine Zach Maher A selection of articles about what Jerome Groopman calls our “culture of suspicion,” the widespread mistrust of authority that complicates relations between doctors and patients.   A Look Back at the Violence in Ferguson VICE News invited Darryl Pinckney to discuss the civil rights movement awakened by Ferguson, and to read from the essay he published in the Review after his visit to Missouri last fall.