Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday 15 March 2015


Sunday reading on nybooks.com: Manhattan’s new skyscrapers, Schubert’s songs, the investigation of Boris Nemtsov’s murder, writing after success, early photographs of Alaska, and the robots among us.
 
THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY HAUS PUBLISHING
Martin Filler
The smokestack-like protuberances that now disrupt the skyline of midtown Manhattan signify the steadily widening worldwide gap between the unimaginably rich and the unconscionably poor.
 
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Ian Bostridge
It was as a composer of song that Schubert first became famous; and his fecundity and sophistication in that genre, his gift for melody and his grasp of harmonic drama, both inner and outer, in turn lifted its status.
 
Amy Knight
The arrests of five Chechens have led to new speculation about the Kremlin’s involvement in the murder of Boris Nemtsov.
 
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Tim Parks
Whether happy to join the scrimmage or appalled by the idea of being contaminated, all writers are inevitably changed by the reception of their work and removed from the atmosphere of their initial inspiration.
 
James Gleick
Increasing numbers of Twitterers don’t even pretend to be human. Or worse, do pretend, when they are actually bots—tiny, skeletal, incapable robots, usually little more than a few crude lines of computer code. The scary thing is how easily we can be fooled.
 
Ian Frazier
The photographs in Steaming to the North—of whaling ships, villages, natives, sailors, landscapes and seascapes—chronicle theBear’s 1886 journey from San Francisco to Alaska and Siberia, and give us a rare glimpse of a remote place and time.