Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

New on nybooks.com: Great Greek bronzes, the pope’s radical critique, the 2016 election campaign, an epic poem based on court records, Mexico’s war on journalists, the history of US influence in Cuba, and what Las Vegas shares with Pyongyang.

The Grandest Art of the Ancients Ingrid D. Rowland It is the endless depth of those sightless eyes that drives home the distance between his suffering and the feelings he evokes in us. Is that suffering face, with its unique pattern of damage done, a mask to cover his intimate self or the true image of his soul? Was it the soul of a poet or a brute?   ADVERTISEMENT   The Pope and the Planet Bill McKibben Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change is nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet. Also: Climate Change: A Warning from Islam   2016: From Peculiar to Worrisome Elizabeth Drew The collapse of the political parties has left a vacuum into which even the most preposterous candidates can put themselves forward.   A Brutal American Epic Charles Simic This summer I read Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative for the first time. I know of nothing like it in literature.   Mexico: The War on Journalists Alma Guillermoprieto On July 31, perhaps between the hours of two and three in the afternoon, in a peaceful middle-class neighborhood in Mexico City, five young people were murdered.   Cuba: We Never Left Esther Allen Cubans generally welcome stronger ties to the United States; indeed, the US is very present to most of them already. Everyone in Havana seemed to have seen the Grammy Awards within two days of their airing in the US.   Empty Cities Pico Iyer Pyongyang seemed vacant and two-dimensional as a textbook photograph, while Las Vegas was overflowing with an excess of animal high spirits; but both really felt like hallucinations, designed to dazzle (or defeat) the innocent.