Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: The Internet and the future of television, the pope and the planet, and Xi Jinping’s Sisyphean task: stamping out corruption. Plus Oliver Sacks among the ferns.

TV vs. the Internet: Who Will Win? Jacob Weisberg Despite sharing the vulnerabilities of other long-standing media—shrinking audiences, changing consumption patterns, new competition for ad dollars—the television dinosaur has only grown fatter. Will it elude the bitter fate of newspapers and the music industry?   ADVERTISEMENT   The Pope and the Planet Bill McKibben The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.”   China: The Superpower of Mr. Xi Roderick MacFarquhar In the almost 100-year existence of the Chinese Communist Party, its current general secretary, Xi Jinping, is only the second leader clearly chosen by his peers. The first was Mao Zedong. Why was Xi chosen?   ADVERTISEMENT   A Garden for Oliver Sacks Roberto Calasso My meetings with Oliver Sacks were all marked by an irrational euphoria. One morning in New York, with Oliver equipped with all his paraphernalia, as if we were leaving on an expedition, we found ourselves in his car, heading for the Botanical Garden in the Bronx.   CONFERENCE Scholars and journalists, including Salam Al Kuntarand Hugh Eakin, meet to discuss ISIS’s destruction of antiquities (Wellesley, September 24)   CABARET The journal Little Star hosts an evening of fiction and poetry readings, featuringAnakana Schofield andApril Bernard (New York, September 24)