Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Weekend reading: In the Review’s new issue, Don DeLillo’s new novel Zero K, preventing pandemics, and why families in extreme poverty have gotten even poorer. On the NYR Daily, the challenges facing the divided Kurds, and Bi Gan’s engrossing new film Kaili Blues. And from the archives, a 1989 essay on Europe by the great historian Fritz Stern, who died last week. On June 4 and 5 in Berlin, The New York Review of Books Foundation and the German Council on Foreign Relations are holding a conference, “The Middle East: World Crisis?” See the link below for more information or to register. Sponsored by McGill-Queens University Press

 

Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer Christopher Jencks Increasing inequality can be blamed on deliberate political choices at both the federal and state levels.

 

The Awful Diseases on the Way Annie Sparrow Sonia Shah’s Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond represents six years’ work and considerable prescience on her part.

In DeLillo’s Icy Future Nathaniel Rich What is the oracle of American fiction to write about after he has lived long enough to witness his prophecies realized?

 

Also in the June 9 issue: Kenneth Roth on Noam Chomsky, Hermione Lee on Stevie Smith, H. Allen Orr on DNA, Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Churchill, Priyamvada Natarajan on Einstein, George Stauffer on Bach, and much more

 

The Common House of Europe Fritz Stern Great historic upheavals are the result of conjunctions, when several and seemingly self-contained processes emerge, distort, and reinforce one another.  (1989)

 

The Kurds: A Divided Future? Joost Hiltermann Many Kurds dream of destroying the modern borders of the Middle East to finally create an independent state. Yet they first have to contend with ISIS.

A New Language for Chinese Film J. Hoberman Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues is both the most elusive and the most memorable new film that I’ve seen in quite some time.