Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE

This week on nybooks.com: The third-most-deadly job, the president’s second-term agenda,science and teleology, Norway’s happy warriors of architecture, and Morsi’s Egypt. Plus the death of a noble hacker, Afghanistan on film, a library of tweets, and how the South is defeating itself.
1,000 FEET DOWN Diving Deep into Danger Nathaniel Rich A diver cannot be claustrophobic or antisocial, because he must spend much of his time in a tiny sealed capsule with several other divers. He must be well-disciplined and perceptive, for he is likely to encounter a variety of unexpected hazards on the job. “You have to be willing to adapt to any situation,” one former diver told me. “Philosophically, when you go out on a dive job, you’re expecting something is going to go wrong.”
POLITICS Obama’s Big and Quiet Transformation Michael Tomasky Obama’s is the most transformational presidency in modern history. Why doesn’t it feel that way?
PHILOSOPHY Awaiting a New Darwin H. Allen Orr Thomas Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived. As he makes clear in his new book Mind and Cosmos, part of what he thinks must be reconceived is our reigning theory of evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism.
ARCHITECTURE The Risk of Being Too Nice Martin Filler Perhaps only a post-industrial social democracy as progressive as Norway could have produced an architectural office such as Snøhetta, a self-described non-hierarchical cooperative whose principals avowedly seek to avoid celebrity.				EGYPT The Rule of the Brotherhood Yasmine El Rashidi When Mohammed Morsi took office last summer, the big question was whether he would be able to separate himself from the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that had authorized, guided, and financed his presidential campaign. By this winter, the public seemed to accept the fact that there was no alternative to Morsi’s Brotherhood running the show.
					IN THE CURRENT ISSUE Tim Parks on Fifty Shades of Grey, Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Churchill, Steve Collon Zero Dark Thirty and torture, Neal Ascherson on Orhan Pamuk, Avishai Margalit on the making of modern Israel, Pico Iyer on Natsume Soseki’sThe Gate, Charles Rosen on Chopin, a poem by Rosanna Warren, and much more.
THE SOUTH Dumb America Garry Wills No one needs better health care more than the South, but it fights it off so long as Obama is offering it. This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution. The South has decided to be defeated and dumb.
			SUICIDE The Death of Aaron Swartz Peter Singer and Agata Sagan For a young and exceptionally talented person who acted from noble motives, the idea of going to prison must have been even more shattering, and the depression from which he suffered would have magnified its impact in ways that those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced that condition cannot fully imagine.
			FILM Filming the Many Afghanistans Mariam Ghani The Afghan jeshn is a major reference point for Afghan films, as it is for Afghan society itself. It isn't anchored to a single historical event or to a fixed date on the calendar. Instead, it has been a shifting set of commemorations that reflect the continually changing identity of the twentieth-century Afghan nation-state.
			CATALOGING TWEETS Librarians of the Twitterverse James Gleick The Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. As of December, it had received 170 billion. This is an ocean of ephemera. A library of Babel. The library will take the bad with the good: the rumors and lies, the prattle, puns, hoots, jeers, bluster, invective, bawdy probes, vile gossip, epigrams, anagrams, quips and jibes, hearsay and tittle-tattle, pleading, chicanery, jabbering, quibbling, self-promotion and humblebragging.