Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This issue sponsored by The British Library

This week on nybooks: An unsettling Holocaust memorial, Henry James on screen, war in Syria, design failures, the history of political surveillance, and a poem by Zbigniew Herbert.
New Surveillance, Old Story Aryeh Neier Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s consisted in efforts to identify organizations that were critical of government policies and gather information on their adherents. The NSA's electronic surveillance practices that have been revealed in recent weeks are fundamentally different, but over time, they may lead in the same direction.
Syria’s Invented Holy War Toby Matthiesen Why exactly is Hezbollah getting involved in the Syrian war, and is the conflict really rooted in religion? The answer to both these questions may lie in a suburb of Damascus called Sayyida Zainab, the site of an important Shia shrine and since the 1970s a haven for foreign Shia activists and migrants in Syria.
What ‘Maisie’ Doesn’t Know Francine Prose The new film adaptation of What Maisie Knew distills Henry James’s complicated and courageous novel down to a screed about the dangers and consequences of bad parenting. Do the filmmakers assume that their audience is incapable of dealing with the moral ambiguities that made the novel so profound?
‘Jews Aren’t Allowed to Use Phones’: Berlin’s Most Unsettling Memorial Ian Johnson Germany today is filled with memorials and institutions dealing with aspects of the Holocaust. Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s controversial “Places of Remembrance” remains one of the most visceral.
					Collapse and Crash Bill McKibben For Henry Petroski, failures reveal “weaknesses in reasoning, knowledge, and performance that all the successful designs may not even hint at.” “The best way of achieving lasting success is by more fully understanding failure.” It’s also the best way of entertaining an audience not necessarily gripped by engineering as a topic.
From An Unwritten Theory of Dreams Zbigniew Herbert The torturers sleep soundly their dreams are rosy good-natured genocides—foreign and home-grown already forgiven by brief human memory a gentle breeze turns the pages of family albums the windows of the house open to August the shade of an apple-tree in bloom under which a fine brood has gathered…
Sontag: Reborn This one-woman show is “an affectionate portrait, but one that plays her for laughs,” writes Elaine Blair. (New York Theatre Workshop)		La Donna del Lago Joyce DiDonato's American debut in the part of Elena promises to be a blockbuster event, says Philip Gossett. (Santa Fe Opera)		The Boxer at Rest Andrew Butterfield: One of the great masterpieces of Hellenistic sculpture is making a visit to New York. (Metropolitan Museum)		Also in the Calendar More summer events: A conference to honor the legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams in Oxford, El Anatsui in Brooklyn, the cinema of Scientology in Los Angeles, a tribute to Russell Hoban in New York, the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, the final week of Henry Labrouste at MoMA, Stravinsky's Petrushka and Le Baiser de la Fée, and more.