Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

New on nybooks.com: Oliver Sacks’s last essay, Jerome Groopman’s review of Sacks’s On the Move, and David Bromwich on the MOOC movement. Plus Sara Lipton on Jewish illuminated books, Tim Parks on ambiguity, Francine Prose on The Brink, and Italo Calvinoon the movies. SPONSORED BY THE IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

Urge Oliver Sacks Walter’s attention assumed an all-or-none quality. “I became distracted so easily,” he said, “that I couldn’t get anything started or done.” Even more disquieting was the development of an insatiable sexual appetite.   ADVERTISEMENT   The Victory of Oliver Sacks Jerome Groopman Oliver Sacks inspired my efforts as a physician-writer, as he has for so many others. His writing, like the light from a distant star, will continue to illuminate the lives of his readers, long after its source is extinguished.   Trapped in the Virtual Classroom David Bromwich Let me start with a proposition: the great social calamity of our time is that people are being replaced by machines. This is happening and it will go on happening. But we may want to stop or slow the process when we have a chance, in order to ask a large question.   Coming in the September 24 issue: Timothy Snyder on Hitler, Lorrie Moore on True Detective, Michael Tomasky on Donald Trump, Marilynne Robinson on fear, and much more   ADVERTISEMENT   Books of Jewish Beauty Sara Lipton Since the late 18th century, Jews have often been viewed as contributing little to the visual arts. The gorgeously illustrated volume Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts should challenge that view.   Clearing Up Ambiguity Tim Parks What is it about ambiguity that it has to be praised to high heaven by all and sundry? Above all, how did it come to take on, at least for some, a cloak of liberal righteousness, to shift from being an aesthetic to a moral virtue?   The Situation-Room Comedy Francine Prose The HBO series The Brink is so funny, so inventive—and so fearless in what it has to say about geopolitics—that watching it would be pure pleasure were the events it depicts not so uncomfortably close to the perilous reality of the world in which we live.   The Movies of My Youth Italo Calvino There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world.   The Venice of the Sands in Peril G.W. Bowersock The preservation of buildings and objects that managed to survive for two thousand years of Palmyra’s history has to be a priority wherever civilization is cherished. (May 25, 2015)