Innholdsfortegnelse for February 11, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine a documentary film directed by Alex Gibney Steve Jobs a film directed by Danny Boyle Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. Crown Business, 447 pp., $30.00 Partway through Alex Gibney’s earnest documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, an early Apple Computer collaborator named Daniel Kottke asks the question that appears to animate Danny Boyle’s recent film about Jobs: “How much of an asshole do you have to be to be successful?” Boyle’s Steve Jobs is a factious, melodramatic fugue that cycles through the themes and variations of Jobs’s life in three acts—the theatrical, stagemanaged product launches of the Macintosh computer (1984), the NeXT computer (1988), and the iMac…

The following is a revised version of an interview between George Soros and Gregor Peter Schmitz of the German magazine WirtschaftsWoche. Gregor Peter Schmitz: When Time put German Chancellor Angela Merkel on its cover, it called her the “Chancellor of the Free World.” Do you think that is justified? George Soros: Yes. As you know, I have been critical of the chancellor in the past and I remain very critical of her austerity policy. But after Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, she became the leader of the European Union and therefore, indirectly, of the Free World. Until then, she was a gifted politician who could read the mood of the public and cater to it. But in resisting Russian aggression, she became a leader who stuck her neck out…

To the Editors: David Cole’s comments on “The Trouble at Yale” [NYR, January 14] neglect an important aspect of the controversy there and elsewhere on university campuses where student protesters have framed their demands for an end to discrimination in terms of their need for individual comfort and safety. It is the administrators, not the students, who have set the terms of the protests. The context for what are surely threats to First Amendment and academic freedom rights comes from university administrators who increasingly treat their students as paying clients whose comfort and safety are a university priority. A classic recent example comes from Margaret Spellings (the former Bush administration secretary of education and the president- elect of the University of North Carolina), who explained her support of for- profit…

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond by E. J. Dionne Jr. by E. J. Dionne Jr. Simon and Schuster, 532 pp., $30.00 Everybody told everybody early in this year’s presidential campaign (during what was called Trump Summer) that we had never seen anything so sinisterly or hilariously (take your choice) new. But Trump Summer was supposed to mellow into Sane Autumn, and it failed to—and early winter was no saner. People paid to worry in public tumbled over one another in asking what had gone wrong with our politics. Even the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, joined the worriers. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, he set up what he called the Growth and Opportunity Project, to reach those who…

Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond. Melville House, 193 pp., $15.95 (paper) The Game’s Not Over: In Defense of Football by Gregg Easterbrook. PublicAffairs, 222 pp., $24.99 Billion- Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big- Money Culture of College Football by Gilbert M. Gaul. Viking, 249 pp., $27.95 League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru- Wada and Steve Fainaru. Three Rivers, 413 pp., $15.00 (paper) Concussion a film directed by Peter Landesman Requiem for a Running Back a documentary film directed by Rebecca Carpenter 1. Of the many sayings attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, the one that seems most relevant to football today is not about winning, the pursuit of excellence, or the…

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Spiegel and Grau, 152 pp., $24.00 In Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” a poem published in 1936, a narrator speaks for those who struggle— the poor white, the Negro bearing slavery’s scars, the red man driven from the land, the immigrant clutching hope—and he offers the consolation, the defiance, of the young man, the farmer, the worker, united in demanding that America become “the dream the dreamers dreamed,” “the land that never has been yet.” Hughes addressed rallies of thousands in the Midwest and predicted that because the Depression had been so traumatic, mainstream America would go to the left politically. He got it wrong and spent the next two decades coping with the fallout, professionally, of having been sympathetic…

It’s hard to see them through the lacing of forest shadows,the old crimson blazes on tree-trunks marking the line.Sometimes the tree has fallen. Sometimes the painthas worn away and could be confused for lichen.I clamber down banks, trample underbrush, pausesquinting between boughs, seeking the next mark.The pines have scaly, lacerated bark.Yellow birches wring crabbed hands and shudder.I played here as a child, now I stumblefrom boulder to moss hollow. Who was that girlin raggedy summer jeans and smudged T-shirtscrambling up granite ledges? I think I see herslip like a coyote into older dark.She had unevenly cropped hair, grime in her fingernails.She crouched on a rock, mid-stream, and peered for trout,umber quaver in the bronze-flecked flow.And once, in shadow, kissed another girlon the mouth, both of them wanting to knowhow a…

The year 2015 marked the eight hundredth anniversary of one of the most celebrated, and least read, of the world’s legal texts: the Magna Carta. The great twentieth- century British jurist Lord Denning described the Magna Carta as “the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.” But it was not always held in such high repute. Pope Innocent III, in annulling the Magna Carta just a couple of months after it was promulgated (though it was later reinstated), declared that the charter was “not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust.” And as a peace treaty between King John and certain rebel barons— which was its purpose—it was something of a flop, with the rebellion…

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami. Vintage, 321 pp., $15.95 (paper) Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, an essay by the Moroccan- born writer Laila Lalami appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In “My Life as a Muslim in the West’s ‘Gray Zone,’” Lalami, whose Ph.D. is in linguistics and who regularly produces opinion pieces, criticism, and essays on a range of cultural and human rights subjects, discussed some of the challenges she has faced during her quarter- century as a Muslim immigrant to the United States: Some months ago, I gave a reading from my most recent novel in Scottsdale, Ariz. During the discussion that followed, a woman asked me to talk about my upbringing in Morocco. It’s natural for readers to be…

West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein. Random House, 334 pp., $30.00 1. Jean Stein’s West of Eden is an oral history about Los Angeles, shaped from interviews collected over a period of thirty years. It focuses on five influential civic founders and major figures in the early cinema, beginning in the 1930s with the Dohenys, one of the great LA fortunes, now commemorated in the names of a street, a park, apartment buildings, a historic site, and more. Next come the film entrepreneurs the Warner brothers, principally Jack Warner and his descendants; someone called Jane Garland—no relation to Judy—whose significance is less clear; Jennifer Jones, the actress and wife of, first, Robert Walker the actor, then David O. Selznick, then Norton Simon the multimillionaire industrialist, philanthropist, and…