Spring 2022

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar2 min read
Watch This Space
WHO CAN BLAME US, given the way things have been going on Earth, for casting our eyes heavenward, imploringly, or in exasperation, or to find solace in the deep blue of the sky or the reassuringly constant motion of the moon and the stars? Sorry, fol
The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar
ROBERT WILSON Editor SUDIP BOSE Managing Editor BRUCE FALCONER Senior Editor STEPHANIE BASTEK Associate Editor JAYNE ROSS Assistant Editor DAVID HERBICK Design Director SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor SALLY ATWATER Copy Ed
The American Scholar1 min read
Thank You, Friends!
STEVEN ANDERSON ANN BEATTIE & LINCOLN PERRY THOMAS BETHELL ALLISON BLAKELY FRED H. CATE LINCOLN CAPLAN & SUSAN L. CARNEY BRAD EDMONDSON LUCY FERRISS WERNER GUNDERSHEIMER EWA HRYNIEWICZYARBROUGH ANN HULBERT DONALD S. LAMM ANDREW LEVY LOUIS P. MASUR R
The American Scholar6 min read
A City Beyond Savings
IN LATE JANUARY, I went to an open house at a four-bedroom brick California bungalow in Willoughby, one of Sydney’s quiet, northern suburbs. The house, staged with contemporary Australian-style furniture from a shop that rents it by the week, was att
The American Scholar2 min read
Salt Of The Earth
Barbara Boissevain’s photography, which explores environmental and social justice issues, has been exhibited internationally and received the 2009 Best of ASMP Award from the American Society of Media Photographers. She recently completed a seven-yea
The American Scholar3 min read
Letters
I am a fan of cognitive science. In fact, I wrote the first history of the field—The Mind’s New Science (1985). But Natalie Wexler (“Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn,” Winter 2022) is naïve if she thinks that training in cognitive science is the “s
The American Scholar3 min readWorld
Sanctioning the Silver Screen
Erich Schwartzel reports on the film industry for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. His work for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won the 2011 Scripps Howard Award for
The American Scholar2 min read
The Beginning Of The End
Carmen Giménez, a professor of English at Virginia Tech, is the author of six books, including Milk and Filth, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Be Recorder, which was short-listed for the National Book Award and PE
The American Scholar4 min read
The Country & the Country
A FEW WEEKS AGO, a long-ago conversation with a friend came to mind as I tried to bring some order to my bookshelves. My friend was not yet of a certain age, but he had, he confessed, crossed a line: he had made a transition from the curating stage o
The American Scholar13 min readCrime & Violence
2022: A Space Emergency
THE BONE THAT BECOMES a spaceship is the most famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and probably the most famous cut in all of cinema. A human ancestor, having used a tool, throws it into the air. As it falls with a spinning motion
The American Scholar14 min read
Women’s Burden
“... the acute burden of being female” —Michelle Obama, Becoming SINCE I WAS INSOMNIAC in my early teens, I heard my parents quarreling at night. It took a while for me to puzzle out what was causing these arguments: my father Jack’s philandering wa
The American Scholar23 min readAmerican Government
American Mandarins
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2022, a classic of American journalism and politics will be 50 years old: The Best and the Brightest, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author David Halberstam. Still in print, it explored in unprecedented detail and memora
The American Scholar2 min read
Voicing the Ineffable
POEMS MAKE YOU HEAR something that is inaudible in most prose: the white space of the page. This is the space you hear in a line break and between stanzas; it is the silence in which poems sign off and disappear. The sound of innuendo, not inflection
The American Scholar1 min read
Five Poems
The symbols are inoperative. Worry about the expanse of dark water The “done” button doesn’t work. The relentless march of cattails into northern lakes The blanket of cloud cover “Your response needed” A plaintive address to a phantom beloved I’m in
The American Scholar21 min read
The Last Naturalist
“THE FACT WHICH INTERESTS us most,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, having paddled a pair of rivers and pondered countless facts on a week’s canoe trip, “is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.” Writing in the 1840s, he wo
The American Scholar19 min read
The Scar On The Hand
IN 1939, WHEN THE BRITISH playwright Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Sträussler) was a year and a half old, he and his family fled Moravia ahead of the Nazis. In January 1942, they fled again, this time from Singapore to escape Japanese troops. Unfortunatel
The American Scholar23 min read
Searching For Tommy And Rosie
NOT LONG AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, one of my students gave me an Italian leather notebook with leaves embossed on the cover. It was thick and had a substantial feel to it. Cupping it in my hand, smelling the oaken leather, I wondered, as I opened and clo
The American Scholar14 min read
Safer Than Childbirth
AT OUR RURAL COUNTY’S historical society, the past lives loosely in bulletins, news clippings, plat books, and handwritten index cards. It’s pieced together by pale, gray-haired women who sit at oak tables and pore over old photos. Western sun filter
The American Scholar10 min read
On Aging
AGING IS SLIPPAGE. Wax, then wane, toward humble pie, another day, another dollar. I was born a month after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. So I clean my plate at meals and follow that famous bit of fatherly advice, Neither a borrower nor a
The American Scholar25 min read
The Constancy of Things
The first time Anna saw Salvatore, he asked if he could borrow her goggles. She was doing a few stretches on the pool deck, still wearing those goggles, when he approached. Something had fallen out of his swimsuit pocket, he said, and he needed to di
The American Scholar8 min read
Frightfully Askew
MY FATHER’S GENERATION endured worldwide depression and war, one catastrophe after another, and in consistently predicting further disaster, he attempted to toughen my tender skin in anticipation. But I was young, my new president was boyishly handso
The American Scholar10 min read
The Birth of the Egghead Paperback
ONE DAY IN THE EARLY 1950s, an editorial assistant at Doubleday was walking across Central Park with his boss when he asked whether the company couldn’t publish quality paperbacks to sell in bookstores. The young man, named Jason Epstein, had an idea
The American Scholar4 min read
From Cold War to Y2K
AT A GLANCE, nothing much happened in the ’90s, and even when it did, there were few repercussions. Sandwiched between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the intervening decade—give or take a year or two on either side—s
The American Scholar5 min read
Where I End and We Begin
IN NEGROLAnD (2015), her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning memoir about her upbringing among the Black upper class in Chicago, Margo Jefferson blends a wry personal narrative with an expansive range of historical, critical, and self-critical
The American Scholar4 min read
Surviving The Ebb And Flow
ON AN EARLY DECEMBER night last year, my husband, my two daughters, and I suited up in all of our warmest clothes, grabbed headlamps, and drove to the beach. With temperatures in the single digits, it might have been nice to stay home and light a fir
The American Scholar4 min read
Making the List
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT an index is, it may help to begin with what it is not. An index is not a table of contents—such a table would feed multitudes—but it does lay out in more granular form all of the contents of a book. An index is not a concordance, s
The American Scholar5 min read
A Name Not Writ in Water
THERE IS SOMETHING irresistible about John Keats’s poignantly brief life and his outsize greatness as an artist. That such a wealth of material about him exists—his own astonishing letters as well as reminiscences and diaries of his friends—means tha
The American Scholar5 min read
Dollars Versus Degrees
SINCE 2010, emissions of carbon dioxide have flattened in the United States and slowed worldwide to about 35 to 40 gigatons per year, half of which has been absorbed by land and sea. To keep the global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius,
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857 “My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottl
The American Scholar4 min read
Wielders Of The Knife
“WAR HAS ALWAYS benefited surgeons,” writes Ira Rutkow in Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery. “Battlegrounds, with their vast numbers and wide variety of wounded, provide intensive opportunities for the education and training of men who pr

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