Winter 2023

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar
SUDIP BOSE Interim 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 Editor ELIZABETH PANKOVA
The American Scholar2 min read
The Naked Flame
In his essay about the twin perils of hurricanes and wildfires, David Gessner recounts a scene he witnessed in the West two summers ago: "I can see fire burning on the ridge, the flames kicking up and leaving behind burned trees like sticks, the red
The American Scholar8 min read
The Bully In The Ballad
Josh Ritter’s “Folk Bloodbath” is a haunting, hallucinatory song featuring the title characters from three great American murder ballads: Stacker Lee, Delia Green, and Louis Collins. Ritter methodically kills them all off and inters them in the same
The American Scholar6 min read
At Home In The Asylum
In August, Salman Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed in front of a crowd of terrified onlookers who had come to Chautauqua, New York, to hear the novelist speak. Though the assailant’s motives remain vague, his characterization of Rushdie as “someone who
The American Scholar6 min read
Not Your Parents' New York Phil
In the mid-1950s, the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance in New York City authorized the demolition of a working-class Black and Hispanic neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side—a culturally rich community that included among its residents Thelonious
The American Scholar5 min read
A Royal Disappointment
A reported 82 million households watched the first season of the Netflix show Bridgerton—writer and producer Shonda Rhimes’s romance set in early-19th-century Britain—but until recently, mine was not one of them. Not that I didn’t want to see it. I’d
The American Scholar5 min read
The Book Of Maps
Four years ago, I bought myself a paperback atlas—a floppy, glossy, 200-page edition quite unlike the hardback tome that had gathered dust on my shelf for decades. And this flimsy new atlas soon altered my grasp of reality in a way so elemental that
The American Scholar7 min read
Don't Tell the Tourists
In 1887, when real estate developers Harvey and Daeida Wilcox founded the Hollywood subdivision outside Los Angeles, there were already two famous Hollywoods in America: a luxury hotel in New Jersey and a cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. The cemetery
The American Scholar23 min read
The Road to Paradise and Back
It is the summer of 2021, and I am out west for what was meant to be a short stay. But I have decided to linger. I need to see where all the smoke is coming from. Smoke is everywhere, and people are wary. As with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when the
The American Scholar16 min read
The Corals And The Capitalist
During winter break four years ago, our family rented a condo on the beach in South Padre Island. Stretching along the Texas coast, it’s the world’s longest barrier island, infamous for its spring break debauchery. But in the winter, it’s a low-key g
The American Scholar14 min read
The End Is Only the Beginning
If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to
The American Scholar2 min read
Bearing Witness Beyond Despair
Wong May’s reader needs to be ready to dream a little. Her poems unfold with the intensity, the abrupt shifts of focus, and the uncanny, enigmatic quality of our dreams, even when she is writing about ordinary sunlit experience. Take the poem titled
The American Scholar4 min read
Five Poems
You have to first Sit in the temple gloom In the mahogany chair & despair. The only glimmer In the temple (being the inlaid bits of The Mother-Of-Pearl shells On the tall, more than humanly tall Chair back, for these These too Are the reputed “Tears
The American Scholar2 min read
In The Frame Of The Father
In 1981, when Darrel Ellis (19581992) was a young artist in search of a style, he received a present that would change his life: an extensive archive of photographic negatives that had belonged to the father he’d never known. Thomas Ellis, a postal c
The American Scholar24 min read
Foreign Affairs
ROSANNA WARREN is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection So Forth and Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. From early childhood, I used to haunt my parents’ bookshelves, leafing through “grown-up” works that I couldn’t yet
The American Scholar21 min read
I Am Become a Name
KARL KIRCHWEY is a professor of English and creative writing at Boston University. He is the author of seven books and editor of two anthologies, including, most recently, Poems of Healing. My father’s younger brother, for whom I am named, was a Navy
The American Scholar17 min read
Anatomy Of A Collision
JESSICA LOVE holds a doctorate in cognitive psychology and edits Kellogg Insight at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. When children arrive, nothing from our old lives is sacred anymore. Not sleep and not sex, not furniture arran
The American Scholar21 min read
Housewarming
DENNIS MCFARLAND’S most recent novel is Nostalgia. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the Scholar, among other places. When Kevin arrived at the top floor and stepped into a long dark hallway, he couldn’t re
The American Scholar8 min read
Declassified
John le Carré suffered for your reading pleasure, but not in any material way: after more than two dozen bestsellers that spawned multiple blockbuster films—from The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The Constant Garde
The American Scholar7 min read
The Friend Zone
The three words most closely identified with the French revolutionary tradition must surely be liberté, égalité, and fraternité. And though the ideas of liberty and equality have inspired countless individuals to take up muskets or pens, not so with
The American Scholar4 min read
Beauty Born Of Ashes
“The Waste Land,” not “The Wasteland” or “Waste Land,” and “not Waste Lands,” T. S. Eliot would correct people regarding the title of his epoch-defining poem. Originally he’d had in mind another title altogether, “He Do the Police in Different Voices
The American Scholar5 min readAmerican Government
Head Of The Deep State
Many a biography has made its subject carry the weight of the “American Century,” Time publisher Henry Luce’s phrase for the nation’s ascendancy in the middle decades of the 20th century. Among recent examples, William McKinley was said to have been
The American Scholar4 min read
Quark Of Habit
A round 400 BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus proffered the idea that all matter was composed of indivisible, featureless constituents. He described them using the Greek word for “uncuttable”: atomos. Two thousand years later, scientists found tha
The American Scholar4 min read
Structural Foundations
The early 21st century is a time of reckoning for architecture. The field is grappling with its subservience to global capital and complicity in the agendas of autocrats like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. There is broad recognition within t
The American Scholar4 min read
Our Founding Contradiction
Early in this compelling account of the tangled relationship between liberty and slavery, Edward J. Larson, a professor of history at Pepperdine University, cites the chaotic 1770 riot known as the Boston Massacre. Six Bostonians protesting import du
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, T
The American Scholar1 min read
Anniversaries
“ In the summer of 1947 … [William Kapell] played the Third Rachmaninoff Concerto. No one who heard it will forget that performance. With it Kapell moved into the company of Horowitz and Rachmaninoff himself, who alone had conquered the citadel of th

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