Spring 2019

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar2 min readAmerican Government
Trials
AFTER THE BLOODY NATIONAL CATASTROPHES of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln, the people of the reunited union deserved a period of calm. That was not to be. “Peace had come,” the journalist Matthew Josephson later wrote, echoin
The American Scholar7 min read
Letters
In the opening paragraph of “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre” (Winter 2019), Farah Peterson characterizes Crispus Attucks as an unarmed black man, shot and killed by men in uniform who “got away with it.” This bald statement seriously distorts or
The American Scholar12 min read
Reading the River
WORDS FAIL TO CONVEY the magnitude of the Grand Canyon—that abyss almost a mile in depth that stretches to the horizon in three directions, containing a world of side canyons, peaks, and cliffs of all colors, usually washed with the moving shadows of
The American Scholar2 min readEarth Sciences
The Lost Lakes of Iran
Solmaz Daryani grew up an hour’s drive from Iran’s Lake Urmia, where her grandmother and other family members lived. She recalls watching the lake shrink, year after year, as the effects of climate change and drought took their toll on the region. “T
The American Scholar3 min read
Growing Up
MONICA L. SMITH, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, specializes in the history of cities with a focus on ancient urban development on the Indian subcontinent. She is the author of A Prehistory of Ordinary People and the forthcoming Cities: The Firs
The American Scholar2 min read
Renaissance Woman
To think of the Harlem Renaissance is to recall some of the greatest art of the early 20th century: the wailing trumpet of Louis Armstrong, the bold paintings of Jacob Lawrence, and the rhythmic stanzas of Langston Hughes. For many of these men, thei
The American Scholar2 min read
Alone, Together
In the early 1990s, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe public spaces, separate from our homes and workplaces, where people intentionally meet and socialize. These include churches, bars, parks, community centers, and
The American Scholar2 min read
The Ghosts In The Hills
Kelly McMasters is the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town. In her forthcoming book of nonfiction, A Measurement of Loneliness, she explores one woman’s struggle for home and self. Her essay about a murder-suicide that took pla
The American Scholar2 min read
Decoding DNA
Because the brain’s inner workings remain impervious to deep understanding, addressing psychiatric disorders presents a particular challenge. But a provisional clarity may be emerging. Neuroscientists and computational biologists are making headway i
The American Scholar15 min readSocial Science
The First President To Be Impeached
February 25, 1868, Washington, D.C. A cold wind blew through the city, and the snow was piled in drifts near the Capitol, where gaslights flickered with a bluish glow. Throngs of people, black and white, waited anxiously outside or pressed into the
The American Scholar3 min read
Literary Information Derived From Privileged Writers
1. From Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya (letters exchanged between critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov): Dear Volodya: I was awfully glad to hear about your book. Did you make any arrangement with them for subsidizing you while you write anot
The American Scholar7 min read
Present-Day Thoughts On The Quality Of Life (1969)
THE ESSAY THAT FOLLOWS WAS originally delivered as a lecture in 1969, but the two of us learned of its existence only in 2002. We were visiting our grandfather and his wife, Marguerite, at their home in San Antonio, Texas. After dinner, our grandfath
The American Scholar15 min read
“Is Life Worth Living?”
MY PURPOSE IS CHIEFLY to describe what is bothering a good many people today, rather than to go deeply into the causes of disquiet and unrest in the Western world, much less to offer remedies or advocate revolution. I take it for granted that we all
The American Scholar13 min read
The Hedgehog’s Great Escape
THE AIR IN THE BARRACKS DETENTION CELL was hot and sultry—typical July weather for the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. Not surprisingly, the woman lying on the cot was bathed in sweat. But the reason wasn’t just the stifling heat. It was als
The American Scholar3 min read
Afterlives
“REMEMBERING POUGHKEEPSIE” is Elizabeth Spires’s sharp-edged elegy for her mentor, William Gifford, a literature professor at Vassar who helped Spires start out on her four-decade-long career as a poet. Spires describes a cold walk that she and Giffo
The American Scholar21 min read
Orwell’s Last Neighborhood
IT’S HARD TO KNOW what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? Apparently not. We’d bee
The American Scholar14 min read
At Play In The Fields Of The Bored
IT’S A TYPICAL WEEKDAY morning at Klyde Warren Park, a five-acre rectangle on the edge of Dallas’s arts district. Two teenage girls play Jenga on the grass while a middle-aged woman reads a copy of Bon Appétit. Elementary-school children on a field t
The American Scholar3 min read
Five Poems
for William Gifford, 1928–2015 The river. Always the same, never the same.Poughkeepsie. A place north of where I am.To remember you is to remember Poughkeepsie.To remember Poughkeepsie is to remember the river.I am downriver now & you are a memoryI
The American Scholar9 min read
The Man Behind the Counter
AS A SMALL CHILD in deepest Brooklyn, postwar, pre-cool Brooklyn, I had many wishes, mostly extravagant and drawn from fantasy. But one of my most fervent was modest and attainable: I wanted permission to cross East New York Avenue by myself. I was a
The American Scholar18 min read
The Third Obituary of Anton Popov
Three days after Anton Antonovich Popov garroted himself with piano wire, Elsie Green motored up his looping driveway—voice recorder and notepad in her shoulder bag—to write Popov’s first, and her 200th, obituary. Popov, composer of an acclaimed debu
The American Scholar8 min read
The Fantastical Little Dyer
OF THE THREE GREAT ARTISTS who dominated Venetian painting for much of the 16th century, Tintoretto was the wildest and most avant-garde. In 1568, the Tuscan artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, who had met Tintoretto in Venice and liked him, report
The American Scholar9 min read
The Sound of Evil
IN THE LATEST SEASON OF Fargo,after accidentally killing his deadbeat brother, Minnesota businessman Emmit Stussy gazes in dejection at the bloody corpse. Terror flushes across Emmit’s face before he slowly reaches for his phone. Then a piano starts
The American Scholar14 min read
Southern Cassandra
LIKE ALL TRULY AGGRAVATING people, Lillian Smith refuses to go away. That is, the corporeal Lillian Smith may have died in 1966, but her words refuse to go away—words that described white privilege before that was a phrase, words that seem newly rele
The American Scholar5 min read
Shrinking Success
Norton, 384 pp., $27.95 PSYCHIATRY TODAY IS IN CRISIS. By some reckonings, mental illness is more prevalent than ever—yet the effectiveness rates of most treatments are no higher than they were 40 years ago. The profession is riven, as ever, by inte
The American Scholar4 min read
Continental Drift
Metropolitan Books, 384 pp., $30 “DO WE REALLY NEED another book on the Turner thesis?” a relative said with a sigh, flipping through my copy of Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth on a family getaway. Granted, there’s a textbook whiff of social stud
The American Scholar5 min read
The Writer at Ground Zero
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $28 THIS ADMIRABLE BOOK about an admirable man, while insisting it is not a biography, recounts enough of John Hersey’s life to explain some of his enduring concerns and the arc of his career. It belongs to that e
The American Scholar4 min read
How the South Rose Again
Penguin Press, 320 pp., $30 IN Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The forces that pushed the freedmen back and how the bla
The American Scholar5 min read
Freedom of Thought
Oxford University Press, 220 pp., $18.95 REAL PRESIDENTS READ BOOKS. When the Library of Congress was destroyed in the War of 1812, the former president Thomas Jefferson offered his collection to replace it, commenting that “I do not know that it co
The American Scholar4 min read
Prophets Of The Avant-Garde
Knopf, 432 pp., $30 THIS IS THE STORY OF FOUR talented people: Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury, who met by chance and remained involved with one another for the rest of their lives. Rather like partners in a qua
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
An April Sunday brings the snow Making the blossom on the plum trees green, Not white. An hour or two, and it will go. —Philip Larkin, “An April Sunday brings the snow,” 1948 Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themse
The American Scholar4 min read
His Life Spoke Volumes
Other Press, 520 pp., $28.95 DENIS DIDEROT (1713–1784) has never burned with the reputational brightness of French Enlightenment stars like Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Leading-man status has perpetually eluded the philosophe associated with

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