Winter 2022

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar2 min read
At 90
WHEN THE SCHOLAR turned 75 in 2007, we asked our friend the historian Ted Widmer to read through the whole run of the magazine, something he did cheerfully, or at least without complaint. In his witty report, he detected, among other things, a tenden
The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar
Editor Managing Editor Senior Editor Associate Editor Assistant Editor Design Director Editor-at-Large Poetry Editor Copy Editor Editorial Assistants Consulting Editor Ann Beattie, Emily Bernard, William Deresiewicz, Allen Freema
The American Scholar3 min read
Letters
Much of the criticism Murzban F. Shroff levels against Narendra Modi’s handling of the Covid crisis in India (Letter from Mumbai, Autumn 2021) is well justified. His reference to India’s vaccine preparation, however, is highly misleading. Although th
The American Scholar10 min read
Community in Concrete
ONE RAINY SATURDAY evening in September, Renate Taucher and her neighbors at Binzer Straße 1 sat in a low-ceilinged room with whitewashed concrete walls in the basement of their building. A few of them, their faces now sculpted by wrinkles, had celeb
The American Scholar2 min read
The Power Of The Past
“As a photographer and sociologist who has lived in communities affected by the collapse of steel and grain production, I am especially interested in understanding places that are physically and socially defined by a now-absent industry. In 2016, I w
The American Scholar3 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Taming the Wild Web
Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. His forthcoming book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will be published in March 2022, and his Sub-stack newsletter, “The Hinternet,” bro
The American Scholar2 min read
A Death in Karachi
Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood are journalists based in Pakistan. Imtiaz is the author of the novel Karachi, You’re Killing Me! and has published articles in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Marie Claire, and Saveur. Masood has written for NPR, Dawn,
The American Scholar4 min read
On Kindness
KINDNESS IS KINSHIP, and like humor is expansive. An arm over the shoulder, a voice in one’s ear. Overlapping sensibilities make us feel good and can correct for misperceptions. Empathy then seeps into our calculation. We feel better, as though we ma
The American Scholar24 min read
The Art of Losing
LIKE ENGLISH PROFESSORS EVERYWHERE, I suppose, I love to teach “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle about “the art of losing.” I teach it to first-year cadets at West Point every spring, even though I have the impression that the poem’s deepest a
The American Scholar13 min readWorld
Lessons From an Unwritten Autobiography
TWICE, PUBLISHERS HAVE approached me to suggest I write a memoir or an autobiography, and both times I instantly recoiled from the prospect. I can’t say quite why I did, perhaps because of the implication that my life was over when to me it seemed so
The American Scholar22 min read
Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn
WHEN ERIC KALENZE was getting his master’s degree in education in the 1990s, he was immersed in pedagogical theories that have prevailed at ed schools for a century. Learning proceeds best, he was told, when focused on skills like critical thinking a
The American Scholar2 min read
Lifelines
HEATHER TRESELER’S POEMS are as full of closely observed, telling detail as realist prose fiction. They tell vivid stories about the constraining norms of class and gender. They also evoke the potential for escaping or transforming those constraints
The American Scholar5 min read
Cul-de-Sac
That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog
The American Scholar27 min readArchitecture
Portrait Of A Marriage In Six Homes
SOME PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES are separate from everyday life; others, such as the culinary arts and architecture, intrude. Like a chef cooking for her family, an architect who is building a home, buying a home, or even furnishing a home, inevitably b
The American Scholar18 min read
Never Take Hope From the Patient
IN CITY OF GOD, Saint Augustine tells the story of Innocentia of Carthage. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she was advised by a physician to follow the ancient recommendation of Hippocrates: “It is better and safer not to treat than to treat a hidden c
The American Scholar16 min read
From Murderpan to Mattapan
AS A CHILD, I IMAGINED I would escape Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood through my writing. As an adult, the Mattapan branch of the Boston Public Library hosted the writing classes I taught, where, among other things, I guided my adult students through
The American Scholar24 min read
The Submerged
When I was 14, I lost my virginity to David Flower, the future congressman. My parents had moved us, the summer before, from Cambridge to West Virginia. They were junior co-hires in public health at WVU, but they wanted to live way out in the country
The American Scholar12 min read
Sex and Secrets
HOW MANY TIMES have I seen North by Northwest? Impossible to count—40, 50? Sometimes a few notes from Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack will sneak up on me and stick, so suddenly that whatever I’m doing, however pedestrian—washing dishes, grading papers—
The American Scholar5 min read
Mightier Than the Sword
BY EDWARD SOREL Knopf, 227 pp., $30 EDWARD SOREL’S Profusely Illustrated manages to fuse art and autobiography with an unusual warmth and panache. Meant to be a “portfolio” of his best illustrations, cartoons, caricatures, and magazine covers, it al
The American Scholar5 min readCrime & Violence
The Burden of Guilt
BY KATHARINE BLAKE FSG Originals, 224 pp., $17 IN THE UNINNOCENT, Katharine Blake, an adjunct professor at Vermont Law School’s Center for Justice Reform, confronts a horrific murder committed by her cousin Scott, who as a teenager received a senten
The American Scholar4 min read
Hoping for Recovery
BY CARL ERIK FISHER Penguin Press, 400 pp., $30 A YOUNG DOCTOR is engaged in a mighty struggle with alcoholism. One night, exhaustion and amphetamines push him so far over the edge that he cries out for help. A neighbor calls the police. When the of
The American Scholar6 min read
New York Was Very Heaven
BY EDITH SCHLOSS Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $32 THE LOFT GENERATION has several things to recommend it: an inspired title (that’s “Loft,” not “Lost”); a cast of characters essential to postwar American art (not only the de Koonings and Cy T
The American Scholar4 min read
Tales Of Mercy And Sacrifice
BY ROBERTO CALASSO (TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY TIM PARKS) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $35 THE VENERABLE ITALIAN publisher and writer Roberto Calasso passed away in July, at age 80. Called “a literary institution of one” by The Paris Revi
The American Scholar4 min read
A World Weird and Wondrous
BY MATTHEW AUCOIN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 301 pp., $28 MATTHEW AUCOIN HAPPILY wrestles with multiple impossibilities in this highly personal book. In vivid, granular detail, he explores composers and operas he loves, from Claudio Monteverdi in 17
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
The light from the full moon lent a silky, glacial sheen to the towering front of the cloud, which stretched off to the horizon in both directions. I stood transfixed as it made its way down the street toward me at a little over the town’s speed limi

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