Spring 2024

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar
SUDIP BOSE Editor BRUCE FALCONER Executive Editor STEPHANIE BASTEK Senior Editor JAYNE ROSS Associate Editor ELLIE EBERLEE Assistant Editor DAVID HERBICK Design Director SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor SALLY ATWATER Copy E
The American Scholar6 min read
Good Vibrations
In the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, along a narrow two-lane road that runs through the small town of Landers, a white dome glimmers amid the desolate landscape. From a distance, it seems like a trick of the eye. Up close, it resembles a
The American Scholar6 min read
I So Wish That You Remembered
Toward the end of my mother’s life, when she couldn’t carry on a conversation, I took to singing for her. She lived in a group home for people with dementia in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. I live in Brooklyn, and even before the pandemic, I vi
The American Scholar7 min read
Bubble Girl
I’m still surprised that no one ever told me about the incubator baby kidnapping. To be fair, it happened 63 years before I was born, but it also happened half a block from where I was born, and little Marian Bleakley was perhaps the most famous baby
The American Scholar4 min read
Downstream of Fukushima
Iam two levels down in Tokyo’s massive central railway station, eating seafood with my wife, Penny, and a crowd of hungry Japanese commuters and travelers. In August 2023, the Japanese government, with the blessing of the International Atomic Energy
The American Scholar6 min read
Lunching With Rabi
On October 28, 1964, when I was 26 years old and in my first semester as an instructor in Columbia University’s English Department, my father called and asked if I’d read an article in The New York Times that morning about I. I. Rabi. I had not. “Wel
The American Scholar5 min read
Sins Of The Fathers And Mothers
"Oh let me, let me kill them,” one woman cried, a knife in one hand, a rasping file in the other, as she struggled with the soldier trying to restrain her. “They killed my husband. They burned my house and child. Oh, let me through.” It was November
The American Scholar27 min read
Tales From an Attic
SIERRA BELLOWS lives in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, and the Scholar. 1. In February 1995, New York Governor George Pataki announced plans to close the Willard Asylum for the Insane
The American Scholar22 min read
Strength and Conditioning
STEVE YARBROUGH is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, and Prisoners of War, which was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/ Faulkner award. His most recent novel is Stay Gone Days. He teaches at Eme
The American Scholar10 min read
The Dragon Amid the Tigers
AMITAV GHOSH is the author of the Ibis trilogy, comprising Sea of Poppies (shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other books include The Circle of Reason, In an Antique Land, The Glass Palace, and The Grea
The American Scholar16 min read
The Redoubtable Bull Shark
JOHN GIFFORD is a writer and conservationist based in Oklahoma. His books include Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature; Pecan America: Exploring a Cultural Icon; and the forthcoming Landscaping for Wildlife: Essays on Our Changing Plane
The American Scholar3 min read
Ollie Ollie Oxen Free
The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described play as the engine of creative growth in children. In its earliest forms, play takes place in the presence of the mother, who provides a “holding environment” for the child. Hide-and-seek is a model for the
The American Scholar12 min read
My Name Is Emily
Emily Bernard is the author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in
The American Scholar4 min read
Five Poems
Security confiscated the bracelet I’d slipped into my wallet but not the thin black sweater I wore as I walked out of Macy’s. The sweater still had its price tag and was so soft it soothed whoever was whispering “more, more” in my ears adorned with s
The American Scholar17 min read
Tramping With Virginia
Emily Fox Gordon is the author of two memoirs, two novels, and a collection of essays, Book of Days. Her second novel, Madeleine and Jane, was published last September. I’m a devoted fan of Virginia Woolf ’s essay “Street Haunting.” For many years, I
The American Scholar17 min read
Red Tide Warning
LENORE MYKA’s work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, New England Review, and other publications. The recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, she is currently at work o
The American Scholar13 min read
The Widower's Lament
STEVEN G. KELLMAN’S books include Rambling Prose, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, and The Translingual Imagination. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. —Emily Dickinson I had been asleep for a few hours when the policeman a
The American Scholar23 min read
Sifting
CASSANDRA GARBUS is the author of the novel Solo Variations. Her fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, American Short Fiction, Texas Review, Meridian, Louisiana Literature, and The Cortland Review. Lily slumps on the living room couch, absorb
The American Scholar5 min read
Chain Gang
By law, no building in Rome’s city center may exceed the height of St. Peter’s Basilica. Its immense, distinctive dome towers above the city’s Seven Hills, dominating the horizon from as far away as the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, nearly 25 miles to the
The American Scholar4 min read
The Jazz Singer
Since her death in 1959, Billie Holiday’s life has inspired artists, filmmakers, and biographers, whose efforts have contributed as much to her legend as her unique voice and exquisite musicianship have contributed to her artistic legacy. Paul Alexan
The American Scholar4 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Thought Experimenter
When Daniela Rus tells people what she does for a living—designing artificially intelligent robots at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—“they generally have one of two reactions,” she writes. “Some get anxious and … want to know when the robo
The American Scholar4 min read
We've Gone Mainstream
Marie Arana’s sprawling portrait of Latinos in the United States is rich and nuanced in its depiction of the diversity of “the least understood minority.” Yet LatinoLand is regrettably old-fashioned and out-of-date. For starters, Hispanics aren’t rea
The American Scholar4 min read
Invisible Ink
"Shakespeare’s Sister” is an oblique reference to Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in which the British writer imagines that the Bard had an equally talented sister named Judith. With little opportunity and few protections, Judith
The American Scholar4 min read
Our Pets, Our Plates
Jeremy Bentham scorned polite society but loved his London cats, even the pasta-eating swashbuckler Sir John Langbourne. Life with Langbourne led to feline character-study (“His moral qualities were most despotic—his intellectual extraordinary; but h
The American Scholar5 min read
Acting Out
In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act
The American Scholar4 min read
The Choice Is Ours
In December 1866, mathematician Mary Boole wrote to Charles Darwin: Do you consider the holding of your Theory of Natural Selection, in its fullest & most unreserved sense, to be inconsistent,—I do not say with any particular scheme of Theological do
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
To Err Is Human; to Forgive, Supine —S. J. Perelman, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970 You must know the bees have come early this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough to not have crisped with
The American Scholar1 min read
Anniversaries
The proliferation of streaming services has made network TV seem increasingly out-of-date. Only 75 years ago, however, it was just getting started. On January 11, 1949, Pittsburgh news station WDTV (today KDKA-TV) debuted locally on Channel 3 while a

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