American Scholar articles from January 2005

American Scholar archives from January 2005

Fear itself.(Editor's Note)
January 1, 2005... THE NOVEMBER ELECTION proved that the most potent force in American politics today is fear. Both parties suspected as much, which is why neither candidate saw fit during the long campaign to quiet those fears, as presidents have traditionally...

The death of Derrida.(Letter from Paris)(Jacques Derrida )
January 1, 2005... On the day Jacques Derrida was buried in nondescript cemetery near his house outside Paris in Ris-Orangis, Le Monde lavished on its readers a ten-page supplement about the philosopher's life and work. Such posthumous honors, reserved by...

Change.(Commonplace Book)(A Book About Myself: Newspaper Days)(Christianity and Evolution)(Saving Graces: Sojourns of a Backyard Biologist)(Simple French Food)(The Anatomy of Bibliomania)(The Beak of the Finch: A Stony of Evolution in Our Time)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have...

Class warfare: it is wrong that America's most privileged families have abandoned military service.(Exhortation)
January 1, 2005... It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence of it. ...

The glue is gone: the things that held us together as individuals and as a people are being lost. Can we find them again?(democracy)
January 1, 2005... There's a flutter to society now, a tremulousness: young people studying yoga therapy after college instead of essaying graduate school, and their parents taking cooking very seriously, with Hummers in the suburbs but debt a major household...

So help me God: what all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history.
January 1, 2005... I. EXORDIUM January 20 is the feast day of Saint Fabian, a third-century pope who was appointed in a most unusual way. Before 236, he was a simple layperson, leading an utterly obscure life, even by third-century standards. That year,...

What we got wrong: how Arabs look at the self, their society, and their political institutions.
January 1, 2005... Two recent studies attempt to account for the Arab world's apparent failure to keep pace with the economic, political, and scientific innovations of the West. Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? focuses on Muslim fears that foreign contacts and...

The coming of the French: my life as an English professor.
January 1, 2005... In 1971, in my second year of holding a doctorate in English literature and of teaching at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, I attended a lecture by a French literary scholar of whom I knew nothing. Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities, which...

The software wars: why you can't understand your computer.
January 1, 2005... On a bright winter morning in Philadelphia, in 1986, my downtown office is bathed in sunlight. I am the lead programmer for a software system that my firm intends to sell to the largest companies in the country, but like so many systems, mine...

The crooner and the physicist: Jacques Brel and The New Yorker profile that never reached critical mass.(Biography)
January 1, 2005... From 1957 to 1959 I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I was doing theoretical physics. I had written nothing professionally but physics papers, and it hadn't occurred to me to write anything else. If someone...

A sturdy man: notes on a human symphony.(Bob Boehmer)(Biography)
January 1, 2005... Imet Bob Boehmer when he was seventy-eight years old and I was thirty-four. He was a short, tough man with a chest like a refrigerator and a perfectly round belly that hung between his suspenders like a face between fence posts. His face was...

Point and shoot: how the Abu Ghraib images redefine photography.(Arts)
January 1, 2005... In spring of 2004 the International Center of Photography in New York presented an exhibition called "War in Iraq: The Coordinates of Conflict," featuring the work of James Nachtwey, Christopher Morris, Ron Haviv, and other veteran...

"I can't believe I'm doing it with Madame Bovary": learning to write musical comedy.(Arts)
January 1, 2005... Some people climb mountains. My quixotic quest has been more sedate but just as rigorous. For the past five years, I've been writing a musical comedy. It is my obsession, my singing and dancing white whale. It has consumed me, occupied most of...

In praise of flubs: the pursuit of perfection has taken all the personality out of recorded classical music.(Arts)
January 1, 2005... A recent article in the New York Times revealed something startling about the world of classical music. Professional musicians, it seems, are becoming increasingly hooked on beta-blockers such as Inderal (a medication usually taken by people...

The industrial-strength humanist: J. Irwin Miller knew how to get things built.(Arts)(Biography)
January 1, 2005... The twentieth century was the century of experts, when the very word amateur came to be spoken with a curled lip. It was also the century of sorting firings out, an activity always regarded, for some reason, as scientific. As it began, the...

The peculiar intellectual: in the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery.(Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... CONJECTURES OF ORDER: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1819-1860 By Michael O'Brien University of North Carolina Press | $95 Until recent decades the suggestion that the antebellum South might have possessed a robust and...

What Einstein knew: one year and five papers that changed physics forever.(Einstein 1905 The Standard of Greatness)(The Einstein Almanac)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... EINSTEIN 1905 The Standard of Greatness By John S. Rigden Harvard University Press $21.95 THE EINSTEIN ALMANAC By Alice Calaprice Johns Hopkins University Press \ $24.95 Two thousand five promises to be a good year fin centennials....

Thoreau's landscape within: how he came to know nature, and through it came to know himself.(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... NATURAL LIFE: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism By David M. Robison Cornell University Press | $24.95 Henry Thoreau once famously noted that he had "traveled much in Concord," and over the years scholars have traveled equally much in...

Rocket men: a daughter explores the male-dominated universe of her father.(Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science )(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... ASTRO TURF: The Private Life of Rocket Science By M. G. Lord Walker & Company $24 Put together the words "nineteen-fifties" and "engineer" and a vivid image springs to mind--to my mind, anyway--of a skinny, boyish man in a crew cut and tie...

End of discussion: why I'm leaving my book group.
January 1, 2005... At Book Browse.com, there is an online forum that s set up for people who want to talk about the problems in their book clubs. Most of the gripes posted are about the difficult personalities who spoil the fun at book club meetings: the member...

Dining with robots.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... Ellen Ullman tosses an encomium ("Evolution, that good mother") to evolution into her familiar essay on cooking and artificial intelligence (SCHOLAR, Autumn 2004). Of course she doesn't literally mean that evolution is a "good mother." That...

Joyas Voladoras and love in a box.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... "Joyas Volardores"? Surely the word was voladoras. If not, then where is your sic? Sic 'em, SCHOLAR! RUPERT ALLEN Tucson, Arizona I read Brian Doyle's "Joyas Voladoras" [spelling corrected] in the Autumn 2004 SCHOLAR several...

Another Washington leak.(Findings)
January 1, 2005... A century ago, Washington's Dupont Circle was a ring of petits palais, the least petite and most palatial of which belonged to Levi Leiter, who had made millions in dry goods and real estate, and his wife, Mary. It was a marble-lined...