American Scholar articles from January 2009

American Scholar archives from January 2009

Two cents.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
January 1, 2009... The Obama administration will not lack for problems to solve or for advice about how to solve them. But part of the fun of having a change in government, especially a change as dramatic as the one we are about to see, is the chance to put in...

Artists & models.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... Leonard Bernstein's comments in "Something Called Terrorism" (Autumn 2008) about the world situation and his criticism of U.S. foreign policy are quite illuminating. We sometimes make the mistake of expecting our artists only to entertain us,...

Modified interlinear.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... I have read with interest Ernest Blum's essay "The New Old Way of Learning Languages," in which Blum suggests that James Hamilton's once-popular, now rarely employed interlinear system of reading the classical texts "could serve as a template...

Supreme or better.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... In the Autumn 2008 issue, on page 20, Learned Hand is referred to as a Supreme Court Justice. While many students of the law believe that his opinions were as good, if not better, than those of the Supreme Court, he never served there. He was a...

Who wood have guessed?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I enjoyed the Bruce McCall cartoons about possible new buildings for the National Mall. One of them was to be shaped like a giant redwood tree for the "U.S. Institute of Logging's Museum of the Tree." But did you...

Would you settle for mean?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... Did I subscribe to The American Scholar or The National Enquirer ? I am sure the author of "The Torture Colony," Bruce Falconer, never thought of Paul Schaefer as the "World's Most Evil Man." Does your editorial staff? A distinguished journal...

Flat wrong.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] God knows this is a minor point, but when Sarah L. Courteau, in her review of How Fiction Works, mentions "the famous distinction E. M. Forster made in Aspects of the Novel between one-dimensional or 'flat'...

Stuck in 1986.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... Brian Boyd deserves belated praise for his article "Getting It All Wrong" (Autumn 2006), which argues for a biocultural perspective over Theory. I know the article is several years old, but it resonates with the frustration I feel as a graduate...

Globalization on steroids.(Letter from Dubai)
January 1, 2009... Promotions for Dubai on CNN, BBC World, and other satellite channels show a shimmering skyline of glass and steel office towers with their graceful curves and aquiline shapes, suggesting a distant galaxy where all the unpleasantness of urban...

On the road.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In August 2000, an otherwise-anonymous graphic designer who calls himself Someguy released 100 blank journals into circulation around the world, leaving them in bars, on park benches, and in the hands of friends....

Small steps, giant leaps.(Works in Progress)
January 1, 2009... The history of science since Copernicus has been one of growing recognition that human beings are not at the center of the universe. The sheer number of galaxies, stars, and planets, which we are discovering at an increasing rate, seems to make...

Art imitates art.(Norwegian Opera House and Monica Bonvicini's Hun Ligger )(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Although the Norwegian Opera House on Bjovika harbor in Oslo has been open to the public since April, it awaits completion this spring with the installation of a sculpture that will be anchored in the harbor basin....

Master masticator.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... French food scientists have built the world's best mechanical month, the first machine to accurately reproduce the complicated grinding, swishing, and salivating that takes place with every bite. It looks nothing like chattering teeth from...

Incredible husks.(use of rice husks in rural electrification)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... In undeveloped countries, rural electrification projects based on power grids are complex, costly, and prone to political interference, World Bank experts say. But now four young men with expertise in engineering, business, and politics are...

HD 11964 d by any other name: what to call the planets we find beyond our solar system?(Tuning Up)
January 1, 2009... We don't call people by their Social Security numbers. We don't hail em by their birth dates. We call them by their names. We don't refer to cities by their latitude and longitude. We use their names. Mountains have names, so do rivers, states,...

Putting man before Descartes: human knowledge is neither objective nor subjective. It is personal and participant--which places us at the center of the universe.(historical criticism)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... Un mauvais quart d'heure, the French say, of those painful 15 minutes when a son must tell his father that he failed in school or that he stole, or when a man thinks he now must tell his woman that he will leave her. They have to tell the...

The future of the American frontier: can one of our most enduring national myths, much in evidence in the recent presidential campaign, be reinvented yet again?(Cover story)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... The presidential campaign of 2008 will be recalled for many firsts: the first African-American presidential nominee, the near-miss campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the record spending and record turnout. But what was not new was...

Affirmative action and after: now is the time to reconsider a policy that must eventually change. But simply replacing race with class isn't the solution.(Essay)
January 1, 2009... A recent column in the alumni newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Mississippi, is headlined "We Have Legacies." The quote is lifted from the column and would ordinarily evoke the world of Southern landed gentry. A photograph on the...

Spies among us: military snooping on civilians, which escalated in the turbulent '60s, never entirely went away and is back again on a much larger scale.(Essay)
January 1, 2009... John O'Brien first became suspicious of his employer, the Army's 113th Military Intelligence Group, when he saw a dossier labeled "Adlai Stevenson III" on his boss's desk. It was September 1969, and O'Brien had recently transferred to the...

Between two worlds: Rosanna Warren's midlife revelations of the real and the fantastic.(poetry)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... The four poems that follow are poems of midlife. Rosanna Warren evokes a perspective from which childhood and adolescence are remote--or "far," as she says in "Ocular." But "far" also means just far enough away that youth can be recalled and...

Ghost in a Red Hat.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2009... Ghost in a Red Hat --these cabbages under full sail, these ancient walls smothered in ivy and wisteria with its purple froth: in my middle age and sensible girth I remember starving. I didn't...

Aubade.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2009... Aubade Silver gelatin the fine outline of the window sash at dawn but morning turned blind eyes to us nor could I see you Sleep had cobwebbed you like a pharaoh and later when we walked in the frozen field we cracked every...

After.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2009... After The highway straight to the end of the world skims past a ruined mall, Kmart with roof stove in, acres of parking lots where weeds judder through cracks. Police station smashed, but McDonald's still sells shocked...

Ocular.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2009... Ocular So damp the pages of novels curl up like vine leaves, the stories smear. In the Metro this morning a man was scraping a poster from the wall: all the promised felicity hung in shreds. My eye is swollen,...

A country for old men: having reached the shores of seniority himself, the author finds a surprising contentment in the eyes of his fellow retirees.(Essay)
January 1, 2009... More and more I've been concluding that by middle age most people in this country have sculpted their lives so they'll land about where they aimed to. The few who genuinely aspired to be rich or famous will probably become so for a spell, and...

Collateral damage: the Civil War only enhanced George Whitman's soldierly satisfaction; for his brother Walt, however, the horrors halted an outpouring of great poetry.
January 1, 2009... On May 16, 1864, George Washington Whitman, a captain in the Union army, wrote to his mother, Louisa, in Brooklyn: I am all fight so far. We had a pretty hard battle on the 6th. I dont know what the battle is called but it was about...

My bright abyss: I never felt the pain of unbelief until I believed. But belief itself is hardly painless.(creative writing)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... My God my bright abyss Into which all my longing will not go Once more I come to the edge of all I know And believing nothing believe in this: And there the poem ends. Or fails, rather, for in the three years since I first wrote that...

The high road to Narnia: C. S. Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien believed that truths are universal and that stories reveal them.(The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings series)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... In the beginning was the story. Or so C. S. Lewis would have said, and 40 years after his death it is not too late to say it for him. Oddly enough he is now famous for everything except his critical views. His novels are read; his Narnia...

Nessus at noon.(Fiction)(Play)
January 1, 2009... CUSTOMER NOTES This garment was carefully cleaned & we wish to inform you that: [check] Sorry, this is the best that can be done. --slip enclosed with a dry-cleaned item SCENE: A dry-cleaning establishment, between a pizza...

The art of human surveillance.(Fiction)(Short story)
January 1, 2009... The trouble starts when my wife, Charli, gets a call from Win's teacher, informing her that Win won't stop kissing other boys on the playground. Win's teacher says this is something best handled on the home front, but ! know she wants to pass...

Cauldron bubble: Macbeth minus its supernatural elements could not have mattered so much to Lincoln and Dr. Johnson--and should not matter to us.(Theater)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... It was an iconic moment in the history of the presidency: The tall, long-limbed man, dressed in the black Brooks Brothers suit in which he would be shot a few days later, gazes sadly at the ruins of Richmond and, for a time, walks its nearly...

Lunching on Olympus: my meals with W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson.(Books)
January 1, 2009... The British writers W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson paid respectful attention to each other: Larkin wrote English Auden was a superb and magnetic wide-angled poet, but the poetry was in the blaming and the...

Cal & Liz & Ted & Sylvia: the corresponding prose of midcentury poets.(Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and Letters of Ted Hughes)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... LETTERS OF TED HUGHES Selected and edited Christopher Reid Farrar, Straus and Giroux 758 pp. | $45 WORDS IN AIR The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia...

A passion for architecture: nuggets from a critical gold mine.(On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... ON ARCHITECTURE Collected Reflections on a Century of Change By Ada Louise Huxtable Walker & Co. 496 pp. $35 Ada Louise Huxtable is always a delight to read--unless, of course, you've designed a building she doesn't like. Even...

Let me count the ways: are we getting more obsessive or more compulsive about diagnosing?(Obsession: A History)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... OBSESSION A History By Lennard J. Davis University of Chicago Press 290 pp. | $27.50 This quirky but informative book begins with an account of one of the author's childhood rituals: his nightly counting of the illuminated...

Lucid madness: a massacre of Apache women and children, and the difficulties of telling their story.(Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... SHADOWS AT DAWN A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History By Karl Jacoby Penguin 377 pp. | $32.95 "American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said...

Of time and the camera: an art critic and historian turns his attention to contemporary photography.(Why Photography Matters Now as Art as Never Before)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS NOW AS ART AS NEVER BEFORE By Michael Fried Yale University Press 408 pp. $55 Critic and art historian Michael Fried made his reputation with the 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood," one of the most...

Grief.(quotations)(Quotation)
January 1, 2009... I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus...

Biographer Hazel Rowley reflects on book censorship in France.(Point of Departure)
January 1, 2009... The French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were vehemently opposed to censorship in any form, a belief in truth telling that extended to their own lives. To them, the notion of privacy was a relic of bourgeois hypocrisy. In...