American Scholar articles from June 2005

American Scholar archives from June 2005

Reason in the sun.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
June 22, 2005... For all of us Godless Secular Humanists, these should be the good times. The attack on science has diverted the attention of those for whom the GSH... um... community has always been a convenient target, leaving us free to spread our...

The keys to St. Peter's.(Letter From Rome)
June 22, 2005... In case there was any doubt, Rome is still the Eternal City. On April 1, 2005, we seemed to be going through a literal Gotterdammerung; Titans and would-be Titans were falling all at once. In the last few hours remaining to John Paul II,...

Sound.(Commonplace Book)
June 22, 2005... I was in a box near the stage and thus in a position to judge rather optimistically the strength of [Gemma Bellincioni's] voice and the clarity of her phrasing. At the end of the evening I realized I had always watched her sing; that...

Touching up art history.(Works in Progress)
June 22, 2005... In 1930, the Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas (1898-1979) and his assistants painted oil-on-canvas murals in five rooms of the Fisk University library in Nashville, Tennessee. Known as "Pageant of the Negro," the epic work follows a path...

A step toward a cure.(Works in Progress; diabetes)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2005... When scientist Paul Langerhans first observed the endocrine cells that release a number of vital hormones, including insulin, he called them "islets" because of the way they stood distinct from the surrounding tissue of the pancreas. Type 1...

Last stand.(Works in Progress)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2005... Sometime in the late 1800s, a farmer transplanted a few eastern American chestnuts to his patch of prairie in West Salem, Wisconsin, beyond the western edge of the chestnut's natural range. In 1902, the accidental introduction to North America...

Parallel with nature.(Works in Progress)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2005... In creating the Big Belt House in Meagher County, Montana, architect William E. Massie eschewed blueprints, backhoes, and many other tools of his trade. The first step was digital mapping of the immediate landscape. Massie, an associate...

"Night" at the opera.(Works in Progress)
June 22, 2005... The musical score above is a piano reduction of a theme from a new opera in progress composed by Jorge Martin with co-librettist Dolores M. Koch. Before Night Falls, an adaptation of the memoir of the late exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas,...

Accidental elegance: how chance authors the universe.(Works in Progress)
June 22, 2005... In the century and a half since Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, scientific research has conveyed one consistent message: evolution is an indisputable fact. Despite this message (or perhaps because of it), scientific investigations continue...

Genome Tome: twenty-three ways of looking at our ancestors.
June 22, 2005... Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they soy. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.--Linda Hogan, "Walking" from Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living Word The scientific revolution known as...

Not so fast with the DDT: Rachel Carson's warnings still apply.
June 22, 2005... What the World Needs Now Is DDT" read the headline in The New York Times Magazine early last year. If you need more proof that the current decade is dedicated to driving a stake through the heart of the 1960s, those seven words ought to do it....

Roosevelt Redux: Robert M. Ball and the battle for Social Security.
June 22, 2005... PART TWO: The Word with the Big New Syllable It was E. B. White who described "interdependence" as "the word with the big new syllable." He was writing, toward the close of the Second World War, about the need for nations to learn that the...

Twinkletape.(Poem)
June 22, 2005... Twinkletape Woods, as we know, can scarcely be seen: a gray fog of twigs. The same with cities and stars. What glints and twinkles, though, all the more visible along the highways now that it is...

Angel bones.(Poem)
June 22, 2005... Angel Bones Next to the statue-laden cathedral of Rheims, the bishop's palace has become a museum containing many stones cast down by wear, bombardment, renovation, and the rare too-thunderous Te Deum. Huge...

Summer visitors: buy a house in Maine and they will come. And come.
June 22, 2005... What did we expect would happen if we got a summer house? We'd seen Fawlty Towers. We knew that our friends were usually not happy to be introduced to each other. I was already oppressed, making the water run (which years ago replaced the wine...

Hearing is believing: Ivory-billed sightings leave field biologists wanting to hear more.
June 22, 2005... The ivory-billed woodpecker, arguably the most famous bird in the world right now, sounds like an annoying toy trumpet. Not the kind you blow into, but the kind of horn you might attach to a bike, with a red rubber ball stuck on one end. Until...

The call of the wild.(ivory-billed woodpecker)
June 22, 2005... I am a birder, one of those who rise early to see as many as possible of the world's 10,000 avian species. In my pursuit I've contracted Lyme's disease (twice), sloshed around swamps and sewage ponds, and spent hours sorting through the flocks...

The man who loved cemeteries; Ted Ashton Phillips Jr., 1959-2005.(Obituary)
June 22, 2005... Gone before his time, Ted Phillips Jr. was, to quote his beloved Walker Percy, the last gentleman. Ted resembled those Quentin Compson lawyer-collector-raconteur-historian-archivist-tibblerliberal-wits found mostly in unread leather-bound...

Into the swamp: how will the Atlantic fare when it leaves the capital of dissent?(MAGAZINES)
June 22, 2005... The recent news that The Atlantic Monthly was pulling up stakes and moving to Washington from Boston, its home since 1857, came as a disappointment but not exactly a surprise to New Englanders who have been losing electoral clout since the...

Principally to delight: who says that museum-going isn't a leisure activity?(ART)
June 22, 2005... Perhaps in keeping with the apocalyptic tenor of the times, American critics have become fond of lamenting the commodification of our national museums. Motorcycles at the Guggenheim, Renaissance paintings in Las Vegas, theme restaurants at the...

On virtuosity: a mastery of technique ought to be exalted, not disdained.(MUSIC)
June 22, 2005... I was about five or six years old--a typical age to begin such a pursuit--when my parents decided that I ought to learn to play the violin. Thanks to their fairly substantial collection of records, I had started to show interest in music even...

War stories: what West Point graduates are reading in Iraq.(BOOKS)
June 22, 2005... Hurry up and wait. My father used to spend a lot of time waiting for planes to land. Enlisting in the Army Air Corps at 18, he trained as an air traffic controller at a series of stateside bases, made sergeant, and in 1944 shipped out to India,...

Universal truths: the stories we've told ourselves about the heavens and the Earth.(The Garnd Contraption: The World as Myth, Number, and Chance)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... THE GRAND CONTRAPTION: The World as Myth, Number, and Chance By David Park Princeton University Press | $29.95 David Park's new book, The Grand Contraption, seeks to tell the story of Western explanations of the universe--the contraption we...

Moral exemptions: should the law give special rights to the religious?(The Impossibility of Religious Freedom)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan Princeton University Press | $29.95 In March 1999 a trial-court judge in Boca Raton, Florida, ruled against a group of plaintiffs who had filed suit against the city,...

An epitapher of literary ghosts: William Dean Howells secured the reputations of others, but not his own.(William Dean Howells: A Writer's Life)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS: A Writer's Life By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson University of California Press | $34.95 In July 1860, William Dean Howells, then a 23-year-old newspaper editor from Ohio, presented himself at James Russell Lowell's...

Drinking in the past: six beverages that changed the world.(A History of the World in 6 Glasses)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 6 GLASSES By Tom Standage Walker & Co. $25 What do six popular drinks tell us about the genesis of civilization? A lot more than you might assume, according to Tom Standage. As technology editor of The Economist...

Telltale hearts.(Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... VIRGINIA WOOLF'S NOSE: Essays on Biography By Hermione Lee, Princeton University Press, $19.95 As a young girl, Virginia Woolf had the habit of scrutinizing herself in the hall looking glass when she was alone. Decades later, she mused on...

Sisyphus at Oxford.(Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... LOST FOR WORDS: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary By Lynda Mugglestone, Yale University Press, $30 Consumers of language tend to grant the dictionary an almost biblical authority, and since its completion in 1928, The...

Just looking.(Realist Vision)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... REALIST VISION By Peter Brooks. Yale University Press. $27 Stendhal's famous dictum "the novel is a mirror carried along a highway"--the meaning of which may never be ascertained--inaugurated the intense interest in observation, and...

Socrates stubs his toe.(The Reader Replies)
June 22, 2005... I am stunned by the arrogance with which George Watson dismisses Socrates' claim about the unexamined life as a "mistake" (SCHOLAR, Spring 2005). The standard quote about its not being worth living is not quite accurate; what Socrates says...

All about eve.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2005... With reference to the Lawrence Summers imbrogligo, I offer the Door Knob Theory of History. A young woman of prehistoric times is sitting in a cave with her children. Her man-mate comes in from outside bringing food and tosses it to her....

Roosevelt redux and end game.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2005... Regarding readers' complaints of your addressing issues of the day, there is never a need to apologize for being relevant. In fact, if it had not been for that, I, as a newcomer to the SCHOLAR, might not have picked up a copy from my local...

The Balanchine factor.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2005... William Deresiewicz's arguments in "The Salome Factor" (SCHOLAR, Spring 2005) are very persuasive. He is dead on about the hyper-athletic quality of modern ballet, and I particularly love his downright disdain for Peter Martins. George...

Arthur Miller's manifesto.(THE Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2005... Wendy Smith's "Miller's Tale" is a thoughtful appreciation of Arthur Miller. Although I join her in admiring Miller for one of the greatest American plays, Death of a Salesman, and for his unflagging concern about theater, I can't join in...

The battered trunk.(Findings; biography writing)
June 22, 2005... There I was, on a warm summer's day, sipping hot tea out of a delicate porcelain cup with a group of octogenarian Hawthornes. Writing biography, as I was of Nathaniel Hawthorne, one pries open every oyster, hoping to find that single pearl, and...