American Scholar articles from June 2006

American Scholar archives from June 2006

Story time.
June 22, 2006... IN ITS NEARLY 75-YEAR HISTORY, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR has never published a single short story. Now in the Summer issue we offer two of them, and we intend to bring out stories at about that rate for the foreseeable future. A couple of questions...

Feckless and reckless.(financial crises)
June 22, 2006... Scandals are a way of life in Brazil, where reports of government corruption or stolen public funds barely last a day or two in the news. One story, however, just won't go away. It involves a baroque web of misdirected and stolen funds,...

Summer.(Commonplace Book)
June 22, 2006... A bottle of thick English port is a very heavy and a very inflammatory dose. I felt it the last time that I drank it for several days, and this morning it was boiling in my veins. Dempster came and saw me, and said I had better be palsied at...

Look of a warrior.(memorial monuments)(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... The four presidents carved into South Dakota's Mount Rushmore are as stone-faced as so many cigar-store Indians. In contrast, a representation of Lakota warrior Crazy Horse now emerging from another Black Hills outcrop, 17 miles southwest of...

The ring of truth.(observations of planet Saturn)(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... Scientists have known for years that Saturn's rings are composed of water-ice particles ranging in width from a centimeter to 10 meters--plus a couple of "gap moons" nicknamed Pan and Daphnis, respectively 30 and seven kilometers wide. Now,...

History in the making.(Works In Progress)(Excerpt)
June 22, 2006... How will we Americans reflect upon this era? Garry Wills offers a theoretical passage from a textbook published in the year 2041. Wills is professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University. His most recent books are What Jesus Meant and...

Walk, don't drive.(military parks)(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... "It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people," William H. Whyte once wrote. "What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished." Whyte, America's guru of bottom-up place design, died in 1999. But the nonprofit...

One (motorized) step forward.(Works In Progress)(James Jay Martin's prosthetic foot )(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... What began in 2003 as Oklahoma resident James Jay Martin's application #10/410,491 for an "Electronically Controlled Prosthetic System" is recognized today as U.S. Patent Number 7,029,500 B2, illustrated below: a motorized ankle joint that can...

Climbing crime among kids.(Works In Progress)(Statistical table)
June 22, 2006... The latest report of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics shows a rise in violent crime involving juveniles. In one year "18 per 1,000 juveniles were victims of serious violent crimes--that is, homicide, rape, aggravated...

Pomp and circumstance.(Warren G. Harding)(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... History does not recall Warren G. Harding with a great deal of reverence. Our 29th president once gambled away a set of White House china in a card game. Elected in 1921, he died within two years, after suffering a heart attack, leaving behind...

The ordinariness of AIDS: can a disease that tells us so much about ourselves ever be anything but extraordinary?
June 22, 2006... The AIDS epidemic is now 25 years old. Early in the epidemic Susan Sontag forecast a day when AIDS--"the disease most fraught with meaning," she called it--would become an ordinary illness. But can AIDS be ordinary? Something like...

The sack of Baghdad: the U.S. invasion of Iraq has turned cultural icons into loot and archaeological sites into ruins.(art thefts)
June 22, 2006... In a few hundred or thousand years' time, the looting of the Iraq National Museum in early April 2003 will fill one more paragraph in a long history of wartime plunder and spoil. From the last major looting of Baghdad's artistic treasures, in...

The Crux of the matter: Heather McHugh.(POETRY)
June 22, 2006... Heather McHugh's Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, collecting the work of the first half of a lively poetic career, made it apparent that she is a poet of rare intellectual ambition, verbal playfulness, and emotional intensity. New books of...

Boondocks.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... Boondocks We come from there--that clattering tautology. The boon's the boom--what lowers a load from the tottering sky; the boon's the planks and pilings, strictness of the structures made so we can...

Hand Over Mouth.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... Hand Over Mouth We clap one hand across the gaping hole-- or else the sight might leak inside to melt the mind--if any thinking spoke were in the wheel, if any real fright-fragments broke...

A Smattering.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... A Smattering A carnation the crux of the matter, heart close-read. The head not only minded: minding. Participles hot, thoughts insufficiently wooden: flow in flesh. See notes on hand (the human...

No Sex for Priests.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... No Sex for Priests The horse in harness suffers; he's not feeling up to snuff. The shell is sensate but the cook pronounces lobsters tough. The chain's too short: The dog's at pains to reach a sheaf of...

And the Greatest of These.(Poetry)(Poem)
June 22, 2006... And the Greatest of These Stupidity's no grounds for our despair. It drives or drowses everywhere-- waxen, bristling, pitted, slick-- as variously textured as notoriously tough. It ought arouse more wonder than...

Unto High Heaven.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... Unto High Heaven Some people trust in will and dream of power. The man of the moment would kill to be man of the hour. Some people live by asking daylight's worth. My God, they're multi-tasking ...

Miles from nowhere: on a return trip to the wilderness of British Columbia, the author sees changes in the people, the landscape, and himself.
June 22, 2006... In 1966, at the age of 33, the essayist, novelist, and traveler Edward Hoagland spent three months in the remotest parts of northwest British Columbia, west of the Rockies and south of the Yukon. His goal was not only to drink in a landscape...

Rum and Coca-Cola: the murky derivations of a sweet drink and a sassy World War II song.
June 22, 2006... "War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience," writes historian Sidney Mintz. Shortages force folks on the home front to change their expectations of what's for dinner. Expeditionary forces in...

The embarrassment of riches: do not pity me for having more money than anyone I know. Still, wealth does have its mild difficulties.
June 22, 2006... I will never have a face-to-face conversation with a friend about the things that I write here. Today my husband made tens of millions of dollars for his clients. He and his colleague invented computer models that help trade commodities...

The case for love: did the friendship of an early Supreme Court justice and the wife of a colleague ever cross the line of propriety?(James Wilson, Hannah Gray)
June 22, 2006... On Sunday, June 9, 1793, James Wilson--an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court who, at 51, was generally regarded as one of the nation's wealthiest and most brilliant men--attended church at "Doctor Thatcher's meeting" in...

What do you want to know for?(Short story)
June 22, 2006... I saw the crypt before my husband did. It was on the left-hand side, his side of the car, but he was busy driving. We were on a narrow, bumpy road. "What was that?" I said. "Something strange." A large, unnatural mound blanketed with...

Dinners at six.(Short story)
June 22, 2006... When Theo was 13, his father, Bernie, ran away. He came back once, a few weeks later, to tell Theo's mother he wasn't coming back. The next time they met was in a judge's chamber in Paterson. Bernie wore a charcoal-colored suit and had a new...

The man who got his way: John Hammond, scion of white privilege, helped integrate popular music.
June 22, 2006... On the day John Henry Hammond Jr. was born (December 15, 1910), he was "immediately entered at St. Paul's, Groton, and St. Mark's, college preparatory schools for the sons of the wealthy destined to follow their fathers into business or the...

For Vanessa Hayden.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... For Vanessa Hayden Center for the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx South Florida weather will thrash All but the sturdiest roofs Or bring them to the ground. Its hardest neighborhoods Leave everyone behind. Brought up,...

The mind-brain problem: psychologist Jerome Kagan has always known that biology is only a partial solution.(An Argument for Mind)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... AN ARGUMENT FOR MIND By Jerome Kagan Yale University Press $27.50 Will the sum and substance of that evanescent phenomenon we call mind one day be completely understood in terms of the physical structure and functioning of the brain?...

Worked well with others: discovering the structure of DNA was not Francis Crick's only important collaboration.(Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code )(Book review)
June 22, 2006... FRANCIS CRICK: Discoverer of the Genetic Code By Matt Ridley HarperCollins | $19.95 The English scientist Francis Crick, who died in 2004 at the age of 88, is well known as a discoverer of the double-helical structure of DNA--the...

Half-brother to the world: the United States has been more like other nations than we like to think.(A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History )(Book review)
June 22, 2006... A NATION AMONG NATIONS: America's Place in World History By Thomas Bender Hill & Wang | $26 America, thou, half-brother of the world; With something good and bad of every land.--Philip James Bailey, Festus (Boston, 1854) For Thomas...

African Renaissance? Finding hope on a continent where many people see only despair.(New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance )(Book review)
June 22, 2006... NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance By Charlayne Hunter-Gault Oxford | $23 A friend of mine, an Italian neurobiologist, once told me about the year he spent in East Africa as a young research scientist. There was...

In search of a great modernist: do Proust's final days illuminate his novel?(Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... PROUST AT THE MAJESTIC: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris By Richard Davenport-Hines Bloomsbury | $24.95 So much has been written about Marcel Proust since his death 80-odd years ago (in November 1922) that it takes a...

Tiny Tomes: literature in miniature has a 500-year history, but what's the appeal of a volume too small to read?
June 22, 2006... I met my first sixty-fourmo by accident when I ordered the complete print run of Albert Schloss's English Bijou Almanac (1839-43) at the British Library. Freed from their box, the tiny books scattered like dice on a croupier's table. While...

Leaving race behind.(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2006... Kudos to Amitai Etzioni for his realistic account of the race issue in the United States (THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Spring 2006). He has some excellent suggestions for the government and all of us to begin seeing people as people no matter their...

Onward, Christian liberals.(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2006... In the Spring 2006 issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Marilynne Robinson points out that liberal Christianity has a distinguished history in this country, and she expresses puzzlement that conservative Christians no longer consider liberals to be...

What Jesus did.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2006... I have long admired the scholarship of Garry Wills, but I must protest his article in the SCHOLAR (Spring 2006) taken from his new book. He is in good company in seeking to forget the historical Jesus. The process began very early with...

Shouldn't there be a word?(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2006... In regards to Barbara Wallraff's essay "Shouldn't there be a word...?" in the Spring issue, there is a wonderful word in Hebrew that is not needed in the Holy Land, but is needed here, in North America. The word is Shalechet. It describes...

Erratum.(The Reader Replies)(Correction notice)
June 22, 2006... F. W. Myers's quote "the words of God, Immorality, and Duty" in Paula Marantz Cohen's essay "Why Read George Eliot?" (page 129 of the Spring 2006 issue) should be corrected to read "the words of God, Immortality, and Duty."

A bogey tale.(story behind Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde )
June 22, 2006... Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream, in October 1885, on a wind-whipped night by the sea. He'd fallen asleep uneasily, and as his wife, Fanny, remembered, "my husband's cries caused me to rouse him, much to his...