American Scholar articles from June 2007

American Scholar archives from June 2007

History revisited.(Editor's Note)
June 22, 2007... Most reasonable people threw in the towel on the Alger Hiss case years ago, even those who longed to believe that this well-educated, dignified man was the victim of a dark, hysterical time in the nation's history. Emerging information--in...

A New Theory of the Universe.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2007... In his otherwise engagingly written essay, "A New Theory of the Universe" (Spring 2007), Robert Lanza's proposal that "biocentrism" in general and "consciousness" in particular are the crucial missing ingredients required for any deep...

When 2 + 2 = 5.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2007... You were kind to publish Robert Orsi's "When 2 + 2 = 5." There are other church bodies that believe in The Real Presence, including the Anglicans and the various Orthodox, and just as firmly as Orsi does, with a good deal less superstition and...

One Day in the Life.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2007... I am deeply offended that you tided Melvin Jules Bukiet's article about his stupidity, "One Day in the Life of Melvin Jules Bukiet." By echoing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's seminal account of one person's suffering in the Gulag and attaching it to...

The Apologist.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2007... As the translator of Peter Handke's Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, and as author of half-a-dozen articles about Handke's work, I don't recognize the writer Michael McDonald vilifies in "The Apologist." He has given readers of this...

On Gilgamesh.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2007... I appreciated Sudip Bose's review of David Damrosch's new translation of the epic Gilgamesh. I once taught that old story in my comparative literature course at the University of Texas (El Paso). Babylon, Uruk, Kish, Ur, and Susa: those...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction notice)
June 22, 2007... In a review of Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison (Spring), the first name of psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan was incorrect.

Chasing the blues away.(Letter from New Orleans)(jazz fest to sooth New Orleans)(Report)
June 22, 2007... Even though many vital signs remain weak, a feeling of quasi-normality is starting to return to New Orleans. Meter maids armed with Wi-Fi contraptions are writing almost as many parking tickets as they wrote before the storm. The Department of...

Sic transit Gloria?(Works in Progress)(tunnel construction in Barcelona poses danger to La Sagrada Familia)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... "Artists do not need monuments erected for them because their works are their monuments," wrote the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. However, some fear that a planned subway tunnel in Barcelona endangers La Sagrada Familia, the towering monument...

I sing the body digital.(Works in Progress)(representing Walt Whitman's works)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... "Do I contradict myself?" Walt Whitman famously asked in Song of Myself "Very well, then.... I contradict myself; / I am large.... I contain multitudes." Since 1995, scholars at the Walt Whitman Archive have sought to digitize those multitudes,...

Robo-nation.(Works in Progress)
June 22, 2007... Robots are now performing a surprising range of tasks, from bombing targets in Iraq to mowing lawns, greeting visitors at a corporate headquarters, and folding origami. Lee Gutkind questions both the promise and peril of our increasing use of...

They can't take that away.(Works in Progress)(1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, by Tom Moon)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... The Great American Songbook, as it is loosely called, encompasses 40 midcentury years of popular music by composers and lyricists writing primarily for Broadway and Hollywood. The songs are propelled by melody, not percussion, and most have a...

Global pigeoning system.(Works in Progress)(research on homing pigeons' navigation)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... Researchers at the University of Frankfurt have discovered in the beaks of homing pigeons iron particles that may explain how birds navigate. Homing pigeons are known to find their way back to the nest over hundreds of miles. The recent...

The new space race.(Works in Progress)(McDonald Observatory)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... Cosmologists associated with the McDonald Observatory in West Texas are competing with their counterparts at half a dozen research centers around the world in a race to understand dark energy, a hypothetical entity that may comprise as much as...

Buddha's jigsaw.(Works in Progress)(University of Chicago's project to cyber reconstruct China's Buddhist relics)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... During China's Northern Qi dynasty (550-577), the caves of Xiangtangshan housed temples adorned with painted spirits, limestone lotuses, and stone bodhisattvas in flowing robes. But by the mid-20th century, the Buddhist treasures had been...

The mystery of Ales: the argument that Alger Hiss was a WWII-era Soviet asset is flawed. New evidence points to someone else.
June 22, 2007... Nearly 60 years ago, Alger Hiss, a former high official in the U.S. State Department, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison on the grounds that he had lied about his role in a Soviet spy ring prior to World War II. The Hiss case...

Love on campus: why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor.
June 22, 2007... A professor is walking across campus one afternoon when he spots a student coming the other way. "Excuse me, young man," the professor says, "am I walking north or south?" "You're walking north, professor," the student replies. "In that case,"...

Remember statecraft? What diplomacy can do, and why we need it more than ever.
June 22, 2007... With strategic setbacks dwarfing successes and America's standing in the world diminished, it is no surprise that the Bush foreign policy receives withering criticism. But too often the critiques are as simple-minded and misplaced as the policy...

Staging.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... Staging (Ovarian) Cancer. In no time, pre-op meds: a sweet amnesia drip, and one that means to keep nausea at bay... your IV cocktail almost done, you're under Anesthesia's spell. One waits, imagining the...

R & R.(TWO POEMS)(Poem)
June 22, 2007... R & R Laputa? Lost for centuries, of course-- by now, so far off course one might have thought to find her lurking vainly miles above an empty Caribbean. Well, the plot (author unknown, unknowable) requires a week...

Gazing into the Abyss: the sudden appearance of love and the galvanizing prospect of death lead a young poet back to poetry and a "hope toward God".
June 22, 2007... Though I was raised in a very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn't been to church in any serious way in more than 20 years. It would be inaccurate to say that I have been indifferent to God in all that time. If I look back on...

'Mem, mem, mem': after a stroke, a prolific novelist struggles to say how the mental world of aphasia looks and feels.(Paul West)(Excerpt)
June 22, 2007... One day in June of 2003, my husband, Paul West, lay in a hospital room in Ithaca, New York, watching the sun's hallelujahs beyond the sealed window and aching to go home. He'd already been there for three weeks with a kidney infection that...

Between two worlds: the familiar story of Pocahontas was mirrored by that of a young Englishman given as a hostage to her father.(Work overview)
June 22, 2007... When a hundred or so adventurers from the Virginia Company of London landed on the north bank of the James in May 1607 and began the history of English-speaking North America, they had already inherited a vivid set of myths about the New World....

Fragments of paradise: gardens like those of Friedrich II at Sanssouci help us to read the world.
June 22, 2007... Welcome into the world as reading animals. Our first impulse is to decipher what we sense around us, as if everything in e universe carries meaning. We try to decode not only systems of signs created for that purpose--alphabets, hieroglyphs,...

The House at Belle Fontaine.(Fictional work)
June 22, 2007... Monsieur Rossier has asked Maud to dinner at a quarter past seven on a Saturday night in late February. Monsieur Rossier, her landlord, is very old and very rich--one of the richest men in France, she has heard people say. He is also very much...

Tamarack State.(Fiction)(Fictional work)
June 22, 2007... Imagine a hill shaped like a dog's head, its nose pointed south and resting on crossed front paws. The main buildings of Tamarack State Sanatorium for the Treatment of Tuberculosis, including the two long brick wings where we used to cure, are...

Arthur of Camelot: remembering Arthur Schlesinger, a knight-errant with typewriter.(Arts: History)(Biography)
June 22, 2007... "The American Scholar," the 1837 Emerson oration that gave this publication its name, describes a mythical person who magically combines qualities of derring-do with intellectual rigor, and simultaneously fills the offices of "priest, and...

The short reign of Fred Allen: Jack Benny's comic rival starred in programs that prefigured "Weekend Update," "News of the Weird," and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.(Radio)(Biography)
June 22, 2007... Sixty years ago, Fred Allen, a 52-year-old comic known for wry jokes, bow ties, and baggy eyes, made the cover of Time magazine. The accompanying article lauded Allen's radio work for its "angry big-city clank, a splashy neon idiom, and sort of...

The whirling princess: how a little rich girl known as Pussy Jones became Edith Wharton, writing her way into the aristocracy of American letters.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... EDITH WHARTON By Hermione Lee Knopf\ $35 In the early 1900s, Edith New. bold Jones Wharton and her feckless, somewhat weak-minded husband, Teddy (Edward Robbins Wharton), began to build a summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, a structure...

The heroic and the crass: case studies in American presidential backbone.(Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989)(Book review)
June 22, 2007... PRESIDENTIAL COURAGE Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 By Michael Beschloss Simon & Schuster $28 Great presidents achieve their stature not by presiding over calm, unchallenging periods but by confronting historic turning...

Wide world: an essayist and activist who makes eloquent connections.(Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)(Book review)
June 22, 2007... STORMING THE GATES OF PARADISE Landscapes for Politics By Rebecca Solnit University of California Press \ $24.95 Sierra Club founder John Muir once said, When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in...

The meandering naturalist.(A Wanderer All My Days: John Muir in New England)(Book review)
June 22, 2007... A WANDERER ALL MY DAYS: John Muir in New England. By J. Parker Huber, Green Frigate Books, $23.95 We commonly associate John Muir with the Far West, yet he was born in Scotland, raised in Wisconsin, walked from Indiana to Florida, and, in...

Magical mind.(Einstein: His Life and Universe)(Book review)
June 22, 2007... EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe. By Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, $32 Making Albert Einstein new again defines the word difficult. More than a hundred books have been published in English probing the mind and life of this unique...

Dismantling the dream.(The Trap: Elling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America)(Book review)
June 22, 2007... THE TRAP: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. By Daniel Brook, Henry Holt, $23 In his polemic The Trap, journalist Daniel Brook asks us to think about the compromises we make in the name of modern "success." He begins...

A seductive spectacle: the languid bazaar of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet still beckons 50 years later.(Essay / Books)
June 22, 2007... Speak the name Lawrence Durrell, as I have been doing recently, and you will have little trouble prompting the title of his masterwork, the four-novel cycle he called "The Alexandria Quartet." Yes, everyone read it back when. Or some of it....

Scoundrels.(Commonplace Book)
June 22, 2007... Why has a legitimate concern with security become so distorted and inflated? Why has it pursued so many false pathways? Why is there so much activity which alleges to add to the security of our secrets but which add up to so little? ...

Privacy revealed.(Findings)
June 22, 2007... Who are privacy's true enemies? For many Americans today, government stands at the top of the list. Almost 50 years ago, the journalist and political commentator Richard H. Rovere voiced the same concerns in his essay "Technology and the Claims...