American Scholar articles from March 2005

American Scholar archives from March 2005

Plaint du Jour.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
March 22, 2005... A wise and gentle friend tried to explain the rage engendered in some quarters by the halting words offered in this space last time. He suggested that the response--a couple of dozen letters to us and a jeremiad in a newspaper--was not the...

On Independence Square.(Letter from Kiev)
March 22, 2005... As I walked along Kiev's Shevchenko Boulevard to my office on the morning after Ukraine's presidential runoff election late last November, it quickly became clear that something remarkable was happening. The air was bitterly cold, but the...

Catastrophe.(Commonplace Book)
March 22, 2005... Terrified, shrieking women, helpless old and young, people intent on their own safety, people unselfishly supporting invalids or waiting for them, fugitives and lingerers alike--all heightened the confusion. When people looked back, menacing...

Face of revival.(Works in Progress)(an arch in Atlanta)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... With the rise of modernism in the last century, classical training in architecture all but dried up. A Beaux-Arts revival is gaining steam, however, generated in such quarters as Notre Dame's architecture school, the Institute of Classical...

Roving eyes.(Works in Progress)(NASA'a Martian rovers)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... In January 2004, a couple of NASA rovers touched down safely on Mm-s despite assault by some of the strongest solar flares on record, which had bombarded the spacecraft with high-energy particles. The rover Spirit landed inside the Gusev...

Excavating poetry.(Works in Progress)(Alfred Corn)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... Twenty years ago, Alfred Corn wrote a poem about an ancestor born in 1752 in Albemarle County, Virginia. Corn is the author of nine books of poems, the most recent of which is called Contradictions. The poem about his ancestor was entitled...

Remains of the day.(Works in Progress)(a wrecked steamboat in Red River)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... Not all shipwrecks occur in the deep sea; some are hidden from view by merely a few feet of water and sediment. In 1999, Oklahomans realized that a tangle of wood in the Red River, visible at the low water mark and long regarded as mere remnant...

Remembering king.(Works in Progress)(Martin Luther King Jr)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... In 1996, Congress authorized the raising of private funds for building a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C. Ten years latex, 30 percent of the funds have been raised for a project expected to cost $100 million, and...

Raise high the roof.(Works in Progress)(Andy Goldsworthy's Roof exhibition at National Gallery of Art)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... The nation's capital is receiving yet another dome. Nine of them, actually, as Andy Goldsworthy and a team of master craftsmen complete Roof. the National Gallery of Art's largest new installation in a quarter-century. Five hundred and fifty...

Roosevelt redux: Robert M. Ball and the Battle for Social Security.
March 22, 2005... PART ONE: Hazards and Vicissitudes. At first glance, it seems a wildly uneven match. The challenger occupies the White House and has at his fingertips the entire armamentarium of the presidency. At the lift of an eyebrow he can send forth...

End game: what the elderly have earned.
March 22, 2005... In the mid-1980s, a senator invited me to join the board of a new lobby he was forming that would be called Americans for Generational Equity, or AGE. The group was going to mobilize young Americans to fight against older citizens, who, the...

All about Eve: what men have thought about women thinking.
March 22, 2005... Has there ever been a time when people did not speculate about the differences between men and women? Probably not, since men and women are alike in so many obvious ways, and yet different enough to invite endless commentary. When President...

Invisible things.(Poetries of Thylias Moss and Charles Simic)
March 22, 2005... Thylias Moss and Charles Simic Thylias Moss likes poem titles that tease or tax the reader. The title of her poem printed on page 51 is a real mouthful: "Mulberry Breath as Proof of the Wave in Form of Question." The footnote at the end of...

That Little Something.(Three Poems)(Poem)
March 22, 2005... That Little Something The likelihood of ever finding is small. It's like being accosted by a woman And asked to help her look for a pearl She lost right here in the street. She could be making it all up, Even...

To Laziness.(Three Poems)(Poem)
March 22, 2005... To Laziness Only you understood How little time we have. Not enough to lift a finger, Not enough to blink. The voices on the stairs, Ideas too quick to pursue-What did they all matter? When eternity...

Eternity's Orphans.(Three Poems)(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Eternity's Orphans One night you and I were walking. The moon was so bright We could see the path under the trees. Then the clouds came and hid it So we had to grope our way Till we felt the sand under our bare...

A long cold view of history: how ice, worms, and dirt made us what we are today.
March 22, 2005... The tsunami that killed more than 250,000 people living along the shores of the Indian Ocean also sent a shock wave through Western culture. Once again we learned that our vaunted technological civilization is vulnerable to the power of the...

Performance: is there a genetic predisposition to sing Streisand on street corners?
March 22, 2005... My daughter sings in the shower, in the back seat of the car, at the table waiting for her soup to cool at lunchtime, while walking the dog or changing the bedding in her guinea pigs cage. She sings along with the stereo and she sings a...

Socrates' mistake: the philosopher's view of knowledge--forever demanding explanations, justifications, definitions, and criteria--is a fantasy, and a dangerous fantasy.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... In the fifth century before Christ, as Plato tells in his early dialogues, Socrates asked the Athenians--friends, enemies, and strangers--what their concepts meant, as if the unexamined life were not worth living. The mistake is still being...

A standard oil childhood: oil refineries, sand dunes, and other objects of beauty and affection.
March 22, 2005... The Calumet is a region in the northwest corner of Indiana between the Valparaiso moraine and Lake Michigan, a place of sandy east-west ridges marking the Glenwood, Calumet, and Tolleston beaches of prehistoric Lake Chicago. Those ridges were...

The big roundup: John Lomax roamed the West, collecting classic songs from the cowboy era.(Biography)
March 22, 2005... I've heard a thousand, but Lord, I kain't sing.--an Old-Timer Our knowledge of true cowboy songs would be all too meager were it not for a happy occurrence in the unlikely setting of a Harvard University classroom, circa 1906. Professor...

The Salome factor: how the sexualization of concert dance helped end a golden age.(Dance)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... Although most Americans don't realize it--even those who follow the arts--we recently passed through a golden age that can be compared, without hyperbole, to the heyday of Florentine painting or Viennese music. It took place in the most...

A few good buildings: reading the obituaries of Philip Johnson.(Architecture)(Obituary)
March 22, 2005... When a prominent but controversial figure lives to the age of 98, we can be sure that members of the press have spent at least a decade considering their characterizations. And when that figure is notoriously opinionated and a powerful opinion...

Miller's tale: the playwright drew a line between reaching out and selling out.(Theater)(Obituary)
March 22, 2005... Broadway theaters dimmed their marquees at curtain time the evening after Arthur Miller died. I like to think that somewhere in Times Square at that moment Miller's raspy chuckle could be heard floating sardonically through Manhattan's sooty...

Leading men: authorities on the Revolutionary era say how the Founding Fathers became culture heroes.(Books)
March 22, 2005... Big men demand big books, or so the doorstop proportions of recent Founding Father biographies suggest. Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, at 600 pages, weighs nearly three pounds. The evergreen David McCullough offers both a 736-page John Adams...

Celestial jukebox: the paradox of intellectual property.
March 22, 2005... I often open my speeches by asking for a show of hands: How many people are happy with the current intellectual property systems, American or global? Whether the audience includes students, professors, hackers, librarians, musicians,...

What is it good for? How the U.S. military went from defense to offense.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM: How Americans Are Seduced by War by Andrew J. Bacevich Oxford University Press $28 "History," as T.S. Eliot wrote, has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering...

Battle of Anacostia: the Bonus Army and its unexpected legacy.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... THE BONUS ARMY An American Epic By Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen Walker & Company $27 Cutting veterans' benefits in the midst of a war may be unique to George W. Bush, but veterans have been treated far more shamefully in peacetime during...

Wartime business as usual.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... I could not agree more with the comments of Josiah Bunting III in "Class Warfare" (SCHOLAR, Winter 2005). But he did not go far enough. If we are sending troops to combat, then the entire nation should be mobilized. Every citizen must feel the...

Understanding Iraq.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... It was with dismay that I tore the wrapper off the Winter 2005 SCHOLAR and found a banner that said, "Understanding Iraq." Every other publication that arrives in my mailbox endeavors to help me understand Iraq. I had always relied on THE...

Bully pulpit.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... "Fear Itself" (Editor's Note, Winter 2005) rekindled my fear that once the previous editorial staff had left the scene, the SCHOLAR might take a new and disturbing direction: political correctness. The arresting array of subjects and authors in...

Gift subscriptions.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... Salvos to those of you who produced the fine Winter 2005 issue. I read it through in one day, while most issues from the past few years lie in a pile, only partially read. Rather than canceling my subscription as I had planned, I've ordered...

The source of "Ask Not".(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... Ted Widmer's "So Help Me God" in the Winter 2005 issue is inspiring, just the type of article I've come to expect from an Emersonian legacy. But I wish to suggest that Kahlil Gibran be given the credit and accolades he deserves. Writing in...

Flubs on recordings.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... Sudip Bose's argument in defense of recorded flubs is inane (SCHOLAR, Winter 2005). He chooses to ignore an obvious reality concerning recorded music, namely that we listen to it over and over as often as we like. Such being the case, a...

Rhyme and reason.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... In his lively article on learning to write musical comedy, Jonathan Karp comments that "satanic" and "Titanic" are perfect rhymes. Only in French poetry are identical stressed syllables perfect rhymes--rime riche. A perfect rhyme for "satanic"...