American Scholar articles from March 2009

American Scholar archives from March 2009

Updike at rest.(Editor's Note)
March 22, 2009... In all the many elegant tributes to John Updike that appeared in the first days and weeks after his death in late January, I missed any mention of the thing that was troubling me most. Soon after he died I had said to a friend, half in jest,...

Causality and contingency.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2009... John Lukacs's article in your Winter 2009 issue purports to enhance the readers' knowledge of the methodologies of history and science by demonstrating that both rely on subjectivity. The area allowed for subjectivity in science, however, is...

Savage legacy.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2009... John Tirman, citing Richard Slotkin, writes of a "morally cleansing series of 'savage wars' that conveyed upon the pioneers a 'regeneration through violence.'" I fail to see moral cleansing in the triumphalism with which most Americans have...

Naming names.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2009... Clay Risen's "Spies Among Us" enlightened yet saddened me, particularly his warning that "as of late 2008, there are approximately a million names in the Terrorist Screening Database." Government-paid employees also developed alleged...

Literary encounters.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2009... Steven Isenberg's essay in the Winter issue richly evokes his meetings with four august lovers of language. As a broadcaster of many years, during which I interviewed more than 1,600 authors, I was reminded of the joy I had in meeting them and...

Censorship in France.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2009... My own experience with Sartre's and Beauvoir's heirs and literary executors is not the same as Hazel Rowley's, as mentioned in her Point of Departure column in the Winter issue. In 1998, I was authorized by Arlette Elkaim-Sartre to publish in...

Directions.(Letters)(Correction notice)
March 22, 2009... The caption for the photo on page 144 in the Winter issue should read: Sartre with his lover, Lena Zonina (center), and Beauvoir. A cover line in the same issue alluded to questions posed by astronomer Jeffrey Bennett that begin on page 12....

A Twombly ceiling.(Letter from Paris)(Cy Twombly )
March 22, 2009... Oe morning in late January, after a ride on the Paris metro to its terminus in the eastern suburb of Montreuil and a cold 10-minute walk through an industrial zone, I arrive at a nondescript, unheated warehouse. Inside, laid out on the floor of...

The sound of laptops.(Works in Progress)(Stanford Laptop Orchestra)(Brief article)
March 22, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Twenty computer scientists and musicians take seats on stage and open their MacBooks, and soon the concert hall at Stanford University fills with the sonic grandeur--if not the exact sounds--of a full symphony...

Life in Venice.(Works in Progress)(limiting entry of tourists in Venice)
March 22, 2009... For many travelers, both actual and armchair, Venice is wrapped in mystery and romance. So popular has this floating miracle become--and so overwhelmed by tourists during summer months--that a recent mayor proposed limiting entry by sightseers....

Locks for lettuces.(Works in Progress)(testing hair as fertilizer)(Brief article)
March 22, 2009... The grisly belief that a person's hair continues to grow after death is an urban legend, but studies at Mississippi State University are proving that hair clippings still have a little life in them. In a series of experiments, plant and...

A Stein is a Stein is a Stein.(Works in Progress)(Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories exhibition)(Brief article)
March 22, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From aspiring Gibson girl to Left Bank intellectual to stony neo-classical figure, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) consciously reshaped her public image. The way she cultivated relationships with visual artists to project...

E pluribus unum.(Works in Progress)(Ten Thousand Cents art project)(Brief article)
March 22, 2009... Contemporary art continues to fetch astounding prices, but Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima are fixing the tag for reproductions of their latest work at an even $100. It's an obvious choice, since $100 is both the total labor cost of the...

Smarter than dirt.(Works in Progress)(behavior of slime molds )(Brief article)
March 22, 2009... You can't outfox natural selection for billions of years without some rudimentary smarts. Now scientists in Europe and Japan are showing that primordial slime molds are clever enough to reveal how animal cells glom together to form intelligent...

Who was hall? And just what was his connection to hedgehogs?(Tuning Up)(Marshall Hall)
March 22, 2009... Periodically I shift through the detritus on my desk, which consists of countess levels of documents--papers, offprints, old e-mails, and Christmas cards--that must have meant something to me at one time but now seem utterly mysterious. A...

The terminator comes to Wall Street: how computer modeling worsened the financial crisis and what we ought to do about it.(Exhortation)
March 22, 2009... You've seen this story in countless Hollywood science-fiction movies, from The Terminator to War Games. Scientists develop a ophisticated computer or robot to assure the nation's security, but something goes wrong and the technology itself...

Purpose-driven life: evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. It also makes possible our own capacity for creativity.(The Year of Darwin)(Cover story)
March 22, 2009... [Darwinism] seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable...

Second chances, social forgiveness, and the Internet: we need the means, both technological and legal, to replace measures once woven into the fabric of communities.
March 22, 2009... A young man in upstate New York drinks too much and gets a little rowdy, picks a fight, smashes up the bar, and is arrested. When he gets into trouble again a short time later, the judge sends him to jail for a week. After his release, he gets...

The man who shot the man who shot Lincoln: the hatter Boston Corbett was celebrated as a hero for killing John Wilkes Booth. Fame and fortune did not follow, but madness did.
March 22, 2009... For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb; and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men; and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to...

Belmont Park.(Poem)
March 22, 2009... Belmont Park I can only get there in a dream now, In a poem. The streets and alleys to the south of it Are still a bit seamy, and the Beachcomber Is still a dive smelling of beer and urine, But the real estate is...

Snowglobe.(Poem)
March 22, 2009... Snowglobe In an alleyway beside a nightclub a miniature figure is vomiting: that's how you know this is no ordinary snowglobe. There are stockbrokers visible in tall office buildings staring at lit computer...

Laika.(Poem)
March 22, 2009... Laika Before we said you're breaking up I loved my walkie-talkie's static song, dialed placid satellites where weightless dogs barking in Russian sipped vodka through barber poles...

Visions and revisions: writing On Writing Well and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years.
March 22, 2009... "You should write a book about how to write," my wife said in June of 1974 when I was complaining to her, as I often did, that I had run out of things to write about. At that time our family lived at Yale, where I taught writing and was master...

Dawn of a literary friendship: in 1969 the writer Robert Phelps first wrote to the novelist James Salter. Here are the letters that forged a bond of two decades.
March 22, 2009... At the very end of 1969, A Sport and a Pastime having been published with sales of a few thousand copies, I received a fan letter, long, intelligent and admiring... --James Salter, Burning the Days The author of the fan letter to the...

I wanted to be Robert Phelps.
March 22, 2009... As one reads through the correspondence between Robert Phelps and James Salter, it gradually becomes clear that these are love letters. The talk is of the literary life, of magazine pieces, plays and movies, of revered "makers" like Colette and...

The dowser dilemma: how a town in Vermont found water it desperately needed and an explanation that was harder to swallow.
March 22, 2009... If the drillers had not overlooked the small pile of rocks that Edith Greene had painstakingly heaped in the center of the field, the people of Montgomery, Vermont, would today be enjoying all the clean, fresh drinking water they could ever...

Without Wendy.(Fiction)(Short story)
March 22, 2009... Almost furtively Bernie drops into his shopping cart: one red pepper, one yellow pepper, the smallest bunch of carrots he can find, four Yukon Golds, six, no seven, Brussels sprouts, a loaf of Berkshire Bakery sesame bread, one sinful brownie,...

Promises, promises.(Fiction)(Short story)
March 22, 2009... In memory of David Foster Wallace They'd promised an ocean view, and they'd delivered. Down below was indeed the ocean and the little white tassels made again and again by its waves, as if what might actually be on view was a vast, vastly...

The potency of Breathless: at 50, Godard's film still asks how something this bad can be so good.(Movies)(Jean-Luc Godard)(Movie review)
March 22, 2009... I first saw Jean-Luc Godard's celebrated film A bout de souffle (Breathless, in its English translation) in 1969 when I was 16 and ripe to fall under its spell. Part of its mystique lay in its being French and being in French, a language that I...

Vibrato wars: Elgar, served neat: and unshaken, stirs up the Brits.(Music)(Edward Elgar)
March 22, 2009... Unless you happen to be British, the brash spectacle known as the Last Night of the Proms might seem more like a carnival than the culmination of a venerable classical music festival. Traditionally, on the second Saturday in September,...

The peacock problem: what does evolution say about why we make art?(The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution )(Book review)
March 22, 2009... THE ART INSTINCT Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution By Denis Dutton Bloomsbury Press 288pp. | $25 Asked what he thought of the idea (often attributed to Freud) that what every artist wants is money, fame, and beautiful...

The peacock problem: does sexual selection really explain enough?(The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness)(Book review)
March 22, 2009... THE GENIAL GENE Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness By Joan Roughgarden University of California Press 256 pp. | $24.95 Joan Roughgarden in The Genial Gene does not challenge Darwin s theory of evolution or its...

Founding portraitists: Peale, Trumbull, and Stuart: inventing icons of the new republic.(The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art)(Book review)
March 22, 2009... THE PAINTER'S CHAIR George Washington and the Making of American Art By Hugh Howard Bloomsbury Press 320 pp. | $30 A quarter century after the death of George Washington in 1799, Rembrandt Peale, one of the foremost...

Dark mysteries: in her masterly stories, Flannery O'Connor found redemptive grace.(Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor )(Book review)
March 22, 2009... FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O'Connor By Brad Gooch Little Brown 416 pp. | $30 Fiction writers often resist biography because, among other reasons, it goes against the grain of what they do. Biographies seek to explain a...

At liberty to divulge: one student's perspective from inside Jerry Falwell's university.(The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University)(Book review)
March 22, 2009... THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University By Kevin Roose Grand Central Publishing 336 pp | $24.99 In the Fall of 2007, Brown University sophomore Kevin Roose shocked friends and family by...

Circular bread line: through the centuries, with lox and cream cheese.(The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread)(Book review)
March 22, 2009... THE BAGEL The Surprising History of a Modest Bread By Maria Balinska Yale University Press 240 pp. | $24 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My late husband and his brother were brilliant raconteurs, especially of Jewish jokes....

Literary cubs, canceling out each other's reticence: letters between Federal Writers' Project cohorts Richard Wright and Nelson Algren depict a mutual admiration rare among young novelists.
March 22, 2009... In Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a cart rolls out from the stacks with archival boxes from the Richard Wright collection, neatly arranged, belying their insurgent contents. I open one and find, in a letter from March 1940,...

Debt.(Commonplace Book)
March 22, 2009... It is now, in this very moment, that I can and must pay for that I have received. The past and its load of debt are balanced against tile present. And on the future I have no claim. Is not beauty created at every encounter between a man and...

Biographer Stacy Schiff reflects on Franklin in Paris.(Point of Departure)(Benjamin Franklin)(Brief article)
March 22, 2009... If in the Philadelphia of his youth Benjamin Franklin recognized the value of seeming to work hard, in Paris, at age 70, he quickly mastered the essential French art of accomplishing much while appearing to accomplish little. Industry and...