American Scholar articles from September 2005

American Scholar archives from September 2005

Veritas.(EDITOR'S NOTE; college curriculum)
September 22, 2005... An article in The Atlantic Monthly this past spring brought the dispiriting but somehow unsurprising news that once you've done the nearly impossible thing of being admitted to Harvard as an undergraduate, it s fairly easy if you re a student...

War and Remembrance.(Letter from Berlin)
September 22, 2005... Change seems the only thing permanent about Berlin these days. Because of a sluggish economy, the building boom that took place after the wall came down has slowed a bit, yet cranes still dot the horizon, here and there lifting yet another...

[Youth].(Commonplace Book)
September 22, 2005... I admire the exact admeasurement of my niece in your Mother's letter--O the little spanlong elf--I am not in the least judge of the proper weight and size of an infant. Never trouble yourselves about that: she is sure to be a fine woman--Let...

Eyes on Afghanistan.(School of Visual Arts initiates campaigns and brings a degree program in photography in Afghanistan)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... When the Taliban's stranglehold on Afghan culture eased in 2002, so did a five-year ban on public photography. The following year, the School of Visual Arts in New York City, led by Photography Department Chair Stephen Frailey, initiated a...

Proof is in the primes.(infinity of twin primes)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... The Twin Primes conjecture is one of the great unsolved problems in number theory. Prime numbers are called "twins" when they occur as a pair separated by one even number, as do 3 and 5. As whole numbers increase toward infinity, the spaces...

The 88% solution.(new lace bug species discovered)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... The lace bug shown here is one of 543 species new to science discovered in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park's 849 square miles since the fall of 2000. An All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory at the park, administered by the National Park...

Rebuilding Balai.(Works in Progress; death of women)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... Last December's tsunami was disproportionately devastating to women. Whether slowed by their attempts to save children, encumbered by long dresses, or unable to swim because they'd never been taught, women comprised at most only one-third of...

Tyke bike prototype.(Industrial Designers Society of America's Industrial Design Excellence Award)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... The world's first two-wheeled riding machine propelled by pedals appeared in 1865 and was called the velocipede. SHIFT (right) showed up 140 years later and won the Industrial Designers Society of America's Industrial Design Excellence Award,...

Tea and fantasy: fact, fiction, and revolution in a historic American town.
September 22, 2005... Chestertown, Maryland, is a place where what's past is present. That much is evident even to first-time visitors to this strenuously picturesque village on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The town's main thoroughfare, High Street,...

Education is my mother and my father: How the Lost Boys of Sudan escaped the destruction of their ancient culture and landed in the 21st century.
September 22, 2005... In early August of 2001, 80 young men walked into the milking shed at the University of New Hampshire's Dairy Management Program and were utterly perplexed. Most were tall, many well over six feet. Their skin was jet black--almost blue in the...

Teaching the N-Word: a black professor, an all-white class, and the thing nobody will say.
September 22, 2005... Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whir bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out...

The rise and fall of David Duke: how Holocaust memory broke the code of right-wing populism.
September 22, 2005... Getting pulled into Louisiana politics was far from Holocaust survivor Anne Levy's mind that morning in June 1989. She boarded a bus in Uptown New Orleans for the 90-minute trip to Baton Rouge and the opening of a Holocaust exhibit in the...

The latches of paradise: Charles Wright's meditations and memories at year's end.(POETRY)
September 22, 2005... Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines an almanac as "a book or table containing a calendar of days, weeks, and months, added, such as the times of sunset and sunrise, changes of the moon, etc." In such a book we are likely to find jokes...

Appalachian Autumn.(POETRY)(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Appalachian Autumn 1 It may not be written in any book, but it is written-- You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable. No matter how fast you drive, or how hard the slide show Of memory flicks and...

Chekhov's journey: a writer discovers the ideal of freedom in a rugged prison colony.(Anton Chekhov)
September 22, 2005... At various moments in my life, both difficult and happy ones, I have thought of Anton Chekhov, finding in his stories, plays, and letters the kind of mirror that enables me to see my inner rather than nay outer image. In a much-quoted 1888...

Beaten boys and frantic pets: a close reading of Tom Sawyer reveals why Mark Twain isn't nearly as funny as he thinks he is.
September 22, 2005... I must begin with an apology. I understand that this panel is sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association, a standing committee of the MLA, and that I am charged with delighting as well as instructing you. I had originally intended to...

Custom and law: after the death of his father, a not-notably-observant Jew turns to the mourning rituals of his faith.
September 22, 2005... PART ONE: COVERING MIRRORS The first two questions that everyone asks are "Was it expected?" and "Did he suffer?" The answer to both is "Yes." Of course, I could say as much for my own eventual death or yours. I expect that all of us will...

Travels with Alfred: on assignment with one of the world's great photographers.(Photography; Alfred Eisenstaedt )
September 22, 2005... The obituaries for Alfred Eisenstaedt have long since come and gone. They told us a lot about the pictures, as they should have, because any photographer is his pictures. This was especially true of Eisenstaedt. Beyond an accumulated amazement...

All the extras: when the criterion collection releases a classic on DVD, the movie is only the beginning.(FILM)
September 22, 2005... For those of us past a certain age, the concept of owning a film will always be a strange one. Not so long ago, in a time before video stores, we couldn't just select a movie for an evening's entertainment. Back then, film buffs kept a close...

The abuses of enchantment: why some children's classics give parents the creeps.
September 22, 2005... When I started reading my son the books I remembered fondly from my own childhood, I was startled by how peculiar some of them now seemed. It wasn't the talking animals, or the magic talismans leading to marvelous adventures, or the fantasy...

Edmund Wilson's Clear Light: the lucid prose and inclusive views of "the last great critic in the English line".(Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... EDMUND WILSON: A Life in Literature By Lewis M. Dabney Farrar, Straus and Giroux | $35 This book has been long in coming and much awaited. Since his Columbia dissertation on Edmund Wilson (1895-1897) decades ago, Lewis Dabney has...

Power to the People: winning the revolution did not assure ordinary Americans a role in governing themselves.(The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... THE RISE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: From Jefferson to Lincoln By Scan Wilentz W. W. Norton | $35 The subtle, complex and powerful elements that combine to create a revolution can be identified after the fact, even if the reasons why they...

Cheered as Savior, Condemned as Demon.(Heroes: Saviours, Traitors, and Supermen)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... HEROES: Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen By Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Knopf $30 Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless," wrote Thomas Carlyle in his 1841 history of heroism, is "the vivifying influence in a...

Letter from a teacher.(DOCUMENT; Bible study vs. humanities)
September 22, 2005... Last spring the public school district that includes Odessa, Texas, adopted an electre course in Bible studies that some local parents fear will advocate religion rather than study it. One parent, David Newman, an associate professor of English...

Science matters.(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2005... Why did the "Science Matters" issue (Summer 2005)--in which several essays and John Updike's poem "Angel Bones" engaged vital intersections of science and culture--open with a page of incongruous disdain for science? In a wryly intended...

Accidental elegance.(THE READER REPLIES)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2005... The central thesis of Mary Beth Saffo's essay on evolution in the Summer SCHOLAR is perplexing in the extreme. She asks, with a straight face, whether evolution might possess "purpose, destiny, or design" or whether "chance has also had an...

Genome Tome.
September 22, 2005... I enjoyed Priscilla Long's "Genome Tome" in the Summer issue but doubt that medical schools in 1959 wrote to her talented twin sister, Pamela, that "girls need not apply." I know from personal experience, having married one of them, that women...

The man who loved cemeteries.(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2005... Allan Gurganus's tribute to Ted Phillips Jr. (Summer) is an evocative masterpiece, especially for me, who grew up in Charleston and whose great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents are buried in Phillips's beloved Magnolia Cemetery. In...

On virtuosity.(musical ability)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... While I admired Sudip Bose's enthusiastic and honest praise of virtuosity (Summer), he should have added one clarification. What is less thrilling is when instrumentalists capable of playing as virtuosos show off their mastery...

Letter from Rome.(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2005... There is a very odd sentence tucked into Ingrid D. Rowland's "The Keys to St. Peter's": "John Paul was physically warm, but he was also a despot by nature and by office." Once I figured out that "physically warm" did not mean that he was given...

The Baroness eyewitness.(FINDINGS; Baroness Riedesel; American Revolution)
September 22, 2005... From a London war room, it looked so easy. Tell General Burgoyne to march from Montreal to Albany. Tell Sir William Howe to go up the Hudson and meet him. Together they would cut off New England from the other American colonies. No more...