American Scholar articles from September 2006

American Scholar archives from September 2006

Rest in peace.(Barbara Epstein, Jane Jacobs and Noel Perrin)(Editorial)
September 22, 2006... Several decades ago, when I was young and looking for a job in New York, a friend suggested that I call up Barbara Epstein, one of the editors of The New York Review of Boobs. Somehow I summoned the courage to dial her number, and she urged me...

The Chicago connection.(Letter From Qyteza)(Travel narrative)
September 22, 2006... During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Albania, perhaps the poorest nation in Europe, invested unfathomable time and resources erecting more than 600,000 above-ground bunkers to defend a population of less than three million. Today, those...

Color.(Commonplace Book)
September 22, 2006... There's nothing in the American Constitution to the effect that all front doors have to be white or dark green. Have you ever considered the possible charm of a turquoise-blue door in a pale gray stucco house, with boxes of frilly pink petunias...

Through the opera glass.(Works in Progress)(Peter Westergaard's musical adaptation)(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... Seated at a piano in his Princeton, New Jersey, home, composer Peter Westergaard recites lines of dialogue from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first in a tone simulating the Hatter's voice, then in exaggerated musical tones. "The Hatter's...

Knowing when to fold.(Works in Progress)(Erik Demaine)(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... As a teenage mathematical prodigy, Erik Demaine developed a theorem demonstrating that, with the right folds in a sheet of paper, any two-dimensional shape--whether a star, a unicorn, or a letter of the alphabet--can be formed by a single...

U.S. military: past, present, future.(Works in Progress)
September 22, 2006... Lieutenant General Gregory S. Newbold served in the Marines for 32 years, commanding infantry units at the platoon, company, battalion, Marine Expeditionary Unit, and division levels. At the time of his retirement in October 2002, he was the...

Navigating India's Tower of Babel.(Works in Progress)(WebKhoj)(Website overview)(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... Computer programmers in India are testing an Indian-language-focused search engine, WebKhoj, which for the first time will allow India's non-English speakers to search the Web with the ease English speakers enjoy. WebKhoj (khoj means "search"...

Gummed up and ready to go.(Works in Progress)(Ross D. Mann's dispensing device)(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... "Prior art kinetic-activity gumball dispensers have been subject to a number of difficulties," writes electrical engineer Ross D. Mann in his successful application for U.S. patent number 5,897,022. One problem that his device addresses is the...

Origin of the species.(Quote Unquote)(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... Did Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper widely regarded as the mother of computing--coin the term bug to describe defects in hardware and software, as has been reported? In September 1945, while serving in the Naval Reserves as the programmer for...

Poetry in motion.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
September 22, 2006... James Tate, Cole Swenson, and Arthur Sze are among more than 100 prominent poets hitting the road during 50 days in September and October. They are scheduled to read at the Space Needle in Seattle, James Turrell's Roden Crater in Arizona, the...

Getting it all wrong: bioculture critiques Cultural Critique.(Exhortation)
September 22, 2006... We love stories, and we will continue to love them. But for more than 30 years, as Theory has established itself as "the new hegemony in literary studies" (to echo the title of Tony Hilfer's cogent critique), university literature departments...

Lincoln the Persuader: everyone knows he was a great writer, but until now we did not know how he became one, or why.(Abraham Lincoln)(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... In the four years that Abraham Lincoln was president, the American public gradually discovered, much to its collective astonishment, that this unprepossessing Illinois politician had remarkable abilities as a writer. In that brief period, and...

The Man who loved languages: a scholar with the ability and audacity to rebuild the Tower of Babel died a year ago, but his controversial project lives on.(Sergei Starostin)(In memoriam)
September 22, 2006... "Next time, the origins of pitch accent in Old Japanese," Sergei Starostin called out to his graduate students as they left his afternoon seminar in historical linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanities. No one in the room...

The leaves rush, greening, back: Carl Phillips.(Poetry)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... Carl Phillips's passionate, elusive poems extend a tradition of lyric poetry that speaks of eros in spiritual terms and that treats the spiritual as a kind of erotic experience (think of John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins)....

Cloud Country.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Cloud Country As from a sea-- as endless as we choose to believe it to be, at rest, and in restlessness, its waves cresting, breaking, now the latest idea about moral freedom, now a memory of it, that dims until no...

Directions from Here.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Directions from Here The figs at Jane's. Migrants harvesting the cabernet-- the brown of their hands--The blue in twilight... The talismanic becoming merely notational. You as Oblivion riding bareback on Notoriety,...

To Drown in Honey.(Poetry)(Poem)
September 22, 2006... To Drown in Honey Now the leaves rush, greening, back. Back now, the leaves push greenward.--Some such song, or close to. I forget the most of it. His voice, and the words pooling inside it. And the light for once not...

My mother's body: source of torment, source of desire, how can I bring it back to life?
September 22, 2006... My mother was one of the afflicted. She was stricken, at the age of three with polio. I wonder if she had any bodily memory of running, of walking without labor, without anxiety: of movement as a joy. There is a picture of her, dressed to the...

Tomorrow is another day: an Ethiopian student survives a brutal imprisonment by translating Gone with the Wind into his native Amharic.(Nebiy Mekonnen)
September 22, 2006... Addis Ababa is nine degrees north of the equator, a city of brutal sun and cold nights chilled by mountain air, ringed by hilltops, and fed by springs that tumble into polluted creeks swarmed by buzzards and hawks. It is a city of old palaces...

Saratoga Bill: he bet cautiously at the track, but elsewhere he was drawn to those with the odds stacked against them.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... He lay on his back, eyes closed, skin sallow and sagging, belly bulging under the hospital sheet. So many tubes and wires hooked into his bruised veins, I could barely recognize him. The sterile room in the Mount Sinai cancer ward scared...

The preacher's wife.(Short story)
September 22, 2006... On a Thursday morning of brilliant sun, the shadow of a passenger et glided over Mobile Bay, then rippled across the white strip of beach in front of the house, the great oak in the yard, and the several angles of the dark green roof. Bonnie...

The dome.(Fiction)(Excerpt)
September 22, 2006... The first domes, the precursors, appeared here and there in affluent neighborhoods, on out-of-the-way roads, where they attracted a certain attention before growing familiar and nearly invisible. The few outsiders who actually witnessed them...

Uncommon sense: remembering Jane Jacobs, the 20th century's most influential city critic.(Urban Planning)(In memoriam)
September 22, 2006... The last time I saw Jane Jacobs was in San Francisco, in the spring of 2004, almost exactly two years before her death. She was 88 and on tour to promote the book she had just finished, Dark Age Ahead, which I suspect she knew would be her...

Birthday suit: what you want to know about the organ that tells all.(Skin: A Natural History)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... SKIN A Natural History By Nina G. Joblonski University of California Press | $24.95 Not long ago I was backpacking through the majestic Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, feeling fit and fine and in the first blush of peacock as I bounced...

Environmentalism for outsiders: what Alexander van Humboldt offers modern America.(The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... THE HUMBOLDT CURRENT Nineteenth Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism By Aaron Sachs Viking | $25.95 The best-selling SUV in this country is the Ford Explorer and not far behind is the Nissan Pathfinder. Those...

Peaceable Kingdom: the power of nature and the nature of our power over it.(The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animlas and Power)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... THE MEDICI GIRAFFE And Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power By Marina Belozerskaya Little, Brown | $24.99 The airport in Madrid sells little plush bulls as souvenirs, which may be as close as many tourists ever come to real bulls in the...

Domestic insurrection: sowing the seeds of disorder in Revolutionary America.(Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution)(Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... ROUGH CROSSINGS Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution By Simon Schama Ecco | $29.95 FORGOTTEN ALLIES The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution By Joseph Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin Hill & Wang | $26 "It is not one...

Eclogues.(Best Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... BEST PERSON RURAL Essays of a Sometime Farmer By Noel Perrin; selected, with an introduction by Terry Osborne David R. Godine, $24.95 In the last piece in this posthumous collection of essays about rural life, Noel Perrin says goodbye to...

The case for love.(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2006... I enjoyed entering into the imagination of Natalie Wexler as she connected the dots between the four principals in her essay, "The Case for Love" in the Summer 2006 issue. One could conclude that the human heart must learn the same lessons...

Fiction.(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2006... While reading the Editor's Note in the Summer issue about the introduction of fiction to THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, I was not disappointed in my expectations. There, at the bottom of the page, was the obligatory warding off of unfamous writers:...

Errata.(The Reader Replies)(Correction notice)
September 22, 2006... The photo illustrating "My Holocaust Problem" on page 40 in the Winter 2006 issue should have been credited as follows: Nalewki Street, the Heart of the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw, 1938, photo by Roman Vishniac. [c] Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy...

And the Greatest of These.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... 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 aversion: cases most complex...

Bearing gifts.(Findings)
September 22, 2006... The author of the Gospel of Matthew writes with all the verve of a tax collector, with two exceptions: the Wise Men's visit and the Sermon on the Mount. The first is high romance: Eastern sages, summoned by a star, arrive in Bethlehem and offer...