American Scholar articles from September 2007

American Scholar archives from September 2007

Cornerstones.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
September 22, 2007... It's dawned on me lately that I've seen with my own eyes more than one-fifth of all American history. That's long enough, or should be, to get the drift, to have some sense of where those times have taken us. I was born before Brown v. Board of...

The mystery of ales.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was very disappointed to see yet another article (Summer 2007) trying to pretend that we don't know that Alger Hiss spied for the Soviet Union. The historical record is clear--Hiss committed perjury when he denied...

Love on campus.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... Yale professor William Deresiewicz expects us to believe that when intimacy takes place between student and professor, "it is an intimacy of the mind. I would even go so far as to say it is an intimacy of the soul.... The professor ignites...

Gazing into the abyss.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... Thank you for Christian Wiman's thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, "Gazing into the Abyss." As an oncologist, I witness despair and suffering almost daily. It is difficult at times even to understand what I do or who I am as a physician....

The short reign of Fred Allen.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... I read Dennis Drabelle's essay about Fred Allen with mixed emotions. One was chagrin at being scooped, as I had been thinking about writing something similar. The other was delight at seeing a longtime personal icon remembered. As a "student"...

A seductive spectacle.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... Charles Trueheart perfectly encapsulated and expressed my feelings about Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, both as an enthralled adolescent and now as I approach retirement and look askance at some of Durrell's excesses. It's so nice that...

Not compassionate, not conservative.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2007... There is a very simple explanation for the replacement of political conservatism with pseudo-conservatism. (See Ethan Fishman's essay in the Winter 2007 issue.) This has nothing to do with the popular dissatisfaction cited by Richard...

Clarification.(Letters)(Correction notice)
September 22, 2007... "Tamarack State" by Andrea Barrett (THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Summer 2007) is an excerpt from a novel titled The Air We Breathe, forthcoming this fall.

At last, a tribunal for Khmer Rouge atrocities.(Letter from Cambodia)
September 22, 2007... Monysophak Temple sits in a tranquil rice field about three hours southwest of Phnom Penh, in Cambodia's Kompong Speu Province. Not so long ago, that rice field was jungle. During the second half of the 1970s, Khmer Rouge soldiers regularly led...

Inshallah: the war in Iraq might leave us a new word to match a new sense of our own limitations.(Tuning Up)(inshallah, an Arabic phrase which means "if God wishes")
September 22, 2007... When worlds collide, the sparks are sometimes linguistic. Not long ago, in a Q & A on the Web site of The New York Times, an Iraqi translator was asked to explain the points of difference he saw between his own people and the Americans he...

Some like it cold.(Works in Progress)
September 22, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Thousands of scientists are focusing their research on the Arctic and Antarctic for the fourth International Polar Year (IPY), which began in March 2007 and extends to March 2009. The IPY program hosts more than 200...

On history's scent.(Works in Progress)(American archaeologists found proof that Minoans manufactured perfume)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... For almost 20 years American archaeologists have worked to excavate Bronze Age villages on the island of Mochlos, an outpost of the Minoan civilization near Crete. One site contained an ancient building that appeared to be a factory, complete...

Red--pen patriots.(Works in Progress)(suggested changes to the United States Constitution)
September 22, 2007... Some see the U.S. Constitution as an inviolate contract; others want it to evolve. Larry J. Sabato is one who believes that our government needs such drastic structural alteration that there is only one solution: a Constitutional Convention....

About face.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] To help police catch criminals, biometric scientists Kevin Bowyer and Patrick Flynn want to build better faces. They and a team of computer scientists at the University of Notre Dame are working to perfect morphable...

From antigone to zoot suit.(Works in Progress)(L.A. Theatre Works' project called The Play's the Thing for Higher Education)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Audio enactments of O'Neill dramas, Miller tragedies, and Mamet rants can help college students not only in literature and theater but also in history, biology, psychology, mathematics, and Chicano studies. That's...

Power sitting.(Works in Progress)(The Crowd Farm, an electric generator powered by footsteps)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... A couple of MIT graduate students believe that useful electrical energy can be produced by people walking in high-foot-traffic areas. James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning demonstrate their theory in a...

Red, white, and new.(Works in Progress)(opening of a gallery for the original flag raised over Fort McHenry that signified victory for the Americans over the British)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This state-of-the-art gallery for the Star-Spangled Banner is scheduled to open next summer, part of extensive architectural renovations to the Smithsonian Institution's 43-year-old National Museum of American...

Wonder bread: come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft.(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful--whether it's as enormous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one--and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the...

Unto Caesar: religious groups that have allied themselves with politicians, and vice versa, have ignored at their peril the lessons of Roger Williams and U.S. history.
September 22, 2007... For much of its history, the United States has largely avoided the religious conflicts that have cost other nations countless lives. Our ability to escape such conflicts is grounded in the Constitution's First Amendment, which requires...

The Trojan war: now even some environmentalists are supporting the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. One man's story suggests the industry can't be trusted.
September 22, 2007... My relationship with the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant's cooling tower, which stood for more than 30 years beside the Columbia River in northwestern Oregon, ended on May 21, 2006, when the tower was imploded into rubble. I know now that the giant,...

Louise Gluck's Italy of the mind: on a classical stage peopled by workers, wives, and lovers.(Poetry)
September 22, 2007... Since Ararat, her sixth collection of poetry, which appeared in 1990, Louise Gluck has composed her poems not as discrete utterances but as pieces in a book-length series; and each subsequent book, including The Wild Iris, which won the...

Threshing.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
September 22, 2007... Threshing The sky's light behind the mountain though the sun is gone--this light is like the sun's shadow, passing over the earth. Before, when the sun was high, you couldn't look at the sky or you'd go blind. ...

In the Plaza.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
September 22, 2007... In the Plaza For two weeks he's been watching the same girl, someone he sees in the plaza. In her twenties maybe, drinking coffee in the afternoon, the little dark head bent over a magazine. He watches from across the...

Hunters.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
September 22, 2007... Hunters A dark night--the streets belong to the cats. The cats and whatever small thing they find to kill-- The cats are fast like their ancestors in the hills and hungry like their ancestors. Hardly any moon. So...

Sunset.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
September 22, 2007... Sunset At the same time as the sun's setting, a farm worker's burning dead leaves. It's nothing, this fire. It's a small thing, controlled, like a family run by a dictator. Still, when it blazes up, the farm...

Poetry stand: how a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand.
September 22, 2007... In July of 2006, I received an e-mail from Richard K. Weems, who directs the creative writing division of the New Jersey Governor's School of the Arts. He had hired me to teach poetry to a group of gifted high school students later that month,...

Lady of the Lake: writer Brenda Ueland and the story she never shared.(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Brenda Ueland is someone I can conjure easily: an ancient woman with a gnarled face and white hair walking very fast around Lake Harriet. I must have seen her making her way around that Minneapolis lake a thousand times, hunched over, a funny...

Apologies all around: today's tendency to make amends for the crimes of history raises the question: where do we stop?
September 22, 2007... Imagine that you attend a dinner party where you get roaring drunk, insult all the guests, break your hostess's Tiffany lamp, throw up all over the bathroom, make crude sexual advances toward the family's teenage daughter (or son, depending),...

The nursery.(Fiction)(Fictional work)
September 22, 2007... After the accident it was decided that the boy would spend the winter working at the nursery, hauling bags of soil, doing the hard labor and handy work his mother assigned him. The nursery was hers--Beth's. Thirty acres of land just beyond...

Good thing going: Stephen Sondheim only looks better with time.(Musical Theater)
September 22, 2007... Fifty years ago this fall, when the young lyricist for West Side Story made his Broadway debut, only one New York critic even bothered to mention his name. Since then, however, Stephen Sondheim has more than made up for the deficit in...

Death on the installment plan: growing old gracefully the Rolling Stones way.(Rock)
September 22, 2007... Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones once grumbled, "We're a terrible band, really, but we are the oldest. That's some sort of distinction, isn't it?" Never mind that he said that in 1970, when most of the Stones were still in their 20s and the...

The genius and her sanctuary: pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... TWO LIVES Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm Yale University Press $25 In 2003 and 2005,Janet Malcolm published essays in The New Yorker about a great American couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Two different sets of responses...

Atonality and beyond: the century when composers and audiences parted company.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... THE REST IS NOISE Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross Farrar, Straus and Giroux | $30 In 1958, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin commissioned a solo sonata from the American composer Ross Lee Finney and decided to include the...

The early end of consensus: bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... A MAGNIFICENT CATASTROPHE The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign By Edward J. Larson Free Press | $27 Two hundred and four years before Democrats lambasted George Bush as a destroyer of liberties, Thomas...

Swept away: when Gericault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he immersed himself in his subject's horrors.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... THE WRECK OF THE MEDUSA By Jonathan Miles Atlantic Monthly Press $25 Shipwreck stories are so inherently dramatic that they have long been one of the most popular genres in publishing. Ships catch on fire; they run into icebergs, reefs,...

Nurtural intelligence: the discoverer of the Flynn effect claims that genes control IQ less than you'd expect.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? Beyond the Flynn Effect By James R. Flynn Cambridge University Press | $22 During the past hundred years, an impressive increase in IQ scores has occurred in the world's industrialized countries. In What Is...

Words and music: two ways of thinking about what our brains can do.(The Stuff of Thought; Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain)(Book review)
September 22, 2007... THE STUFF OF THOUGHT Language as a Window into Human Nature By Steven Pinker Viking | $29.95 MUSICOPHILIA Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks Norton | $26 Readers of serious but popular books about neuroscience can look...

Homecomings.(Commonplace Book)(Excerpt)
September 22, 2007... When I came to the Creek, and knew the old grove and farmhouse at once as home, there was some terror, such as one feels in the first recognition of a human love, for the joining of person to place, as of person to person, is a commitment to...

Amateurism.(Findings)
September 22, 2007... While there have always been amateurs--those who have taken time from their usual labors and obligations to pursue a disciplined study of some subject outside their usual sphere--their emergence as a distinct and somewhat curious class is...