American Scholar articles from September 2008

American Scholar archives from September 2008

Rattling with implications.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
September 22, 2008... Terrorism and torture, those twin nightmares of modern life, seemed before 9/11 to exist, somehow, out there. Terrorism was a Middle Eastern and North African phenomenon, mostly, and torture a South American specialty. Of course neither could...

The educated elite get back to us.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... William Deresiewicz, in his essay "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" (Summer 2008), says that his prestigious education kept him from being able to communicate with people who aren't just like him. My prestigious education, at Yale,...

New plot twists in the black American narrative.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... I would like to add a few qualifiers to Charles Johnson's timely essay, "The End of the Black American Narrative," in the Summer 2008 issue. Mainstream history professors, students of the civil fights movement, and historians of...

Best westerns, now featuring color TV.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... It was great fun reading Richard Locke's "Grand Horse Opera" in the Summer issue and remembering each movie, larger than life, when it came out. He may be right that Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven is still the most recent great Western, but I wish...

Correction.(Correction notice)
September 22, 2008... We regret an editing error in Willard Spiegelman's essay "Buoyancy" (Summer 2008). In the first complete sentence on page 100, the sentence should have read: "But there aren't many of them before Byron, aside from Marlowe, who described Leander...

Captives of the Junta.(LETTER FROM BURMA)(Travel narrative)
September 22, 2008... A group of National League for Democracy (NLD) members gathered outside their party headquarters in Yangon to mark Suu Kji's 63rd birthday Thursday by releasing 63 sparrows and shouting "Free Aung San Suu Kyi. "Seven government cars arrived...

O pioneers!(Works in Progress)(Seasteading Institute )(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... The Seasteading Institute plans to build 10,000-square-foot floating platforms upon which pioneers can launch their own autonomous states on the high seas. Institute co-founders Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman believe that...

Microbe management.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The body has only a few trillion human cells but contains 10 times as many microbes; over half the DNA found in our bodies is foreign. The National Institutes of Health is collecting and cataloging these resident...

A matter of fact.(Works in Progress)
September 22, 2008... Has any institution in American life been more endangered by the rise of the Internet than serious newspaper journalism? What are the implications for American democracy if our best papers don't pull out of the economic tailspin that has...

Heritocracy.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Forget about the weather report, the availability of voting machines, or even how zoomed up you are about either of the presidential candidates. Whether you vote on November 4 will be determined more by your DNA than by any other factor....

Sound investment.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Recording tape, which employs billions of iron oxide particles that register either positive or negative voltage, is not a robust medium. The antsy iron molecules realign themselves with very little provocation, and the tape itself is subject...

New museums for The National Mall.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... The National Mall in Washington, D.C., is getting pretty full, and each new museum approved for it is said to be the last one the Mall can accommodate. But given the openness of Congress to good ideas if backed by enough money, we asked writer...

The most important election in history: is it possible to elect a president without invoking that phrase?(Tuning Up)
September 22, 2008... In July 1864, as President Abraham Lincoln prepared to run for a second term against General George B. McClellan, The New York Times editorialized: "We have had many important elections, but never one so important as that now approaching.......

The censor in the mirror: it's not only what the Chinese Propaganda Department does to artists, but what it makes artists do to their own work.(Exhortation)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Censorship in China is a powerful field of force; it affects anyone who gets close to it. Four years ago, I signed five book contracts with a Shanghai publisher who planned to bring out four volumes of my fiction and a collection of my poems....

The torture colony: in a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds.(Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schaefer, Augusto Pinochet)
September 22, 2008... Deep in t e Andean foothills of Chile s central valley lives a group of German expatriates, the members of a utopian experiment called Colonia Dignidad. They have resided there for decades, separate from the community around them, but widely...

Where does American history begin? Mixing geography with invention, the first explorers and mapmakers made the New World a very hard place to pin down.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Ralph Waldo Emerson may be the patron saint of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, but it would be difficult to argue that he felt much admiration for the intellectuals of his day, and particularly for those who read, wrote, and taught American history. At...

Apollo and Dionysus: Henri Cole combines the formal and the sensual.(POETRY)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... How to be Apollonian in body and Dionysian in spirit--that is my quest." This is how Henri Cole describes his ambition as a poet: a desire to combine in his work the qualities of formal balance and open-ended, anarchic exploration that have...

Passion.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Pasion Climbing around the immense bronze lap of Buddha, wearing only briefs, short white robes and zori, the priests appear on the verge of song, mopping and washing his big hypnotized eyes, the thick, caressable...

By the Name of God, the Most Merciful and Gracious.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)
September 22, 2008... By the Name of God, the Most Merciful and Gracious My name is--a student in high school. It cost me such an effort to look at you. Me and my family were sleeping when we heard knocking. My heart was racing. I...

Taxidermied Fawn.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Taxidermied Fawn When a soft projectile hits a fixed obstacle, soft comes out of it badly. Over there, in the bedroom, that's a fawn. Salt, blood, & saliva are gone now. Sleep and death have transported the lithe body,...

Seaweed.(FOUR POEMS)(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Seaweed I love the green and brown seaweed floating freely on the surface of the water, like a Jackson Pollock, or an enormous bed in which the world is no longer a place of rigid structures. I feel drawn to it but...

Something called terrorism: in a speech given at Harvard 22 years ago and never before published, Leonard Bernstein offered a warning that remains timely.
September 22, 2008... Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990, is in the news this fall with a series of events and concerts that mark both his 90th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Meanwhile, a young...

Truth in a time of war.(Speech)
September 22, 2008... By way of instant apology for the rambling remarks that follow, let me certify that I have just returned from three weeks of conducting abroad, involving eight cities in seven countries, with two different orchestras, and juggling five...

The new old way of learning languages: now all but vanished, a once-popular system of reading Greek and Latin classics could revitalize modern teaching methods.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... In this country and abroad, there is a sense of malaise if not crisis about the state of foreign-language education. Critics note that it takes too long to acquire a foreign language, that the results hardly justify the investment of time and...

Bronze Bells of Autumn.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Bronze Bells of Autumn Although I've made a kind of peace with those I loved who are already dead, bronze bells of autumn, in their minor key, toll for the losses still ahead. The weather tells a narrative of...

Making good.(FICTION)(Short story)
September 22, 2008... Dr. Samuel Rosen believed in the circle. They rearranged their chairs and Gretel, one of the Viennese visitors, volunteered to go first: "I am Gretel Mindel. You are Margot Groszbart. Dr. Samuel Rosen. Father Sebastian Gotthalt--" Here Dr....

Modern lovers.(FICTION)(Short story)
September 22, 2008... Physical descriptions! His head, for example, was like a melon, except it was like a melon with unfortunate tonsorial stylings. His head was like a Gothic cathedral poorly renovated, featuring leaky window casements. His head was like a...

From Oppressed to Oppressors: The Battle of Algiers took a pitiless look at the war for Algerian independence, but the filmmakers could not foresee the failures that would result.(Arts: movies, etc.)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... The Battle of Algiers, arguably the most famous and influential political film ever made, was a sensation from the moment it opened at the Venice Film Festival in 1966. French audience members walked out of the screening: memories of the brutal...

The swiveling light of truth: remembering Grace Paley and her wise, fierce, funny, sad, innovative short stories.(In memoriam)
September 22, 2008... I can still remember, all these years later, the shiver of pleasure that ran through me when at the end of the 1950s I first read Grace Paley's early stories. Hers was a voice so raucous, so appealing, that I felt as if someone had grabbed me...

Immortality gained: John Milton was not only a great poet, but also a great defender of liberty.(Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... MILTON Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot By Anna Beer Bloomsbury Press 458pp. | $534.99 It seems almost impossible to hold John Milton in one's head, as he was so many things at once: a poet rivaled only by Chaucer,...

Copyright wrongs: when technology makes an illegal act easy, should the law make that act legal?(Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... REMIX Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy By Lawrence Lessig Penguin 328pp. | $25.95 John Philip Sousa, the March King, was no fan of the gramophone. "These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic...

How special a relationship? Whether T.R. needed Edward VII to establish the United States as a world power.(The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... THE KING AND THE COWBOY Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners By David Fromkin Penguin 256pp. | $25.95 I once had a professor--a lapsed ambassador, as it happens--who described the realist theory of...

Potted history: learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter--poet.(Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... CAROLINA CLAY The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave By Leonard Todd W .W. Norton 336pp. | $25.95 History tends to be rigidly textual--which is both a strength and a weakness. The scientific method used in other...

Shaking habit's house: critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert.(How Fiction Works)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... HOW FICTION WORKS By James Wood Farrar, Straus and Giroux 265pp. | $24 The first task of most readers contemplating a primer such as How Fiction Works is to get past a monumental sense of inferiority. Here are the best bits...

The preparation of a lifetime.(Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... RACING ODYSSEUS: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again By Roger H. Martin, University of California Press, $24.95 As midlife crises go, Roger Martin's is unconventional and intriguing. Having beaten cancer several times, Martin,...

Secrets.(Commonplace Book)
September 22, 2008... When we started to work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, everything was in such a hurry that it wasn't really ready.... Whenever I wanted somebody s report and they weren't around, I'd just go to their office, open the filing cabinet, and...

Social historian Marcus Rediker reflects on a dark page in our history.(POINT OF DEPARTURE)(Excerpt)(Speech)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We now have a great and ironic discrepancy about this country's history. Over the past generation, scholars have probably learned more, and written more, about the history of slavery and the struggle against slavery...