Recently added articles from American Scholar:
Unpulled punches.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
Jun 22, 2008; ... An older friend of mine, who was a lifelong friend of the late, great editor and writer George Plimpton, has never had occasion, thank goodness, to address me with the words 'I knew George Plimpton. George Plimpton was a friend of mine. You are no ..." Of the many ways in which I would ...
Passing the torch.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jun 22, 2008; ... I found it odd that Stephen J. Pyne, in his article "Passing the Torch" (Spring 2008), omitted the Kelowna firestorm of 2003 from his list of megafires, the genesis of which would also expand his list of contributing factors. The Kelowna fire was certainly the largest and most devastating ...
The liberal imagination of Frederick Douglass.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jun 22, 2008; ... Thank you for publishing Nick Bromell's insightful call for a new language of emotion and spontaneity in today's liberal politics. Bromell echoes arguments made by the political philosopher Nancy Rosenblum, who similarly sought to bring together the atomized spheres of Romantic ...
Rome's gossip columnist.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jun 22, 2008; ... I was amused to find in Garry Wills's article in the Spring 2008 issue the classical source for a verse published in an 18th-century American newspaper and reprinted some years ago in The William and Mary Quarterly. Martial's lines, lamenting the death of a little slave, read (in Wills's ...
Polymer persons.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jun 22, 2008; ... Priscilla Long, in her essay "Polymer Persons" in the Spring issue, correctly asserts that public fascination with the macabre has deep historical roots, and her grotesque description of a gallows disembowelment and the theater surrounding it is well written. It seems somehow ...
Exit no exit.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jun 22, 2008; ... David Lehman declares that existentialism is dead, leaving behind only its "faded glamour," holding the Age of Aquarius, Vietnam, and deconstruction responsible for its demise. Despite recognizing it as an "action philosophy," a "survivor's answer to nihilistic despair," Lehman ...
A dangerous weapon.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jun 22, 2008; ... In his review of Louis P. Masur's The Soiling of Old Glory, Andy Grundberg mentions "Eddie Adams's image of Vietnamese General Loan executing a man on a Saigon street." In The Sixties Unplugged, historian Gerard J. DeGroot writes, "What the [Adams] photo did not show was that the victim ...
Cold comfort.(Letter from Antarctica)(Travel narrative)
Jun 22, 2008; ... When a thousand Adelie penguins congregate, they make a noise out of all proportion to how small and cute they are. Their collective caw sounds like a car engine turning over and over. I discovered this while sitting for a couple of hours in the midst of an Adelie colony near McMurdo ...
To fly.(WORKS IN PROGRESS)(research in fruit flies)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A researcher at the California Institute of Technology known as "Fly Man" has employed a bug-sized flight simulator, the Fly-O-Vision, to investigate the in-flight decision-making behavior of fruit flies. Confronting his insect pilots with two simple ...
Moon harvest.(Works In Progress)(Civil Twilight)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2008; ... Streetlights consume 8 percent of the electricity used for lighting worldwide. Meanwhile the moon and stars--our original, inexhaustible night-lights--are obscured from view by light pollution in many densely populated areas. A collective of California designers has created a ...
Refining Fuji.(Works In Progress)(Fuji apples)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Fuji apples are prized by growers for their resistance to insects and decay and by consumers for their crispness and sweetness, but they tend to develop internal brown spots--especially the ones harvested late in the season. Now an English scientist, using ...
Giving no quarter.(Works In Progress)(state coins)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2008; ... This year the last of the 50 "state" quarters will be released by the United States Mint. In 2009 the District of Columbia and the five United States Territories will also be honored, using designs chosen from two or three constituent proposals. For the first 10 years of the program, the ...
All grown up.(Works In Progress)(five-year-olds' academic performance)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2008; ... Thirty-one years ago, Simmons College researchers from the fields of social work, psychology, and education began a study of all 700 five-year-olds then enrolled in public school kindergartens in Quincy, Massachusetts, a South Shore Boston suburb. The researchers selected Quincy because of ...
Looking at the sun.(Works In Progress)(Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2008; ... The sun would be just another star were it not for the immensity of its magnetic fields, which produce explosions of energy known as solar flares. First observed in 1859, flares may last for minutes or hours and release up to 6 x [10.sup.25] joules of energy, the equivalent of detonating ...
A most interesting young man: was that Bob Dylan my sister met on a weir above Woodstock?(Tuning Up)
Jun 22, 2008; ... In 1968, when my quiet sister was 19 years old, she spent the summer cleaning pools and painting cottages in Woodstock, New York. She worked for a man named Marry. Their unspoken agreement was that she would work as hard as she could until early afternoon at which point she was released to ...
The disadvantages of an elite education: our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.(Exhortation)(Essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I ...
The end of the black American narrative: a new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge.--John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Back to the things themselves!.--Edmund Husserl As a ...
Intimacy: revisiting the gritty Roman neighborhood of his youth, a writer discovers a world of his own invention.(Via Clelia, Rome, Italy)(Travel narrative)
Jun 22, 2008; ... I finally went back to Via Clelia. I had passed by the first time I returned to Rome almost 40 years ago, then a second time 15 years later, and still another three years after that. But for reasons that had more to do with my reluctance to come back here, these visits either occurred by ...
Confluences of sound and sense: Kay Ryan's idiosyncratic approach to the commonplace.(Poetry)(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... When she reads her poetry in public, Kay Ryan does something unusual: she reads poems, at least some poems, twice. Few poets write poems short enough to permit that repetition, or interesting enough to reward it, but Ryan's invite (and demand) rereading: they are that intricate and quick ....
A Dozen Finches.(SIX POEMS)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> A Dozen Finches A dozen finchesin unisondip down,tilt their wings,swing up,sink to theirchosen inchof branch, andsettle, neat ...