American Scholar back issues from September 2006:
Rest in peace.(Barbara Epstein, Jane Jacobs and Noel Perrin)(Editorial)
Sep 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 to come right over for a little chat. Nothing ...
The Chicago connection.(Letter From Qyteza)(Travel narrative)
Sep 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 indestructible concrete "mushrooms" are still in ...
Color.(Commonplace Book)
Sep 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 under the front windows and a pair of dwarf ...
Through the opera glass.(Works in Progress)(Peter Westergaard's musical adaptation)(Brief article)
Sep 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 madness does not come out in extreme pitch ...
Knowing when to fold.(Works in Progress)(Erik Demaine)(Brief article)
Sep 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 straight-line cut. He was 20 years old when he ...
U.S. military: past, present, future.(Works in Progress)
Sep 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 director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of ...
Navigating India's Tower of Babel.(Works in Progress)(WebKhoj)(Website overview)(Brief article)
Sep 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" in Hindi) will circumvent the need for Unicode, ...
Gummed up and ready to go.(Works in Progress)(Ross D. Mann's dispensing device)(Brief article)
Sep 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 inherent inexact "sphericity," as he puts it, ...
Origin of the species.(Quote Unquote)(Brief article)
Sep 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 Mark I, the world's first large-scale ...
Poetry in motion.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
Sep 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 U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, ...
Getting it all wrong: bioculture critiques Cultural Critique.(Exhortation)
Sep 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 in the English-speaking world have often done ...
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)
Sep 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 in the midst of a relentless siege of crises ...
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)
Sep 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 that day, September 30, 2005, had any inkling ...
The leaves rush, greening, back: Carl Phillips.(Poetry)(Critical essay)
Sep 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). Fascinated by romantic beauty but skeptical of its ...
Cloud Country.(Poem)
Sep 22, 2006; ... <Pre> 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 memoryof it, that dims until no longer trustworthy, the stuffof ...
Directions from Here.(Poem)
Sep 22, 2006 ... <Pre> 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. Youas Oblivion riding bareback on Notoriety, myfavorite horse. You the boy who, in ...
To Drown in Honey.(Poetry)(Poem)
Sep 22, 2006 ... <Pre> To Drown in Honey Now the leaves rush, greening, back. Back now,the leaves push greenward.--Some such song, orclose to. I forget the most of it. His voice, andthe words pooling inside it. And the light for oncenot sexual, just light. The light, as it should ...
My mother's body: source of torment, source of desire, how can I bring it back to life?
Sep 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 nines in a white lace Edwardian outfit. She is ...
Tomorrow is another day: an Ethiopian student survives a brutal imprisonment by translating Gone with the Wind into his native Amharic.(Nebiy Mekonnen)
Sep 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 hidden by soaring gates and of dirt alleys that ...
Saratoga Bill: he bet cautiously at the track, but elsewhere he was drawn to those with the odds stacked against them.(Short story)
Sep 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 me. I'd visited many hospitals, but I'd ...
The preacher's wife.(Short story)
Sep 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 Owen Vandorpe, situated in a rattan chair on the ...
The dome.(Fiction)(Excerpt)
Sep 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 tended to dismiss them as follies of the rich, ...
Uncommon sense: remembering Jane Jacobs, the 20th century's most influential city critic.(Urban Planning)(In memoriam)
Sep 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 final work. It is a despairing look at the state ...
Birthday suit: what you want to know about the organ that tells all.(Skin: A Natural History)(Book review)
Sep 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 downhill at the head of our party of four. But ...
Environmentalism for outsiders: what Alexander van Humboldt offers modern America.(The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism)(Book review)
Sep 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 fantasy tanks on wheels appeal to a deep ...
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)
Sep 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 ring. Marina Belozerskaya's The Medici ...
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)
Sep 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 war, but many." So wrote the ...
Eclogues.(Best Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer)(Book review)
Sep 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 farm that had been both where he ...
The case for love.(Letter to the editor)
Sep 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 generation after generation. The travails of the ...
Fiction.(Letter to the editor)
Sep 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: Don't call us, we'll call your agent. ...
Errata.(The Reader Replies)(Correction notice)
Sep 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 of the International Center of Photography. ...
And the Greatest of These.(Poem)
Sep 22, 2006; ... <Pre>Stupidity's no grounds for our despair.It drives or drowses everywhere--waxen, bristling, pitted, slick--as variously textured asnotoriously tough. It oughtarouse more wonder than aversion:cases most complex are hexedand know it--while the ...
Bearing gifts.(Findings)
Sep 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 gifts to the infant son of homeless Jews ....