American Scholar back issues from June 2008:
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 ...
Boats.(SIX POEMS)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> Boats You've seenthe tide of timelift up a thing,then put it back.Anything willbriefly float--a shoe, a hat, acut of coat.Words too,it ...
Domino Theory.(SIX POEMS)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> Domino Theory One domino--stoodup again--can doincalculable good.Where doesn'tmuch matter. Theblackest watercan unscalefrom ...
It Cannot Be Said for Certain.(SIX POEMS)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> It Cannot Be Said For Certain. It cannot besaid for certainthat imagininga pattern isself-flattery.Our acts couldmatter. At someunfathomed distancethe randomcould condense...
Finish.(SIX POEMS)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> Finish The grape and plummight be said totarnish when ripe,developing somesort of light duston their finishwhich the leasttouch disrupts.It is this that...
Easter Island.(SIX POEMS)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... The people of the island built those amazing stone statues, and in the process cut down every last tree. No trees, no wood for houses and fires; no protection from erosion; no useful species, and so on.--Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle <Pre> Easter Island It worked ...
Pullovers: knitting a new life in America after a mother's suicide, long ago in Japan.(Essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... The first sweater I knitted for my husband, back in 1985 when I was married, was a denim-blue pullover with beige, white, and cream squares in the yoke. The pattern, called "Candle-Lit Windows," came from Nova Scotia, where the average January temperature is 23 degrees, the expected yearly ...
Her own society: when Emily Dickinson and her radical friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson met for the first time.
Jun 22, 2008; ... In 1862 Emily Dickinson asked the well-known abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Her question spawned one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American letters, between a man who ran guns to Kansas, backed John Brown, ...
The Bout: when George Plimpton, the boyish editor of The Paris Review, went three rounds with the light-heavyweight champion of the world.(Archie Moore)
Jun 22, 2008; ... In December 1958, British Empire light-heavyweight boxing champion Yvon Durelle, "the Fighting Fisherman" from Canada's maritime New Brunswick Province, knocked down World Champion Archie Moore three times in the first round of a title fight in Montreal. Durelle floored Moore once again in ...
Buoyancy: in literature, as in life, the art of swimming isn't hard to master.
Jun 22, 2008; ... The most famous swimmer among the English poets, Lord Byron, wrote a jaunty poem on the activity--one of the many activities-that made him legendary throughout Europe in his lifetime. "Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos" reverses and updates the old myth of Leander, who braved ...
After Callimachus.(Poetry)(Poem)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> After Callimachus Somebody thoughtless dropped your name: "Such a shameabout Heraclitus--and so young." I bit my tongue,but hot tears came. Mind's inward screenhosted a scrum of flashbacks: long, late-teen bull sessions, bulldozing ...
Happy with crocodiles.(Fiction)(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2008; ... Her envelope had hearts where the o's in my name should have been and I tore it open and read her letter right there in the sun. The V-Mail was like onionskin and in the humidity you spent all your time peeling sheets apart and flapping them dry. Two guys who'd been waiting behind me for ...
Symbols.(Fiction)(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2008; ... When her eldest asked, the night before, delaying the moment before her mother turned off the light, where daddy was going in the morning, she told her three girls that Serge was going to Brussels. The eldest, Sarah, who is 11 and has slant eyes and long, light brown hair, lay back on her ...
Grand horse opera: the best Westerns celebrate our history and criticize the ugly stereotypes of the genre.(Movies)
Jun 22, 2008; ... Every few years a new Western appears and people go once more to gaze at men with guns and horses, at grandiose landscapes and Tinkertoy towns, at the rituals of conquest and combat. Westerns are not so popular as they were in the 1950s, and their dependence on a sense of the past makes ...
Syncopated clock, indeed: on Leroy Anderson's centennial, a defense of the popular composer from an orchestra's stage.(Music)(Biography)
Jun 22, 2008; ... The conclusion of "Sleigh Ride" by Leroy Anderson is the part you never hear in the elevator or in the grocery store (it's cut from the Muzak version), but that final trumpet solo is the moment that players in the orchestra are waiting for. It's an imitation of a horse's whinny, and each ...
Over there: a pugnacious public intellectual looks to Europe for his ideal.(the book 'Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century' by Tony Judt)
Jun 22, 2008; ... REAPPRAISALS Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century By Tony Judt Penguin 462pp. | $29.95 Tony Judt is a member of that breed known as the public intellectual. His erudite books and essays are written for the well-informed reader. His ...
Democracy in three dimensions? How the nation's capital rose from a fetid forest on the backs of slaves.(the book 'Washington: The Making of the American Capital' by Fergus M. Bordewich)
Jun 22, 2008; ... WASHINGTON The Making of the American Capital By Fergus M. Bordewich Amistad 384 pp. / $27.95 A familiar story about the creation of the nation's capital concerns the deal that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison worked out with Alexander ...
Ireland revised: where the Celtic Tiger came from, and where it has gone.(Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000)(Book review)
Jun 22, 2008; ... LUCK AND THE IRISH A Brief History of Change 1970-2000 By R. F. Foster Oxford University Press 239 pp. | $29.95 During the middle of the 1990s the Republic of Ireland went through a period of intensive economic growth, a ...
Repatriating art: a museum director examines the controversy over whether nations own their cultural artifacts.(the book 'Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage' by James Curio)
Jun 22, 2008; ... WHO OWNS ANTIQUITY? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage By James Curio Princeton University Press 248 pp. | $24.95 In 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired, for the then-astounding price of $1 million, an ...
A look beyond the tragic mystique: Posthumous Keats.(Book review)
Jun 22, 2008; ... A Look Beyond the Tragic Mystique POSTHUMOUS KEATS By Stanley Plumly, W. W. Norton, 392 pp., $27.95 In a central scene in Stanley Plumly's new biography, John Keats and Joseph Severn, the young artist who will eventually be at Keats's bedside ...
The grasshopper and his space odyssey: a scientist remembers the celebrated science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.
Jun 22, 2008; ... A few years after I began writing for The New Yorker in 1960, the editor, William Shawn, asked me if I would like to do an essay on science fiction. I think there are two groups of scientists: those who love science fiction and those who can't stand it. As a physicist, I am somewhat ...
Hope.(Commonplace Book)
Jun 22, 2008; ... You must get on with your friend's burial now--the games must go on--but I accept this gladly, my old heart rejoices. You never forget my friendship, never miss a chance to pay me the honor I deserve among our comrades. For all that you have done for me, Achilles, may the immortals fill ...
Point of departure: film and theater critic Steve Vineberg reflects on the art of surprise.
Jun 22, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgment that we re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It's the art of mixed tones--buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in ...