Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2017 i The American Scholar

AS I WRITE THIS, it has been only a week since the election, and I continue to waver between despair and the stubborn habit of a lifetime to feel hopeful. First among the many causes for despair is knowing that a reversal or even a delay in the world’s efforts to allay the worst consequences of climate change might well hasten their arrival. The hope is that the office is bigger than the man, that when the new president wanders the halls of the White House late at night and stares at the portraits of his predecessors, they will school him. Part of the sickening realization of the results had to do with what it said about a near majority of American voters. Could so many people really forgive the…

REREADING KIM RECENTLY, I encountered words I hadn’t known the first or even the second time I read Rudyard Kipling’s novel. For example, kichree: dal with vegetables. My son had introduced me to this dish around 2009, when he returned from a year in Nepal. And madrissah: a Muslim school. Kim was published in 1901, exactly a century before 9/11, yet like many Westerners, I imagine, I learned the term only after the Twin Towers fell. It goes without saying that kichreeand madrissahs— let alone more familiar words such as tsunami— preceded by many centuries, even by millennia, our provincial Western knowledge of them. These words, and the things they signified, were waiting, until they finally came to life for me. I was waiting, too. I read—reread—Kim in a big…

Needless, useless, pointless, moot: stripped of every honest purpose, nothing so haplessly worthless now, so meaningless. Needless, needless: the deadbolt, the strongbox, the padlock lolling from the tall spiked gate, the little metal teeth all jingle-jangling mindlessly on their rusting ring, the all too obtuse fitfulness of pin and tumbler, every chain known to man. All melted down for scrap: the whole clanking, tinkling, delirious mess spaded into the pitiless furnace for our trusty smiths to put to good use, all that glorious blazing gloop walloped anew into buckles, skillets, wind chimes, wind-up toys, more spades. Needless, worthless, baseless, daft: the locket, the lockbox, the lockers slambanging in the winless locker room, the secret hasp in the desk or the case to trip for the stash, the fireproof safe, the…

Until the 1960s, performances of Bach and Handel tended to be unabashedly romantic: big-boned, lush, thickly textured, and slow. HAD YOU TURNED ON the radio to any classical music station in the 1970s or ’80s, chances are you would have heard, before too long, a recording by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. No conductor at that time was more synonymous with the Baroque repertoire—the music of Corelli, Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann, a n d B a c h — t h a n t h e orchestra’s music director, Neville Marriner, whose stylish performances, full of charm, wit, and grace, were in stark contrast to the dour interpretations that were all too common before him. Marriner died in October, at the age of 92. And although he had turned over his…

What made the Stalinist period unique was in part the secular religion at the heart of Marxist thought and, even more, the way in which it was interpreted. STALIN AND THE SCIENTISTS: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953 BY SIMON INGS Atlantic Monthly Press, 528 pp., $28 NO COUNTRY WITH a long-standing social framework for science has seen less of a change in that framework than Russia. The explanation is that developments there have always been driven from the top down, beginning with the initiatives of Peter the Great (“science by decree,” as Alexander Vucinich puts it in the first of his two groundbreaking volumes on science in Russian culture up to 1917). Catherine II was motivated—at least initially—by admiration for the work of leading Enlightenment figures in the…

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? —William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4 The chickadee’s fear of windy places is easily deduced from his behavior. In winter he ventures away from woods only on calm days, and the distance varies inversely as the breeze. I know several wind-swept woodlots that are chick-less all winter, but are freely used at all other seasons. They are windswept because cows have browsed out the under growth. To the steam-heated banker who mortgages the farmer who needs more cows who need more pasture, wind is a minor nuisance. To the chickadee, winter wind is…

In Spite of Education … Alan Taylor is spot-on with regard to the necessity for an educated electorate in order to sustain a true republic (“The Virtue of an Educated Voter,” Autumn 2016). However, the conclusion that an uneducated electorate predisposed our country to the rise of “reckless demagogues” ignores several other more significant factors at play. Taylor even indicates that we currently have a much higher percentage of college graduates than we did at the country’s founding. We should, therefore, be more resistant to manipulation by reckless demagogues. Although I am quite certain that politicians have always attempted to twist the truth, our citizenry in the past 30 years has fallen prey to the most calculated, sophisticated Madison Avenue techniques to manipulate perception that mankind has ever known. Media—social…

1. When the Cold War fizzled in the early 1990s, American officials began asking what to do with the U.S. intelligence agencies. Politicians were keen to save money; the “securocrats” were focused on saving their jobs. It soon became clear, however, that the new political landscape had actually increased the need for intelligence. Today, fresh targets, national economic rivalries, new threats (such as weapons proliferation, terrorism, rogue states, arms trafficking, and drug dealing), and emerging threats like cyber war and Islamic jihad all demand new answers and intelligence structures. Is the present organization of agencies suitable for future challenges or does it need restructuring? 2. The biggest problem intelligence agencies face is the accelerating pace of change in the digital age, which has opened up mass surveillance beyond the comprehension…

The Chicago Police Department, despite new leadership, body-camera videos, and a federal investigation, still struggles with public trust. At the Chicago-based digital rights nonprofit Lucy Parsons Labs, data scientists have spent the past year digging into and exposing an often-dubious police tactic: surveillance of citizens. “We want private citizens to have privacy, and we want the government and public officials to be more public and share more information about what they’re doing,” says Parsons Labs cofounder Jennifer Helsby. After winning several lawsuits, the labs have helped force city police to release information on their use of cell phone tracking devices and has created an interactive primer on local police surveillance practices. This year the lab launched Chicago’s first whistleblower submission system via a web platform called SecureDrop, which enables people…

“JUST SAYING,” WE SAY, when we want to make a point but shirk the responsibility for making it, should we cause offense, as if to remind the injured that we have done nothing more than put together so many words, and words are only ever words, inexact and generic like the phrase “just saying” itself. David Barber listens with an attentive, attuned ear to the way people say things, knowing that they’re never “just saying” something. Even—or is it especially?—in our clichés, we are expressing ourselves and our relationships to each other and the world around us. Barber approaches the scrap heap of common discourse as a connoisseur ready to celebrate the vitality of lexicons and vocabularies so encased in custom and context that everyone else has mistaken them (and…

Smart as a whip? How smart is that? Smart enough to prick up ears at a snap? Smart enough to know what’s sport and what’s not? Smart enough not to leave a mark yet make your point felt? Smarter than the belt that smote your own smart ass? Smarter than the sharpest tool in the shed you were told not to touch? Too smart to try to act as if you can wipe the blank slate to outstrip what still hurts? Too smart to be smitten by the thought that you’ll learn to hit on her or her yet, after all that hard work to master your stroke? Far too smart to toil for squat, far smarter than any artful dodger who ever beat the rap, such a smarty-pants savant…

I didn’t fly here to listen to your precious prattle about your kids, Red erupted at Happy, who’d been telling Mr. Original about her teenage daughter’s summer internship at Hotseat Capital. Conversation stopped, and the old friends around the dinner table looked warily at each other and at Red, who was florid with drink and irritation, and then at Happy, who was stung but appeared unfazed. And here I was worried you’d gone soft, Happy said. But you’re right, let’s talk about something else. She moved her hands through her thick dark hair, as if freeing herself from an attitude, smiled at her audience, and said, Really, I’m glad to be away from the kids for a few days. Sorry for running on about it. Maestro, who’d organized the reunion…

POET AND CRITIC RANDALL JARRELL, one of the most prominent American intellectuals of the mid-20th century, taught a seminar in Russian literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the fall of 1964. I was an MFA student in fiction at the time and a member of Jarrell’s class—the last he saw through to the end before his death at the age of 51. One night in October 1965, Jarrell was killed by a car when walking along a highway in Chapel Hill. Although the driver said Jarrell had “lunged” at the car, the coroner ruled the death an accident for lack of sufficient evidence to confirm suicide. (He also concluded that the driver was not at fault.) Jarrell’s wife, Mary, always maintained that his death had been…

 PETER CARLSON, a former Washington Post columnist, is writing a book with the working title “Knuckleheads: A Comic Memoir of a Father, a Son, and a Jamaican Jail.” It’s the story of how his father, “a guy who climbed poles for the Long Island Lighting Company,” rescued him after he and his friends were detained for marijuana possession in Jamaica in 1972, when Carlson was 19. The following scene describes the night of Carlson’s arrest. “We were walking down the road in a small Jamaican town,” Carlson explains, “and the cops searched our box of groceries, found a little bit of pot, and arrested us. A woman I call Marjorie—I changed everybody’s names—owned a bar on the beach and the nearby treehouse where we were staying.” Candy? Are you out…

Meaning, in Yaghan, the wordless yet meaningful look between two people who want to begin something but are both reluctant to start. Meaning, in other words, that moment of silence that says so much more about why we’re speechless than all that would be lost in translation. Meaning, you’ve said a mouthful, stranger, maybe we should get to know each other better. Meaning, next time you’re down in Tierra del Fuego, let’s say we take a meeting, if you know what I mean. Meaning, maybe we could make beautiful music together by saying nothing, if only you, not me, would get things going. Meaning, easy for you to say, word maven, so why oh why don’t you make the first move. Meaning, what in the world are we doing, doing…

Now the mankiller roars on cue. Now the brass band begins to wheeze. Then the fire-eaters clear their throats, And then the gaslights sputter out. And now the great beast paces and fumes, Switching his tail now and then. Now the damsel ripples the wings. Then the spot bathes her up and down. And now there’s a whiff of holy smoke, And now the swell of an opera march. Then you can taste the heat in the tent. Now the sacred rite can commence. And now behind that frothing veil The fair lass must be swallowing hard—For now she’s taking her own sweet time Wafting past the crush like a swan, Leaving a snail-track as her train Glisters along in the ogling beam. And now we ask the faint of…