Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2016 i The American Scholar

WE DON’T OFTEN SEE a lot of wild animals in these precincts, but somehow our Summer issue is bursting with them. From the twin grizzlies on our cover to the vanishing rhinos in our Letter from South Africa to the sandhill cranes in choreographed migration in our feature well to the sentient fish swimming in our book-review section, all we’re missing is that yellow border out front. We’ve even sprung for some fine National Geographic photographs. But why should that estimable magazine have a lock on subjects it presents so well: wild animals and the natural world, our species’ relationship to the rest of Nature, and our place on Earth? In his cover story for us, “The Taming of the Wild,” environmental writer David Gessner celebrates the 100th anniversary of…

Four years ago, photographer BARRY GOLDSTEIN attended the Republican National Convention in Tampa, capturing dozens of portraits of convention-goers, including these. This summer, on assignment for the SCHOLAR, Goldstein will immerse himself in the crowd at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, each day sending us images and brief interviews with people he meets. The overarching theme of Goldstein’s work, he says, is “the long-term influence of 9/11 on our society.” To that end, he has photographed medical students who volunteered in the morgues after the Twin Towers fell, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and voters. Check our website in July for Goldstein’s daily reports from Cleveland and Philadelphia.…

THAT EVENING, AS I REMEMBER IT, my mother and I were sitting out on the red-tiled hotel terrace in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. We were probably drinking gin-and-tonics and listening to the sound of the wind and the cry of the cicadas, when she told me something surprising. With her lovely dark eyes and soft white curls, my mother was still slim and attractive at 60. She was wearing one of those tight-fitting knit dresses she was fond of, in a pale mauve, her favorite color. As usual, she wore her diamonds on her small, delicate hands, including the big blue one that was supposed to bring bad luck. My mother was a mysterious woman with many secrets. She had announced, when my sister and I were 14…

Michael was aging. His smile was young, but the slack of his skin and the hollows of his face belonged to someone far older than 33. He was a sales manager at a medium-sized marijuana dispensary on Colfax Avenue that resembled a cell phone store, complete with kiosks of edibles and cases of “hardware.” Whenever Alicia’s husband, Gary, left town for his annual auctioneers’ convention, she called Michael. She recognized her inability to spend an evening alone. That, and she still loved Michael. Probably always would. When night fell, Alicia slipped into his old teal Nova, a vision out of a low-rider magazine, even if the interior was a pigsty, with a sweatshirt, some woman’s black tights, and three empty spray-paint cans on the floor. Alicia picked up one of…

ENGINES OF LIBERTY: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law BY DAVID COLE Basic Books, 307 pp., $27.99 UNDER CHIEF JUSTICE John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court for the first time in American history issued the majority of its ideological 5-4 rulings along party lines—a streak that ended with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. The five conservative justices, appointed by Republicans, made up the majority, the four moderate liberals, appointed by Democrats, the dissenters. The decisions that came down—favoring the interests of corporations over those of consumers, gutting the power of labor unions, striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, and many other rulings—support the view that the Roberts Court has been the most conservative in a generation, and likely in the…

EVERYTHING EXPLAINED THAT IS EXPLAINABLE: On the Creation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–1911 BY DENIS BOYLES Knopf, 464 pp., $30 FORTY-FOUR MILLION WORDS, 40,000 entries, and 28 volumes. More than 1,500 contributors shepherded by 64 editors, with an editorial budget in today’s money of $30 million. By any yardstick—and you’d need at least one to measure it on a bookshelf—the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a beast. More than a century after its publication, it still casts a long intellectual shadow. With an author roster drawn from history’s Who’s Who—George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Rutherford, John Muir, and Bertrand Russell, to name but a few—it became the first encyclopedia to sell more than a million copies. Today, it lives on in countless printed anthologies and digital…

Our Digital Selves I applaud James McWilliams (“Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie,” Spring 2016) for his valiant literary effort at rescuing the self from the mindless divertissements of the digital age. At my gym, I have watched in horror as millennials interrupt sets of bench presses to check their cell phones. Or as young girls sit side by side and text each other—missing the time-honored pleasures of youthful conversation. But McWilliams should not confuse social media with all forms of digital media. The truth is that I read his article on an LG tablet. No pulp was required; no trees were destroyed in the process. At the touch of a finger, I could employ the wonders of the Internet to explore McWilliams’s many references and allusions—as…

1. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that FBI and NSA spying on Americans for political purposes was illegal, noting that the collection of foreign intelligence information was possibly not covered by either the Constitution or statute. Thus, in 1978, Congress passed a law aimed at specifying how and under what conditions law enforcement and intelligence agencies could surveil suspected agents of foreign powers in the United States. Known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), it relied on the decisions of federal judges who were appointed to a special FISA Court and made classified decisions about whether the FBI could get a warrant to eavesdrop. For nearly 25 years, that court functioned under the radar, almost never turning down FBI requests for such warrants, and therefore never requiring…

Investor-owned colleges such as the unaccredited, defunct Trump University and now-bankrupt Corinthian College are often denounced as “dropout factories” that burden students with unreasonable debt while collecting billions in federal and state support. Now backers of for-profit education hope that a new corporate model might help improve their image by making them accountable to stockholders. In the past three years, six for-profit colleges have reorganized as “benefit corporations.” This corporate form, which emerged in 2010, requires a company’s board of directors to pursue a social benefit while also making a profit for shareholders. Colleges reorganize into benefit corporations to attract private investors who they hope will behave like donors, upholding the college’s educational mission. So far, 30 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia allow benefit corporations. Most of…

DOES POETRY MATTER in America today? Does it matter, for instance, to Black Lives Matter? What does that movement have to say to poetry, and vice versa? There is a video on YouTube that shows The Donald holding forth at a podium. Behind him has been arranged the semi-diverse human background before which politicians usually speak. What makes the video tweetable is that an audience member, a black woman, renounces her role as a token object of identification, and she does so by reading a book. She lifts it high, covering her face, so that we can see that it’s Claudia Rankine’s award-winning book of poetry, Citizen. There’s a rustling in the crowd. People try to get her to put the book down or leave. Blocking out a Trump rally…

HIS NAME WASN’T JOE STRUMMER. He didn’t strum his guitar, either; he famously hammered down on the strings, thrashing them so hard and fast that the fingers of his right hand were in tatters after a show. His name was John Mellor. He was born in Turkey, of a mother born in Scotland and a father born in India, and he lived in Egypt and Mexico and Germany before being sent to boarding school in Surrey at the age of nine. He said he never recovered from being exiled to that prison filled with violence and cruelty, where he made himself a jester, a scamp, a leader of the mischievous, neither scholar nor dolt nor leader nor Lothario but a boy apart, one who knew how to escape the castle…

IN 1953, AS A HARVARD JUNIOR, I took Professor Charles S. Singleton’s course on Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia. Twelve of us—apocryphal lore held that Professor Singleton insisted that our number must equal that of the Apostles—worked our way through the 100 cantos of the Commedia, straining to catch every word as he read aloud in Italian from the venerable C. H. Grandgent edition and explicated in English the lines we had just heard. We covered the Inferno and the Purgatorio thoroughly and gave less time to the Paradiso,which was fortunate for me, since I had no faith in God and found it difficult to suspend disbelief sufficiently to accept the theological underpinning of the poem. I remember, however, lingering on Canto XVII of Paradiso and the prophecy by Dante’s…

These days, “pretentious” is a go-to, catch-all disparagement for anything seen as excessively fussy. But was it always a term of denigration? PRETENTIOUSNESS: Why It Matters BY DAN FOX Coffee House Press, 159 pp., $15.95 IN HIGH SCHOOL, when I smoked clove cigarettes, watched Jean-Luc Godard films, and professed my love for a range of clichéd signifiers of sophistication, my classmates often accused me of pretension—an allegation I resented. The word seemed to imply an element of insincerity, of performance. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “pretentious” as a matter of “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.” Say what you will, my tastes were genuine. I subjected my long-suffering and chronically unimpressed boyfriend to Breathlessbecause I found it moving. I may have…

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right. —Molière, George Dandin, 1668 My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation) the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955 There are women who are unmarried by accident, and others…

Our father rode sitting upright in the high baby carriage, like a boy in a small boat. It was his first memory. Displaced as he’d been from the shade under the perambulator’s hood, occupied now by yet another bundled infant, he spread out his arms and clutched the sides of the carriage: a boy in a storm-tossed rowboat. His mother, pushing the thing, was behind him. She navigated the broken sidewalks, the curbs and the street crossings, with a banging determination that caused the whole contraption—high wheels and springs and the hard black body of the carriage itself—to shudder and quake, rearing at the curbs, bucking at the cobblestones, swinging left or right around pokey pedestrians, dog droppings, the spilled contents of fruit markets, dry-goods stores, garbage cans. He rode…

With antiquated charm, Chicago’s Municipal Code section 8-16-040 on “Flipping Cars” states, “It shall be unlawful for any person under the age of 18 years to climb, jump upon, cling to, or in any way attach himself to any streetcar, railroad locomotive, or car of any kind while the same is in motion, under a penalty of not less than $2.00 nor more than $10.00 for each offense.” This year, nearly 180 years after the city was founded, a new education initiative called Envision Chicago is offering teenagers the opportunity to steer their government toward more relevant laws. Students from four high schools from different wards are participating in a city competition to rewrite outmoded parts of the municipal code. And it’ll all be done online. “In a world where…

Halo We wander round ring after ring of life,One after another, blossoms of lightTo which we’re but a mere flotsam of bees. And although this isn’t true, the poem saysThis is true; life, light, flowers and bee: truths.So stop and hold this poem above your head. Hold it up to whatever light you find.Then let it go: forget it if you can.If it is meant to remain, it will remain. And if it is meant to light, it will light.Your hands will have moved on to something elseBut your head will have, say it, its halo. Mortality Ode Waiting in the cellular store like waiting for breadWe see two NYC police cars pull up, casually,One behind the other. Two officers enter,Two wait outside. One struts up and stopsA few feet…

FIFTY YEARS AGO, the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in New York City’s Lincoln Center. The search to replace the company’s storied yet outdated home on Broadway and 39th Street had gone on for decades, and opening night was much anticipated. To mark the occasion, the Met commissioned Samuel Barber to write a new opera. Barber was one of the most accomplished composers of his day—equally adept at orchestral and vocal music, his tonal, Romantic idiom favored by the notoriously conservative Met audiences, who had adored his previous opera, Vanessa. For this work, Barber considered and rejected many potential texts before settling upon his favorite Shakespeare play, Antony and Cleopatra. Leontyne Price, who by the mid-1960s had soared to international stardom, would sing the role of Cleopatra, and Justino Díaz,…

DIANE ARBUS: Portrait of a Photographer BY ARTHUR LUBOW Ecco, 752 pp., $35 DIANE ARBUS IS ONE of the 20th century’s most influential photographers, who along with two other greats, Lee Friedlander and Garry Wino-grand, first gained fame in the 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, unlike Friedlander and Winogrand, whose snapshot-indebted, 35-millimeter images fell into the new category of “street photography,” Arbus was a classic portraitist, positioning her subjects by ones and twos at the center of her camera’s square frame and having them look straight into the lens in a manner reminiscent of German photographer August Sander, whom Arbus credited as her greatest influence. But what subjects they were! Nudists, dwarfs, sword swallowers, transvestites, autistic adults, and possibly normative children…

JOE GOULD’S TEETH BY JILL LEPORE Knopf, 235 pp., $24.95 IN 1942, JOSEPH MITCHELL, master of the magazine profile, introduced the world to a “blithe and emaciated little man” named Joe Gould in the pages of The New Yorker. Mitchell’s article, “Professor Sea Gull,” presents Gould as a near-comic figure who had attended Harvard and studied eugenics, befriended the great literary lions of his age, and was at work—always at work—on “An Oral History of Our Time,” an immense, shapeless, and haphazard collection of character portraits and conversations of ordinary people, the pages of which he wrote and kept hidden in countless locations. The piece made Gould, ever penniless and drunk, into a celebrity and cemented Mitchell’s literary fame. But in 1964, in a two-part sequel titled “Joe Gould’s Secret,”…