Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2018 i The American Scholar

As part of her series “Dreams of Dust,” SARAH CRAIG has spent two years photographing several communities in the Central Valley of California, hoping to learn more about issues related to climate, migration, and an increasingly imperiled water supply. She speaks here about her most recent work, focusing on the Morrison family, whose members advocate for safe drinking water in the small town of Allensworth, where naturally occurring arsenic in the water is just one problem for the community. —NOELANI KIRSCHNER Allensworth was founded as an African-American utopia in 1908, and it flourished for almost a decade until a series of events altered the town. Colonel Allensworth—who was the African-American founder—was murdered, and at the same time the town lost its railroad stop, deterring local commerce. There was also a…

While visiting the Thai-Burmese border in 2011, Jessica Marks noticed something that aroused her curiosity: refugees living in camps were regularly using computers. She wondered, upon returning home to the United States, what kind of access to technology migrants and refugees in this country had that could help them in the process of resettlement. It turned out that refugees here were indeed using computers or smartphones at least once a day, yet very little practical information was available to them on the Internet. “Refugees and migrants are resourceful and resilient; they can make the best decisions for their own future,” Marks says, “but they need information and access to resources.” So, with a team of volunteers, she founded the Refugee Center Online (RCO), making its free content available in 45…

I can’t remember why I lugged my drum set to The Nit that night. It was probably the club’s shitty reputation, which I knew about without ever having been in the place—long sets, low pay, no kitchen, the audience screaming over the band. The idea of enduring all that while despising my sound might explain why I didn’t just get on the subway with a snare and a cymbal. My memory of that gig has many caved-in places. I know I called for a van before hauling my stuff to the street, and that when it finally came it was just a normal taxi, no hope of holding a whole set of traps. By the time an actual van arrived, showtime had passed. “Look who decided to make an appearance,”…

They opened the gates of their city and tore down part of their walls so they could bring the horse to the goddess’s temple, hoping to win her favor. GREEK MYTHOLOGY CAN PROVIDE a rather frightening parallel to the situation in which the citizens of the United States find themselves. That situation is the decision made by the male citizens of ancient Troy to break down their city walls and bring in the wooden horse left to them as a “gift” by their enemies, the Greeks. As we all know, that was a disastrous decision. Why did the Trojans make the choices that brought their own destruction, when they could have so easily saved themselves? All they had to do was leave the horse where they found it, outside the…

THE WAR BEFORE THE WAR: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War BY ANDREW DELBANCO Penguin, 464 pp., $30 TRY AS THEY DID to define people as property, early American slaveholders knew that the enslaved had volition. Not surprisingly, various measures over the decades required that bonded laborers be restored to their owners, but although many people supported these laws, others resisted them. Runaway slaves forced Americans to take sides. As Andrew Delbanco shows in this wide-ranging, thought-provoking volume, slaves who sought to self-emancipate via escape transformed the law, politics, and culture of the United States in the decades between the Revolution and Civil War. Delbanco, a distinguished scholar and literary critic at Columbia University, opens by considering a twofold problem: how…

1. CERTAIN BORDERS SHOULD not be crossed. Some are clearly demarcated by signs and walls and other barriers. Some are not marked at all, mostly invisible and almost laughable at first, absurd, but real. And some have signs that we, or some of us, simply ignore. Here is the sign I am ignoring today: WARNING: YOU ARE TRESPASSING ON PRIVATE PROPERTY & ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST I have reached the halfway point of my regular bike ride, a loop that carries me out to the coast under live oaks dripping Spanish moss and past some historic plantation houses, then down into a more modern though still ritzy neighborhood right on the water. The neighborhood has its own little harbor with docks for the residents’ boats, and often I get off…

Damon and Coriolanus were two middle-aged white men with busy schedules, but they tried to set up a lunch date once a month. They took turns buying. ¶ About once every five or six outings, Damon would arrive to find Coriolanus already sitting there with a third man, a man younger and more imposing than Damon and Coriolanus, a famous photojournalist with whom Damon and Coriolanus were acquainted. “I forgot to tell you, I ran into this guy and invited him,” Coriolanus would say. The photojournalist was always on the verge of leaving for somewhere dangerous and exciting early the next morning. His life was urgent. Damon didn’t mind. He liked how brash the photojournalist was, though the man’s manner made him nervous. Confidence and talent and worldliness unsettled Damon.…

THE IMPROBABLE WENDELL WILLKIE: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order BY DAVID LEVERING LEWIS Liveright, 400 pp., $28.95 FAILED PRESIDENTIAL candidates are usually relegated to biographical purgatory, with the lion’s share of historical attention reserved for the victors. Happily, an exception is this superb, long-awaited portrait of Wendell Willkie by David Levering Lewis, a professor of history at New York University and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his multivolume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. Now is an ideal moment for us to consider Willkie, who, as the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, courageously broke with his party’s isolationists and its advocates of “America First,” helping to unite the country before it entered World War II and…

HEART: A HISTORY BY SANDEEP JAUHAR Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $27 TICKER: THE QUEST TO CREATE AN ARTIFICIAL HEARET BY MIMI SWARTZ Crown, 316 pp., $27 THE HUMAN BODY is decked with clocks—chemical, hormonal, molecular, neuronal—that govern the operation of organic life: proteins and genes turn cyclically on a microscopic scale and oscillations abound, marking the passage of cellular time. Two new books make a study of one such biological clock, taking as their subject the organ that keeps time to life itself. Any consideration of the heart must inevitably grapple with the matter of metaphor. In Heart: A History, Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center, considers how the biological heart “instigates metaphor,” describing it with a clinician’s eye for the poetry of…

ELEGY LANDSCAPES: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime BY STANLEY PLUMLY Norton, 272 pp., $29.95 ELeGY LANDSCAPeS IS a delicately wrought meditation on the effect of the loss of loved ones on two painters of genius, John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. There is something odd, even startling about the study of such a particular aspect of two 18th-century lives, however trimly composed and relatively succinct. Who has the time nowadays for a rapturous contemplation of the abstruse? Even to ask this of a reader takes bravura, not to mention the patience needed for such an inquiry. Stanley Plumly, however, has received praise for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” work about the death of Keats (Posthumous Keats, 2008) and is as well regarded for his poetry as…

Aung San Suu Kyi represents the country’s isolation and suffering, its endurance and grace and beauty and grit. MY FRIEND MYINT TUN had passed away at 47 the previous spring, after a failed heart operation, so my son and I decided to return to Burma, where Myint lived, to join his widow and three children in Mandalay for the anniversary of his death. We would go to the cemetery, stand at the mouth of the crematorium, leave a small stone or two on his grave. It would be a pilgrimage, a journey that would allow us to honor Myint’s memory, but also an opportunity to re-enter the monkhood, which Myint had first invited us to join. We felt a need to keep alive the seed he had planted within us.…

We often hear of the dangers of media and social-media echo chambers—in which our beliefs and opinions are constantly reinforced by our exposure only to like-minded individuals. Echo chambers exist in our physical environment, too—but what would be the benefits of experiencing daily life with people outside our demographic or socioeconomic group, or with people whose level of education varies from our own? Jia Zhang, a graduate student at M.I.T.’s Center for Civic Media and a specialist in data science, believes that if “you spend more time exposed to people who are unlike you, then you are a more balanced person fundamentally, because your worldview is bigger.” Zhang, a resident of New York City, has built an app that correlates location data from a smart-phone with demographic information from the…

For the past seven summers, archaeologist Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina has directed excavations at Huqoq, an ancient village near the Sea of Galilee. Her team has uncovered several striking mosaics from the floor of a fifth-century A.D. synagogue, including the one shown here from this summer’s dig. It depicts a scene from the Book of Numbers in which two Israelite spies, dispatched to Canaan by Moses, return from their expedition carrying grapes hanging from a pole. The inscription on the mosaic reads: “a pole between two.”…

WHEN DID ALL THE DINOSAURS DIE? The short answer is that they went extinct about 66 million years ago (MYA). But no one can check that date by consulting a history book or glancing at a calendar or a clock. So how is it possible to establish a date for the death of dinosaurs that long ago? For that matter, how was it possible to pinpoint the age of the famous fossil hominid Lucy, unearthed in East Africa in 1974, at 3.18 MYA? Many fossil bones look much alike, whether their owners were striding around East Africa 200,000 years ago or three million years ago. But with an accurate age, a fossil bone or a stone tool can fit into a meaningful niche in our developmental time-line. Without an accurate…

VISUAL ARTISTS HAVE been known to emulate and envy other art forms. They’ve aspired to evoke, in colorful pigments, the complex, coherent worlds of Ovid or Dante, aware of the life-changing power of poetry. In painting imaginary ideal cities, Renaissance artists dreamt of housing and molding a perfectible mankind, while Michelangelo became an admired poet and architect. Music set the bar high as well, and by 1877 Walter Pater could confidently write that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” From the time of the ancient Greeks, visual artists admired the quantifiable rigor involved in dividing a string so that when plucked it reverberated in pleasurably subtle ways. The planets themselves were seen to share in a form of musical harmony, such that the music of the spheres,…

THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH, VOLUME 2: 1956–1963 EDITED BY PETER K. STEINBERG AND KAREN V. KUKIL Harper, 1,088 pp., $45 THE STORY OF SYLVIA PLATH and Ted Hughes began as a kind of fairy tale, or—to be more contemporary—a True Romance. When we last encountered the lovers, at the end of the massive first volume of Plath’s letters, they were addressing each other in passionate prose: Sylvia was Ted’s “kish and puss and ponk”; he was her own “Teddy-ponk.” Volume two begins with the same romantic enthusiasm, as Sylvia tells American friends about her secret Bloomsday marriage to a “roaring hulking Yorkshireman,” “exactly the sort of person I’ve always needed [a] strong brute with dark hair, in great unwieldy amounts, & green-blue-brown eyes [who] sings ballads, knows all Shakespeare…