Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i The American Scholar

WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE explain to me how the dutiful 0s and 1s of computer processes at some point unbind themselves and undertake independent thought? Could anyone describe the actual instant of transition? I’ve been asking these questions around the office for the last little while. Might we find a writer to explain, in terms that even I could understand, this moment when the warm breath of life turns a box of metal into Frankenstein’s monster? One smart sciency friend of mine told me (rather dismissively, I thought) that it was all about algorithms. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t take me very far. Then several months ago there arrived unbidden an article that reinforced my doubts about computer autonomy in terms that I could not have expressed but could follow. The…

JILL LEOVY is the author of Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, which examined the reasons behind the high homicide rate among black Americans. The following passage is from her current project, a book tentatively titled Haters, about the role of petty conflict (and conflict resolution) in human history. Big violence is a big topic. Small violence barely qualifies as a topic at all. War swims in seas of politics and history. Quarrels, fights, and feuds, on the other hand, are seen as mundane, trivial. Indeed, the word petty often attaches itself to this kind of conflict, as in petty infighting, petty disputes. What I want to convince you of is this: the big lurks in the small. Tamping down arguments, the inevitable, tiresome fussing and fighting of…

RHYME AND METER are commonly understood today as technical constraints, as barriers to expression, standing between the poet and experience. But what if we were to turn the idea around and view them as vehicles of access, perhaps even a means of letting go, of getting closer to life? A. E. Stallings plays with this question subtly in “Getting In.” She starts by making a distinction between people at the beach who dive right in and those who take a considered approach. The poem is on the side of patience, and its own formal organization makes the case. As the poem proceeds couplet by rhymed couplet, each pair suggests a foot put forward, followed and completed in the next line by a second step. Pause … for the length of…

HUMANS CRAVE CERTAINTY. We long to know what will happen, what to believe, and how to live. This desire drives some of us to depths of soul-searching and heights of scientific inquiry. It drives others into the arms of authoritarians, who are all too willing to put our doubts, and our unquiet minds, to rest. Philosophers have long warned that this desire for certainty can lead us astray. To think and learn about the world, we must be willing to be uncertain: to accept that we don’t yet know everything. In 19th-century Europe, when the urge for certainty was deepening national and religious divisions, Goethe wrote, “Nothing is sadder than to watch the absolute urge for the unconditional in this altogether conditional world; perhaps in the year 1830 it seems…

Getting In Some people jump, some people dive,Others inch by inch arrive And give themselves up to the chill,Piecemeal, with a grudging will: First toes, then ankles tempt the cold,And backs of knees, that, tender, fold, Then thighs that start to pimple, blotch,A shock like ice that slaps the crotch And slides up shivering past the hips,(And into the bellybutton slips). Elbows hitch higher, till a rippleLaps the aureole and nipple (Sea-urchin shells, repoussé, round).The armpits shrug until they’re drowned, Now collarbone, now nape, now chin,And now, out of your depth, you’re in. Daylilies I remember them, a lifetime back,Fanta orange, the way they grewFeral by the railroad track,Abundance in abandon, swarmsOn the embankment, gravelled, steep.I’d pick some for a vase, or two,Back then, when I held beauty cheap,There for…

PICTURE THIS. IN THE FOREGROUND, by a thatched farmhouse, a beautiful woman holds by the claws the chicken she’s just slaughtered, her white apron stained with blood. She talks, perhaps flirts, with an equally gorgeous hunter in leather, a hawk on his gloved arm. Behind them loom the picturesque ruins of a Welsh castle, gray clouds throwing it all into high relief. I once came upon this scene while on vacation, and it would have made for a memorable photograph, the image preserved within the confines of a four-by-six-inch print. But instead of fumbling around for a camera, I continued instead to gaze at the scene before me, which, in all its expansive, seemingly limitless glory, became burned into my frontal cortex. For that I am forever grateful. Artists have…

SUFFRAGE: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote BY ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS Simon & Schuster, 383 pp., $28 WE AMERICANS LOVE the myths about our nation’s past. We pretend to be a land of unlimited opportunity, despite a painful legacy of discrimination based on the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender. We celebrate abstract notions of natural rights, human liberty, and social equality, even though Americans have routinely embraced deeply inegalitarian ideas of white supremacy, class pedigree, and maternity as women’s destiny. Take California. In 1850, the new Free Soil state prohibited slavery yet protected peonage (servitude) of Native Americans. After passage of the 15th Amendment, southern states used grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes to deny black males and poor whites the right to vote. In the presidential…

THE MAN IN THE RED COAT BY JULIAN BARNES Knopf, 288 pp., $26.95 THE MAN IN THE red coat on the cover of Julian Barnes’s eponymous biography has neither a name nor a face—a fitting mystery, as Barnes had never heard of him until he happened on his “tremendous” portrait done by John Singer Sargent in 1881. A few pages in, the reader is told that the man clad in this sumptuous red coat was Samuel Pozzi and learns quickly that he was known as a remarkable gynecologist and an indefatigable lover. Sarah Bernhardt, who knew him in both guises, nicknamed him Docteur Dieu (Doctor God). To be sure, Barnes does not take himself for a biographer god. “We cannot know,” he repeats over and over again. In his view,…

In memory of John Churchill Fred H. Cate Werner Gundersheimer Donald S. Lamm Scott Newstok Marcia Stanton Robert Wilson In memory of Douglas W. Foard Ann Foard Philip Alcabes Julius Altman Steven Anderson Ann Beattie & Lincoln Perry Allison Blakely George Bradley Luanne Buchanan Paula M. Cohen Nancy Crooker Roger Dahood T. Gerald Delaney Brad Edmondson Mark Edmundson Phoebe C. Ellsworth Lucy Ferriss Andrea Finkle Ernest B. Furgurson Thomas Gibson Sandra Gilbert Stephen H. Goodwin Langdon Hammer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough Ann Hulbert Kathy Mank Ann Marsh-Meigs Louis P. Masur Roger Mudd Michael O’Donovan Ana Puente Diana Ranson Mike Rose Herbert Royden Ray Sachs Judith Shapiro Shirley Streshinsky Peter Suedfeld Sara M. Taber Patrick Troccolo Charles Trueheart James VanOosting Brenda Wineapple Don J. Wyatt Robert Yamartino Edwin M. Yoder Janet Zimmerman Martha…

NICHOLAS CARR is the best-selling author of several books about technology and its consequences. A new, expanded edition of his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will be published this spring. We asked him to pose four questions about how the Internet will affect our future. 1 The way people use the Internet changed dramatically over the past decade as the smartphone became the personal computer of choice and social media became the main conduit for information of all sorts. Recent research confirms what most of us know from experience: our phones, with their constant updates and notifications, are mesmerizing. They keep us in a more or less permanent state of distraction. One 2017 study led by Adrian…

A CENTURY AGO, The New York Times was even more sober than it is today, seldom deigning to cover the titillating stories of love or scandal that fueled its lowbrow competitors. But on April 6, 1905, an extraordinary headline greeted readers at the top of the paper’s front page: “J. G. Phelps Stokes to Wed Young Jewess.” Other newspapers across the country and the world were no less enthralled. The San Francisco Chronicle’s story, “New York’s Most Interesting Romance,” was framed by drawings of two winged cupids. The religious press weighed in as well, The Christian Advocate’s account titled “Hearts Making Havoc of Conventionalism.” In the America of 1905, intermarriage between gentiles and Jews was indeed unconventional. But something else made this match even more startling: the enormous gap in…

Philip Larkin was middle aged at birthand came into his post-imperial worlddressed in spectacles and quiet clothing.Proud of being nasty, he produced artdrunk or sober in little poems distilledfrom a homemade mash of equal partsenvy, bile, self pity and self loathing.Some were quite well done, for what it’s worth. Myself, I never liked it much, the verse.Put beside the undeniable gloriesof English poetry, the reaching wildcosmology of Blake, the tender yetunblinking gaze of Keats, the squalid storiesLarkin tells appeared inadequateif not decayed, clotted trifles that spoiled.The letters he sent are evidently worse. Now I begin to wonder if he hasn’tbeen waiting up ahead. Come in my turnto the inglorious reduced realityof middle age and waking late at nightto take a piss and read awhile, I learnthe use of poets who…

WHEN THE BEATLES APPEARED on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, in 1964, I was about to turn nine and knew nothing about them, although my parents and my six-year-old sister, Anne, somehow did. So did my best friend, John Ruth, who explained that the round things on their guitars—which I had guessed were decorative moons—were control knobs. My ignorance wasn’t permanent. When A Hard Day’s Night came to Kansas City, where we lived, John Ruth and I went to see it more than once, and we watched it the way we watched Dr. No and Goldfinger, by going to the theater without checking the starting times, and staying in our seats until the movie had come back around to where it had been when we sat down.…

IF—AS SEEMS LIKELY—we keep heating the globe and depleting its groundwaters, many of us will starve. In the history of humans, starvation—not war—has been our overwhelmingly biggest killer. People stuck on Pacific islands during World War II starved. On uninhabited islands the only food was coconuts. The Japanese themselves were starving in Japan, and their troops overseas fared worse. Allied prisoners of war, like the two Americans in this photograph, starved on islands or on hellships hauling them to POW camps in Japan. The brains of mammals like us must live at any cost or the whole animal dies. Starving, our brains eat the rest of us in descending order of survivability. They skip vital organs, quickly deplete fats, and settle on consuming muscles. For a visual gauge of wasting,…

WARHOL BY BLAKE GOPNIK Ecco, 976 pp., $45 ONE SHOULD APPROACH this elephantine account of Andy Warhol’s life—perhaps modeled on one of his endless films, like Sleep(1963)—with caution. To begin with, there are no source notes—some 7,000 of them are available online but not on a page. For a work that plainly hopes to be termed “definitive,” this is a curious omission. Then there is the staggering length, almost 1,000 pages, made all the more challenging by Blake Gopnik’s verbosity, which reveals a steely determination to tell you far more than you ever asked to know. Given the two schools of biography—telling a rollicking good story and details be damned versus a minute chronology and reader be damned—this author opts for the latter. Apart from the book’s tantalizing start, which…

The pawn is the soul of chess. —François-André Danican Philidor, Analysis of the Game of Chess, 1749 But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could well become someone from a past age. The steam envelops me but not so densely that the visible world is lost to view; neither is it a mere thin, silken swath that, were it to be whipped away, would reveal me as a normal naked mortal of this world. —Natsume Sōseki, Kusamakura, 1906, tr. by Meredith McKinney This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s…