Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2024 i The American Scholar

For many years now, I have taken a photo of every plate of food I’ve cooked, a practice that extended, during the homebound years of the pandemic, to lunch as well as dinner. I do not share these photos on social media. They are meant only for me, making up a visual diary that I often revisit. Lately, I have been looking back at what we ate during that first pandemic year. The photos reveal a surfeit of decidedly atypical luxury items: truffles, sea urchins, an inordinate amount of caviar. A chanterelle omelet for lunch could be followed by rabbit paella for dinner, or a biryani rich with saffron and lamb. The uncertainty of the times must have compelled me to splurge, to treat ever meal as if it were…

Tuning Up Notlong ago, my son asked me about the meaning of a word in a novel he was leading for his fifth-grade book club. “Look it up,” I responded, my automatic rejoinder when my children ask me the meaning of a word, which is often. “But my screen time is off,” he whined. We were sitting next to a book shelf that held at least three dictionaries, plus a thesaurus. I looked pointedly at the shelf, and my son sighed dramatically. “Can’t you just use your phone?” he asked. A terrifying thought occurred to me. “Do you even know how touse a dictionary?” This was my second son, and it turned out that my sureness ofhaving taught him something was often a transplanted memory of having taught that very…

DAWN STARIN is an anthropologist who has spent decades researching human and nonhuman primates in Africa and Asia. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Humanist, andthe/ouf*nal of the Royal Society of Medicine, among other publications. For many years, I spent my days, from well before sunrise until long after sunset, following a troop of endangered western red colobus monkeys (Piliocolobus badius temminckii) around a small forest in The Gambia. Established in 1968, the Abuko Nature Reserve encompasses several types of habitat within its 260 acres: riverine forest, woodland, Guinea savanna, clearings, and swampland dense with Raphia palms—all surrounded by agricultural fields, rice paddies, vegetable gardens, village compounds, and roads. No matter how deep I was in the forest, the sounds of everyday life constantly…

The Cantares Mexicanos, one of the major works of indigenous American literature, is a codex that preserves 91 songs for musical performance in Nahuatl, the language of the people of central Mexico, including the Mexica, the group that later came to be called Aztecs. Dating from around 1580, the manuscript is a document of the period directly following the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the destruction of the Aztec empire. John Bierhorst, the first scholar to publish an English translation of the songs (in 1985), held that most of them were composed in the post-Conquest period by “warrior-singers” who used poetry to “summon the ghosts of ancestors in order to swell their ranks and overwhelm their enemies.” This view of the Cantares as “ghost songs”—similar to the “ghost dances” of…

1. THE DAWN Helen always begins with THE DAWN. At 5:30 a.m., clad in her terry-towel robe, Helen stands on her veranda and watches the light rise. Leaves define themselves from the shadows. The night mist over the lake starts to lift. She watches until, on the opposite bank, the lean trunks of the gum trees glow in the morning light. The dawn is reliable. Without fail, every morning, it arrives. Helen thinks that when she was young, the dawn was faster, somehow. Easily missed. Now, the dawn is slow. Helen used to say that the dawn was for Geoffrey and his birds. But now it belongs to her. 2. KOOKABURRA The kookaburra comes at seven. By now, Helen has moved indoors and is drinking her morning tea. She hears…

In the final chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois asserts that African-American gospels and spirituals were not only the most original American music but also the most beautiful expressions of humanity born of great suffering. Tracy K. Smith echoes this sentiment in her beautiful lyric To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, in which she confidently plays Ariadne in the labyrinth of American history, masterfully leading the reader with experiences that depict the resilience of the soul as her red string. Smith, a former poet laureate of the United States and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 collection, Life on Mars, begins by plumbing the history of her paternal line, using census data to situate her family in…

A quarter century has passed since Michael Jordan won his last NBA championship with the Chicago Bulls, a quarter century since his tongue wagging dominance culminated in champagnedoused glory, and we’re still busy dissecting his legacy. In 2013, Wright Thompson’s masterly profile of Jordan as he turned 50 captured the human side of his uneasy transition into retirement. During the pandemic, The Last Dance, ESPN’s 10-part series about Jordan’s final championship season, burnished the legend yet again, inspiring an endless succession of memes about his ability to channel any perceived slight—an ambiguous quote, a public cold shoulder—into fuel for his competitive drive: “It became personal.” And earlier this year, Air, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, gave cinematic play to the creation of the Air Jordan, the sneaker that helped…

The word apuro is Spanish for “trouble” or “problem,” and it is often used when the difficulty is of one’s own making: a predicament, nothing terribly serious. You tell a lie and suddenly find yourself caught in a contradiction, which requires another lie to cover it up, but rather than solve the problem, the second lie requires more invention and devolves into further contradictions. Soon you are in a tangle. As with a snare, everything gets worse when you try to pull free and the encircling strands tighten. Extricating yourself one loop at a time from the consequences of an initial misunderstanding or untruth is often the action of a sitcom episode. The fun comes from seeing how much more stumbling is required. No one seems the worse for the…

When Netflix released the docudrama miniseries Queen Cleopatra in May 2023, controversy quickly arose around the casting of Adele James—a mixedrace English actor with Jamaican ancestry—as Cleopatra. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a long public statement in rebuke of the eight-episode series. Cleopatra, the ministry argued, was in fact a Macedonian Greek woman, “light-skinned” and possessing “Hellenic features.” Zahi Hawass, one of the country’s most famous archaeologists and twice its antiquities minister, adamantly maintainedthat Cleopatra was not Black. And Mustafa Waziri, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Archaeology, argued that the portrayal of the queen by a Black actor was nothing less than a “falsification of Egyptian history and a blatant historical fallacy.” Many Egyptians view their history as distinct from that of subSaharan Africa, so the…

Last night I dreamt that I was employed as a suicide prevention specialist in ancient Mesoamerica. We had no phones then so no hotline to call or anything like that. I held these gatherings going place to place for people to tell me their stories and songs and stories and songs about others. If anything seemed amiss with someone’s emotional ideation we would bring them into crafts therapy of various kinds, employing them meaningfully. Sometimes I would bring them to help me with my work. In my dream depression, anxiety, and suicide were pervasive in the gritty and unforgiving world of ancient times. I stayed so busy with my job. I knew it was a dream because in a few hours I saw Claude Lévi-Strauss in his hotel room in…

THOMAS SWICK was the travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel from 1989 to 2008, and his work appeared in six editions of The Best American Travel Writing. He is the author of four books, the most recent being Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer. We Floridians are viewed by other Americans the way Americans are viewed by many Europeans: as primitive, mystifying, hellacious beings living in a paradise lost Deprived of a history, we are not taken seriously, though we are considered capable of creating great chaos. It’s the combination—conundrum?—that’s at the heart of much of the ridicule: We are laughable, on a national scale, and also terrifying, whether robbing convenience stores with live alligators or making a mess of…

“Next?” The row of ancient men on the cracked vinyl seats gave no response, as if enchanted into muteness. Isabella Bruni repeated her question, turning it into more of a statement. Surely one of the guys would come forth and deposit himself in her chair, rest his feet on the metal platform, and let her attend to his hair. As one of the three barbers at Dale’s, next to Larry and John, she needed the patronage. But the old men who formed Dale’s clientele tended to be wary of a female haircutter. At 27, she was decent-looking, with a mane of auburn hair, expressive blue eyes, and an inviting smile she’d worked on. She wore loose shirts and tight jeans, the most she could manage without exciting comment. Hip but…

Willa Cather loathed biographers, professors, and autograph fiends. After her war novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer in 1923, she decided to cull the herd. “This is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she told one researcher. Burn my letters and manuscripts, she begged her friends. Hollywood filmed a loose adaptation of A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck, in 1934, and Cather soon forbade any further screen, radio, and television versions of her work. No direct quotations from surviving correspondence, she ordered libraries, and for decades a family trust enforced her commands. Archival scholars managed to undermine what her major biographer James Woodress called “the traps, pitfalls and barricades she placed in the biographer’s path,” even as literary critics reveled in trench warfare over Cather’s sexuality.…

O for a beaker full of the warm South … -John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” 1819 On the Sunday in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a group of College Board officials happened to be having lunch together in Princeton … talking, as they often did, about how nice it would be to abolish the old College Board essay examinations and use the SAT for all applicants, not just scholarship students. In the middle of this the telephone rang with news of the raid. Within two weeks, the essay exams had been suspended for the duration of the war … and the SAT immediately became the admissions device for the most prestigious private colleges in the country, something that would previously have been an unthinkably radical step.…

Write what you know, the high school guidance counselor said to us 50 years ago. Write about your passions and your loves, your books and your goals. I wrote about my love of the English language, about Beowulf and kennings, and about how I would try to capture something of these old sounds in my own poetry. I applied to six schools. Five thin letters came back. The only college that accepted me was Wesleyan. In the early 1970s, it was a school in search of an identity, an old-boys’ place in a small Connecticut town that had decided to remake itself, opening its doors to women and recruiting African-American students. As a result, enrollment doubled. Meanwhile, a new generation of faculty showed up, most of them fresh from Yale,…

HUGH MARTIN is the author of the poetry collections In Country and The Stick Soldiers. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, and The Sun. He teaches at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In Jalawla, in eastern Iraq, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was an occupying American soldier, and the Iraqis watched me very closely. They watched all of us very closely. Whenever anyone in our platoon did something stupid, the Iraqis would laugh, while often trying to hide their amusement. On a summer day in 2004, their laughter came after we tried to kill a small black dog. This stray…

WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, an architect and a writer, is the author of more than 20 books. His latest is The Story of Architecture. An afternoon walk in my downtown Philadelphia neighborhood sometimes takes me past the old Board of Education Building, an impressive limestone pile whose top is decorated with an assortment of busts—educators, scientists, and inventors, including Horace Mann, Isaac Newton, and Alexander Graham Bell. The nine-story building was constructed in 1932 in a style sometimes called Modeme, a fusion of Classicism and Art Deco that cheerfully blends tradition and fashion. The building faces the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but I pass by the rear, where the sendee entrance is located. Its paneled door is surmounted by an elaborately caned pediment and an oversize ornamented scrolled bracket. The words SERVIE ENTRANCE…

In 1972, Suzanne Lacy, Judy Chicago, Sandra Orgel, and Aviva Rahmani staged a performance during which women dipped their naked bodies in metal vats of eggs, cow blood, and clay, then were wrapped in sheets, while the audience listened to an audiotape of women talking about being raped. Animal innards were nailed to the walls, and eggshells, ropes, and chains were strewn on the floor. The performance, called Ablutions, “harnessed the power of repulsion to make its point—one they found could not be expressed in language alone,” writes Lauren Elkin in her politically perceptive and disarming exploration of feminist art. “The old ways of making art or telling stories were no longer equal to the task of telling the story of the body under assault.” Elkin, a Franco-American writer and…

Call it 1941. A choreographer, nearing 50, and a small band of women and men appear onstage in costumes that some of the dancers themselves have sewn, using remnants of silk and cloth from the counters of Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They are all part of the New York premiere of a dance piece at the Mansfield Theatre on West 47th Street. It’s called Letter to the World, and it’s about Emily Dickinson, who lived out her life in utter obscurity in Amherst, Massachusetts. The choreographer Martha Graham plays Dickinson, wearing a very long skirt that seems like a semaphore as she whisks across the stage in bare feet, a rare sight on Broadway. Martha “asked her dancers to think of the floor as a drumhead—a surface…