Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i The American Scholar

Charles G. Salas's “American Carthage” (p. 27) explores the many ways in which the name Carthage has resonated through history. Central to his narrative are the exploits of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who battled the Romans during the Second Punic War. Hannibal has always beguiled the student of military history, but another figure associated with Carthage—no less a personage than Dido, the city's legendary founder—has held greater appeal for the artist. Ovid, Marlowe, and Shakespeare all wrote of Dido's illfated love affair with the Trojan hero Aeneas, though no account is more heartbreaking than Book IV of Vergil's Aeneid. On his way from the ruins of Troy to become the progenitor of Rome, Aeneas lingers in Carthage, having fallen in love with its queen. Eventually, Aeneas is reminded of his…

I had little incentive to see Todd Phillips's Joker when it first appeared in the fall of 2019. A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it “weightless and shallow.” Richard Brody of The New Yorker said it was a film marked by “a rare, numbing emptiness.” I was never a great fan of Marvel or DC Comics and their monopoly on films about superheroes and supervillains. Batman, in particular, seemed humorless in all his incarnations. His butler, Alfred, when played by Michael Caine in Christopher Nolan's three Batman films, was far more appealing. So I was prepared to leave Phillips's Joker behind. But I had long admired Joaquin Phoenix and his quirky performances, and I have always been nostalgic about Batman's Gotham City, a funhouse mirror of Manhattan,…

ELIZABETH KADETSKY is the author of four books, most recently The Memory Eaters, winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. A three-time Fulbright scholar in India, she is a professor of creative writing at Penn State University and a 2025 NEH Public Scholars fellow. Her article on looted Indian statuary, “The Goddess Complex,” appeared in our Spring 2023 issue. Wild boar crash through a grass path beside our tent; Indian cattle nose so close, I see an indentation in the canvas. It is the week before Christmas, and my nine-year-old son, Sascha, and I are glamping at the Shergarh wildlife camp, located on the edge of the Kanha Tiger Reserve in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We are living in proximity to nature, to animals: jackals and…

Arguably, modern poetry in the West begins with lyric, and lyric poetry begins with love. But it is hard to say whether love or poetry is what love poetry is really about. Think of Petrarch and his beloved, Laura. She is remote, remembered, and definitely someone else's wife, a figure to write about, not reach out and touch. Her name rhymes with “aura,” and her lover, inspired by her, becomes the poet laureate. Which might be what he had in mind to begin with. Anthony Walton is a love poet, at least in the poems sampled here. He styles himself not as Petrarch but as Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist whose deployment of multiple authorial identities made him “several / of the greatest poets who have ever lived.” “If I Were…

GARET KEIZER, a contributing editor of Harper's and Virginia Quarterly Review, is the author of nine books, including Getting Schooled and Privacy. One of the advertised features of our old Vermont farmhouse when we purchased it almost 40 years ago was a patch of cultivated raspberry bushes at the back edge of the property, between a hayfield we do not own and a small parcel of woods that we do. Over the years the woods have grown taller and the raspberry bushes ranker, migrating out of the shade and into the field to get more sun. At present, more of them grow on our neighbor's land than on ours, but I continue to tend the plants and pick the berries with his permission. That I have always given away more…

ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His new book is Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl: Nahuatl Poems. “My world was tiny.” —Isaac Babel, “The Story of My Dovecote” to Ofelia Slomianski It is two days before the mother will die. The son is sitting next to her in the living room of her spacious Mexico City apartment, right across from the Perisur shopping center. It is scorching hot: the windows are wide open. He is holding her skeletal hand as she looks unforgivingly into the empty space. What does Irma see? Does she register any sound? With the disease devouring her memory, her extraordinarily varied world is being reduced to a bare minimum. A few months ago, in a sudden resurgence of…

Elaine Pagels is the great popularizer of early Christian history. In books such as The Gnostic Gospels (1979), The Origin of Satan (1995), and Revelations (2012), she has documented both long-repressed and still-in‘uential strains of belief, and sometimes explored in personal terms the draws of religion and spirituality. As a translator of the Greek and Roman pagan classics myself, who has crossed over on a few occasions to translate and comment on sacred literature, I find her diverse and digestible discussions of canonical texts generally quite helpful. But in Miracles and Wonder, Pagels is so uncommitted to the results of objective analysis as to make me wonder whether she is fearful of hurting the feelings and inviting the wrath of religious conservatives. One eye-popping passage in Miracles and Wonder concerns the…

Carbon has gotten a bad name for a good reason: we spew way too much of it into the air. But Paul Hawken reminds us that this problematic molecule is the basis of life itself. Carbon, his very readable synthesis of life on our heating-up, beaten-up planet, begins with the molecule. “Though carbon comprises a tiny fraction of the Earth,” writes Hawken, “a planet without it is a dead rock in space, like a sky without stars, a symphony without sound.” Carbon as chemistry: the element has six protons, plus neutrons and electrons, four of which are available for sharing. There's a lot of sharing going on. Of the molecules in interstellar clouds, 90 percent contain carbon, and of the 33 million substances on Earth, 99 percent contain carbon. Think…

Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster. —Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift, 1975 Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore My love was infinite, if spring make' it more. —John Donne, “Love's Growth,” Poems, 1633 The form of the first flowering plants is unknown; there are various tentative, delicate candidates. To picture a fairly early flower, though, one can, perhaps surprisingly, picture a magnolia—a rather exuberant early effort, as if celebratory of the new way of living. Grasses, birches, and other more restrained forms came later, along with those geniuses of unrestraint, orchids. —Peter Godfrey-Smith, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, 2024 A thought-murder a day keeps the doctor away. —Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear, 1948 The trickle cutting from the hill-crown … I see the whole huge hill…

There's no real substitute for live theater, but during the pandemic lockdown, companies across America hastily threw together online performances to keep their audiences engaged and their actors at least partially employed. “Zoom theater” grew increasingly skillful over the 18 months that theaters were closed, though an essential weirdness remained—that of watching actors in front of individual computers doing their best to interact with other actors in front of their computers. As the lockdown eased, it was possible to bring creative teams together for in-person performances, though the audiences were still remote. Philadelphia's Wilma Theater produced an innovative “all-digital season” in 2020–21: while adhering to Covid safety procedures, actors and crew in a remote farmhouse produced what The New York Times called “beautiful film-stage hybrids” that people could watch online.…

The first time I learned about Enewetak Atoll, I was 10 years old. I'd found a U.S. Army booklet describing the island chain and asked my father about it. He gave me two pieces of information: that there were coconut crabs on Enewetak bigger than armadillos and that he was not allowed to talk about what he did there, ever. My father, G. B. Youmans, was a stiff-necked Georgia man whose credo was, “A promise made is a debt unpaid.” He'd worked as a cable technician on Enewetak in 1954, as part of President Truman's directive, carried out jointly by the Army and the Navy, to test nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands so as “to determine the effect of atomic bombs on American warships.” This assignment required an oath…

CHARLES G. SALAS is an intellectual historian who specializes in the cultural and political legacies of the classical period. He is the university editor in the office of the president at Wesleyan University and previously served as head of research and education at the Getty Research Institute. CARTHAGE, TUNISIA There are many Americans in Carthage, and most are dead. Buried in the North Africa American Cemetery, on the outskirts of this storied suburb of Tunis, they lie in the same mixture of clay and limestone granules that received the remains of Hannibal's Carthaginians during the Punic Wars, some 2,000 years ago. Unlike the Romans (rivals to the ancient Carthaginians) and the French (whose conquest of Tunisia began in 1881), we Americans didn't take this parcel of Africa by force. It…

ADAM GUSSOW is a professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. A professional blues harmonica player and teacher, he is the author of several books on the blues. This essay is adapted from his new book, My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir. When I moved to New York City in 1980 at the age of 22, I almost never went near 125th Street, the unofficial boundary of Harlem, even though I lived only two blocks away in Morningside Heights, across the street from Riverside Church. Harlem, of course, was the beating heart of Black New York: the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg Library, the Apollo Theater, Sylvia's Restaurant. It was also, less than two decades after the scarring riots of the 1960s, a place where white…

LISA RUSS SPARR's most recent books are Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel. Her collection Soul Cake: Poems will be published next year. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the Creative Writing Program. Before she died nearly three decades ago at age 93, my widowed paternal grandmother put her modest farmhouse in order, emptying the attic of what I saw as precious artifacts: children's books and toys belonging to my father and his sister, vintage dresses from John Wanamaker, her 1928 wedding gown, a hooped petticoat belonging to a great-great aunt. She unsentimentally emptied drawers of greeting cards and photographs, gradually consumed the mason jars of tomatoes, peaches, and other bounty she'd…

JEAN McGARRY is the author of 10 books of fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and The Southeast Review. She is the Elliott Coleman Professor Emerita at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. There's something wrong with my face, she thought, taking up the tweezers with the gold tips, but the bathroom mirror was smoky, so the face reflected could have been anyone's. She'd been born 30 years ago with a wine stain like a slap of paint on her neck, but she'd never worn a high collar or scarf. Children wanted to touch it, lovers would lick or bite. She'd been turned down for jobs, even though she could have covered it with a coat of foundation. It was the first thing people…

Adam Plunkett is an eloquent and meticulous writer, and his new biographical study of Robert Frost, Love and Need, is a welcome addition to a long list of excellent books on the poet. In it, Plunkett sets out to trace connections between Frost's life and his work—an inherently precarious undertaking. As one of Frost's many biographers, I have skated on the same thin ice, and I appreciate the dangers. Poems arise from many sources, most of them hidden. Yet Plunkett seems to have understood the diculties before him, and his work adds handsomely to our understanding of Frost, bringing us closer to the poems themselves. Frost's poems grew out of his circumstances, especially his time spent on farms in rural New Hampshire and Vermont, that area he famously called “north…

Vaclav Smil has some questions, as he often does. Why does one-third of the planet's food supply end up in the garbage? Why won't we swear off beef? Which is more important, grains or smartphones? Standard economics calls that last one a near tie: the smartphone market and the global rice and wheat harvest were both recently valued at around $400 billion. Losing our devices would mean great inconvenience, Smil acknowledges, but losing the staple grains that provide 35 percent of global food energy “would result in unprecedented famines and the deaths of a significant portion of today's 8 billion people.” False equivalencies like these are why Smil hates economists. What does make him happy? Raw data. Big numbers. Cataracts of fact. Smil's prose can veer from snappy to gnomic,…

“With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership.” —So wrote Alain LeRoy Locke in his essay “The New Negro,” which appeared in The New Negro: An Interpretation, published a…

When my children were little, I found myself immersed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. Part treatise on education and part novel, Emile calls out the artificiality of social expectations, which can lead to suffering, anxiety, and physical ailments. Rousseau advocates instead for a system of education that can free human beings from the chains of public opinion while fostering virtuous interactions with others. For Rousseau, the arbitrary rules and conventions imposed by society and well-meaning parents only stifle a child's capacity to learn. Sometimes, after days tending to my children, I would read passages aloud to my husband and we'd laugh over the impracticality of Rousseau's suggestions: exposing children to cold weather or setting them loose in the woods so they would get lost and have to find their way home.…

JESSIE WILDE is a writer and filmmaker who creates content for NASA and other government clients. The air was crisp and dry on the top of Mount Lemmon. The peeling white paint of telescope domes turned pink with the setting sun. At an elevation of just over 9,000 feet, we were as close as we could get to the stars outside Tucson. It was a perfect, clear night to hunt for asteroids. My two colleagues and I, all filmmakers, met David Rankin, the telescope operator and resident asteroid hunter, at the gated entrance to the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded project at the University of Arizona that involves searching for near-Earth objects. Rankin was wearing jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the emblem of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO),…

MATTHEW ZIPF is a PhD candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. 1. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Joan Didion and her daughter, Quintana, were looking at a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. The work, Sky Above Clouds IV, hung across a landing, so they had a gulf of air between themselves and the flat white shapes that span a long wall at the museum. It is a giant painting, practically a mural, as wide as the abstract Barnett Newman canvases that you can walk along and let fill the whole of your vision. But this work floats at a distance, celestially, and you just look out at it. There are 192 square feet of clouds. You are in an airplane. “Who drew it?” Quintana…

SHEILA KOHLER'S novels include Cracks, The Bay of Foxes, Dreaming for Freud, and Becoming Jane Eyre. She is also the author of three short-story collections and a memoir, Once We Were Sisters. She teaches creative writing at Princeton and Columbia and this spring will be a writer in residence at the American Library in Paris. I The Father We were not taken to the funeral but were left with an aunt to play in the garden. Afterward, what I remembered were the stones in the rock garden, the spiky cactus, and my shiny new shoes with the bar across the instep. I remembered the brilliant sunlight in my sister Mary's blond, bouncing curls as we tried to balance on the stones, holding hands. We were seven and nine years old,…

Some years ago, in a condition of acute emotional distress, I found myself in the office of the resident psychologist on a unit of a mental institution. Sitting in this psychologist's office on day four of my incarceration, I was wracked by a kind of psychic claustrophobia; I was miserable and scared and desperate to get out. Fueled by panic, I pleaded tearfully that I needed to go home. The psychologist said that leaving in my present state would be a bad idea—and she wasn't wrong— but then she asked if I'd ever had a manic episode or been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I had not, I told her, and I was not having one now. But she seemed determined to pin this diagnostic label on me. At that moment…

We have entered the era of the third- and even fourth-generation World War II memoir. It comes with its own distinguishing features: these grandchildren and great-grandchildren must write not from memory but from investigation, sometimes as dispassionately as if they were outsiders to their own families. In his new book, Children of Radium, the Welsh novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne approaches the task of unearthing his great-grandfather's story with profoundly mixed emotions. Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist who helped develop gas masks and chemical weapons, for a time under the Nazis, until he left Germany in 1935. The story that Dunthorne comes up with provides an illuminating history of the Third Reich's radioactive legacy. But from the start, something human is missing from this book. Dunthorne first tries to…

After God created the Heavens and the Earth and saw that it was good, He thanked Lorne Michaels in his acceptance speech and rested. Lorne said, “Not bad. Now try making something new like that every week for 50 years. While worrying about sponsors.” Then Lorne name-dropped some of the cooler archangels in a story about the time he bought motorcycles with Paul Simon and Zadkiel the Merciful, way back before Creation. God went home exhausted, wondering if maybe Lorne hated him. This might be a slight exaggeration— Zadkiel wasn't born back then—but such is the mythology around Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live and its vast ecosystem of offshoots. His reach in the comedy world borders on the universal: everyone knows someone with a Lorne story. (Mine…