Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i The American Scholar

Emily Katz Anhalt has taught undergraduates for nearly 40 years, and never before, she reports in this issue, has she seen such a crisis in mental health, with students who are poorly rested, unable to concentrate, and prone to feelings of sadness, fury, and despair. Well, times are tough. And college sophomores aren’t the only ones these days suffering from sustained anxiety. Anhalt, however, believes that all of us can learn to cope with the adversity in our lives by embracing the humanities: “Literature, history, philosophy, and art carry us beyond ourselves and our own limited experience and timespan, empowering us to assess and benefit from the achievements, suffering … and errors of people—real and fictional—throughout the ages.” During the early days of the pandemic, while others were discovering The…

PAUL CRENSHAW is the author of the essay collections This One Will Hurt You, This We’ll Defend, and Melt With Me. His work has also appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, and Tin House. In the fall of 1989, my senior year, I bought a handgun in the lobby of my high school library. It was a cheap .25 caliber, small enough to fit in my front pocket. The guy who sold it to me, a fellow student, said it was unregistered. He said it was something I didn’t want to get caught with. For several years, I kept the gun in the glove box of my truck. Each morning, before I drove to school, I would check to make…

ERIC MCHENRY is a poet and critic whose work has appeared in The Yale Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and The Threepenny Review. He teaches creative writing at Washburn University and is a former poet laureate of Kansas. Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man. Mattison found it in The Land Where the Blues Began, a celebrated memoir and cultural history by the folklorist Alan Lomax. According to one of Lomax’s sources, Charlie Idaho was a powerful Mississippi levee contractor who once murdered an SPCA humane officer who’d come to inspect Idaho’s mules for abuse or overwork. “He walked Charlie Idaho’s line from end to end. Ain’t been able yet to find a…

SIERRA BELLOWS lives in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gulf Coast, Meridian, Greensboro Review, and the Scholar. At the beginning of last year, I decided that if I could cut my family’s weekly expenses, not including mortgage payments, to $400, then our life would be better. Optimized. Simpler. Less cluttered. There had to be a trick to it, a hack, such that if I gave up the small stuff, I’d be able to afford what I wanted the most. After spending the pandemic with my family constrained to our little house in Ottawa, I wanted to swim in the ocean; eat ripe, flavorful fruit in January; or walk through a city where I didn’t know the language. My husband and I had been carrying a…

In the crowded field of problematic male modernists, Paul Gauguin leads the pack. There is arguably no 19th-century painter with a lousier public approval rating. The charges against him are varied and severe. He drove Vincent van Gogh to madness, then abandoned him in Provence, severed ear and all. Years later, he pulled a similar vanishing act on his wife, trading marriage for dissolution in French Polynesia. In Tahiti and the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa, Gauguin used his colonial privilege to bed Indigenous girls of 13 and 14, leaving painted records of his conquests—to say nothing of the illegitimate children he fathered or the venereal disease he transmitted. With such a reputation, Gauguin is not an obvious candidate for a new biography. But as Sue Prideaux contends in the…

In any book about the evolution of nuclear weapons, a few pages are always dedicated to the discovery of fission and other early developments in nuclear physics. These words often seem to have been written more out of duty than from ardor. And yet the authorial obligation is a necessary one. Understanding the science that underlies the invention of the atomic bomb is a prerequisite to following the more dramatic events to come. After all, how else is one to understand the etymology of “curie” as a unit of measure? Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds makes a surprising choice: What if the prerequisite pages were the entire book? What if the author simply told the story of the science itself, from the beginning to the invention of thermonuclear weapons? Destroyer…

Years from now, perhaps it is the dress you will remember most. I recall the first time I saw it, at sunrise, on a summer morning in July 2000: it was celestial white, made of cotton and sailcloth, billowing elegantly in the welcome breeze, wrapped around a 30-foot, steel-framed mannequin atop the historic Coal Tower in Charlottesville, Virginia, hard by the railroad tracks. An early riser, I was bringing coffee home that morning when the haunting dress appeared to the east, looming over the surrounding landscape. I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t know that the dress had found its way there in the evening of the day before, or that it had been installed with the help of a crane from Richmond that had to…

Similes! I have hundreds of them on three-by-five notecards, highbrow and lowbrow, copied from newspapers, comic strips, sonnets, billboards, and fortune cookies. My desk overflows with them. They run down to the floor, trail across the room into the hallway. I have similes the way other houses have ants. Why? To start, for the sheer laugh-out-loud pleasure of them. “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.” From time to time, I’ve tried to organize my collection,…

LINCOLN CAPLAN, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and a lecturer in English at Yale, is the author of six books about legal affairs, including Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire and The Tenth Justice: The Solicitor General and the Rule of Law. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker and a member of The New York Times editorial board. He is a contributing editor of the Scholar. In September of 2022, the stormy remains of a giant typhoon struck 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline. Waves more than 50 feet tall and winds around 90 miles per hour beat up 40 low-lying communities, ravaging beaches, ripping up roads, and ruining houses. The storm caused fires and power outages, spoiling fish and game…

Fruitless A grief of salt over a deer’s last leap, collapse ofthat crystal palace over the fatal synaptic blink, riseninto a fifth day of indignity. Absolved,she softens. The township’s embossed herwith acid. Unhinged, she is: pelt split, within visible, stingdissolving acts: nosing apples, lying with sisters.Fractals disguise the isolate body.Why me? is a fruitless question, and dangerous.Snowflakes touch her unseeing eye, the feminine tense,It had been before it never was and never will be again. Horizon The hatchlings wrestle from gum and yolk, sealedenvelope or leather-bound diary,picking the lock with an egg tooth, which falls after a day,and the horizon is compass, is the will to liveencoded for millennia, so they courage on with jelliedsiblings toward the saline. Let there be notconfusion of photography or artificial white wave tipsof a…

BEN SLOTE is Professor Emeritus of English at Allegheny College. His scholarship has focused on late-19th- and 20thcentury American fiction and culture. Currently he is writing essays and plays. This plant would like to growAnd yet be embryo;Increase, and yet escapeThe doom of taking shape;Be vaguely vast, and climbTo the tip end of timeWith all the space to fill,Like boundless IgdrasilThat has the stars for fruit.— from Richard Wilbur’s “Seed Leaves” (1964) John Mangine stands in his basement before a large square canvas, pausing between brushstrokes. He cannot pause long. It’s mid-February 2024, and a collection of his bright, abstract acrylic paintings is scheduled to go up in a local gallery in two months. He’s not ready for the show, so he works quickly. “Maybe one out of 16 things…

ROBERT WILSON’S first novel, The Love You Take, will be published in the fall. He is the author of biographies of Clarence King, Mathew Brady, and P. T. Barnum. He was the editor of the Scholar for more than 17 years. Unlike so many of us in our generation, my friend Michael Griswold kept his nerve after graduating from college. He did not slink off to grad school or to study law. In those days, as the war in Vietnam staggered to a close and the churches emptied of skeptics and hedonists such as we prided ourselves on being, the old careers we read about in English novels, of military officer or clergyman, were no longer under consideration by a young man in search of a profession. Business was likewise…

Investigative journalist Mariah Blake’s They Poisoned the World will inevitably be likened to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s 1962 account of the chemical pollutant DDT was a national wake-up call that inspired the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Blake’s book, a masterly expose of the chemicals known as PFAS—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—similarly reveals the extent to which these toxins permeate our planet. Let us hope that it also leads to the kind of policy shift that a story of this magnitude demands. PFAS are synthetically produced chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine. Fluorine, sometimes called Lucifer’s gas, was long feared by scientists because of its tendency to burst into flames on contact with water. But when carbon chains are swaddled in fluorine, the resulting molecule takes on extraordinary…

To the east and west, they call it “flyover country,” a place where there is supposedly nothing worth knowing or seeing—a flat, boring land covered by grass or wheat and corn, stretching from the Rockies almost to the Mississippi River. Although it provides much of their supply of food and energy, many Americans and Canadians prefer to ignore it. Some, however, want more out of that interior country than electricity or protein. They want myth and romance. Sea of Grass offers plenty of those desirables, but does it offer a plausible future? Coauthors Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, both reporters at The Minnesota Star Tribune, aim at a grand new overview of the North American grasslands and their history over the past 200 years. The region has many names, but…

Curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form. -Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947 Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. … Some people have pulled the lamppost down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. … Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark. -G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905 As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees…

A spooky painting by Francisco Goya has haunted me for decades. Painted around 1820 on a wall of the artist’s house and later transferred to canvas, it depicts two men, standing deep in mud or perhaps quicksand, holding cudgels poised to strike each other. They are alone in a stark landscape. The lighting suggests the sun rising or dying. Neither man sees the surrounding hills, or the vast sky, or even the mud. There is a fierceness in the way they are posed. They will not stop. Each is concerned with only one thing: to bash the other’s brains in. One is already blood streaked, but neither is close to being vanquished. One favors an overhand strategy; the other prefers a sidearm stance. Either approach would probably do the job.…

I solve my jigsaw puzzles in my dining room, on a little platform that rests atop four thin drawers designed for sorting and storing. I start by pouring the puzzle pieces onto the platform, turning them face up, and arranging them into categories helpful to the eventual solving. One drawer is reserved for straight-edged pieces, and the other three get pieces of similar themes or colors, pieces that seem as though they will eventually make up some distinguishing feature of the larger image—a mountain ridge or teacup, perhaps. It’s a good system. And yet, as I stared at my latest puzzle—a 1,000-piece reproduction of William Morris’s leafy, lovely Tree of Life tapestry—no obvious categories presented themselves, save for the border pieces. Even those were dismayingly similar in color and pattern,…

EMILY KATZ ANHALT teaches classical languages and literature at Sarah Lawrence College. Her publications include Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny, and the forthcoming Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times: Why Humanity Needs Herodotus, the Man Who Invented History. The mood on campus this spring was grim. At Sarah Lawrence College— where I teach classical languages, literature, and history to undergraduates—many students appeared anxious, lonely, and depressed. Tuned in to social media and alarmed by contemporary political turmoil, they complained of insomnia and an inability to concentrate. Some seemed incapacitated by life’s ordinary, inevitable pains—a failed romantic relationship, the loss of a beloved pet, an arduous homework assignment. Some expressed hatred toward themselves and their own bodies. Sad and…

MARK PHILLIPS is the author of My Father’s Cabin. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Commonweal, and Salon, among other places. On a summer afternoon when restlessness nudged me from my vacation cabin, I hiked into the forest, taking no compass or map or GPS or cell phone, and without informing anyone, including myself, of where I was headed or when I expected to be back. About an hour later, I spotted a small stand of old-growth timber that I’d never noticed before and hurried toward it, as if to overtake the hemlocks and maples before they could flee, and then to another such stand, where again I gazed upward with the awe I usually feel when in the presence of old trees. While departing the…

Does biography illuminate the work of an artist? James Joyce slyly poked at this age-old question in his 1922 novel Ulysses. In one of the book’s many meandering scenes, Stephen Dedalus and a group of literary associates banter at the National Library of Ireland. Stephen spins out his theory that various characters in Hamlet stand in for Shakespeare himself. Yet Joyce gives the episode’s best line to another character who regards interest in writers and their lives as an unseemly distraction: “Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.” Ulysses is immortal as well: brilliant, infuriating, hilarious, unfathomable—an unrivaled colossus of modern literature. Who could write such a novel? An English professor at Northwestern University…

A shaman, according to Manvir Singh, “is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination.” If the definition seems efficient but unimaginative, you’ve got the gist of Shamanism. Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis and a frequent New Yorker contributor, seeks to understand shamanism from a global perspective. What are the attributes that link shamanic rituals across geographic, religious, cultural, and linguistic spheres? Is it possible, in a Levi-Straussian approach, to draw broad conclusions about the entire human condition? This ambition, frankly, is a distraction. Singh’s book is both exhaustive and exhausting. He stayed for prolonged periods with Mentawai communities on Indonesia’s Siberut Island and observed Indigenous ceremonies in Colombia’s rainforests. At every turn, he…

When nature needs an attorney, rivers make star plaintiffs. In 2017, New Zealand’s third longest watercourse, the Whanganui, received the rights of a legal person, thanks to pressure from Maori leaders. This spring, the district council for Sussex’s hardworking Ouse affirmed its right to flow free and untainted to the sea—welcome news for all Britain’s rivers, since 100 percent of them are now polluted beyond legal limits. In his 10th book—Is a River Alive?— British travel writer Robert Macfarlane chronicles the murder-for-profit of rivers worldwide; a watercourse can be strangled, poisoned, entombed, stolen, erased. His young son has no doubts about river selfhood— “Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!”—but both are alarmed by visits to the springs near their home,…