Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2026 i The American Scholar

Some months ago, as she writes in this issue, Vivien Schweitzer heard Richard Wagner's opera Siegfried performed in a historically informed style, with the orchestra playing 19th-century instruments or replicas. Textures were light, tempos fleet, voices nimble; expressive effects such as vibrato were used sparingly. Anyone weaned on the golden age of Wagner recordings might have found the idea bizarre. But I can think of at least one person who would not have felt that way: the late English conductor Roger Norrington. One of the leading lights of the period-instrument movement, the iconoclastic Norrington died in July at the age of 91. With such ensembles as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, he advocated for strict adherence to a composer's metronome markings, while…

Six monks in burgundy robes were seated in six high-backed imitation Louis XIV chairs in a room at the Watergate Hotel. The year was 1984. The center chair was occupied by the Dalai Lama, Tibet's 14th incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion and one of the most famous religious figures on the planet. The Dalai Lama was on a globe-girdling tour to show that though he lived in exile in India, he was engaged in world affairs and was actively supporting the Tibetan people, who were living under the ruthless thumb of China. I was seated in my own Louis XIV replica, facing the Dalai Lama. I knew little about him and nothing about Buddhism, but I was expected, as a reporter for The Washington Post's Lifestyle section, to…

I began to paint in 2023, soon after I turned 70. At an age when I am rarely surprised, I feel I am channeling a new creative impulse while also returning to something from my past. As a young child, I was thought to be talented in art. When I was six, my father submitted one of my crayon drawings—a picture of trees done on brown newsprint paper—to a contest for children sponsored by our local museum. I won first prize, and I still have that drawing. Looking at it now, I can't for the life of me see why it won the contest, unless there was a Cy Twombly fan among the judges. (I note a vague resemblance to the spidery work of that modernist artist.) I left off…

JESS LOVE is the senior director for the Ryan Institute on Complexity at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor's front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn't filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven't held them in a while. I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did…

Facial expression is so unnecessary and sometimes so embarrassing that I often prefer a statue without a head. —BERNARD BERENSON, Piero della Francesca: The Ineloquent in Art The faces are famous, partly because they seem barely variant versions of one face— as heavy-lidded awake as asleep, forthright even when gazing offstage, unsmilingly mild in fulfillment, unruffled by distress: in a nutshell, what they wish is less to hide from expression than to express their hiddenness. Faces on a pillar of neck always thicker than you'd expect. Rock-solid rondure in Mary, whether openly pregnant or postpartum with that hefty baby; in Magdalene cradling her jar of ointment, penitent; in bearded Constantine in his tent dreaming between his pike-wielding sentinels; in the dozing soldiers not startled yet by the torso-pierced Christ, burst…

WILLARD SPIEGELMAN was for many years the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the longtime editor of the Southwest Review. His nine books include Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming collection, My (Lucky) Stars, which will be published in September 2026. Turbot is ambitious brill. Today, these four words are likely to be as indecipherable to most young, or even not so young, people as they were to an impressionable 12-year-old lad in 1957, besotted with language, books, and music but terrified sports. That boy was my preadolescent self, serving a term at a summer camp for Jewish kids in the Poconos. If one was not athletic, competitive, or outdoorsy, there was little respite…

During preproduction of The Lord of the Rings, the hugely successful film trilogy, director Peter Jackson gave a speech to the members of the design team. He asked them to make believe that J. R. R. Tolkien's novel about hobbits and wizards “is real; that it was actually history; that these events happened.” He then told them to go a step further and pretend that “we've been lucky enough to be able to go on location and shoot our movie where the real events” took place. Although the story is high fantasy, Jackson wanted the costumes, creatures, and weapons to have a degree of verisimilitude that would set his movies apart from standard Hollywood epics. And they did: The trilogy grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide, and its final installment, The…

Over seven decades, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso annexed women nonstop. To Marina Picasso, her celebrated grandfather was an obligate carnivore, in life and in art. “He needed blood to sign each of his paintings,” she declared in 2001—the “blood of all those who loved him,” adding later that he “submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, then crushed them onto his canvas.” To generations of art experts, mostly male, a turbulent home life was merely a sideshow to Picasso's phenomenal productivity, which resulted in the paintings that built modernism, from 1907's Cubist marvel Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to the great antiwar Guernica of 1937. Two wives, four cohabitations: What of it? Genius…

Jessica Mitford spent a lifetime shaking off her highborn English heritage. Whereas one of her sisters married Oswald Mosley, Britain's leading fascist, and another became an intimate friend of Adolf Hitler himself, “Decca” devoted herself to fighting for the progressive causes of her era. She and her first husband fellow-traveled with antifascist forces in Spain in the late 1930s. Not long after, as a sudden World War II widow, Decca rebuilt her life in the United States, where she toiled for the American Communist Party and the nascent civil rights movement. Yet Mitford's most public triumph was for a cause that doesn't quite fit the picture: raising public consciousness about the American funeral industry. The American Way of Death, her 1963 best-selling sensation, appeared alongside two other books that captured…

How modest these houses—and so near the church, almost snug up against it. As if the secular and the sacred, as in feudal times, had no strict boundary, and were part of each other. The midcentury church rises up like a massive windbreak sheltering the small houses. No wonder the residents of these tidy postwar homes heard the first shot that sweet late-summer morning, a Wednesday. If the shooter had just pivoted from his position facing the church, he could have taken out someone in the nearest white bungalow. Instantly, these neighbors were calling 911. The cops were there within minutes. Though, of course, too late for two of the children, Harper Moyski, age 10, and Fletcher Merkel, eight, murdered in their pews at a Mass marking the beginning of…

Ask most opera lovers what comes to mind when they think about Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and they'll likely mention the huge voices and lush, booming orchestras of the so-called golden age of the 1930s and '40s—not the transparent, mellow instrumental sounds and light, flexible voices typical of period-instrument performances. Indeed, when I mentioned to friends that I'd recently attended a memorable historically informed performance of Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle, I was met with bemused looks. Beginning in the mid-20th century, the historically informed performance (HIP) movement led to dramatic reinterpretations of Renaissance, baroque, classical, and some Romantic era music. Proponents relied on period instruments (or replicas) and scholarly research to convey the stylistic norms and sounds of those earlier eras. In general, this led to…

HARRIET A.WASHINGTON is the author of Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness and Medical Apartheid. She is a lecturer in bioethics at Columbia University. “Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.” So wrote Langston Hughes in his landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Today, Paul Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, antiracism icon—needs no introduction. But who was Rudolph Fisher? You would not have had to ask in 1926. Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was one of the brightest figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes described him as the “wittiest of…

THOMAS A. BASS is the author of three books on Vietnam, including The Spy Who Loved Us, which was cited by the Overseas Press Club and featured in The New Yorker. His eighth book, Return to Fukushima, on life in nuclear exclusion zones, has recently been published. On April 30, 2025, Netflix released a five-part, nearly seven-hour documentary on the Vietnam war. This marked the 50th anniversary of the fall—or was it the liberation?—of Saigon. The Vietnam war as shown on Netflix does not look like the war that Ken Burns filmed for PBS in 2017. It is not a war “begun in good faith” by honorable men. It is a war begun in bad faith by men who ended up being skunked by history and hubris. The opening shot…

JOSEPH HOROWITZ'S forthcoming book is a novel about Anton Seidl and Wagnerism in America, The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age. His books-in-progress are Bearing Witness: The American Odyssey of Leonard Bernstein and Why Ives? A Celebration of Cultural Memory. The American arts are receding and blurring. Cultural memory—a prerequisite—is fast disappearing. American orchestras, espousing the new, privilege a surfeit of makeshift eclectic music dangerously eschewing lineage. American opera companies „aunt new American operas that are here today and gone tomorrow. What is needed is an informed quest for orientation, for future direction. The Italian-born composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni was a clairvoyant who will never cease to magnetize a coterie of adherents. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), Busoni proposed the notion of “Ur-Musik.” It…

JAMES McMANUS is the author of Positively Fifth Street, Cowboys Full, and eight other books of poetry, fiction, and journalism. His work has appeared in Best American anthologies of Poetry, Sports Writing, Science and Nature Writing, Political Writing, and Magazine Writing. Jimi Hendrix covered the national anthem on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, on August 18, 1969, the last day of Woodstock. The melody had been composed by John Stafford Smith for a London musicians club in 1776. In the years that followed, various celebratory lyrics were written to accompany it on both sides of the Atlantic before Francis Scott Key, having witnessed the end of the British navy's daylong bombardment of Baltimore's Fort McHenry in 1814, penned what became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Among the Americans…

As the title of her book promises, classicist Eve MacDonald does indeed oœer a fresh understanding of Carthage, the much-maligned city of lore. The Punic Wars, ending with Rome's destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, are one of history's most storied spectacles. Told from the victor's point of view: Romans are the heroes, Carthaginians not so much. MacDonald, however, presents the ancient city as a multicultural “place of connectivity,” prosperity through trade, and technological accomplishment. She admires its “heroic warriors, beautiful queens and intrepid explorers” and is tolerant of its flaws, if flaws they be. While acknowledging Greek and Roman characterizations of the Carthaginians (barbaric, wily, greedy, deceitful), MacDonald is determined to hear what the Carthaginians had to say for themselves. Not easy, as their voices were largely erased from…

A little more than 200 years ago, Arthur Schopenhauer arrived at the University of Berlin to offer a course on philosophy—his own philosophy, to be precise, based on a book he had just published, The World as Will and Representation. The class was a miserable -op, drawing fewer than half a dozen students. In part, this was because the book—to cite what one of Schopenhauer's heroes, David Hume, said about his own first book—fell stillborn from the press. But it was also because the 30-something philosopher decided to offer his course at the same place, day, and time as G. W. F. Hegel, the superstar of German philosophy, had scheduled his class. What was Schopenhauer thinking? One of the many merits of David Bather Woods's new biography is his superb…

The problem has stumped many would-be biographers of Shakespeare: The Bard was born in 1564, but no one mentions him before 1592. Jorge Luis Borges's solution? Invent Shakespeare's inner life. Here is Borges on the so-called lost years—from around 1585, when most biographers believe Shakespeare came to London, to roughly 1592, soon after which he wrote Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream: In his twenties he went to London. He had become instinctively adept at pretending to be somebody, so that no one would suspect he was in fact nobody. In London he discovered the profession for which he was destined, that of the actor who stands on a stage and pretends to be someone else in front of a group of people who pretend to take him…

When my son Evan was five years old, he would not let me read him Charlotte's Web. He'd seen both movie versions of the book, beginning with the lousy Hanna-Barbera animation that came out in the 1970s, while E. B. White was still alive and couldn't even roll over in his grave. (White wrote in a letter, “After listening to Wilbur sing ‘I Can Talk, I Can Talk’ … I can take anything. I wanted to run on my sword but couldn't find it.”) Evan had also seen the better but not great movie from 2006, with real people and real animals, and with Wilbur's lips and Charlotte's lips and the other barnyard characters' lips digitally manipulated when they talked. Julia Roberts is the voice of Charlotte, and to be…

In March 2025, when Eli Lilly announced positive results of an experimental drug, lepodisiran, that could significantly lower levels of the lipoprotein Lp(a) and thereby lower the risk of a heart attack for thousands, if not millions, of people, prominent cardiologists called the news “thrilling” and “a huge new frontier in cardiovascular medicine.” According to data presented by Eli Lilly at the 2025 meeting of the American College of Cardiology and cited in a New England Journal of Medicine article, some 20 percent of all Americans have elevated levels of Lp(a). Phase two of the trial involved 320 participants, all of whom were over the age of 40 (the mean age was 62.7). According to Martha Gulati, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, just 0.8 percent of…

PHILIP ALCABES is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at Hunter College, the City University of New York. His writing on health, medicine, and illness has appeared in the Scholar since 2004. He is working on a book about the institution of medicine and public health. Years ago, when I was interned in a psychiatric unit, I watched as a young woman was wheeled in on a gurney. She was about my age and only semiconscious, her pallor nearly as gray as the gown issued to each of us patients. The gray blanket covering her legs and feet and the unit's gray walls gave the whole scene, as I recall, a chilling grisaille, overlayered with apprehension. The accompanying silence was funereal. Sounds baƒed, death was in the air. Penny, as I…

NATILE ANGIER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, among other books. Through the kitchen window, I could see my husband, Rick, in the back yard, his expression grim, his phone pressed against his ear. He was walking in tight circles as he talked, the way he does when he's stressed. I opened the back door and heard a smattering of ominous, dreary words: Stroke. Fall. Hospital. Rick's parents were dead. My father was dead. Our aunts and uncles, nearly all dead. The only possible subject of the conversation was my 94-year-old mother, Adele Angier, who lived in Manhattan, a four-hour drive north of us. Having failed to reach me, my older brother Joe had called Rick. My mother had suffered a stroke…

WILL BOAST is the author of a story collection, Power Ballads; a memoir, Epilogue; and a novel, Daphne. His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Scholar, and other publications. His forthcoming collection, The Submerged, won the 2025 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. It started with the most miraculous haircut Giuliu had ever seen. Signora Azzaro had brought in her 13-year-old son. Every boy in Erice wanted to look like a footballer, but this … The sides had been brought down to near stubble, then textured in tight zigzags like lightning bolts. The top had been made to stand at attention, somewhere between a mohawk and a pompadour, except the front, which fell moodily…

In 1897, Russian physician and scientist Marie de Manacéïne made a startling but necessary observation: “If we pay no attention to sleep, we thereby admit that a third part of our lives is unworthy of investigation.” The quality and content of our dreams and our sleep, she believed, could reveal an immense amount of information about our worries, our memories, the things we learn, and the condition of our bodies. Dreams should never be washed away with the morning splash of water to the face. More than 100 years after de Manacéïne, sleep scientist Michelle Carr, based at the University of Montreal, is shining a light on our sleeping minds. Her new book, Nightmare Obscura, is a thorough and engaging tour through the science and philosophy of our dreaming lives.…

I'm an irrepressible underliner, note scrawler, and corner folder. Over the years, I've developed a personal shorthand to capture my responses to what I've read. Simon Winchester's The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind compelled me to add a new symbol: “TOP,” for Turn of Phrase. I scribbled TOP next to Winchester's description of the jet stream as “enigmatic high-speed snakes of air.” And again, next to his evocation of Trieste's bitter Bora wind: “It tips out of the karst valleys like ice water from a chipped saucer and then swirls into the city with terrific ferocity.” And yet again, next to this incisive couplet: “Today's windmills do not manufacture flour. They manufacture power.” Winchester doesn't merely capture ideas; he elevates, elaborates, denigrates, or explodes…

We were leaving to deliver Christmas presents when the tire blew Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared Down by a storm stood, limbs bared … I want you. —Louise Glück, “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson,” The First Four Books of Poems, 1968 How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing, quacking world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry, February 17, 1838 I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. —Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968 A wild,…