Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2018 i The American Scholar

ON 9/11, I WORKED FOR an outfit whose leader was, among other things, a historian. The morning after the attacks, dozens of us who were his colleagues gathered to hear him offer words of consolation and hope. His tone was neither angry nor bellicose but reflective. He did not dare to propose that history offers a template for the future, but his words were about the past nonetheless. He was old enough to remember vividly the Cuban Missile Crisis, had been a young boy during Pearl Harbor, and had written a book about the Civil War. What history offers at a time like this, he suggested, is the modest reassurance that we have been here before and gotten through it. Don’t despair, he said; don’t be afraid. Part of what…

Although the chambered nautilus has been around for hundreds of millions of years, it does not readily disclose its secrets. This cephalopod, with its tentacle-like cirrus and lustrous shell, is a deep-sea scavenger: odd and obscure, challenging to observe, even more challenging to breed. Inside the husbandry division of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, however, the aquarists (those in charge of the marine life) have been carefully monitoring 150 chambered nautilus eggs, half a dozen of which have hatched since July. No other hatchling in captivity has survived more than a few years. “The life cycle of the chambered nautilus in the wild remains a mystery,” says Ellen Umeda, one of the aquarists. “No one has seen an egg in the wild, and young hatchlings are rarely seen. Therefore, we don’t…

Haste makes waste, handle with care, and a stitch in time saves nine were core adages back when people knew, for instance, the difference between a sparrow hawk and a pigeon hawk, a chicken hawk and a duck hawk. Arcane stuff, huh? And remember penny-wise but pound-foolish? Not all figures of speech have vanished, though, just neckand petand gettingto first base, which Internet porn has subsumed. Nor do we say that people are fish-eyed, lion-hearted, pigeon-toed, horse-faced, bird-brained, and so on. PIN numbers are more germane. Up the creek without a paddle is not the first trope that comes to mind when people suffer losses in the stock market in this epoch of apps. Hurdy-gurdies, pennywhistles, and street violins. Who still really understands proverbs like Don’t look a gift horse…

IN MY FRESHMAN YEAR at Queens College, I had a strange awakening—strange in that the attendant, overmastering emotion was a combination of humiliation and pleasure. My English professor had called me to his desk and handed me the A+ paper I had written on Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and suggested that I make an appointment to see him. This was no ordinary suggestion at the City University of New York, where professors never scheduled regular office hours and only rarely invited students to private conferences. I was uneasy about the meeting, though I imagined that Professor Stone wished simply to congratulate me further, perhaps even to recommend that I join the staff of the college literary magazine, or to enlist my assistance as a tutor. Delusions of grandeur. Modest grandeur.…

IN ALL MY LIFE, it might be the thing I’ve looked for hardest, apart from unrelenting love. A bird: not big or bright, no bird of paradise, no pheasant of Tibet. Instead, a sparrow, a meager lump not quite come into focus in a misty lens. I saw it only once, half a lifetime ago. It’s haunted me ever since, hag of my heart. APRIL 15, 1980 By some measures the morning is voluptuous. Apocalypses are first of all voluptuous, no end of scenic calamities: flesh and muck, fire and monsters. Nothing burns now, but breezes sweep the salt marsh, sprites forming in swirls. Ghosts come and go in a weave of cordgrass. Salt marsh covers the St. Johns River valley in Florida, not that any valley is evident. All’s…

The only thing Dave liked about working at the chicken processing plant—years ago now—was the company of his buddy Miguel. They used to argue over what kind of shit smelled worst, and Miguel insisted it wasn’t chicken shit. “You get used to chicken shit, man! It starts to smell like home, like a nice little chicken house with fat hens making big eggs in their boxes.” “Chicken shit’s the worst,” Dave insisted. “No, man. Hog shit is worse. I would never work in a hog farm.” Dave still missed Miguel. For a year, he had worked beside him in the gutting room at the plant. The plucked chickens, hanging by their feet from a moving belt, arrived in a shroud of steam from the scalding room. All day Dave and…

THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World BY CHARLES C. MANN Knopf, 640 pp., $28.95 ONE OF THE PLEASURES of reading Charles C. Mann’s new book, The Wizard and the Prophet, is the simple pleasure of learning. Mann knows things about the world, lots of things, and if you spend time with him, you will come to know things, too. In this particular book, he introduces us to Norman Borlaug, an agricultural scientist who in 1970 won the Nobel Prize for fathering the Green Revolution that helped feed millions of people around the world, and William Vogt, who Mann claims is the “principal founder” of modern environmentalism. Mann writes about Borlaug and Vogt both as human beings and as symbols of…

Foreign Farm to Table In his Winter 2018 cover story (“Here’s the Beef with Chicken from China”), James McWilliams reports on concerns about the safety of chicken imported from China. Here in Europe, there are similar concerns about chicken produced in the United States. As Britain prepares to leave the European Union, hopes for a U.K.-U.S. free-trade deal are tempered by worries that Britain may be required to accept imported chicken that has been washed in chlorinated water, a practice that is not permitted by strict E.U. food safety rules because of fears that it may be used to mask poor hygiene standards in poultry-processing factories in the United States. The European Union also bans imports of American beef and pork treated with growth hormones. There are three reasons: uncertainty…

1. America’s critical infrastructure—TVA dams, Bureau of Reclamation canals, Corps of Engineers levees—was built in an era of active federal agencies with robust budgets. We’re now moving in the opposite fiscal and ideological direction, when budgets are contracted and federal agencies look for ways to divest their infrastructure responsibilities. Will state and municipal governments be on their own to manage rivers if the feds continue to step away? 2. Much of our local infrastructure—pipes, sewer lines, and treatment plants—is geriatric, poorly maintained, out of date, and in need of massive infusions of capital. The problem is particularly acute in depopulating or stagnating cities, which have declining tax bases to pay for basic water services; the crisis in Flint, Michigan, came about when a city with a declining population began looking…

In the village of Aradas, on the north-central coast of Portugal, a 400-year-old church houses statues dating to the 17th century. The figures look almost lifelike, so uncannily realistic is the depiction of skin tones: you can see rosy cheeks and lips, highlights and shadows around the eyes, even stubble on the chins of men. Yet the statue of Saint Benedict of Palermo is different. Instead of exhibiting subtle flesh tones, his body—hair, face, hands, feet—is painted a single tone of black. In baroque art, says Erin Rowe, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, the “blackness” of black saints “was the central feature of their sanctity that the painters wanted to elevate.” Rowe is writing a book on the spread of devotion to black saints during the…

IT USED TO BE THAT no one talked about cancer. These days we talk about it a lot, and our metaphors are military. The disease is something we battle or fight. Those verbs ennoble and empower us. They disguise the helplessness cancer imposes and the fact that the enemy is inside us, even part of us. Most people being treated for cancer today are in a double position. To overcome the disease, they undergo trials. These involve difficult, sometimes humiliating medical procedures and painful side effects. To be healed, we must be wounded. To defend ourselves, we submit to attack. The disease locates a potentially fatal otherness in the self. Something alien within must be rooted out. J. D. McClatchy—a distinguished poet and one of the world’s leading librettists—explores these…

LAST SUMMER, DANIEL H. WEISS was named president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the United States. In addition to its iconic building on Fifth Avenue, the Met now includes the Cloisters, which is located in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and specializes in medieval Europe, and the Breuer, the former Whitney Museum, currently a showcase for modern and contemporary art. An art historian who has an MBA as well as a PhD, Weiss was dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins University and then president of Lafayette and Haverford colleges before joining the Met about three years ago as president and chief operating officer. I first spoke to him as he was finishing his move into his new office, its…

VICTORIOUS CENTURY: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 BY DAVID CANNADINE Viking, 624 pp., $40 IN THE VERY PLAY on words that is the title of this huge new book by the prolific Princeton historian David Cannadine, there is captured much of what is within. Yes, it is about Great Britain in the Victorian Age (and a bit before that), and it is about the monarchy and empire over which Victoria reigned. Even more, it is about a nearly always victorious people and a nation at the height of its relative power in the world. Victorious Century, the latest installment in the Penguin History of Britain, is a multilayered study, much more than a textbook, yet at the same time a work that can now be regarded as the standard single-volume treatment…

Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening, I love you with the window open. —Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone Jollivet, 1926 Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself. —William Dean Howells, 1894 Finally she went into an elaborate and almost Jesuitical rationalization of the plain fact that she would like to eat another croûte, or perhaps one between us. The gist of her argument (against her mother’s early training? Her damaged liver? Her lifelong war with her voluptuous nature?) was that she knew she would never taste such a beautiful thing again. It was that simple! Of course, the last shared portion we could barely swallow, but…

I grew up in the valley of that mountain, just poor enough that I could imagine a way out. I lived with my mom and a rotating cast of her boyfriends, my father either dead or just checked out. My mother was so vague about him, not a single picture. It seemed like maybe some Greek god had assumed the form of a stallion and impregnated my mother before returning to his home atop a mountain. More likely it was just a pervert in one of the fancy homes that my mom cleaned. I preferred to think he was dead, that he wholly was incapable of saving me from my unhappiness. This school, the Iron Mountain Girls Preparatory School, offered one or two full scholarships each year to girls in…

Belly down on the hot seat, I can feel the liquid StyrofoamShape itself around me as both armor and target.What I can’t feel is the bull’s-eye BB delicately placedDead center on the wrinkled sphincter, as the tattooistInks five blue beads around my pelvis, mappingA constellation that begs to be dubbed Anus Major. The three chemo pillsThere on the kitchen counter—Hard fates to swallow. My nurses, Kamal and Caesar, behaveLike courtiers to the late QM,Steadying me by the elbows on the stepladder,Discreetly hiking up my gown, guidingMy knees as if onto a pew where a kind soulHas ballpointed X’s on the sheet for my knees.Now I am aligned with the routine, and lowerMy face into the rubber crown of officeAs if in shame for what I have doneTo deserve such fear,…

I WAS STANDING IN A ROOM at the National Gallery of Art last October, puzzling at three Dutch paintings of women with parrots: Gerrit Dou’s Woman With a Parrot (1660), Frans van Mieris’s Woman Feeding a Parrot (1663), and Caspar Netscher’s Woman Feeding a Parrot, With a Page (1666). Having come to see the 65 works making up Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, I had already looked at three paintings of women with lutes; two of women with clavichords; a half dozen of women writing, reading, or sealing letters (as well as one of a man writing a letter); two of women weighing coins on a balance scale; three of women washing their hands; and two of women peeling produce—an apple in one case, a…

THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath BY LESLIE JAMISON Little, Brown, 544 pp., $30 THE ARCHETYPE OF THE ADDICT looms large in the American mythos, constellated by paradoxical tales of genius and madness, tragedy and lechery. Who among us doesn’t know someone touched by addiction? Participating in the life of an addict, whether intimately in one’s family or in the realm of literature, invariably brings with it wild vicissitudes of rage, love, thrill, and tedium. It is an affliction, some believe a disease, composed of contradictions, which Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (2014), asks us to behold with more flexibility in her new book, The Recovering. The myth of the addict is one of conflicting narratives, and the way in which stories are told by and about addicts…