Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2021 i The American Scholar

Photographer Maranie Staab has spent the past several years covering social justice and human rights issues, most recently capturing the protests for racial justice in Syracuse, Rochester, Portland (Oregon), and her native Pittsburgh. Another project close to her heart concerns something more solitary: the depiction of a young friend’s battle with cancer. —JAYNE ROSS "I first met Kaylee Marshfield in Syracuse, New York, in August 2018. I had recently moved there to attend graduate school in journalism, and my first assignment was to ‘find a story’ at the New York State Fair. In my first hour at the fair, I saw Kaylee and her family; it was evident that the young girl was not well, as she was near-bald and very thin. After talking with them for a while, I…

LATE ONE WINTER AFTERNOON several years ago, three friends and I were running in a recreation area near my home in Asturias, in northern Spain. Though the area is just a 15-minute drive from the heart of the city, it’s more wilderness than park, and the trail we followed through the woods was rough and sometimes steep. On the uphill stretches we pushed ourselves rather than slow down, recovering our breath when the trail leveled off. So when the other woman in the group lagged unexpectedly on a steep hill, we others kept on to the top, and waited for her there, kicking our toes at the leaves and sticks underfoot. The two men had been conversing as they ran, and they continued talking while I, looking around in the…

It’s hard not to romanticize the year we lived down the street from each other, and I need to remind myself that there were problems for all of us. I FIRST MET BRAD WATSON back in 1997, when my wife and I were living in East Dennis, Massachusetts, on the bay side of Cape Cod. Brad was already 40 when his first book, the short-story collection Last Days of the Dog-Men, was published, and the critical acclaim it received led to a prestigious five-year appointment as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard. Brad was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and having spent much of his life in the South, he liked to play up the Beverly Hillbillies aspect of his move north—the country bumpkin strolling into Harvard Yard with a…

TEST GODS: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut BY NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE Henry Holt, 333 pp., $29.99 ON ITS SURFACE, Test Gods tells the story of Mark Stucky, the lead test pilot for Virgin Galactic, a space tourism startup in Mojave, California, as he flies the company’s experimental space plane to the “edge of space,” 62 miles above the surface of Earth, to become one of the rare non-NASA pilots to earn astronaut wings. The book also charts the birth and ascendancy of private space travel and the brilliant if wacky characters devoted to transforming a concept from science fiction into a commercial reality. At its center, however, it is a story of fathers and sons—and this emotional core ought to grab readers who might not care about…

Flawed but Democratic I must take exception to a statement in Shakhar Rahav’s “The China Model” (Spring 2021), which asserts that “Xi’s rise augured the rise of populist, authoritarian leaders in many countries.” The examples that follow include “Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil,” “the Hungary of Viktor Orban,” and “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.” On what basis is Israel included in this list? Israel is a vibrant, multiparty parliamentary democracy with a free and independent news media. According to the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Israel ranks 27th in the world and is characterized as a “flawed democracy.” The United States is ranked 25th and is also identified as a flawed democracy. There certainly are legitimate grounds on which to criticize Israel’s government and Prime Minister Netanyahu, but Israel’s government cannot…

Aditi Mayer is a sustainable-fashion blogger, photojournalist, labor-rights activist, and speaker. Next year, as a National Geographic Storytelling Fellow, she will report on the social and environmental effects of India’s fashion supply chain. We asked her to pose five questions about the future of fashion in a rapidly changing world. 1 The sustainability movement often poses the question, “What is the most eco-friendly [fill in the blank]?” But sustainability requires context, and to understand fashion, we can’t forget that clothing is a product of agriculture—unless it’s derived from synthetic materials like polyester, a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. Instead of posing one-size-fits-all solutions or defining “eco-friendly” through isolated metrics such as water intake, we need to ask more constructive questions: Is this fiber indigenous to that region? Is the…

ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR AFTER England locked down for the first time, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, I was walking down a wild and overgrown abandoned canal with my young family, looking for frogspawn and other signs of spring. I was 10 days overdue with our third child, deliriously desperate to go into labor, and seeking signs and talismans everywhere. When we found the lumpy soup of proto-frogs, it felt reassuring to me: a symbol of renewal, the circle of life, the planet turning on its axis. I wouldn’t be pregnant forever. We walked on and watched wrens, small and curved as eggs, glide across the path, which was bordered by strongly scented, vivid green wild garlic and freshly unwrapped nettles. We had planned to give our new son…

The Metropolitan Museum of Art At the Met you enter not with a bleeding but an open heart, a heart proudly exposed like those of ancient saints seriously displaying theirs so beautifully on the outside of their blue and red garments, garments of bright colors trimmed with yellow gold leaf and sewn with glowing silver thread. Inside the museum a surprisingly orange-pink mountain rises up out of a dark thicket of young saplings, a lonely lady at a table by a window writing a letter, an ancient Egyptian king sits patiently in a near-empty room. Bright sunlight splashes down through great windows into the entryway where thousands enter to the warmth. That same sunlight shines across vast fields of sunflowers. Two diggers dig the earth somewhere north of your memory.…

I WOULD NEVER HAVE AGREED with Robert Lowell’s comment about the “tranquillized Fifties.” Maybe that’s because I grew up in New York City, which always seemed to pulse with unruly energy. Or maybe it’s because I went to a special high school—Hunter College High School for “gifted” girls, where a clear majority of the students were as unruly, as restless and aspirational, as I was. And maybe, too, because I came from an immigrant family (Niçoise, Sicilian, Russian), I never felt like a regular rule-abiding American. And that was a problem in the supposedly placid (though witch-hunting) McCarthyite ’50s. Most of my friends were like me. I didn’t know anybody who had grandparents without accents. A grandparent, by definition, was a person from the “old country.” Which old country? Any…

I FIRST FELL IN LOVE with director David Fincher after watching Se7en (1995), a film about a fictive serial killer with a menacing softness that lent a poetic flair to the truly monstrous—and that made all of us in the theater sit in the shadow of madness. Fincher’s best film, Zodiac (2007), about the real-life serial killer who preyed on the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s, was also a subtle polemic on the idea of monstrosity. Fincher’s latest film, Mank—which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards this year and won for cinematography and best production design—is no exception. The historical figures it portrays, including Orson Welles, Louis B. Mayer, and William Randolph Hearst, all have a monstrous side. It’s Hollywood, after all. Mank could never have been…

AT THE END OF DECEMBER 2020, a tremendous storm surge hit the seafront of Naples. Waves of more than 30 feet, pushed by a wind that roared at nearly 55 miles an hour, slammed into the central coast of the Bay of Naples with a fearsome energy, driving the city to retreat inside. Pictures of that amazing event, taken from the balconies of apartment buildings or from the cars of the unfortunate people still on the street, made the rounds of the Internet and were reproduced by the main Italian news outlets. Some days later, I drove the short distance to the center of Naples to give a copy of my just-published novel to a gentleman who had written a blurb for the back cover, a retired top editor of…

I HAD A SORROW I COULD NOT SHAKE. It tailed me, waited for me around corners and whispered from the shadows. Sometimes it seemed to jump into my path. Because of it, I resolved to go for a walk. A long one. Although hardly young, I elected to go to the back side of the Himalaya, near the edge of the Tibetan plateau. I would go walking with doctors, nurses, and Buddhist clerics to deliver health care in a land where trained clinicians rarely go. I hoped to absorb the medicos’ approach to caring for people even when the care could not cure, even when routine ailments, for want of laboratories, scanners, and operating rooms, resisted their powers. Perhaps their dilemma might teach me about my own. The planetary disasters…

NAPOLEON HAD TWO ARMIES: one for conquering nations, the other for gathering their artifacts. At its height, the Grande Armée numbered nearly 700,000—infantry, cavalry, and artillery capable of military dominance across the European continent. On its heels, legions of antiquarians and scholars systematically captured the cultural treasures of subjugated states. It was the success of this second army that made Napoleon’s France the greatest European empire since Rome. The Horses of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the Vatican’s Apollo Belvedere, the Egyptian sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, the Rosetta Stone—all were packed onto ships and sent to the Louvre. Napoleon’s dual armies make a great deal more sense if we accept two principles put forth by the art historian Albert Elsen: first, that art can tell people who they are and…

AMERICAN REPUBLICS: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 BY ALAN TAYLOR Norton, 554 pp., $35 “BEFORE THE WAR, it was said ‘the United States are,’ ” noted the late novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote. “Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always ‘the United States is.’ … And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’ ” This would be a remarkable testament to the reconciliation that followed the Civil War if only it were true. Pace Foote, conceptualizations of the United States in the singular and the plural were in wide circulation during the early republic, and though the singular would eventually become conventional, it was a…