Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2022 i The American Scholar

WHEN THE SCHOLAR turned 75 in 2007, we asked our friend the historian Ted Widmer to read through the whole run of the magazine, something he did cheerfully, or at least without complaint. In his witty report, he detected, among other things, a tendency in the publication to overcelebrate even inconsequential anniversaries—although, by the 50th, he observed, “there was no longer a vivid sense that the magazine’s survival constituted a miracle worthy of beatification.” Still, in that general vein, Widmer asked at the end of his piece, “Will there be a 100th anniversary?” He ran through a gloomy litany of why there might not be: “Sound bites are shrinking, attention spans narrowing, and public language is degraded 24/7, from the vapid ad slogan to the lying speech to the vowelless…

SOME PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES are separate from everyday life; others, such as the culinary arts and architecture, intrude. Like a chef cooking for her family, an architect who is building a home, buying a home, or even furnishing a home, inevitably brings a professional bias to the task. So it was for me. During our time together, my wife, Shirley, and I shared six homes. I was not one of those architects who imposed their own ideas on others—not that that would have been possible with Shirley. Her strongly held views on domestic matters were often more practical, and more original, than mine. After years of looking at and visiting buildings with me, she had absorbed an architectural ethos, which she combined with her own innate taste. Of course, it was…

When I was 14, I lost my virginity to David Flower, the future congressman. My parents had moved us, the summer before, from Cambridge to West Virginia. They were junior co-hires in public health at WVU, but they wanted to live way out in the country, in a hamlet named Glory, to be closer to their research: obesity and its correlation with diabetes, cancer rates, and other misery. Of course, Glory was also, as the locals said, real beautiful. That fall, I started at Glory Unified High. There he was in homeroom. “Welcome, Dave,” the teacher said, and David Flower corrected him. The other boys wore camo jackets, lewd novelty T-shirts, their crimson and gold football jerseys. David had only khakis and an oxford, tucked tightly in. Sometimes he came…

THE UNINNOCENT: Notes on Violence and Mercy BY KATHARINE BLAKE FSG Originals, 224 pp., $17 IN THE UNINNOCENT, Katharine Blake, an adjunct professor at Vermont Law School’s Center for Justice Reform, confronts a horrific murder committed by her cousin Scott, who as a teenager received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. In detailing the facts, the aftermath, and her attempts to connect with Scott, Blake ruminates on the nature of heartbreak, forgiveness, family, justice, mercy, and redemption. The Uninnocent is a hard book. It is not hard to read: the slim volume is filled with Blake’s lilting, at times poetic sentences—the cellblocks in San Quentin Prison are “like library stacks, rows and rows of stories down every dimly lit hall.” Her spare and often gorgeous prose is…

THE BOOK OF ALL BOOKS BY ROBERTO CALASSO (TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY TIM PARKS) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $35 THE VENERABLE ITALIAN publisher and writer Roberto Calasso passed away in July, at age 80. Called “a literary institution of one” by The Paris Review, he spent half of his life writing a series of esoteric books about the ancient forces that drive modern civilization, with works ranging in subject from Greek and Hindu mythology to Ka›a to Baudelaire’s artistic circle. In The Book of All Books, the 10th installment in the series, Calasso turns to the Hebrew Bible, itself an anthology of books produced over the course of a millennium. Among and even within those books are anthologies of various sources, different versions of the same story…

The light from the full moon lent a silky, glacial sheen to the towering front of the cloud, which stretched off to the horizon in both directions. I stood transfixed as it made its way down the street toward me at a little over the town’s speed limit. Ripples and undulations on its front face rose up and disappeared over the top as it progressed, making it appear to revolve back on itself. It was immense—blocking out the moon and the Southern Cross as it passed over, casting the town into shadow. The back of the roll looked quite different from the front—a falling, Cumulus-like wall of cauliflower mounds, silver and black in the moonlight. This was the cloud that I had crossed the world to see. —Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The…

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. His forthcoming book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, will be published in March 2022, and his Sub-stack newsletter, “The Hinternet,” broadly covers the Internet’s place in human culture and history. We asked him to pose four questions about the future of the Internet. 1 The early dream of a “cosmopolitan Internet,” a global network of computers connecting us without friction across national boundaries, will continue to recede in the coming years. Of course, international communication will continue, but a combination of algorithmic nudging and outright censoring will ensure that the Internet looks very different from country to country, whether because of government propaganda or private enterprise marketing.…

HEATHER TRESELER’S POEMS are as full of closely observed, telling detail as realist prose fiction. They tell vivid stories about the constraining norms of class and gender. They also evoke the potential for escaping or transforming those constraints by putting it “all on the line.” The phrase suggests risk, intensity, self-exposure, and honesty. It is also a punning way to speak of the writing of poetry. In “Cul-de-Sac,” Treseler’s narrator remembers growing up on a comfortable street with no outlet, a dead end where the squat houses met in a circle, eyeing one another, “envious” of this one’s paint job or that one’s carport. Her father made sure the lawn was trimmed the way his barber cut his hair—“boy’s short, regular”—while her mother dusted “porcelain figurines and never-used, quaintly /…

Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood are journalists based in Pakistan. Imtiaz is the author of the novel Karachi, You’re Killing Me! and has published articles in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Marie Claire, and Saveur. Masood has written for NPR, Dawn, HuffPost India, and Samaa and was a finalist for the 2020 Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize. They are collaborating on a nonfiction book, Society Girl, that examines the role of women in 1970s Pakistan. In this excerpt, we revisit the mysterious, unsolved death of the renowned Urdu poet and civil servant Mustafa Zaidi, whose body was found alongside an unconscious Shahnaz Gul—a socialite who was the subject of several of Zaidi’s verses. Ensconced in Mustafa’s rooms, Shahnaz and Mustafa drank coffee, an upper-class affectation that neither of them…

That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog shit on his verdure. Mother, meanwhile, absolved counters of crumbs, paired two dozen socks to matching mates, hummed some half-remembered Sinatra song as she dusted the porcelain figurines and never-used, quaintly painted China plates. In the antic business of having nice things, the obligation of display: a furnishing. Each squat house in our street’s orb eyed the other, envious of another’s paint job, carport or owner. Left alone, I built model planes with my torn-pocket parachutes. Rode a blue scooter in dizzying loops of the prescribed circle.…

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED: A Memoir BY EDWARD SOREL Knopf, 227 pp., $30 EDWARD SOREL’S Profusely Illustrated manages to fuse art and autobiography with an unusual warmth and panache. Meant to be a “portfolio” of his best illustrations, cartoons, caricatures, and magazine covers, it also describes his “remarkably unremarkable life.” He tells us that “this book is essentially an attempt to save a few of my drawings from the oblivion that is the usual fate of ephemeral magazine art.” But Sorel is much too modest about his accomplishments. Over the past 60 years or so, he has given us some of the most original, biting, funny, and disturbing caricatures that anyone in this country has ever produced. Born Edward Schwartz in 1929, he grew up in a tenement in the heartland of…

THE IMPOSSIBLE ART: Adventures in Opera BY MATTHEW AUCOIN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 301 pp., $28 MATTHEW AUCOIN HAPPILY wrestles with multiple impossibilities in this highly personal book. In vivid, granular detail, he explores composers and operas he loves, from Claudio Monteverdi in 17th-century Italy to contemporary British composers Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Adès. He also highlights the process of writing two of his own three operas: Crossing, a work about Walt Whitman dating from 2015, and Eurydice, which premiered in February 2020 at the Los Angeles Opera and made its Metropolitan Opera debut this fall. Now 31, Aucoin is one of classical music’s brightest stars—winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, cofounder of the innovative American Modern Opera Company, and a former Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He…