Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2024 i The American Scholar

If you were swept up in solar eclipse mania—as was Jessica Wilde, who writes about her obsession in this issue (“Corona Chasers,” Tuning Up)—then you may have read about the place now dubbed “the total eclipse crossroads of America.” That would be the small southern Illinois town of Carbondale, which, for the second time in seven years, found itself in the path of totality. On April 8, some 50,000 people descended on Carbondale to gaze up at the sky, increasing the town’s population on that day by 230 percent. Housing was at such a premium that the Motel 8 was booking rooms for $1,000 a night. I was born in Carbondale in 1973, and I can tell you, nothing like this happened when I lived there. Indeed, nothing much ever…

I was telling a white friend about my great-grandfather, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and college professor who began his career in the 1890s, when her face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Was he married to a white woman?” she asked. Stunned, I stammered, “No,” and explained that in South Carolina—where laws prohibiting intermarriage dated back to the 1700s—it might have cost him his life just to have gazed too long in a white woman’s direction. Our conversation was decades ago, but I still sometimes marvel at how little my friend knew of Black history, and how her ignorance (there’s no other word for it) fueled the incredible assumption that a Black man could have made something of himself only by marrying a white woman. Though I tried to explain, I’m not sure…

JOSHUA PRAGER is the author of three books, most recently The Family Roe, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. A former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, he received a literature award in 2023 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters. His website is joshuaprager.com. On August 16, 1918, a bookkeeper in Denver named George Eyser wrote a will. He was not married and had no children. And so it was to his only sibling, his sister Ottilie, with whom he lived in a twostory brick house at 420 Downing Street, that he bequeathed his property and possessions: money, the proceeds from an insurance policy, a gold watch and chain, a scrapbook that…

SANDRA BEASLEY is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, and the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She lives in Washington, D.C. It’s my first full night in Homer, Alaska. I arrived in Anchorage last night, sleeping fitfully on an airport massage chair. Now I have a cabin all to myself, a desk with a window view, and the company of five other writers for the month of June, all of us here for a writing retreat. Our residency is on the coast of Cook Inlet, a crescent of sloping forest with the Kenai Peninsula to the east. The mountains across the water are etched blue on blue, capped in brightest white. Really, these mountains are volcanoes, Iliamna and Augustine,…

WENDY SMITH is a contributing editor of the Scholar and the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. Greek myths were among my favorite stories when I was little, thanks to Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s charmingly illustrated (and thoroughly sanitized) collection of retellings for children. When I was older, Edith Hamilton’s non‡ction and Mary Renault’s novels introduced me to the society that invented those myths. In my teens, I read The Iliad and The Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s poetic English renderings and was swept away by their epic accounts of heroism and adventure. Several decades later, however, I began to have mixed feelings about these literary cornerstones. While I was reading the myths to a son not long past his toddler years, it occurred to…

Five years ago, still struggling to explain Donald Trump’s political success, The New York Times alighted on the 1619 Project, by which one could view Trump’s election as merely one manifestation of the racism that, per the project, has always de˜ned American life. Phrases such as white supremacy, systemic racism, and white privilege became conversational boilerplate, and to people of a certain cast of mind, it all suddenly seemed so obvious and simple. John Ganz’s book is something of a 1990 Project: an attempt to locate the proximate origins of MAGA success in the combative and at times racially sordid right-wing fringe of the early 1990s. Foreshadowing abounds. Pat Buchanan demagogues the Mexican border and seems amused when a liberal protester gets roughed up at one of his rallies. David…

In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectually challenging things … for a machine to do.” One month later, Google released an AI program that did exactly what he’d deemed impossible. It’s easy to chuckle at Poggio, but the pace of technological change nowadays leaves many of us dizzy—and according to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer, we ain’t seen nothing yet. This book builds on Kurzweil’s 2005 title, The Singularity Is Near, which argued that accelerating advances in computer science and other domains, coupled with positive feedback loops, would eventually produce a superhuman intelligence far…

Football games at Louisiana State University draw tens of thousands of fans to Tiger Stadium and its environs. A sea of revelers, clad in purple and gold, spills out in all directions, and a first-time visitor—washed along to the tailgating lots northeast of the gridiron—might be surprised to come across a pair of grassy knolls lying between the Huey P. Long Fieldhouse and the student union. Known as the LSU Campus Mounds, these 20-foot hillocks, according to the university, “are among the oldest human-made edifices in the Americas,” and research shows that they were carefully aligned with one of the brightest stars in the night sky. In 1999 they were added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in recent years the university has begun fencing them off on…

In my early 20s, having received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, I sought to cobble together a living by teaching. Although I had taught an undergraduate class as part of my fellowship, I hadn’t yet published a book, so the only such work available to me was intermittent and, often, unconventional. I spent the first summer after I graduated not working with words but performing the same kind of maintenance and handyman tasks that had helped pay for college—this time for the university from which I had just received an expensive degree. Some of the rooms I cleaned and refurbished had recently been vacated by the students I had just taught. As my summer maintenance work came to an end, I found a part-time job teaching creative…

In her new book of poetry criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, Ange Mlinko identifies two contrasting lyric styles: the plain and the ornate, or the Temperate and the Tropical. The poets Mlinko treats in that book, all captivated by Florida, are representatives of the Tropical. Wallace Stevens and James Merrill are two examples. Their poetry is abundant and ornamental, given to excess and flourish, like the lush southern landscapes that inspired them. Stevens and Merrill were snowbirds. Mlinko too is a non-native Floridian who finds in the region a warrant for the stylistic extravagance and exuberant wordplay of her own poems. Driving south toward her adopted home, she passes “the intangible line / beyond which bougainvillea grows.” The appearance of the rebright flower announces a shift in both…

DENNIS McFARLAND’s most recent novel is Nostalgia. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the Scholar, among other places. In the last scene of Carla Abdala-Diggs’s musical Federal Agent, set in ctional Argos, Ohio, the local undertaker is turned away from the home of the town’s beloved mayor. A former intelligence analyst with the FBI, the mayor has recently dropped dead of an apparent heart attack. It’s a shocking turn in a complicated story in which the mayor’s history-professor daughter squeezes confessions out of him about some shady tactics the agency used in the Filiberto Ojeda Ríos case. When the undertaker arrives at the mayor’s house to collect the body, the mayor’s wife and daughter refuse him with the heartwrenching duet “Too Soon.”…

In June 1860, the Oxford Natural History Museum hosted an open plenary session on a new book, The Origin of Species. Two thousand people turned up, a prizefighters’ crowd. The discussion period got seriously out of hand. The aftershocks of that day are with us still. In Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin, physician and medical historian Howard Markel portrays the two years surrounding the publication of Darwin’s dangerous text. The vital close-up is an oratorical duel between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of the Church of England, defending Creation-based natural history, and Darwin’s stand-in, London biologist Thomas Huxley, who advocated for fact-led research. Their mythic conflict still fascinates. Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin By Howard Markel W. W. Norton, 368 pp., $35 Emphasis on mythic. For Markel, the…

In Japan, on a cold day in the winter of 2012, Australian writer Richard Flanagan stood at the entrance of the mine where his father had labored as a POW during the Second World War. He found “no memorial, no sign, no evidence … that whatever had once happened had ever happened.” The following year, Flanagan published The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a novel inspired by his father’s experiences that won the 2014 Booker Prize. Flanagan’s new book, Question 7—named for the seventh question in Anton Chekhov’s “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician”—is a collection of fragments of memoir, fiction, and history. Together they form an account of various historical events that have affected, albeit often indirectly, the lives of Flanagan and members of his family. Flanagan writes…

In August 2017, my husband, Josh, and I traveled to South Carolina to see a total solar eclipse for the first time. Filled with wonder and awe at the ghostly halo of our sun’s corona, we became eclipse chasers. In 2019, we witnessed this astronomical event in Chile’s Elqui Valley. And this year, on April 8, when a total solar eclipse crossed North America from Mexico to Canada, I was in the path of totality once more, this time in Texas. Alas, it will be 20 years until I’ll have the chance to witness a total eclipse again, at least in the contiguous United States. (Planning for Spain 2026 is underway.) When I try to explain what it is like to watch a total solar eclipse, I often refer to…

American Fiction is the film I’ve been waiting for since I majored in ’lm studies at Columbia University more than two decades ago. Only 27 minutes into it, I was compelled to stop, not only so that I could contemplate the beauty and complexity of this quintessential American story, but also because I couldn’t help seeing my own life reflected in its story lines. The film’s protagonist, Thelo nious “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright), is a writer of literary fiction. But because his work isn’t deemed “Black” enough, it is of little interest to the publishing industry. What’s missing from his writing, as Monk himself acknowledges, are certain kinds of characters: “Black people in poverty, Black people rapping, Black people as slaves, Black people murdered by the police, old…

The Bougainvillea Line Driving south, I cross it—the intangible line beyond which bougainvillea grows, beyond which the land is flagrant. It’s not exact; there is no sign as with a border, so everybody knows. It doesn’t waft to me; it’s not even fragrant. When I see the burning bush, alarm feels like joy. Staring intently can’t sear the retina, yet to capture the exactness of its hue, a swarm of violet tones descants in throes of blind rapture. Fire here, re there, a phoenix bent to a wall: flames trimmed to the shape of an arch or a carport. Still, no emergency crews are present. It maintains its delicate crêpe, burning out with a petulant sizzle. * Éblouissant, it evokes elsewheres whose ghosts aren’t nourished, because the lime-lit ground and…

JAY NEUGEBOREN is the author of 23 books. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The New York Times and have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His latest novel, After Camus, was published earlier this year. On an early spring afternoon in 1965, a month or so before my 27th birthday, I was browsing in a bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 1964. Leafing through it, I thought of how dearly I’d love to have one of my stories chosen for this annual anthology, which had been edited by Martha Foley for more than two decades. My literary career was, at…

Araminta Ross, or “Minty,” was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1820s. Catastrophe marked her early life. She was six years old when she was sent away from her mother to work as a weaver; three of her sisters were sold into the Deep South. As a teenager, Minty suffered a blow to the head, delivered by an overseer, that left her prone to chronic pain, nightmares, visions, and epileptic seizures. In her early 20s, she adopted her mother’s given name and her husband’s surname—and that is how history remembers her, as Harriet Tubman. “Names were important to enslaved people,” Tiya Miles writes in Night Flyer. Tubman was hardly the ˜rst formerly enslaved person to reinvent herself. But most people did so after escaping bondage; Tubman began…

In The Missing Thread, alongside the female stars of classical antiquity, like Sappho, Cleopatra, and Boudica, British classicist Daisy Dunn introduces us to a selection of arresting minor fiures: the swimmer who disabled ships during the Persian Wars, a painter and a historian (their works now lost), the Roman civil warrior Fulvia, and many more. But the book’s central contention—that women “shaped the course of ancient history” in “tangible ways”—brims with problems. Dunn’s starting point, to which she keeps returning, that textile production allowed women the means to do creative and empowering work, finds little support in what we know or can infer about the millions of female slaves and confined wives and daughters in Greek and Roman domains who toiled over carding baskets, spindles, and looms—not to express themselves…

One November afternoon, while jogging on the edge of a swamp about two miles from his house in Massachusetts, John Kaag encountered a lone wolf. As he ran frantically homeward, he discovered a rock cave in his own back yard that he had never noticed before. His wife, though, knew about it. “That cave has a name,” she told him. “The Bloods called it ‘Wolf Rock.’ ” Thus Kaag introduces readers not only to the family at the center of his book but also to the work’s governing metaphor: the Bloods’ “wildness,” their wolfish nature. Wolves and wildness reappear throughout the narrative, in epigraphs that introduce the book and its various chapters. Both themes appear in quotations Kaag selected from Henry David Thoreau and tie explicitly to the Blood family.…

In my experience the spider is the smallest creature whose gaze can be felt. —Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 1954 Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. —Robert Frost, “For Once, Then, Something,” New Hampshire, 1923 True mental health consists in a perfect recollection of the past. —Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Madness,” The World as Will and Representation, 1844 If you have machines that control the planet, and they are interested in doing a lot of computation and they want to scale up their computing infrastructure, it’s natural that they would want to use our…