Spring 2020

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar2 min read
Autonomies
WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE explain to me how the dutiful 0s and 1s of computer processes at some point unbind themselves and undertake independent thought? Could anyone describe the actual instant of transition? I’ve been asking these questions around the
The American Scholar4 min read
Letters
Lincoln Caplan’s “This Man Should Not Be Executed” (Winter 2020) is one of the best long-form articles that I have read in many years. It’s left me stunned and heartbroken. I ardently hope that Billy Joe Wardlow’s lawyers can use this piece to save h
The American Scholar11 min read
Land of Perpetual Night
IN LATE NOVEMBER LAST YEAR, I traveled to the Norwegian port city of Tromsø and boarded a northbound icebreaker called the KV Svalbard. The ship belonged to the kystvakt,the coast guard, and it was stout and gray with a steep bow for plowing into sea
The American Scholar2 min read
A Beautiful Vision
When she was four years old, photographer REBECCA GAAL got her first pair of glasses. The experience changed the way she thought about sight and the world around her. Through her work with the Seva Foundation, Gaal documented doctors and patients at
The American Scholar3 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Our Heads In The Cloud
NICHOLAS CARR is the best-selling author of several books about technology and its consequences. A new, expanded edition of his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will be published thi
The American Scholar2 min read
We’ve Got a Fight on Our Hands
JILL LEOVY is the author of Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, which examined the reasons behind the high homicide rate among black Americans. The following passage is from her current project, a book tentatively titled Haters, about the
The American Scholar4 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Progress Report
For the past three years, the life expectancy of Americans has been decreasing, and Steven Woolf, a professor of population health at Virginia Commonwealth University, is trying to figure out why. He’s skeptical of the hypothesis that attributes this
The American Scholar3 min read
Trade Winds
Andre Drummond is in a funk. His coaches see it. Opposing teams see it. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see it. The trade chatter in recent weeks has crept into Drummond’s head. —Sports Illustrated, January 17, 2020 LESS THAN AN HOUR into the wee
The American Scholar18 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
No Ghost In The Machine
It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interestin
The American Scholar19 min read
The Uncertainty Principle
HUMANS CRAVE CERTAINTY. We long to know what will happen, what to believe, and how to live. This desire drives some of us to depths of soul-searching and heights of scientific inquiry. It drives others into the arms of authoritarians, who are all too
The American Scholar21 min read
For Richer, For Poorer
A CENTURY AGO, The New York Times was even more sober than it is today, seldom deigning to cover the titillating stories of love or scandal that fueled its lowbrow competitors. But on April 6, 1905, an extraordinary headline greeted readers at the to
The American Scholar2 min read
Living In The Song
RHYME AND METER are commonly understood today as technical constraints, as barriers to expression, standing between the poet and experience. But what if we were to turn the idea around and view them as vehicles of access, perhaps even a means of lett
The American Scholar2 min read
Five Poems
Some people jump, some people dive,Others inch by inch arrive And give themselves up to the chill,Piecemeal, with a grudging will: First toes, then ankles tempt the cold,And backs of knees, that, tender, fold, Then thighs that start to pimple, blo
The American Scholar17 min read
Peggy’s War
PEGGY HULL HEARD THE NEWS of V-E Day on a static-filled radio in the orderly room at a location she described in her dateline only as “A Little Army Camp in the South Seas.” She and “her boys” found it hard to get too excited about the news. Hull had
The American Scholar10 min read
Why the Egg Matters
LATELY I’VE NOTICED MY MEMORY glitching more than usual, not that it was stellar to start with. I’m constantly forgetting grocery items—the vital eggs, say, for my daughter Celia’s birthday brownies. Or I mislay the phone 1.5 seconds after I put it d
The American Scholar13 min read
My Hairy Past
WHEN THE BEATLES APPEARED on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, in 1964, I was about to turn nine and knew nothing about them, although my parents and my six-year-old sister, Anne, somehow did. So did my best friend, John Ruth, who explained th
The American Scholar12 min read
Solstice
From our room in Reykjavík, we move to the balcony and watch the beacon break the night in two. “It’s like the bat signal,” my wife says. What we’re looking at is the Imagine Peace Tower, a beam of dense, white light cooked up by Yoko Ono and probab
The American Scholar9 min read
If You Frame It Like That
PICTURE THIS. IN THE FOREGROUND, by a thatched farmhouse, a beautiful woman holds by the claws the chicken she’s just slaughtered, her white apron stained with blood. She talks, perhaps flirts, with an equally gorgeous hunter in leather, a hawk on hi
The American Scholar12 min readWorld
Searching for Amos Oz in Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM SEEMED QUIET and thoughtful that winter,” Amos Oz writes in his final novel, Judas (2016). “From time to time, church bells rang out. A westerly breeze stirred the tops of the cypresses.” It’s a lovely image, but Jerusalem wasn’t at all qu
The American Scholar5 min read
Image Was Everything
ONE SHOULD APPROACH this elephantine account of Andy Warhol’s life—perhaps modeled on one of his endless films, like Sleep(1963)—with caution. To begin with, there are no source notes—some 7,000 of them are available online but not on a page. For a w
The American Scholar5 min read
War by Other Means
AS NOVEMBER’S PRESIDENTIAL contest looms, reminders of Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election pepper every news cycle, with warnings of more to come. The number of countries running disinformation campaigns has more than doubled to 70 over the past tw
The American Scholar5 min read
Making Their Voices Heard
WE AMERICANS LOVE the myths about our nation’s past. We pretend to be a land of unlimited opportunity, despite a painful legacy of discrimination based on the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender. We celebrate abstract notions of natural rights,
The American Scholar4 min read
Poet Of The Newsroom
NEARLY A CENTURY ago, Stanley Walker, city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, was a living legend of journalism, a hard-eyed Texan who wrote about the speakeasies and ruckus of New York City. He foretold the future of other living legends in his
The American Scholar4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Heaven And The Heretic
MARIO LIVIO MORE or less apologizes up front for writing yet another biography of Galileo. After all, hundreds of books on the physicist already exist, so what’s left to say? Still, Livio thinks that Galileo and the Science Deniers can add to the Gal
The American Scholar4 min read
Not Quite Forgotten
A PROFILE OF NOVELIST Robert Stone that appeared in New York magazine in 1997 offered this summary: “It has been Stone’s peculiar fate to have great success without great recognition.” Nearly 60, he had already won the National Book Award, for Dog So
The American Scholar4 min read
Glamour and Violence
THE MAN IN THE red coat on the cover of Julian Barnes’s eponymous biography has neither a name nor a face—a fitting mystery, as Barnes had never heard of him until he happened on his “tremendous” portrait done by John Singer Sargent in 1881. A few pa
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
The pawn is the soul of chess. —François-André Danican Philidor, Analysis of the Game of Chess, 1749 But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could well become someone from a past age. The

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