The American Scholar

Of all the strange sights on the internet, the Instagram videos that people upload of themselves eating enormous quantities of unhealthy food are among the most disturbing. In the videos I’ve seen, it’s always a lot of food, all of it overloaded with sugar or fat—or both. So it’s what they eat—but also how they do it. The people are making a display not so much of pleasure as of conquest, and there is nothing subtle about it. It’s gluttony. It’s a rout. Bad enough that these people were motivate

Anniversaries are times for reflection and celebration. But they also offer the opportunity to speculate, to cast hopes and dreams into a future unknown. All too often, we imagine this future as a vast and shapeless void in which anything becomes possible if only we dare to dream it. But any future is invariably shaped by the now that we allow, and the past that we choose to forget. As a scholar of science fiction—or what I prefer to call speculative fiction, for its more comprehensive implicati

By simple luck, graduation day at the University of Vermont—Wednesday, July 14, 1875—turned out to be “one of the finest days of the summer,” the Burlington Free Press reported with equal parts pride and relief. Less than a week earlier, a tornado had touched down just south of Burlington, home of the university, turning the sky white with hail and shattering hundreds of church windowpanes. But now the winds had calmed, the broken glass had been swept up, and summer had resumed in northern New E

In an era defined by breathtaking technological advancement, a fundamental question has emerged that concerns nearly everyone on the planet: How do we best navigate a future in which artificial intelligence will replicate or exceed many, if not most, human capabilities? This question has been a focus of attention on campuses and in boardrooms, in the halls of government and around kitchen tables. And it has taken seemingly endless forms. What happens if AI transforms the workplace, rendering man

Stanza is the Italian word for a room in a house or building. This fact held little weight for me when I first learned it at 18 years old, slogging my way through an entry-level Italian class that met at nine a.m. every weekday at the University of Virginia. The word acquired gravity only in the poetry workshops I took in later semesters. Stanzas, I was taught, were a principal organizing measure of poems. If I thought of a poem as a house, each stanza became a room; a poem’s formal thresholds,

Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? by Jared Diamond; Mariner Books, 288 pp., $32 Watchers of HBO’s House of the Dragon encountered a surprise in this season’s third episode. Having won a civil war, Rhaenyra Targaryen ascends the throne of a country scorched by clashing armies and dragon fire. The victorious queen is “awash” not in the blood that sometimes spatters her but, as she explains to one of many petitioners, “in dilemmas and deficiencies.” The capital is in

In 1974, the bioethicist and physician Willard Gaylin published an article in Harper’s with the unsettling title “Harvesting the Dead.” It had recently become possible to keep brain-dead patients on life support for extended periods so that their organs could be removed for transplantation. I use the words patients and life support, but as Gaylin pointed out, if a patient is brain-dead, it isn’t really a patient anymore. It is a cadaver on a ventilator. To distinguish these kinds of cadavers fro

I was an undergraduate student in Yale’s American Studies department—a department that claimed my heart and my mind—but even after four years, I was still trying to find my place on campus. That search went on during my subsequent years in New Haven as a PhD student in American Studies. I was looking for models, for fellow travelers, particularly like-minded women who had things to teach me. This is what I found in Kymberly Pinder. As graduate students, Kym and I “was girls together,” to use a p

The Co-Creation: How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth by Olivia Judson; Penguin Press, 560 pp., $35 In southern Colorado, the Great Sand Dunes rise above the San Luis Valley in the shadow of the towering Sangre de Cristo mountains. Two seasonal streams flow out of the mountains, catch sand from the mountain-facing side of the dunes, and carry it around. Eventually it blows back into the dunes, and in this way they repair themselves. They are the tallest dunes in North America and have been he

For a small pocket of Tidewater Virginia, this is a year of significant anniversaries—not only the semiquincentennial of the United States but also the 100th anniversary of the founding of Colonial Williamsburg. Given that 18th-century Williamsburg was ground zero for fomenting local rebellion against the British Crown, this coincidence of dates seems fitting, if not charmed. After all, there is something about Colonial Williamsburg, like the American revolutionary cause, that has always seemed

Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film by Mark Binelli; Metropolitan Books, 544 pp., $35.99 In 1977, Martin Scorsese was working in a cocaine-filled, insomniac frenzy to complete The Last Waltz, his film about The Band’s final concert. One evening, he and his housemate, the group’s guitarist, Robbie Robertson, invited friends to watch a rough cut. Francis Ford Coppola, one of the guests, disliked what he saw—not about the film but about what the boys were eating. Coppola decided to coo

This is matriculation season at American colleges and universities, which means that on many campuses, it is a season of gates—specifically, the ritual of passing through them (or posing in front of them) to celebrate the rich range of possibilities and relationships associated with the life of the mind.  The passage, crucially, is spatial as well as temporal. Gates aren’t mere entrances and exits—neutral dividers between town and gown, street A and quad B. At their best, from Harvard’s Johnston

The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi; Riverhead Books, 336 pp., $32 Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful? These lines come from Peter Matthiessen’s 1978 classic, The Snow Leopard, which documents his journey with field biologist George Schaller high into the mountains of Nepal. The book is alive with insights into both outer and inner worlds rarely seen, looming like Everest above any author who dares tackle the

In photographs from my childhood I am often sporting wide, toothy smiles. Guileless grins. It seems I was—despite the complications of divorce, alcoholism, and mental illness in my family—a happy kid. But by my teens I began to develop a sort of tight-lipped, toothless grin. I could feel myself consciously pulling my upper lip tight against my teeth, my tongue poking at the back of my fake, discolored front tooth. When I attended summer camp in the early 1980s, there was no long journey north f

Back when I used to teach undergraduate composition, I would spring this in-class essay assignment on my students: Do unto others as they do unto you. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What’s the difference? Most students wrote that the first law—giving as good as you got—described a less considerate way of treating others than the second. Those who’d read a fair amount traced the first law back to the Code of Hammurabi or the Old Testament directive of an eye for an eye, a to

Susan Stryker’s new book, Changing Gender, is as chameleonic as the scholar herself, combining as it does trans history, cultural theory, memoir, linguistics, gossip, anthropology, art criticism, and even an unforgettable analysis of the children’s song “Yankee Doodle.” The word gender originated in the domain of grammar, before becoming interlinked with sex in the 20th century, as the story goes. But Stryker’s romp through the historical record shows that as far back as the 17th century, Englis

I am 73 years old and happily married, but I recently fell in love—not with an actual person but with a fictional character. This sort of thing hasn’t happened since high school, when Heathcliff inflamed my adolescent imagination. But now, after a lifetime of reading, I find myself besotted by Lord Peter Wimsey, the amateur detective of uncanny insight and resourcefulness who figures in 11 novels and numerous stories by Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers was one of the queens of detective fiction’s so-ca

Salamanca is a beautiful Spanish city. Meaning what exactly? That the architecture is gorgeous, especially, it seemed to me, the buildings of the university, but really everywhere in the old town. That the masonry is stone throughout much of the old part, that some streets are cobbled, that fountains burble and splash, and that beyond iron gates and around corners and under arches, shaded gardens appear. In such a secret grotto I found myself one sunny Sunday July afternoon. The garden was tucke

Amanda Holmes reads Frank Stanford’s “Everybody Who Is Dead.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Everybody Who Is Dead” by Frank Stanford appeared first on The American Scholar.

Your captain can almost never tell in advance which of his prompts will kickstart players’ imaginations. Haiku will always attract entries; it has the charm of the minimal. Anagrams bring out the ingenuity in word-game lovers. But every so often I invent a prompt with no idea of whether it will work. That was the case when, on August 3, I asked people to “consider writing either an insincere fan letter or a clever rejection of an unwanted submission or invitation. This can be done either in vers