The American Scholar

Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special; drive-through and deli; chili and chile: Loftus devoured them all. Her ensuing book, Raw Dog: The N

In April 2022, one month after my 35th birthday, I was raped. My aggressor did not accost me in an alley; he didn’t slip Rohypnol in my drink. He enacted that night a form of sexual violence so intimate, so egregious, so utterly common that until just a few decades ago, marriage rendered it legally invisible. Before the attack, I was a writer. I don’t know what I became the morning after. Prior to my rape, I’d published two books and several dozen essays and won numerous awards. My books had app

I knew the song playing on the radio, but that didn’t mean I remembered the name, or could figure it out, especially since I’d caught only one line of the chorus. I was on my way from La Pola to Valladolid for a footrace, listening to KISS-FM, which in Spain, as in the United States, plays ’80s and ’90s hits. I recognized most of the songs, but this one I would go crazy trying to place. So I Shazammed it. Shazam will identify a song in seconds, giving the exact title and performer. Tap the icon,

Amanda Holmes reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Boy Died in My Alley.” 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 “The Boy Died in My Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks appeared first on The American Scholar.

The dreams began in the last weeks of December 1999, soon after my husband, Peter, died at the age of 49. The plotlines were always similar. I would be working in the kitchen, tidying up the apartment, or staring at my computer screen when the front door clicked and Peter would be home, not dead at all, but alive and whole. In these visitations, he was my dream husband, my ghost husband—but never was he my dead husband. Was seeing him this way, even in a dream, the fulfillment of an unconscious

The city is an architectural gem, almost a stage set. Unlike much of Europe, it suffered no major damage during either world war. Proud rows of 19th-century buildings line cobblestone streets that wind through low hills, past leafy parks and dozens of sidewalk cafés. Modern apartment blocks ring its outskirts, but most of the city looks much as it did when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The walls of a restaurant near City Hall are hung with dozens of brilliant caricatures—profiles c

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan; Penguin Press, 320 pp., $32 In 1998, philosopher David Chalmers made a bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch about whether, in the next 25 years, any scientist would be able to offer a persuasive and precise explanation for how our messy, spongy brains give rise to the feeling of awareness. Koch wagered that the puzzle could be solved. Four years earlier, Chalmers was a somewhat disheveled postdoctoral fellow at Washington Universi

The morning was still fresh, but my to-do list was burning a hole in my pocket. “Where to start?” I asked myself, and then picked a place, took up my tools, and got going, as tough and determined as any miner or lineman, rancher or cabinet builder. “This is exciting,” I thought to myself. And I thought it again, in one variation or another—satisfying, rewarding, gratifying—as the morning unrolled, items scratched off the list, new ones appearing almost as fast. I lost track of time, and the hour

Amanda Holmes reads Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” 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 “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.

Painter Kati Gegenheimer doesn’t shy away from the heartfelt or “cringe.” In fact, “that’s exactly where I often hope to land,” she says, “making work that is about love and care, and using energy to sustain those things, even when it seems out of fashion.” Gegenheimer, who studied painting and printmaking at Yale, initially wanted to be a journalist, but her fascination with bright hues and various visual media led her to art instead. “My impulse to record feels really close to what I do now in

No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acquire quality pieces and a little bit of history, with the bonus of saving grandma’s treasures from the landfill. For several years, vintage enthusiast Kate Davis has been writing a popular weekly newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing, that not only spotlights upcoming sales of not

In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. I aspired to be a writer. The prevailing mood in Winona was, let’s just say, sincere. Besides Orwell, Kerouac, and school assignments, I was reading an anthology called 25 Minnesota Poets #2. The cover featured cream type against a brown background on sensible matte paper. It might as well have been printed directly on wheat. A few lines describing

“It was Wicas,” my son told me. “Or something similar.” We were sitting at a café terrace, waiting for our coffee, and I had just remarked that I ought to stop at the house where the old yellow dog had lived and ask the owner his name. It had been less than a week since I’d walked by one morning and discovered that the dog wasn’t there. The chain was missing from the ring in the cement by the doghouse. Sad, I’d thought, walking on. Sad, but considering how sometimes the dog barely had the streng

Amanda Holmes reads Jane Kenyon’s “Twilight: After Haying.” 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 “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon appeared first on The American Scholar.

Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964–1976 edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel; Oxford University Press, 648 pp., $34.97 New York City at the close of the 19th century thrilled to an early heyday in the erratic history of American classical music. The presiding conductor, Anton Seidl, was a charismatic protégé of Richard Wagner. More than leading American premieres of five Wagner operas at the Metropolitan (and espousing performances of the composer in

I In December 1998, with talk of impeachment disrupting the apricity of a Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., there was (as the Irish like to say) a wonderful commotion taking place at the Cosmos Club near Dupont Circle. Publishers had shuttled in from New York or Boston or come down on the Metroliner. Democratic socialists from the 1940s and 1950s had come, too (along with a smattering of radicals and red-diaper babies), remarking that the witch-hunt atmosphere of Kenneth Starr’s Washington w

Ask your middle-class or wealthy friends with children between the ages of eight and 18 to do something fun on a weekend in the spring or fall. I would bet that at least half of them are busy, off in some exurban wasteland, logging in to apps like TeamSnap and SportsEngine and GameChanger as they shuttle their kids back and forth between a $200-a-night room at the Marriott, a Chipotle, and a sports field. I am an unlikely sports parent. I was never on any kind of team; I spent my high school aft

Back in the 18th century, when horses and oxen struggled over roads that were often impassable, Spain needed a solution to the problem of inland transport. Following in the watery tracks of France and England, engineers conceived the plan for the Canal de Castilla—the country’s most ambitious project up to that time. The canal is more than its name suggests. Rather than a single waterway, it is a series of canals forming three branches and designed to carry wheat and other agricultural products.

Amanda Holmes reads David Mason’s “Before the Loon Calls.” 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 “Before the Loon Calls”  by David Mason appeared first on The American Scholar.

Multimedia artist K. Shanks feels most at home—and comfortable in their own skin—outside, surrounded by flora and fauna. Growing up, it took Shanks years to discover their queer, gender-nonconforming identity. Along the way, they realized that their relationship to things like clothing and family were fraught; places, such as school or their home, intended to feel safe were, in fact, not welcoming to them. In nature, however, “there was this shelter and protection and safety innately for my body