The American Scholar

Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, The American Scholar is the quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932.

Comfort Fare

The American Scholar

Rip Tide • Trouble at a Spanish beach

Bicentennial Beginnings • Learning to write and learning to live, with Richard Wilbur as a guide

Hey Siri, Call Webster • When it comes to learning new words, it’s not where you look them up that’s important

Black Cleopatra • How a recent Netflix series infuriated Egypt—and raised questions about color stratification and the social construct of race

Tunneling for Daylight • All hail the miraculous, tenacious carpenter bee

In the Forest of the Colobus • At a Gambian nature reserve, troops of endangered monkeys—and numerous other creatures—enact a grand drama that plumbs the mysteries of life, death, and regeneration

Notes From the Front • Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended

Shooting a Dog • During a deployment in Iraq, a young soldier confronts a fundamental paradox about the masculine temperament in wartime

Song Gatherer • THE GHOSTLY CANTARES MEXICANOS, AS RENDERED BY EDGAR GARCIA

From Cantares Mexicanos

Give Us Something to Look At • Why ornament matters in architecture

It All Begins in Love • An essayist sees glimpses of her parents and the many struggles they endured in a new exhibition of southern photography

Florida Man • Making a home in the Sunshine State when you feel like a perpetual outsider

An Outrage Sacred to the Gods • As Antigone knows all too well, the act of burying a loved one is not always a simple matter

The Dawn

Cuts

BODIES GROTESQUE AND BEAUTIFUL • Searching for aesthetics and meaning in the monstrous

HEAVY METTLE • A story of oppression and resilience

THE QUEST FOR CATHER • When subjects play hard to get

THUNDER IN HER HEAD • A new biography of a master choreographer

AIR SHOW • What the rise of an NBA superstar tells us about ourselves

Commonplace Book

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