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.

Precedents

LETTERS

Seas of Change

Where the Livin’ Is Easy

Rivers Run Through Us • MARTIN DOYLE is a professor of river science and policy at Duke University. His new book, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers, documents the complex history of our nation’s waterways, taking into consideration such subjects as politics, ecology, and economics. We asked him to pose six questions on the future of rivers.

Educating Lillian • KEVIN WILSON, author of The Family Fang, is at work on a new novel called Children Made of Fire. It tells the story of Lillian, whose life changes when she enrolls “at a fancy girl’s school hidden on a mountain in the middle of nowhere.”

Ships of Pearl

The Color of Faith

Enviably Green

Haste Makes Waste • Which figures of speech will survive, and which will vanish?

A Vacuum At the Center • HOW A DEMAGOGUE RESEMBLES A TYPHOON, AND WHY IT MATTERS TO THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLIC

Courage Before The Thaw • PORTRAITS OF ALASKAN WOMEN ON THE PRECIPICE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The Privilege Predicament • YES, ADVANTAGE EXISTS, BUT HAS THE PROMISCUOUS CASTING OF BLAME ENHANCED THE WORK OF UNDERSTANDING?

A Blessing and a Curse

Radiation Days

Of a Fire on The Marsh • THE LAST DAYS OF THE DUSKY SEASIDE SPARROW, A SPECIES THAT WENT EXTINCT WHEN IT LOST OUT TO THE MOON RACE

When Death Came to Golden • A WRITER’S STRANGE ENTANGLEMENT WITH ONE OF THE 20TH CENTURY’S MOST PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLERS

What Is a Dog? • FRIENDSHIP, FAITH, AND LOVE, FOR STARTERS—YET OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR CANINE COMPANIONS CONTAIN MANY MORE UNFATHOMABLE MYSTERIES

Live-Hang

Galleries of the World • An interview with the Met’s Daniel H. Weiss

Going Dutch • In these relentlessly disruptive times, 17th-century canvases from the Netherlands can provide moments of solace and hope

Shadow Warriors • After 9/11, what happened when the gloves came off?

Where the Sun Never Set • A new, multilayered history of the British Empire

Literary Life on the Rocks • A writer’s own ordeal highlights the banal sameness of addiction

A Planet in Peril • Can humanity engineer its way out of trouble?

A Window On Europe • How a tsar turned a fetid bog into an imperial capital

A Fallen Angel of Mercy • Did her good works expiate the sins of her dark past?

Commonplace Book

AMERICAN PLACES