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.

The Naked Flame

The American Scholar

The Bully in the Ballad • Was Mississippi John Hurt really the first person to sing the tragic tale of Louis Collins?

Not Your Parents' New York Phil • Opening night at David Geffen Hall was an attempt to reconcile with an institution's past and map out a way for the future

At Home in the Asylum • Fifty years later, the fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto still speaks to the madness of India’s Partition

A Royal Disappointment • Am I the only Black woman in America who thinks Bridgerton is trash?

THE BOOK OF MAPS

Don't Tell the Tourists • Hollywood’s surprising links to the antebellum South

The Road to Paradise and Back • Fires in the West, hurricanes in the East—what it’s like on the ground as we confront our rapidly changing world

The Corals and the Capitalist • The key to avoiding an ecological catastrophe might be found in the wealth of nations and the spirit of innovation

The End Is Only the Beginning • Our species may soon evolve, with the help of technology, into something more than human

Bearing Witness Beyond Despair • THE ART OF DISLOCATION IN THE VERSES OF WONG MAY

Five Poems

In the Frame of the Father • The lyrical, spiritual work of Darrel Ellis began with a precious inheritance

Foreign Affairs • The many lives and loves of the mysterious Saint-John Perse

I Am Become a Name • The uncle I never knew and the war that was his

Anatomy of a Collision • The sudden intersection of one’s professional and parental identities can lead to a strange kind of work-life imbalance

Housewarming

DECLASSIFIED • How genre-bending tales of espionage emerged from a childhood of pain, anger, and deception

THE FRIEND ZONE • Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas on what makes a marriage tick were downright radical for their time

BEAUTY BORN OF ASHES • The story of a lyrical masterpiece that almost wasn’t

HEAD OF THE DEEP STATE • How the FBI’s founding director ruled from the shadows

QUARK OF HABIT • Scientists keep pushing for larger particle colliders—but is this really wise?

STRUCTURAL FOUNDATIONS • The buildings that defined the Western world

OUR FOUNDING CONTRADICTION • The entrenched dichotomy at the center of the national story

Commonplace Book

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