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.

Late Bloom

The American Scholar

One Man's Trash • In the windswept California desert, Noah Purifoy sculpted a visionary monument from the detritus of everyday life

The Pathogen of Hate • It’s time we took a medical approach to dealing with a different epidemic

Birds of a Feather • It’s not hard to see ourselves in the majestic, mysterious great blue heron

Red Beans and Life • The dish that is my mother’s legacy— and mine

WHERE'S WARHOL?

Enough Already With the Trauma • Learning to live with your inner mishegas

The Root Problem • Harvesting wild ginseng has sustained Appalachian communities for generations— so what will happen when there are no more plants to be found?

Why We Are Failing to Make the Grade • Covid- 19 has contributed to a crisis in America’s classrooms, but the problems predate the pandemic and are likely to outlast it

The Degradation Drug • A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal behavior

Ways of Being • INTIMATIONS OF LIVING AND DYING IN THE LINES OF FORREST GANDER

Five Poems

An Artist of Our Social Age • Matthew Wong broke all the rules and flourished online, but he craved what the outsider typically eschews: commercial success

Averted Vision • Seeing the world anew in the aftermath of family tragedy, through the lenses of physics and theology

Rooms With a View • A childhood in Haifa before Israel attained statehood and just after-helped form an architect’s vision of what an ideal home should be

A Monstrous Burden • The original Godzilla illuminates the plight of Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb, but what can it say about the present, about the violence endured by Asian Americans during Covid-19?

Henrietta and Her Moths

DISSIDENT LIT • Vladimir Nabokov and the novel that nourished the souls of a generation of would-be revolutionaries

FREEDOM TALES • Long before the contentious school board fights of today, Lydia Maria Child tried to help America’s children understand their country’s racial transgressions

MYTHS OF THE MOTHERLAND • To understand Vladimir Putin, we must look to his country’s past

BUILDING UP AND BREAKING DOWN • What happens when the structures we erect plunge us into despair?

TO HELL AND BACK • An Italian master’s unlikely depictions of Dante’s dark vision

THE EPHEMERAL ART • How a Russian impresario revolutionized dance

POWER OF THE PEOPLES • American history was shaped as much by Native Americans as by their colonizers

JENA-GADDA-DA-VIDA • The brief flowering of an intellectual mecca in 1790s Germany

ZEAL OF THE CONVERT • A new biography charts a Peruvian seeker’s spiritual quest

Commonplace Book

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