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 Luthier's Art

The American Scholar

Milking the G.O.A.T. • Why are we so obsessed with anointing the very best?

Mortal Music • Franz Schubert, silence, and the final reckoning

Knowledge Before the Fall • Sometimes you simply can't prepare for a seemingly inevitable outcome

George's Angels • Remembering my time with Balanchine's dancers

Night Visitors • The power of music at a New York City soup kitchen

The Lotus Position • What does one of television's biggest hits have to say about the nature of a certain kind of American tourism?

The Goddess Complex • A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in north-western India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

The Pain Principle • What if the animal rights movement abandoned its focus on suffering and appealed to a different set of human emotions?

I'll Be Seeing You • The search for traces of a beloved writer led to an uncertain pilgrimage—and a friendship that endured over distance and time

Drunk on Dub • THE NEW CARIBBEAN SOUNDS OF ISHION HUTCHINSON

The Anabasis of Godspeed

The Sound of Wood and Steel • A new exhibition explores the guitar's power and influence in American art and life

Phantoms • What it's like to navigate the world when your senses conjure up phenomena that others can't perceive

Look Back in Wonder • A father searches for the secret to empathy in the face of unthinkable loss

The World at the End of a Line • The grandson of one of American literature's Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake's love of the sea

Under Covers

DOORS OF PERCEPTION • The often unreliable ways we interpret reality

DEATH IN DROHOBYCH • A new biography of a Polish literary master

CULTURE SHOCK • The hidden history of reverse colonization

LIFE AT THE BOTTOM • It's not just the rich who victimize the poor

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD • A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country

TALES OF MEMORY AND FORGETTING • What happens when we cease to be who we were?

ERRANT THOUGHT • Can we keep the Enlightenment from dimming?

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