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 Humane Approach

The American Scholar

Hiding in Plain Sight • What happens when a progressive city is forced to reckon with its connec- tions to an unjust past?

A Fight With Cudgels • Meditations on death, Goya, and the immutability of art

When True Crime Became All Too Real • How my family survived a harrowing home invasion

What’s Not to Like? • On similes, good and bad

Puzzled • In the world of jigsaws, there can be a fine line between productivity and pleasure

Jeremy Spoke in Class Today • On guns, MTV, Stephen King, and the nightmare from which we cannot awake

The Justice Worker • Rebecca Sandefur’s mission is to provide help to tens of millions of Americans in solving their legal problems

The Art of Coping • In a time of anger, frustration, and anxiety, the humanities have much to teach us about how to deal with life

Who Killed the Mercy Man? • An obscure murder keeps resurfacing in Black story and song

Eight Poems

‘God-Knows-What-Kind-of-Classic’ • Why shouldn’t America’s federal buildings speak to us in a language encompassing the old as well as the new?

On (Middle-Class) Frugality • Does cutting costs mean robbing oneself of life’s small delights?

We Contain Multitudes • Why do so few of us exercise the many talents with which we are born?

A Splendor Wild and Terrifying • Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature

A Language of Many Places • Young Jews with views across the political spectrum are finding a home in Yiddish and klezmer

A Career in the Arts

A PORTRAIT OF THE SCHOLAR • The life of Ireland’s towering literary figure became a work of art in its own right

THE RASCAL OF PONT-AVEN • Reassessing a renowned painter’s troubling life

STICKING WITH IT • A sobering chronicle of our toxic times

UNBUILDING THE MYSTERY • What might Indigenous spiritual practices have in common?

A BLAST OF A TIME • The scientific underpinnings of Armageddon

FARMED OUT • The uncertain future of the nation’s heartland

STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS • A writer’s intrepid exploration of troubled waters

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