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.

Information Sickness

The American Scholar

LETTERS

A Testament to Survival

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Caught in the Dark

Let America Be America Again • New life for a Langston Hughes poem

RACE AND PUBLIC HEALTH • THE CORONAVIRUS REVEALS HOW THIS COUNTRY FAILS TO RELIEVE SUFFERING

Our Post-Privacy World • TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS MAY MAKE US FEEL SAFE, BUT WILL WE REGRET LIVING IN A SURVEILLANCE STATE?

Still Made for You and Me? • OUR PUBLIC LANDS ARE UNDER ATTACK AS NEVER BEFORE BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

Art After the Plague • HOW PAINTERS THROUGH THE AGES HAVE RESPONDED TO CONTAGION, PESTILENCE, AND DEADLY EPIDEMICS

In a Dark Wood

FROM UNDERWORLD LIT

Slow Blues • ON CONFRONTING THE WONDER AND TERROR OF NATURE

Teach What You Love • A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR PROFESSORS OF LITERATURE

The Gravity of the Situation • POPULAR PHYSICS BOOKS MAKE SCIENCE CHEAP, EASY, AND ENTERTAINING. THE PROBLEM IS, THEY OFTEN MISLEAD

FICTION

The Professor’s Wife

The Joke

The Poet Who Painted • Max Jacob, who helped introduce Picasso to the French, was a talented artist in his own right

What a Great Talker She Was • The dramatic art of Ruth Draper

A Mind on Fire • In his acclaimed trilogy of intellectual biographies, Robert D. Richardson sought to help us overcome the burden of the past

Bugging Out • The buzzing, crawling creatures we would be lost without

Admired and Abhorred • The German composer whose legacy continues to confound

Beneath the Powdered Wig • Reinterpreting the life of our trendiest Founding Father

Varieties of Experience • Culture rewires our brains and shapes how we think

Commonplace Book

AMERICAN PLACES