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.

Roger That

The American Scholar

Shattered • After the murders in Minneapolis

The Valedictions of Elwyn Brooks • How the eminent essayist made an art of signing off

The Breath Is Everything • How an encounter with the Dalai Lama led to forays into Buddhism

Too HIP to Be Square • Wagner's Ring on period instruments?

The Heart of the Matter • A new cardiovascular drug may be revolutionary, but what we really need is more quality time with our doctors

The Visual Turn • Painting portraits of other people can tell us truths about ourselves

Renaissance Man • Doctor, writer, musician, and orator: Rudolph Fisher was a scientist and an artist whose métier was Harlem

The Twilight Self • Embracing mutability in a world gone mad means understanding how fantasy took hold of American psychiatry

The Last Good Thing • DVDs, streaming, and the price of nostalgia

Netflix Goes to Vietnam • When a filmmaker wanted to understand the war that changed his father, he decided to make a documentary

To Urbino We Go • PIERO'S FACES AND THE VERSE OF MARY JO SALTER

The Flagellation

The Enigma of Ur • Is the music of the future one in which form and structure give way to an aesthetic inspired by the primordial?

Back to Bellevue • Two deaths nearlyfive decades apart and the hospital that felt like a nightmare

Musings of a Savoyard • Searching for Gilbert and Sullivan in the 21st century

Acid Blues (Slight Return) • The music of Jimi Hendrix continues to strike a chord

The Barber of Erice

CONJURER OF WORLDS • The writer who made fantasy history

HOLD THE SALT • Reconsidering an ancient city's bad reputation

SCIENTISTS IN DREAMLAND • What might our nightly visions mean?

THE MINOTAUR'S MUSES • The romantic cruelty of a brilliant artist

COMPASSIONATE CURMUDGEON • Why we must root ourselves in the real world

SWEPT AWAY • A gusty tour of one of our planet's primordial forces

MAKING TROUBLE • A British aristocrat's leftist noblesse oblige

ALL HIS BIOGRAPHERS MERELY PLAYERS • Retracing the Bard's lost years

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