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26 Articles

given the plunging vaccination rates and the determination in places like northwest Florida to act as if the virus does not exist. And even if we do reach a level of vaccination that justifies our eagerness to return to normal life, we should I THINK OF MYSELF AS AN OPTIMIST, but I am not sanguine about where we are with this virus. Not long ago, I spent two weeks on the Florida Panhandle. My relief at getting away from home and my pleasure at overlooking the glittering Gulf of Mexico were dampened by the general absence of masks in elevators, grocery stores, and restaurants (which we passed through quickly to get to outdoor seating). For now, the rates of infection there suggest that this carelessness about mask wearing, together with…

Flawed but Democratic I must take exception to a statement in Shakhar Rahav’s “The China Model” (Spring 2021), which asserts that “Xi’s rise augured the rise of populist, authoritarian leaders in many countries.” The examples that follow include “Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil,” “the Hungary of Viktor Orban,” and “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.” On what basis is Israel included in this list? Israel is a vibrant, multiparty parliamentary democracy with a free and independent news media. According to the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Israel ranks 27th in the world and is characterized as a “flawed democracy.” The United States is ranked 25th and is also identified as a flawed democracy. There certainly are legitimate grounds on which to criticize Israel’s government and Prime Minister Netanyahu, but Israel’s government cannot honestly be called…

Living in Limbo

AT THE END OF DECEMBER 2020, a tremendous storm surge hit the seafront of Naples. Waves of more than 30 feet, pushed by a wind that roared at nearly 55 miles an hour, slammed into the central coast of the Bay of Naples with a fearsome energy, driving the city to retreat inside. Pictures of that amazing event, taken from the balconies of apartment buildings or from the cars of the unfortunate people still on the street, made the rounds of the Internet and were reproduced by the main Italian news outlets. Some days later, I drove the short distance to the center of Naples to give a copy of my just-published novel to a gentleman who had written a blurb for the back cover, a retired top editor of RAI,…

Living in Limbo

Finding Our Inner Child

Photographer Maranie Staab has spent the past several years covering social justice and human rights issues, most recently capturing the protests for racial justice in Syracuse, Rochester, Portland (Oregon), and her native Pittsburgh. Another project close to her heart concerns something more solitary: the depiction of a young friend’s battle with cancer. —JAYNE ROSS "I first met Kaylee Marshfield in Syracuse, New York, in August 2018. I had recently moved there to attend graduate school in journalism, and my first assignment was to ‘find a story’ at the New York State Fair. In my first hour at the fair, I saw Kaylee and her family; it was evident that the young girl was not well, as she was near-bald and very thin. After talking with them for a while, I asked…

Finding Our Inner Child

Fashion Forward

Aditi Mayer is a sustainable-fashion blogger, photojournalist, labor-rights activist, and speaker. Next year, as a National Geographic Storytelling Fellow, she will report on the social and environmental effects of India’s fashion supply chain. We asked her to pose five questions about the future of fashion in a rapidly changing world. 1 The sustainability movement often poses the question, “What is the most eco-friendly [fill in the blank]?” But sustainability requires context, and to understand fashion, we can’t forget that clothing is a product of agriculture—unless it’s derived from synthetic materials like polyester, a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. Instead of posing one-size-fits-all solutions or defining “eco-friendly” through isolated metrics such as water intake, we need to ask more constructive questions: Is this fiber indigenous to that region? Is the region’s…

Fashion Forward

Life in Black and White

Emily Bernard, a SCHOLAR contributing editor, is an essayist and the author of three books, most recently Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, and editor of two others. Her essays have been reprinted in The Best American Essays and The Best Creative Nonfiction. This excerpt comes from her upcoming book, Unfinished Women: Eight Lives, in which she explores how, over the years, Black women have succeeded despite the numerous obstacles they have faced. Thirty years ago, I saw Fredi Washington perform in the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, directed by John Stahl. I was a graduate student, and the purpose of the assignment was to get us thinking broadly about cinematic representations of Blackness and, specifically, the politics of racial passing. The…

LATELY I HAVE READ ABOUT Latinx, a noun, a term that is supposed to name people like me without naming people like me. I saw it in The New York Times.At some universities, there are academic departments devoted to Latinx studies. I am old enough to be Xtinct, but that is not what Latinx means. I am American (in the provincial sense of that word) because my parents were from Latin America (in the hemispheric sense of that word). That is what Latinx means. I have yet to hear anyone profess to be Latinx out loud. I am curious about how the noun is pronounced. In English, X requires a vowel to sound. We write “Latinx,” but in order to pronounce the word we must add an invisible e,as in Latinesque,…

Rewilding Our Minds

ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR AFTER England locked down for the first time, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, I was walking down a wild and overgrown abandoned canal with my young family, looking for frogspawn and other signs of spring. I was 10 days overdue with our third child, deliriously desperate to go into labor, and seeking signs and talismans everywhere. When we found the lumpy soup of proto-frogs, it felt reassuring to me: a symbol of renewal, the circle of life, the planet turning on its axis. I wouldn’t be pregnant forever. We walked on and watched wrens, small and curved as eggs, glide across the path, which was bordered by strongly scented, vivid green wild garlic and freshly unwrapped nettles. We had planned to give our new son the…

Rewilding Our Minds

Of Plagues and Prejudice

PANDEMICS MAKE US THINK about the plagues of the past. As we live through the time of Covid-19, we seek lessons from other moments when microorganisms caused widespread death and devastation. In the 19th century, cholera put great cities into states of fear and flight and left whole families lying dead, even as physicians debated causation and transmission, and governments wrestled with travel regulations, immigration restrictions, and mandatory quarantines. There is a cholera vaccine now, though its efficacy is not perfect or long lasting, and the disease can be treated, but epidemic cholera remains a problem in regions blighted by poverty, war, or natural disaster. Cholera continues to kill, especially where medical resources and access to clean drinking water are limited. In 2010, a severe outbreak started in Haiti that eventually…

Of Plagues and Prejudice

The Power of Restraint

1 Late last year, the first announcements of 20th-anniversary commemorations of the 9/11 attacks started trickling across the Google transom. ABC, the BBC, and HBO announced the production of significant documentaries. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation began planning a “Never Forget” walk, a 5K run, a “Never Forget” concert, and several illuminated tributes. Across the country, in small towns and cities, schools were devising special curricula. The Yankees and the Mets agreed to play an interleague crosstown game on September 11. Commemorative coins were already for sale, and on clothing websites geared toward firefighters, police officers, and the military, entire “9/11 20th Anniversary” collections were available: keychains, pins, badges, hats. We live in an age saturated with cultural history, in which a deep critique of a totemic holiday like Thanksgiving or…

The Power of Restraint

The Metropolitan Museum of Art At the Met you enter not with a bleeding but an open heart, a heart proudly exposed like those of ancient saints seriously displaying theirs so beautifully on the outside of their blue and red garments, garments of bright colors trimmed with yellow gold leaf and sewn with glowing silver thread. Inside the museum a surprisingly orange-pink mountain rises up out of a dark thicket of young saplings, a lonely lady at a table by a window writing a letter, an ancient Egyptian king sits patiently in a near-empty room. Bright sunlight splashes down through great windows into the entryway where thousands enter to the warmth. That same sunlight shines across vast fields of sunflowers. Two diggers dig the earth somewhere north of your memory. Dark…

Washing Feet in Dolpo

I HAD A SORROW I COULD NOT SHAKE. It tailed me, waited for me around corners and whispered from the shadows. Sometimes it seemed to jump into my path. Because of it, I resolved to go for a walk. A long one. Although hardly young, I elected to go to the back side of the Himalaya, near the edge of the Tibetan plateau. I would go walking with doctors, nurses, and Buddhist clerics to deliver health care in a land where trained clinicians rarely go. I hoped to absorb the medicos’ approach to caring for people even when the care could not cure, even when routine ailments, for want of laboratories, scanners, and operating rooms, resisted their powers. Perhaps their dilemma might teach me about my own. The planetary disasters…

Washing Feet in Dolpo

Orange You Glad

LATE ONE WINTER AFTERNOON several years ago, three friends and I were running in a recreation area near my home in Asturias, in northern Spain. Though the area is just a 15-minute drive from the heart of the city, it’s more wilderness than park, and the trail we followed through the woods was rough and sometimes steep. On the uphill stretches we pushed ourselves rather than slow down, recovering our breath when the trail leveled off. So when the other woman in the group lagged unexpectedly on a steep hill, we others kept on to the top, and waited for her there, kicking our toes at the leaves and sticks underfoot. The two men had been conversing as they ran, and they continued talking while I, looking around in the…

Orange You Glad

Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings

I WOULD NEVER HAVE AGREED with Robert Lowell’s comment about the “tranquillized Fifties.” Maybe that’s because I grew up in New York City, which always seemed to pulse with unruly energy. Or maybe it’s because I went to a special high school—Hunter College High School for “gifted” girls, where a clear majority of the students were as unruly, as restless and aspirational, as I was. And maybe, too, because I came from an immigrant family (Niçoise, Sicilian, Russian), I never felt like a regular rule-abiding American. And that was a problem in the supposedly placid (though witch-hunting) McCarthyite ’50s. Most of my friends were like me. I didn’t know anybody who had grandparents without accents. A grandparent, by definition, was a person from the “old country.” Which old country? Any old…

Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings

I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d; I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for. —Walt Whitman, “So Long!” 1 The truth is, there was no one else around. Months later, not at first, one of them would say that the office was a “desert of souls.” The other one agreed, smiling, proud that he wasn’t included in that description. And little by little, between beers, they came to share sour stories about unloved and hungry women, then soccer banter, secret Santa, wish lists, fortunetellers’ addresses, a bookie, Jogo do bicho, cards for the punch clock, the occasional pastry after work, cheap champagne in plastic cups. In a desert of souls that were also deserts, one special soul immediately recognizes another—maybe for that reason, who knows?…

ALL DAY, OLD MAN MCGINTY had watched the different festivities at the Highland Games: the caber toss and the sheepdog trials and the young girls in their plaid skirts dancing the Highland fling, all vying for blue ribbons and their picture in the local paper. He had eaten pasties with his family and tried to drink a draught of ale, but only managed less than half and had a slight headache from that. He had looked at booths selling coffee mugs and baseball caps depicting Scottish and Irish family crests. He had watched women in long skirts spinning wool, looking incongruous in the midsummer heat. He had moved through the festival with a happy heart in anticipation of the concert early that evening. Wicked Brew was playing that year. They…

I FIRST FELL IN LOVE with director David Fincher after watching Se7en (1995), a film about a fictive serial killer with a menacing softness that lent a poetic flair to the truly monstrous—and that made all of us in the theater sit in the shadow of madness. Fincher’s best film, Zodiac (2007), about the real-life serial killer who preyed on the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s, was also a subtle polemic on the idea of monstrosity. Fincher’s latest film, Mank—which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards this year and won for cinematography and best production design—is no exception. The historical figures it portrays, including Orson Welles, Louis B. Mayer, and William Randolph Hearst, all have a monstrous side. It’s Hollywood, after all. Mank could never have been conceived…

The Inheritance of Nations

NAPOLEON HAD TWO ARMIES: one for conquering nations, the other for gathering their artifacts. At its height, the Grande Armée numbered nearly 700,000—infantry, cavalry, and artillery capable of military dominance across the European continent. On its heels, legions of antiquarians and scholars systematically captured the cultural treasures of subjugated states. It was the success of this second army that made Napoleon’s France the greatest European empire since Rome. The Horses of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the Vatican’s Apollo Belvedere, the Egyptian sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, the Rosetta Stone—all were packed onto ships and sent to the Louvre. Napoleon’s dual armies make a great deal more sense if we accept two principles put forth by the art historian Albert Elsen: first, that art can tell people who they are and where…

The Inheritance of Nations

Remembering Brad

It’s hard not to romanticize the year we lived down the street from each other, and I need to remind myself that there were problems for all of us. I FIRST MET BRAD WATSON back in 1997, when my wife and I were living in East Dennis, Massachusetts, on the bay side of Cape Cod. Brad was already 40 when his first book, the short-story collection Last Days of the Dog-Men, was published, and the critical acclaim it received led to a prestigious five-year appointment as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard. Brad was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and having spent much of his life in the South, he liked to play up the Beverly Hillbillies aspect of his move north—the country bumpkin strolling into Harvard Yard with a piece…

Remembering Brad

E Pluribus Unum?

AMERICAN REPUBLICS: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 BY ALAN TAYLOR Norton, 554 pp., $35 “BEFORE THE WAR, it was said ‘the United States are,’ ” noted the late novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote. “Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always ‘the United States is.’ … And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’ ” This would be a remarkable testament to the reconciliation that followed the Civil War if only it were true. Pace Foote, conceptualizations of the United States in the singular and the plural were in wide circulation during the early republic, and though the singular would eventually become conventional, it was a slow and uneven…

E Pluribus Unum?

From Mojave to the Moon

TEST GODS: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut BY NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE Henry Holt, 333 pp., $29.99 ON ITS SURFACE, Test Gods tells the story of Mark Stucky, the lead test pilot for Virgin Galactic, a space tourism startup in Mojave, California, as he flies the company’s experimental space plane to the “edge of space,” 62 miles above the surface of Earth, to become one of the rare non-NASA pilots to earn astronaut wings. The book also charts the birth and ascendancy of private space travel and the brilliant if wacky characters devoted to transforming a concept from science fiction into a commercial reality. At its center, however, it is a story of fathers and sons—and this emotional core ought to grab readers who might not care about rocket propellant or lifting…

From Mojave to the Moon

Lessons in Abstraction

CLAIRVOYANT OF THE SMALL: The Life of Robert Walser BY SUSAN BERNOFSKY Yale University Press, 392 pp., $35 CLAIRVOYANT OF THE SMALL, Susan Bernofsky’s long-awaited biography of the Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser, is erudite, painstakingly thorough, and sensitively written. Readers of Walser finally have a volume that connects the development of the writer’s work and its publishing history to the various episodes of his peripatetic adult life in the cities of Biel, Bern, Zurich, and Berlin and finally in the sanatoriums in Waldau and later Herisau, where Walser—revered by Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, and many others—ceased writing altogether. Bernofsky traces the development of Walser’s work chronologically, contextualizing his books, stories, novellas, short prose pieces, and feuilletons in the timeline of available biographical information. She cites from letters written…

Lessons in Abstraction

Deep-Rooted Communities

FINDING THE MOTHER TREE: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest BY SUZANNE SIMARD Knopf, 368 pp., $28.95 Many of us look at the trees around us with affection. But there likely isn’t a person in the world whose life is as entwined with trees as Suzanne Simard. I TOOK THE death of the spruce tree outside our kitchen window personally. When we bought the house a decade ago, it was only as tall as our first story. Now it reached up to the second. But a string of warm, dry springs a few years back fueled an epidemic of spruce aphids—invaders from Europe—that infected our tree, along with scores across our seaside town. It was the only spruce on our property, filling the entire frame of the kitchen window and serving as the occasional…

Deep-Rooted Communities

Physics for the Feeble-Minded

Review by Jethro K. Lieberman HELGOLAND: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution BY CARLO ROVELLI (Translated from the Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell) Riverhead, 256 pp., $20 CARLO ROVELLI’S newest book, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, is, the author writes, for readers “who are unfamiliar with quantum physics and are interested in trying to understand, as far as any of us can, what it is.” The field is not merely the stuff of academic esoterica, he assures us, but a realm of intense study about matter at its ultra-tiniest—and one that carries massive practical consequences. Not only Nobel Prizes but also financial fortunes can ride on quantum physicists’ findings, which propel technologies “from computers to nuclear power.” Indeed, as a body of knowledge, Rovelli writes, quantum theory “has never been…

Companions Through Time

THE HERO’S WAY: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna BY TIM PARKS Norton, 352 pp., $27.95 IN JULY 1849, the world was watching as the freedom fighter from Montevideo assembled his troops for a tactical retreat. Writing for the New-York Tribune, American journalist Margaret Fuller was among the crowds in Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano to report on the event, which also featured in British and French newspapers, while American ships were sighted off the Tuscan coast, ready to take the freedom fighters to the United States. Born in 1807 in Nice, then part of the Kingdom of Piedmont, Giuseppe Garibaldi was banished for his republicanism and ventured to South America, where he earned a reputation for his exploits on behalf of liberal causes, such as Uruguay’s resistance to incursions from neighboring…

Companions Through Time

Commonplace Book

The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1853 I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking, Babylon, Nineveh … I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it. —Harry S. Truman, diary entry, July 1945 In that game called pickle, or hotbox, I rarely got caught. I ran like only the sly, four-eyed can—to get there & to get away—to reach somewhere safe, where I never thought to stay. —Kevin Young, “Stealing,” Brown: Poems, 2018 Lastly, I take the liberty of confiding to…

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