American Scholar

An educated nation is an empowered nation. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor details the place of public education in the founding fathers’ vision of American democracy to argue that, even though their vision ignored African-Americans and women, we would benefit from thinking of education as a larger public good, not just an individual economic one.

A journalist’s dispatch from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

Clare Morgana Gillis recalls her days reporting in Libya with James Foley.

On aging baby boomers and skepticism that the cost of caring for them will throw us in economic chaos:

A demographic tool has become an economic one, treating a demographic challenge as both an economic crisis and a basis for pessimism justifying drastic reductions in bedrock government programs, including those supporting children and the poor. Even at state and local levels, the aging boomer demographic is repeatedly blamed for our economic difficulties. That is a lamentable mistake. The United States has serious economic problems, and the aging population poses significant challenges, but those challenges are not the main cause of the problems. They should not be treated that way.

The dilemma of The Food Movement: Can we be “conscientious carnivores” by humanely raising animals if the end result means butchering the animal for our own consumption?

Some skeptics have wondered whether any of the Food Movement’s reforms are even remotely achievable if reformers continue to ignore the ethical considerations involved in eating meat. Simply put, when it comes to the Food Movement’s long-term viability, could it be that changing what we eat is more important than improving its source? Might the only way to reform our food system—rather than simply providing alternatives—be to stop raising animals for consumption? Pollan has addressed these questions by explaining, “what’s wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.” But what if he’s got that backward? What if, when it comes to eating animals, the Food Movement’s principles are out of whack?

The reporter, in Orange County, Calif., examines the gradual decline of evangelical Christianity in America:

Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development—in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”

A young man who grew up experiencing years of violence in Burundi’s civil war is bewildered by the violent, war-like video games played by Americans when he encounters them in a prep school in Massachusetts:

“In the hallway at Deerfield, the boy, whom I’ll call Luke, went on talking about video games, as we waited for our classmates to join us for dinner. Almost everything Luke said was so confusing that I asked him: ‘What do you mean by saying you killed so-and-so?’

“‘Well, my enemies. Paci, how often do you play video games?’

“‘Actually, what are they?’

“The other students looked at each other and smiled.

“‘Come on, Paci!’ Luke led me to his room. He took up a little device in his hands and turned on his computer. He pointed at the computer screen, at images of people with guns. ‘Once you press this button, they start moving and you hunt them, see?’ Out of the computer’s speakers came the sound of shooting, the sound of war.”

DNA testing is showing how racially diverse people are, complicating how we view race:

“I imagined we’d have a vigorous discussion about how DNA turns the historical concept of race upside down. But for my son, the traditional concept of race had already been overturned, and our discussions revealed a deep generational gulf between us. As in my case, the sources and percentages of my son’s ancestry were not surprising: 72 percent European, 25 percent African, and three percent Asian. But when I mentioned how revealing DNA had been to me, Patrick just shrugged his shoulders, as if the numbers meant little to him. ‘They don’t change the way I think of myself or the way I view the world,’ he said. ‘When people ask me, “What are you?” I generally tell them that I am American. And given how diverse my background is, it’s in my way of thinking, a background that could only come about in America.'”

[Fiction] A teenage mother leaves her childhood home, then returns three years later:

“Time seemed to pass according to alternate principles: spatially, barometrically. The car was a thing of the distance, and then it was so close, Cici felt the heat coming off its hood like fever. And then a person—Dane!—was flying out the door, engulfing Cici, submerging her. She breathed in cheap, buttery shampoo, and beneath that was the smell of Dane: rich, ripe, somehow feral. Dane’s pull on people was more than just attraction—and it wasn’t just men, and it wasn’t just sexual. Men, women, prepubescent boys, adolescent girls, family, and people who didn’t know Dane from a Mormon missionary. People wanted her. They wanted to be near her, to touch her, to breathe her in like air.”