Search Results for: The American Scholar

Climate Change Is Personal for These Alaskan Women

AP Photo/Gregory Bull

Alaska is ground zero for climate change. Miranda Weiss moved to Homer, Alaska, in 1999. Her family relies partly on wild foods to live, and she’s watched these changes mount as both a resident and reporter. For The American Scholar, Weiss talked with six Alaskan women about their practical concerns, their anxieties, and how they’re handling these monumental changes physically and psychologically. Fires burn. Insects descend. Acidity and warm waters damage the marine ecosystem, killing birds and poisoning shellfish. As Weiss put it, “The bad news is relentless.” Melting permafrost doesn’t only topple buildings. It topples the economies and identities of subsistence hunters, Indigenous people, scientists, and commercial fisherwomen.

The changing chemistry of the ocean is not abstract to Hannah. She has a boat payment to make, a student loan to repay.

Across Alaska, there’s a $6 billion economy at stake, one that employs tens of thousands of people. More than half the nation’s commercial seafood harvest is at risk. Also on the line is the survival of scores of coastal communities dependent on the fishing industry, and the very character of the state itself.

Alaska’s commercial fisheries harvest more than 40 species of marine life, and fishermen and researchers believe it’s only a matter of time before the industry suffers a catastrophe. Already, the world is looking different to people who live on or by the ocean. They’re seeing warm-water species appear off Alaska’s shores. Oyster farmers are having a hard time getting spat—the small larvae used to start a crop—because their sources are affected by acidification. Lucrative crab and pollock industries are expected to face declines with further acidification and warming. Uncertainties swirl around salmon, which are notoriously sensitive to water temperature.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Former New York Daily News gossip columnist A. J. Benza standing next to a poster of an illustrated woman in a bikini
A. J. Benza, a former New York Daily News gossip columnist, was part of a network of journalists Weinstein used over the years to burnish his reputation. (David Crotty / Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, Susan Dominus, Jim Rutenberg, and Steve Eder; Eliana Dockterman, Stephanie Zarachek, and Haley Sweetland Edwards; John Woodrow Cox; Nadim Roberts; and Phil Klay.

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I Must Be One of the Best, Because I’m Not One of the Worst

A U.S. marine watches children play in Ramadi, in Iraq's Anbar province. (AP Photo/Todd Pitman)

Are there atheists in foxholes? How do we justify our participation in wars that kill civilians, often children? At The American Scholar, veteran and author of Redeployment Phil Klay turns his writer’s eye on himself in this essay on war, faith, and fatherhood, and reckons with his own complicity.

I was in a different position. My job in the Marine Corps meant that I was generally a spectator rather than an actor in the war. I was never faced with the responsibility of leading men in combat, never responsible for the direct act of killing, never faced with what Marlantes has described as “a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite.” Instead, I had the images of those children in my head, and for a young man, fervently believing in the mission and in the potential for the Marine Corps to turn around Anbar Province, they confirmed me in all I believed. A Special Forces veteran later told me why, for him, killing people in Iraq felt less morally troubling than killing people in Afghanistan. “Iraq may have been a giant clusterfuck,” he said, “but al-Qaeda did always make it easy.” In other words, al-Qaeda was so grotesquely, absurdly evil, you could not help but compare yourself with them and assume that you must be good.

So rather than challenging my Christian faith or provoking deep questions about who I was as a man, what kind of war I was in, and what sort of country I was a citizen of, the children made me feel like I didn’t have to justify myself at all. When I got home, those children were a useful tool for propping up my image of myself as a decent human being. Confronted with a man who voiced contempt at the notion that anyone would fight in a war that had caused such horrendous civilian casualties, I told him, “I carried injured Iraqi children to medical care with my own hands! What have you done for Iraqi civilians recently? Posted snarky comments on Facebook?”

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The Hippies Who Hated the Summer of Love

Newcomers to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in April, 1967. At the height of the "Summer of Love," the area had a population density greater than Manhattan.

Kate Daloz | Longreads | August 2017 | 11 minutes (2700 words)

The posters began to appear around the city just after New Year’s, 1967. “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-in…Bring food to share, bring flowers, beads, costumes, feathers, cymbal flags.” On Saturday, January 14, a crowd of young people began to form on the open fields of Golden Gate Park. Throughout the day, local bands — not yet famous — took turns on the stage: The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company. Poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder led Hindu chants to the bouncing rhythm of finger cymbals. Timothy Leary addressed the crowd, urging them for the first time ever to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Owsley Stanley, the rogue chemist credited with manufacturing the period’s highest-quality LSD, donated 75 turkeys for sandwiches — the bread was sprinkled lightly with crushed White Lightning acid. At one point, a skydiver descended gently into the crowd, borne by a white parachute.

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My Mongolian Spot

Photo-Illustration by David Herbick

Jennifer Hope Choi | The American Scholar | August 2017 | 17 minutes (4,250 words)

 

First you should know: I was born with a blue butt.

So was my mother.

Thirty-two years and many thousands of miles of land, sky, and sea separated her creation from mine, yet we emerged the same: wailing, mad for first breaths, 10-fingered, 10-toed, chick-like tufts of black hair nested atop our soft skulls, and, incredibly, a wavy-bordered blue spot not unlike that of Rorschach’s inkblots, blooming across our tiny bums—blue like ice-cold lips, blue like the ocean at midnight, Picasso’s most melancholic bluest of blues.

By the time I learned about my blue butt, it was gone. Like a spy’s secret message written in vanishing ink, the spot disappeared sometime after my fourth birthday. The timing seems strange—to think that as soon as I could form my earliest memories, my blueness had already left me. In one such memory, I recall taking a shower with my mother. The water beat down on my shoulders thunderously. I’d misbehaved (perhaps, refused to wash my hair), and as I slid open the mottled glass door to escape, my mother smacked my bottom. Because this is my earliest butt-related memory, I mined it recently, hoping to uncover any clues of my former blue self. I remember wailing in the showy way children do when they’re old enough to know better, then peering behind me for proof: the fierce, fiery outline of my mother’s hand. But I can recall nothing but plain tush. I was neither red nor blue. We stood as nude as newborns, un-shy in our nakedness, water cascading across my mother’s towering body as she fumed and I wept in her shadow. Read more…

Yes, We Could, But Can We Now? Reflections on Obama’s Speeches

(AP Images / Jay LaPrete)

Americans hear more from our current President on Twitter than we do from his speeches, and it seems better that way. Donald Trump is no orator; he admits he doesn’t even read for pleasure. President Trump’s 140-character tweet style of mass communication—with its em dash misuse, random capitalization, and misplaced exclamation!— might portend the future of American politics in which words don’t particularly matter.

It certainly contrasts greatly with President Obama’s powerful oratory. At The American Scholar, former DOJ speechwriter James Santel reads the newly-published collection of Obama’s speeches, We Are the Change We Seek, to discuss what Obama’s sense of storytelling reveals about him, and how the power of residential speeches can motivate us, set the national tenor, our vision of the future and, as Obama frequently said, define who we are.

Like all good orators, Obama was a storyteller. Among his favorite stories was his own: how the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas rose to become a U.S. Senator. That background opens the speech that made him a national figure, the Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. After talking about his parents and grandparents, he said, “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story.”

Obama uses his autobiography to argue that his unconventional background did not place him at odds with the American experience, but made him emblematic of it. That case required Obama to offer a particular reading of American history, which goes something like this: Our shared commitment to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the principles set forth in the Constitution has always been more powerful than our divisions and disagreements, allowing our country to slowly “perfect” itself over time (to use a favorite Obama verb). It is a story of steady change and patient progress, of obstacles overcome and common ground discovered, a story in which all people are given equal attention and credit. In it, racism and prejudice are not defining features of the American character, but blemishes upon it, historical aberrations that we have slowly corrected over time. Above all, it is a story that, in one way or another, has always made room for everyone.

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Canada, Who Are You?

In a box in my basement, I keep a small bag of letters from my Canadian friend Dayna. We got tight in high school in Phoenix, Arizona, but after she moved back home to Calgary, Alberta, we corresponded by mail. Growing up, cars with Manitoba and Saskatchewan license plates filled my city’s streets during the mild desert winters. “Another snowbird,” my dad would say from behind the wheel. “Be nice to them. They’re good for the economy.” Dayna was the first Canada I actually got to know.

For four years, Dayna and I kept in touch by exchanging mixtapes and letters filled with our teenage obsessions. Hers also contained tantalizing visions of a foreign land. She called dorks “knobs” and heavy-metal kids “bangers.” In the photos Dayna and her friends sent, their cars shimmered with a crystalline sheen and you could see their breath. It all seemed so exotic. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man

David Lehman | The American Scholar | Fall 2015 | 19 minutes (4,696 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from the new issue of The American Scholar. Our thanks to them for sharing this essay with us.

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The Jeopardy category is Opening Lines, and the literary answer is “Two Bars, 52nd Street.” You need to ask what works begin in such venues. One comes to mind quickly enough, but if you have only an out-of-towner’s awareness of New York City and you have not paid close enough attention to W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” you may misread yourself 10 blocks down past Times Square. Read more…

The Wandering Years

Lawrence Ferlinghetti | The American Scholar | Summer 2015 | 23 minutes (4,685 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a series of travel journal entries adapted from poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s forthcoming book, Writing Across the LandscapeIt first appeared in The American Scholar’s Summer 2015 issue (subscribe here!).

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I was part of that Greatest Generation that came of age at the beginning of the Second World War. As I worked in San Francisco, the days and years fell away into the great maw of time. America went through a sea change after that. San Francisco, which had been a small provincial capital, grew up. So did I, and I started voyaging. I was usually traveling to some literary or political event or tracking down some author whose undiscovered masterpiece I could publish at City Lights Books. I didn’t keep journals consistently, so some literary capers went unrecorded, such as when I visited Paul Bowles in Tangier to pry from him his Moroccan tales in A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. This was agreed to, and then we sat dully in his high-rise apartment near the American Embassy. And when Jane Bowles suggested we turn-on, Paul said he didn’t have any hash. I was clean-shaven in a white suit, and I imagine he thought I was a narc. Paranoia, the doper’s constant companion! I wrote these peripatetic pages for myself, never thinking to publish them. It is as if much of my life were a continuation of my youthful Wanderjahr, my walk-about in the world. Rereading them now, I see a wandering figure in momentous times. …The war ends, decades whir by, there is a rumble in the wings, the scene darkens, and Camelot lost! Read more…