Although plantations can be educational, they are often for-profit tourist traps. I didn’t want to contribute to the whitewashing of slavery that some institutions do, where the owners are positioned as philanthropists and the experiences of enslaved people are minimized or erased. However, I also knew that my view of plantations was skewed. The only exposure I’d had to them came from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind, which I read when I was 11, and the subsequent movie. I decided that I would revisit the book during the trip, reading it as we drove through the South.

GWTW was a hit when it was published, selling a million copies in six months and winning the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Today, Americans regularly list it on surveys of their favorite books. It has been translated into dozens of languages, and more than 30 million copies have been sold. The movie has been even more successful. Adjusted for inflation, it remains the highest-grossing film ever. I knew, of course, that Gone with the Wind is racist. This has been pointed out ever since the NAACP objected to the movie in 1937. What I couldn’t have predicted before the road trip, however, was just how much this novel would shock me with its loathsomeness and dedication to white supremacy. On my travels through the South, I found that I wasn’t just interrogating a controversial book. I was interrogating its lasting hold on me.

It’s hard to overstate how much I loved Gone with the Wind as a child growing up in Humboldt County, on the northern coast of California. I was hooked from the first sentence: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm.” Scarlett, with her 17-inch waist and green eyes, possesses a magnetic power that I coveted. She might not be beautiful, as the book unconvincingly states, yet when she attends a barbecue decked out in a hoop skirt, the men surround her like June bugs. I hoped one day to develop a similar irresistible charm that would allow me to control men. I’d already gotten the message that they were the ones to impress if I wanted to succeed in life. On top of that, Scarlett’s determination appealed to me. After the devastation of the Civil War, she vows to get back everything she has lost, even if she has to “steal or kill—as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.” Then she follows through on that promise, marrying a series of men, taking over multiple businesses, and running them successfully, all while driving around in a carriage unchaperoned.

I mistakenly took a feminist message from this, that a strong-willed, smart, painfully thin woman could change her circumstances, even if people were against her, or something along those lines. Scarlett is an unlikable female protagonist, and that meant a lot to me because I felt unlikable. By fifth grade, I was always picked last for partnerships or games. During recess, no one would play with me, so I hid in the hallway and read. Scarlett, I thought, was just like me. She’s passionate, and her desires are easy to understand. I was passionate, and I had strong desires. In fact, GWTW was the first book I encountered with anything approaching sex scenes: drunken foreplay in “swirling darkness,” embraces that evoke “feelings never felt before.” When you’re 11, this is potent stuff. And unlike the other women in the novel, Scarlett doesn’t care what people think. I desperately wanted not to care what people thought. “She wasn’t going to sit down and patiently wait for a miracle to help her. She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could.” Exactly. That was how I would be, starting next recess.

Reading GWTW led to watching the movie, which I adored. I owned a GWTW music box and two collector plates that my mom bought off TV. This led to a fascination with Vivien Leigh, who famously beat out hundreds of actors for the lead role, including heavy hitters like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. I devoured biographies of Leigh and tried to see all her films. I even practiced the catlike smile she employs throughout GWTW and was flattered when another child told me I reminded her of Leigh.

So it was all mixed up in my mind: Scarlett O’Hara, elaborate dresses, Vivien Leigh, “swirling darkness,” white houses with columns, and eating rotten radishes while sobbing that you’ll never go hungry again. What strikes me now is how little thought I gave to the enslaved characters in the book. Today, this seems odd. It’s a story set on a slave plantation, so why didn’t I care about the central conflict of the story? Then again, I remember skipping over large portions of GWTW. The book is structured such that information dumps about the war are interspersed throughout the story, which means you can ignore the battles and politics and still understand what’s going on with Scarlett. On top of that, the enslaved characters speak in dialect: “Is y’all aimin’ ter go ter Mist’ Wynder’s?’ ’Cause ef you is, you ain’ gwine git much supper.” I puzzled over such lines, determined that I didn’t like them, and disregarded any dialect I encountered. Thus I read GWTW for the love scenes and drama and skimmed everything else.

My reaction may have been fairly typical. For many readers, slavery is merely a backdrop for the story. Scarlett’s racism is seen as part of her complexity, a mere foible in the fabric of her humanity. Or it’s written off as ancient history, as if white supremacy is long over, making it therefore harmless to root for an enslaver’s daughter.

The first leg of our 2015 road trip went from Key West to Savannah. Along the way, we stopped in St. Augustine and toured the Castillo de San Marcos, a 17th-century fort built to protect the settlement from pirates. Beside a rock tower, men in old-timey jackets set off a cannon with an impressive blast. My three-year-old son was delighted, shouting, “Bam bam!” and “Wow!” and asking how cannons work.

Unimpressed by the touristy shops surrounding the fort, we decided to go to the beach. Once there, I sat on the sand reading a battered, thrift-store copy of GWTW while my husband and son bobbed in the waves. The first scene revealed Scarlett where I’d left her 20 years earlier, flirting with the Tarleton twins while wearing a dress made from 12 yards of green-flowered muslin. But almost immediately, I was startled by the hatred filling the pages of the novel. GWTW is so overtly racist, it’s difficult to quote. On seeing a white person, a Black man is described rolling his eyes as his “watermelon-pink tongue lapped out” and his body “wiggled” in “joyful contortions … as ludicrous as the gamboling of a mastiff.” In another passage, old men sit by the road begging for someone to write to their “Marsters” to take them back “home”—that is, back to slavery. Black people are compared to devils, sexual deviants, animals, and children. The rape of Black women and the presence of mixed-race infants are blamed on Yankee soldiers, not slaveowners. The n-word is used more than 100 times.

Mitchell describes a nightmarish version of postwar Atlanta, full of violence, displacement, and theft. The Yankees are crass capitalists who want to destroy the rights of Southern men: “Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles.” The sexual assault of white women like Scarlett is so frequent, it causes “the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight.” The KKK is painted as a necessary evil—the last resort of good people backed into a corner by harsh circumstances. Rhett Butler is thrown in jail because, he says, he killed a Black man who was “uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”

Scarlett is not, as I once supposed, a complex, passionate heroine whose trauma keeps her from recognizing true love. Scarlett is the new South that Mitchell decries throughout the book: “It was an era that suited her, crude, garish, showy … too many jewels, too many horses, too much food, too much whisky.” From the beginning, Mitchell is explicit about Scarlett’s greed, stupidity, and destructiveness. After the war destroys Scarlett’s way of life, she is determined to survive: “There’s still plenty of money to be made,” she thinks, “by anyone who isn’t afraid to work—or to grab.”

Now that she can no longer profit from enslaved people, Scarlett uses white criminals as unpaid labor in her sawmill, horrifying the genteel Atlantans. Mitchell suggests that Scarlett is forced to extremes to protect Tara—much is made about the $300 tax bill on the plantation—but really, Scarlett just wants to be rich. “I’ve found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don’t ever intend to be without it again,” she announces. Only occasionally does she have flashes of conscience, always while thinking of her saintly mother, Ellen. Sometimes, when doing something heinous, Scarlett considers “with a sigh that she was not as Ellen would like her to be.” Yet she’s disdainful of her “mealy mouthed” sister-in-law Melanie, the embodiment of the proper southern lady—meek, quiet, kind, and noble.

As the novel continues, Scarlett grows increasingly shrill and cartoonish. At the end, she invites the “scallawag” governor to a party at her house, leading good society to snub her—a scenario meant to show how far she has fallen from the gentility Mitchell associated with the prewar South. Yes, Scarlett survives, but at what cost, Mitchell asks. Scarlett destroys her familial ties and alienates almost everyone in her life. The proper conduct for her is to be the lady Ellen taught her to be, which seems to entail, as Rhett says when he leaves her, yearning for “the calm dignity life can have when it’s lived by gentle folks, the genial grace of days that are gone.” That is, Scarlett, the daughter of enslavers, should be longing for the era of slavery and upholding its values as best she can.

It turns out that Mitchell thought Melanie was the star of the book. As she wrote to journalist Harry Stillwell Edwards, “[Melanie] is really my heroine, not ‘Scarlett.’ I wanted to picture in ‘Melanie’ … the true ladies of the old South, gentle and dear, frail of body perhaps, but never of courage, never swerving from what they believed the right path.” The reader of GWTW is supposed to weep when Melanie dies and dislike Scarlett for her ambition. Little girls are supposed to emulate Melanie, not Scarlett.

So much for feminism. So much for a strong female character.

All of this rereading brought up a question for me: Why did Margaret Mitchell only write one novel? Given the critical and commercial success of GWTW, she could have written anything she wanted. The novel’s final line, “After all, tomorrow is another day,” felt like a cliffhanger, and readers begged her for a sequel. Mitchell refused and spent her time answering fan mail instead.

Born in 1900, Mitchell was inundated as a child with Confederate propaganda about the Civil War. According to Anne Edwards’s 1983 biography The Road to Tara, Mitchell was “taught the names of battles along with the alphabet.” Her “lullabies were doleful Civil War songs,” which she listened to “as she stared up at her mother’s tear-stained face in the dimly lit room.” Her family had lived through the war and was still angry about the end of slavery. Like Scarlett’s father, Gerald O’Hara, Mitchell’s great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland. His 2,375-acre plantation enslaved 35 people.

Her grandmother Annie Fitzgerald was a teenager when the war started, just like Scarlett. At family gatherings, she and other relatives “spiritedly refought the Civil War,” talking about everything from the burning of Atlanta to the smell of gangrene. Mitchell especially enjoyed the stories about women who kept the home front, surviving famine and nursing the wounded. No doubt she imagined herself in their place.

Despite all this, no one told Mitchell about the outcome of the war. She was 10 before she discovered that the South had actually lost, and the way she found out was just weird. Prewar life was so romanticized in her mind that she wanted to try working on a cotton farm, according to Edwards’s biography. Someone must have arranged for her to spend time—it’s unclear how much—picking cotton. Mitchell quickly learned that it was difficult “laboring beneath a blistering sun, her back aching, her hands bleeding.” But she “refused to quit.” The Black people working beside her in the field, who probably didn’t have the option of giving up when their jobs got hard, were the ones who informed Mitchell how the war ended. She was shocked.

In 1926, after resigning as a newspaper reporter, Mitchell began writing GWTW. At that time, Atlanta was headquarters for some six million Klansmen. These violent terrorists set fire to Black-owned businesses and churches and were so dangerous that Mitchell’s domestic worker, Cammie, wouldn’t venture outside after seven p.m. The resurgence of the KKK in America was inspired by The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 blockbuster film based on Thomas Dixon’s white supremacist novel The Clansman. Mitchell was a huge fan of Dixon. “I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much,” she gushed to him after GWTW was published. She went on to “confess” that as a child, she dramatized another Dixon novel, The Traitor, and performed the play in the sitting room of her family home. Her father’s reaction was to spank her and lecture her about plagiarism. In describing the incident, Mitchell added, “For years afterward I expected Mr. Thomas Dixon to sue me for a million dollars.”

In many ways, Mitchell’s success mimics Dixon’s career. Both wrote best-selling novels about the Civil War that championed the Confederacy and romanticized slaveholders. Both books were followed up with even more popular movies. When I watched The Birth of a Nation, I was struck by how much GWTW imitates it. The stories present the same images of life before, during, and after the war. Black characters are viewed through the same racist lens. There’s a focus on making the most out of poverty—in GWTW, Scarlett sews a gown out of a velvet curtain, and in The Birth of a Nation, Flora decorates her dress with “Southern ermine,” raw cotton balls.

Mitchell also borrowed part of The Birth of a Nation’s plot: the attempted rape of Flora by a Black soldier. In the movie, Flora goes to the creek alone, even though she isn’t supposed to go anywhere as an unaccompanied woman. Once there, a soldier named Gus, played by a white man in blackface, attempts to sexually assault her. To escape, she jumps off a cliff to her death. This event prompts her brother to organize the KKK, which ushers in the third act of the movie, where white “order” is restored. In Mitchell’s version, it’s Scarlett who goes to the creek alone without a chaperone. Instead of one potential rapist, she encounters two—a white Yankee and a Black man. At the last minute, Tara’s foreman, Big Sam, shows up and rescues her. That a Black man saves Scarlett does not prevent her husband from joining the KKK. When he’s killed in a raid, everyone blames Scarlett for his death, believing that her actions brought on the assault.

It’s almost as if GWTW is retelling parts of The Birth of a Nation from a female point of view. It’s possible Mitchell never wrote again because so much of her message was misunderstood by the public, and she didn’t want people to notice. Despite the popular success of the novel, critics weren’t blind to its faults. In 1936, literary scholar F. W. Dupee complained in The Nation that the book was “heavily imbued with cliché, and the writing is correspondingly dull and grubby.” Mitchell may have been skilled at constructing sentences—a craft she honed as a journalist—but she couldn’t pull all the threads of her plot together without resorting to borrowing from other texts. She poured everything she had into GWTW: her personal and family histories, fantasies of the Civil War home front, false narratives from her Confederate relatives, and the political and cultural biases in which she was immersed. In the end, the novel’s moral lesson was lost on readers, who didn’t frown in disapproval of Scarlett in favor of perfect Melanie. They just wanted to know what would happen next to Scarlett. Perhaps the reason Mitchell didn’t write another book is because she thought it was better to go out on a high note than be revealed as inept.

While planning the road trip, I’d considered going to Atlanta specifically to see the Margaret Mitchell House, where she lived and wrote GWTW. By the time I got to Georgia, I’d read enough of the novel to be happy I didn’t make the detour. Instead, we chose the more historically preserved Savannah. I was taken by this charming city, which greeted us that morning with a rollicking parade. By contrast, Charleston seemed colder and more sedate. We took the ferry to Fort Sumter, where the first battle of the Civil War occurred. During the conflict, the Confederacy fired on Sumter for 34 hours until the Union surrendered. There were no casualties. After that, the fort remained in Confederate hands until Sherman marched through South Carolina in February 1865.

Visiting the fort felt like entering a mausoleum. A hush hung within the brick walls, and visitors gazed about with somber expressions. When my son saw the cannons, he started shouting, “Bam! Bam! Bam!” and I worried that he might disturb someone. Though to me the Civil War is history, many of these people were acting as if it were a recent tragedy. In the museum, there was a tattered American flag that flew during the attack. A patch in the blue is called the “face in the flag.” I leaned in to study this visage, which did indeed look like a film negative of a soldier with a bushy beard. Some people believe that a ghost is trapped in there, a peculiar kind of afterlife. As I moved away, I noticed that an old man next to me was blinking back tears. He held his hat against his chest.

GWTW is the last accepted cultural artifact that romanticizes antebellum southern life. It presents a fantasy that something charming and graceful was lost forever from America with the end of the Confederacy. The novel, the movie, the whole Margaret Mitchell machine covertly promote white supremacy while seeming to be about something else—history or romance or beautiful costumes, take your pick. The story seduces you so that it can get close to you and whisper hatred in your ear. This insidious, sly approach to racism is perhaps part of the reason why GWTW is still present in the culture while The Birth of the Nation is seen as a relic. As I got deeper into the novel, I realized how dangerous it is to like the fantasy it represents, or to see any of it as attractive or fun. I can say this because I now understand how GWTW affected me.

Growing up in Humboldt County, I was surrounded by the hippies who migrated north after flower-power times ended in San Francisco. Politically, these “back to the landers” were pro–civil rights, anti-consumerism, and busily cultivating illegal weed in patches between redwood trees. At the time, nearly 90 percent of the population was white. People often mentioned this fact as an embarrassed joke, like, “Ha, ha, Humboldt is so white, what are you going do?” I felt removed from the racial unrest that occurred during my childhood, including the Rodney King beating and the LA riots. No one I knew spoke rudely about people of color or used slurs, not while I was around, anyway. I encountered the n-word for the first time when I was eight while reading Tom Sawyer, and I didn’t hear anyone actually use the word until I was in college.

But Humboldt was founded on a heritage as ugly and violent as any in America. The same 19th-century loggers who cleared the old-growth redwood forests also rid the area of other people. They slaughtered the Indigenous tribes and purged the Chinese populations, forcing them onto boats to San Francisco and stealing their belongings in the process. A business directory from 1890 bragged that the area was “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.” Humboldt, it turned out, was white by design. The freedom to enmesh ourselves in an environment where racial problems seemed separated from us was, of course, privilege. It was also counterfeit.

Still, GWTW presented images that seemed exotic to my redwood-bordered childhood. The picture of Scarlett in a billowing dress, surrounded by beaus at the barbecue, went into my mind and stayed there. I fell for this ideal of white beauty so thoroughly that I measured myself against it—quite literally, in the sense that I would measure my waist. (It was nowhere near 17 inches. This bothered me a great deal.) Scarlett’s position as a petite, feminine, well-dressed white woman protects her from scrutiny. For many readers, these physical attributes are enough to counteract her bad characteristics, making her seem complex instead of just a terrible person. The root of Scarlett’s appeal lies in the fact that rich men want her, not just sexually but romantically, which gives her choices other women don’t have. I understood none of this while growing up, but I wanted the power her appearance promised, and I was aware that I had some of it already in my skin color. If you give a child racist material, she’ll absorb it even if she doesn’t understand it. Even today, I can’t completely reject the aspects of GWTW that resonated with me in the past. I still think the dress at the barbecue is pretty. I may hate the novel for its ugliness, but my love for the images of lovely Vivien Leigh came first.

In truth, the images I was responding to weren’t from the South. They’re from Hollywood. GWTW is California’s idea of the Confederacy, with bigger rooms, taller ceilings, and longer staircases. Many of the sets, including the long view of the driveway and front of the Twelve Oaks plantation house, were matte paintings blended on film with action shots. The façade of Tara was built on a back lot in Culver City. And the “Atlanta” that burns around Scarlett and Rhett as they flee the city incorporated a set used in King Kong.

The movie perpetuates Mitchell’s fantasy more effectively than the book. It’s also less racist than the novel because producer David O. Selznick, caving to pressure from cast members and the NAACP, stripped away mention of the KKK and overtly racist language. Even though the enslaved characters are limited and stereotypical, GWTW was the first movie for which a Black actor won an Academy Award. Hattie McDaniel may have been portraying a Mammy, but she endowed a thinly written role with humor and complexity. Responding to criticism for her part in the film, McDaniel reportedly said, “Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making $7 a week being one.”

It must have seemed progressive in 1940 Hollywood for a Black person to win an Oscar, especially over her co-star, Olivia de Havilland, who played Melanie. However, at the ceremony, which was held at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel, McDaniel wasn’t allowed to sit with her fellow actors because of a “no blacks” policy. She was “escorted to … a small table set against a far wall,” according to an article in The Hollywood Reporter. She sat there, away from her co-stars, throughout the ceremony. It would be 24 years before another Black actor would win an Academy Award—Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field.

I decided Middleton Place—a rice farm founded in 1741 near Charleston—would be the plantation we would visit on our trip. Arthur Middleton signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandson Williams Middleton signed South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession from the Union, making the state the first to secede. The Middletons acquired some 50,000 acres of land and enslaved around 800 people. They weren’t content with one mansion, so they built three. During the war, Sherman’s army burned down two and camped in the third, just as Tara in GWTW was occupied by soldiers. Today, you can visit the remaining house, the slave quarters, and the grounds and elaborate gardens.

By the time we went to the plantation, I’d finished rereading GWTW and was relieved to be done with it. Still, when we pulled up to Middleton Place, I was nonplussed. GWTW had conditioned me to think plantations were beautiful, but no pleasing sights met my eye. In the middle of a flat lawn sat a dour brick building. Humidity pressed on me like a cloche as I got out of the car. Spanish moss dripped from the trees. This plant had seemed charming in Savannah, but now it reminded me of the mistletoe that invades the oaks in California, a romantic symbol choking a tree.

I walked around the grounds first, starting at the cabins where the enslaved people lived. These small buildings sat on post-and-pier foundations and made me think of chicken coops. On one wall, a display of a page from the Middletons’ bookkeeping ledger recorded the names of the workers and their individual worth in British pounds. “Ben, a hairdresser” was valued at £50. “Judy, House Wench and Seamstress” was £70. “Old Jonney Superannuated” (his age perhaps remarkable because most enslaved people didn’t make it to middle age) was worth £100. “Maria & Child” were a combined £200. “Quam, cooper” was £300.

Middleton Place was the kind of plantation where, at some point, the property owners built a chapel so the enslaved population could attend Sunday services. Beside the chapel was a pond bordered by green grass. As I approached the edge, my foot sank into something slimy. When I lifted it out, algae slid off my shoe like oil and trickled onto the water. What I’d thought was grass was swamp.

Inside the house, the rooms were smaller and more cramped than anyone who has seen the movie version of GWTW might believe. There were no columns or sweeping staircases, just dark chambers crowded with furniture. Usually a historic home reveals the owner’s personality, but the Middletons seemed strangely blank. There was little creativity or intellectual interest evident in their belongings, just displays of wealth—silverware, oil paintings, gilt busts, a fancy Bible. Instead of the landed gentry Mitchell describes, I found myself thinking of her gaudily dressed carpetbaggers, who try to cover their lack of class with tacky, expensive things. (This, I have since learned, is a stereotype—carpetbagger was a slur for any northerner who came to the South during Reconstruction. Again, Mitchell’s stereotypes played in my mind, uncriticized.)

Outside, I took in the view from the front steps. Ahead was a lawn, and to the left were the slave quarters. Beside the main house were the remains of the two buildings Sherman destroyed. Piles of bricks leaned against a retaining wall like a grave. I imagined the family traipsing from one stuffed house to another. I didn’t think of Scarlett O’Hara. I thought of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, grotesque caricatures revealing the depravity of slavery.

Since most of the plantation was destroyed in the war, the remaining vestige of its heyday are the French-inspired gardens that Henry Middleton established in 1741.The goal was symmetry and order, which were achieved by hundreds of hedges planted by enslaved people. I wandered through, somewhat at a loss. It should have been delightful, but it wasn’t. I don’t remember seeing any insects or hearing any birds. Bushes gave way to secret nooks filled with Grecian statues, and I shrugged. I passed fountains, obelisks, and spiky palm bushes with barely a glance. Shrubs hunched around lawns in a grassy monotone. I sat on a bench. I tried to like it. I like gardens a lot.

Finally, I came upon a swamp. Behind a fence, trees grew out of algae-coated water. Branches slumped, dripping with spidery languor into the green surface. The algae was even and still, concealing the darkness underneath like a musty carpet, and there were suspicious lumps throughout, as if alligators might be lurking. A mosquito reared up and bit my arm.

As I took the path back to the parking lot, I understood what had bothered me about the garden. Here I was in the South, which I love for its friendly people, great music, and delicious food. It’s a place where purple banana flowers seem about to talk to you, where trumpet vine and hibiscus blossoms riot on the fences, where beautyberries group in lipstick-colored balls, and passion vines turn clocklike faces to the sun. Since reading GWTW for the first time, I’d heard that plantations were emblems of this beauty, worth visiting as long as you compartmentalized their splendor from their origins in slavery. I was prepared to compartmentalize for the length of time it would take to see the garden, as I had as a child when I first read GWTW and skipped the parts about the war so I could concentrate on the romance. At bottom, I wanted to witness the famed charm and grace I’d always heard about, the fragrant magnolia trees and serene passages of old and lush beauty. If any of this ever existed, surely I could have found it in this swampland turned, by enslaved lives, into an estate. And yet, this enormous garden did not contain even one blooming flower.

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This last always causes me a moment’s confusion. What poet? I look around to see if I’ve missed a clue. You might also use a generic poet as the authority in English, but no one does—it would sound pompous instead of casual, as it does in Spanish. In “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Elvis Presley croons another version: “Wise men say …” What do they say? That only fools fall in love. So how wise are those wise men? Because doesn’t everyone fall in love, and, hurriedly or not, don’t we all go blindly? To paraphrase a different poet, “Only fools don’t fall in love.” That is Tennyson. But who trusts poets, anyway? Aren’t poets all dreamers?

It was a pair of poets who wrote the 1967 song “What a Wonderful World,” which was in my head when I stopped to pet a dog on my way home from the health center one day this past fall. The narrow, one-way, back road passed through someone’s courtyard, with the house on one side and the hórreo and shed on the other, a doghouse of brick and mortar at the corner closest to the house. I stopped and called.

The big old yellow dog came out of his doghouse a little stiffly. He sniffed, blinked, saw me waiting, eyed me with a mixture of mistrust and interest, and then, smelling friendliness in the air, stepped forward. When he recognized me, his face became soft with pleasure. I petted him, he leaned against my leg, I scratched his ears and said a few silly things, and he moaned with happiness. The world is a wonderful place.

Then I gave a last pat, said goodbye, and walked on. He walked beside me for a few feet until he reached the end of his chain, and suddenly his world must have seemed not quite so nice. I felt glad to have afforded him some happiness but sad not to do more, or be able to do it endlessly.

Poor old dog, I thought. What would I do if he were my cause and improving his life were my project?

With an animal, such a fantasy is easy. The dog lived on a short chain, so the owner, I guessed, couldn’t have much feeling for the animal and might readily sell him if someone held out a wad of bills. If I had deep pockets, that someone could be me. I could then install him in a nice home, add some companions of his own kind, hire a minder to give him and his canine pals plenty of exercise and affection. Doing this would show me to be a near-termist: someone who prioritizes short-term outcomes over long-term ones.

For a near-termist, efforts to better the world—or whatever corner is right outside one’s door—are centered on immediate improvement. More health, more happiness, less struggle, less angst, all right now. With a fortune at my disposal, I would be among the people who, distressed about the state of the world, set about bettering it one suffering individual, or one disadvantaged group, at a time—one lonely dog, one caged chimpanzee, or one herd of elephants. My money might go further toward eradicating misery if I spent it differently—working to change laws or educate the public—but I am nearsighted that way. The causes I fall for are emotionally driven, as the former billionaire philanthropist Sam Bankman-Fried, who organized his giving according to how effective the gift was, described such causes.

Bankman-Fried labeled himself, in contrast, a long-termist for thinking primarily about what is owed to future generations rather than about the state of the world today. What is owed, he claimed, is survival. His altruism was all for the unborn, who run a bigger threat of utter neglect than the living. Dealing with dogs, he wouldn’t think about this one lonely yellow dog but about as-yet-unborn dogs, and not about their comfort but their existence. As I understand it, this means that the misery of an individual is not too high a price for the survival of a group. A similar argument is the one offered by bullfight apologists: I’ve told people that I think the sport is disgusting, and they answer that without the sport, we wouldn’t have the toro de Lidia, the Spanish fighting bull breed.

Is that the best they can do as justification for the torture and cruel death of bulls?

Because if you really want the bulls, then turn the breeding over to the state and fund it with a tax. Let the state foot the bill for keeping the bulls around, grazing on a distant hill, and let the Osborne Bull, an enormous black road sign situated in various places across the country, stand firm as a symbol of a country, not a blood sport. Americans protect the bald eagle, so why not the toro de Lidia?

Driving through the countryside in Salamanca, bull country par excellence, who wouldn’t stop and admire? “As the poet says,” you might repeat for someone in your group, “what a wonderful world!” You might fall in love all over with it. I would—but I can’t help being a fool.

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This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “Only Voice Remains” by Forugh Farrokhzad appeared first on The American Scholar.

In the center of Lugo’s installation sits a table draped with a painted tablecloth, each side depicting one of the places he’s lived plus a small self-portrait. Lugo sifted through old family photos to find reference pictures of himself for the portraits sparking a cathartic reflection on the years it took to come into his own identity. “It was about reclaiming my story of growing up as a queer gay child in Dominican Republic,” he says, “and switching the story to empowerment.” Though his paintings are deeply personal, Lugo says viewers have come up to him to tell him how his story has resonated with them. “These are my stories and my life,” Lugo says, “but of course, a lot of us also go through the same thing.”

The post Delvin Lugo appeared first on The American Scholar.

Go beyond the episode:

• Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink
• Read Scholar executive editor Bruce Falconer’s essay, “What Is the Perfect Color Worth?” on the inscrutable world of color forecasting

Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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For three long decades, artists used literature’s “slippery language,” double meanings, and subversive codespeak to strike back against the U.S. government’s Communist hunters. In her new book, A Treacherous Secret Agent, Marjorie Garber documents how the literary classics infiltrated and confounded official committee proceedings and television broadcasts with “an uncanny counter-testimony,” often too subtle for the investigators to detect.

Garber weaves her argument together with overt and subliminal exchanges from hearings into suspected un-American activities conducted from the late 1930s until the early 1960s by members of the House and Senate and by the Atomic Energy Commission. We read testimony from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist with surpassing literary erudition; Pete Seeger, under attack for his lyrics, left-wing activism, and past Communist Party membership; Paul Robeson, the brilliant bass-baritone, Shakespearean actor, and essayist, stripped of his passport and most of his livelihood for his outspoken beliefs; and Joseph Papp, creator of Shakespeare in the Park, who once told interrogators, “I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare.”

The Bard’s writings, especially Julius Caesar, figure prominently in Garber’s story. In Edward R. Murrow’s closing lines for a 1953 episode of See It Now, the CBS broadcaster parroted Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had quoted Caesar at one of his infamous hearings: “On what meat doth this our Caesar feed?” Murrow then added what he considered to be a “not altogether inappropriate” rejoinder, which appears just three lines earlier in the play: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Garber sees similar pointedness in the timing of a You Are There reenactment, “The Assassination of Julius Caesar,” which aired on CBS on March 7, 1953, two days after Stalin’s death. (“This man / Is not become a God?”) That June, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film adaptation of Julius Caesar premiered. There is more: In one of only a few connections to the present, Garber recalls the 2017 modern-dress performance of the play featuring a blond wearing a long red tie as the lead. “The power of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Garber writes, “resides not in the politics of the moment but in the play itself.”

Many of Shakespeare’s other plays also appear repeatedly in these pages, unsurprising given Garber’s standing as a literary scholar. She also cites the poetry of John Dunne (a particular passion of Oppenheimer’s), T. S. Eliot’s essays, Thomas Kydd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and other classics.

Garber acknowledges that she is not the first to link Galileo’s plight to that of Oppenheimer following his 1954 appearance before the Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. Nor is she first to glean from Robeson’s testimony echoes of the most admirable traits of Othello, Robeson’s signature role. (“Speak of me as I am. I have done the state some service, and they know’t.”)

Transcripts from the hearings show witnesses trapping their questioners in public ridicule. On December 6, 1938, at an early hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Alabama Democrat Joe Starnes questioned Hallie Flanagan, the national director of the Federal Theater Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration. Starnes read aloud a paragraph from her 1931 article on the quest of actors and theatrical workers to create “a new social order” via a network of free theaters. This vision, Flanagan had written, “invests their undertaking with a certain Marlowesque madness.” (Here Garber explains that Flanagan was referring to Christopher Marlowe’s “do-or-die determination,” like that of two of his most memorable characters, Faustus and Tamburlaine.”)

Starnes seized not on the obvious red flag of a new social order but on the prospect of manipulating Flanagan into naming names. He demanded to know if “this Marlowe” was a Communist.

“I am very sorry,” Flanagan said. “I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.”

Starnes pressed on. “Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all we want to do.”

“Put in the record,” she replied, “that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.”

The hearing room erupted in laughter. Next-day headlines mocked Starnes, a former teacher with two college degrees, and the exchange resurfaced 24 years later in his brief New York Times obituary.

Ultimately, Garber’s fresh examination of a well-explored period provides ample evidence to support the notion that literature, acting as a secret agent, “baffled, alarmed, and spooked” the men who “attacked creative artists, belittled poetry, and boasted of their own expertise. What they did not realize,” she writes, “—what their present-day descendants still do not realize—was that literature was reading them.”

The post Words, Words, Words appeared first on The American Scholar.

The restaurant was called Tina’s. Plush red booths, and the waiters were all older Cuban dudes in long black vests and bowties, but really it was a hospitality group–owned chain cosplaying as a classic Miami steakhouse that had been a staple of the community for forever.  I was early, and the hostess pointed me toward a high top by the bar. I didn’t need to look at the menu to know that there wasn’t a thing on it that I could eat.

On the other side of the bar, a shadow darkened the latticed paper room divider like a ballistic missile blipping onto a radar screen. Michael. He scoped me and plowed over to the table. I stood up and gave him a firm one.

“Nice to see you, Michael.”

“I wouldn’t say that quite yet,” he said.

“Ha,” I said.

We sat down. Michael snagged a waiter. He wanted a Coors Light. No Coors on the menu though. Groan. The waiter started in on his script about the comparable beers he might find satisfactory, but Michael waved the guy’s mouth shut. “Just bring me something light,” he said. And when the thing was bubbling in front of him and he brought it to his lips: “That’s not a light beer.”

I held up my mug of ice water. I would’ve gotten a beer, too, but I didn’t know any of the beers on the menu to be vegan, and with Michael’s eyes on me, there was no way I was gonna pull out my phone to Google which ones contained fish bladder collagen and which ones contained gelatinized pig bones and which ones I wouldn’t have a moral problem drinking.

“Well, cheers,” I said.

Michael took another begrudging sip of his beer. My glass hung there pathetically.

“Bad luck,” he said.

“Oh, right.”

Michael was a majestic, powerful fat-ass with a law firm. Big conservative-editorial-reading mitts, five-iron forearms, thick black chest hairs blooming proudly from the crevasse of his half-unbuttoned button-down. We’d never exactly vibed. He’d always seemed a little perturbed that I wasn’t making my bread selling crypto or condos to moneyed foreign nationals like most Miami men in my age bracket. I also don’t think he understood sarcasm. The few times I’d made jokes at my own expense in his presence, he’d scrunched up his nose as if self-deprecating words smelled bad. And then there was his pride. He was a proud motherfucker: proud of himself, his career, and especially his two overachieving daughters. He was the complete opposite of my dad. Michael typified a model of masculinity that I hadn’t grown up with and that I certainly didn’t fulfill and that I therefore glorified, sort of hated, wanted approval from all at the same time.

He stacked his arms like Lincoln Logs and set them on the table.

“Dan,” he said. “Do you have any ambitions in life?”

“What was that?” I said, but I’d heard him just fine. Caught me a little off guard, but it wasn’t a gotcha question. It was earnest. I think.

“Ambitions,” Michael said. “Do you have any ambitions for your life? I’d like to know what your plans are going forward.”

Going forward. That was his email autofill patois, the only way he’d ever talked to me. I’d never even heard him swear. It was almost as if Michael purposefully picked his words to communicate to me a certain subtext, namely: You and I are not chums. We will never sit together on Adirondack chairs ripping cigars, we will never talk ball; we will diligently eschew male camaraderie in all forms.

“You’ve been dating Steph now four years,” he said. “Which means I’ve known you four years. And I don’t have any idea what you’ve been doing in that time. So help me understand, please. Where is this going?”

“Well,” I said, “I love Steph.” I felt gross giving Michael access to my deep-down emotions like that. But I did love Steph. Our relationship was a friends-first kinda deal. We met freshman year on the strip-mall campus of Florida International University before she transferred to a different school out west. I don’t think either of us thought we’d work as a romantic unit. But when she came back home to start law school (I was floundering in the gig economy and lying on my résumé about having finished my degree), we both had the feeling that we belonged together anyway.

“All right,” Michael said. “That’s good to know at least.”

He cupped a paw around his glass of not-light-enough beer and eyed the menu.

“You getting anything?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, right.”

He set the menu down.

“What I don’t get is,” he said, “the lion eats the gazelle. The human eats the cow. That’s why the cow’s there.”

I was used to this sort of thing. But what was I supposed to do? I didn’t have it in me to get all debatelord with him.

“I already ate,” I said.

Michael raised his eyebrows.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “And anyway. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He pulled up short, searching for … what, tact?

“Steph has told me that you’ve been through some not so easy stuff,” he said.

Oh. He was likely referring to my big idiot dad, who’d lost all his money—our money, I guess—trying to launch a company that sold shoes with adjustable widths (you literally had to crank them with an Allen wrench). After which he had a kind of mental falling-apart, which led to my parents splitting, which led to the current state of affairs, wherein my dad is living in a guest room on his brother’s pot farm in Oregon, and my mom is married to some private equity guy from D.C.

“And therefore,” Michael said, “I thought maybe I owed it to you to give you a boot in the ass. For example: What are you thinking about your career?”

A slight change in register: He’d said ass. As to his question—I wasn’t thinking much about my career. ’Cause why should I?

“I like my job,” I said. Which was true. It was a pretty okay gig, working as a PE teacher. Sure, it wasn’t the most prestigious placement—my school was a middling, slightly messianic Christian charter school—nor was it all that lucrative. But at the very least, it wasn’t straight up evil. It’s not like I was a private equity ghoul, or a McKinsey dweeb, or a lawyer who finds legal loopholes for developers looking to knock over historically protected hotels and put up townhouses in the Everglades. Which is exactly what Steph’s dad did.

“If you like working with kids so much,” Michael said, “why don’t you get your master’s? Principal at a nice school, private tutor, something like that. Miami is full of rich parents who pay a lot of money for their kids’ educations.”

Slimy idea, Michael, I wanted to say—going into education not for the greater good but to help the spawns of the managerial class get into Yale. He wasn’t wrong, though. I probably could make a ton of money as some kind of specialist at a swish private school. Miami is an anarcho-capitalist wet dream.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I still have student loans from undergrad.”

Michael slapped his palms on the high top. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll pay. I’ll pay for you to get your master’s. I’ll even help you pay off your student debt. How’s that?”

Someone behind the bar turned the sound system up. Stupid Frank Sinatra began screaming at me from a great height.

“I couldn’t accept that,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Michael said.

I took a hit of water.

“Why the hell not?”

Another good question, Michael. For one? Because it seems like the offer you’re making me has strings attached directly to your insecurity, your shame. Your daughter is building a life with a man that’s not much of one in your eyes. You don’t care about my career trajectory. You’re just vain.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Michael had gotten me all turned around. Maybe I did need a boot in the ass. Maybe I did need to achieve, to succeed. And not succeed in the relativistic witchy way where I’m happy with a cat, a good relationship, a job that nobody envies, and a bread-baking habit; maybe what I need is some normie success, man success, the kind of success that nets you a clean, big-windowed house overlooking a shallow bay. So yes, Michael, I’d love to take your 130K and get me a fancy-ass master’s degree. It’s a great offer. A tempting offer. And now I definitely feel inadequate enough to consider it.

“I’m not asking you to be Josh,” Michael said. Josh was husband to Michelle, Steph’s older sister. He’d been fixing blips and blops on Amazon’s back end since the early aughts and was therefore very wealthy. “I’m not a psychologist either,” Michael went on. “But I think you’ve got to get your life going. Take on some responsibility.”

“I wanna marry Steph,” I said. A complete blurt. A blurt to make Michael think that I did in fact have plans for my life. Steph and I had only come at the marriage topic obliquely, and always with that subjunctive if. As in: “If I ever get married, I’d want a rabbi to be the officiant …” I chugged my water.

“Great,” Michael said flatly. He pushed his beer to the side of the table. “If that’s the case, you really need to consider my offer.”

I nodded.

“And it’d be important for you to convert. I don’t know if you’re religious or not. But we’re a pretty traditional Jewish family.”

My right heel came off the floor, and my toes began pulsing 32nd notes into the stool. I’d always been a vague atheist. That was one of the few things I’d gotten from my dad. He’d given me nothing on manners, cars, stock buybacks, relationships, sports, personal finance, perseverance, or knots. But on the regular, he’d get high and start moaning about the fundies trying to outlaw sex ed.

“I’d have to ask Steph about that,” I said.

Michael curled his lips.

“I know that’s what she’d want,” he said. “Her Judaism is important to her. Besides, converting would be good for you. Think about it.”

“I will,” I said, not convinced he was inviting me to think about anything. Go to grad school, insinuate yourself into the c-suite of some tutoring agency Ponzi scheme, renounce your goyhood, and then and only then may you marry my daughter. And if you do that, Dan, I’ll cease being Steph’s dad, or Mr. Klein, or even Michael. Then I’ll just be Dad. It was feudal. Primitive. Maybe not such a bad deal.

Michael muscled the last gulp of beer down his gullet.

“I’ll pay,” he said, looking around for the waiter. “You just had water anyway. Get out of here.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He shooed me towards the exit. I stood up. Lunch had been foodless, and it’d only lasted 12 minutes.

“I’ll see you at Passover,” he said.

Nonconsensual yarmulke notwithstanding, last year’s Passover had actually been pretty fine. Now, though, headed to Steph’s parents’ for Passover 2, I wasn’t feeling so hunky-dory. Especially about the yarmulke. I asked Steph if she thought I was gonna have to wear it again.

“Probably,” she said from the driver’s seat.

“I don’t think I’m comfortable with that,” I said. In the few days since lunch with Michael, the yarmulke had taken on a serious symbolic weight. Last year it was just a skullcap. This year it was a skullcap tied to a string of demands.

Eye roll from Steph.

“It’s really not that big of a deal,” she said.

“But I’m not Jewish.”

“I’m aware.”

“And you know how I feel about religion.”

Steph’s mouth was a tight disbelieving smile.

“You didn’t have a problem with it last year.”

“I’ve thought about it since then.”

“But it’s just a stupid little hat.”

She slammed on the brakes. Red light. We were lodged in a grid of massive Mediterranean revivals with e-cars charging in the front drives. The girl whispering a true-crime podcast through the Bluetooth box stopped for an ad break.

“Light’s green,” I said. Steph shot the Audi around a traffic circle, in the center of which stood a pair of big bronze shoes on a raised stone dais.

“It’s a tiny bone to throw my parents,” Steph said. She shook her head, and the silver alligators clamped to her earlobes wagged. “So what, you’re not gonna wear it?”

“No,” I said. I was happy with my job, my debts, my dad.

“Fine,” she said. “When my parents ask, you can tell them why you’re conscientiously objecting.” She slid the car across the double yellows to avoid smushing an iguana, a browning long-tailed big boy chilling on the edge of the street. Another red. Steph turned her head slowly to the side and fixed me in a stare for a single calming breath.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “If there’s something bothering you, say it.”

The lunch I’d had with her dad was bothering me. The attempted bribery. The unsubtle suggestion that I, Dan, as currently constructed, was not good enough for you, Steph, his daughter. And the fact that I thought he was onto something—that was definitely bothering me.

“Do you want me to convert to Judaism?” I said.

“Uhhhh,” Steph said. “What?”

“I just want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m not a Jew,” I said.

“You’re a nutjob,” Steph said.

Steering with her left, she threw her right hand into her purse and started digging for her vape. A thick stream of Juul smoke bounced against the windshield.

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“I don’t know babe, I sorta think it is,” she said. “And where is this even coming from?”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I said.

The car slowed, came to a stop, and powered down. Steph’s parents lived in a brutalist glass botch job set along an inlet that fed into Biscayne Bay. The house was built way up on stilts like it was eagerly anticipating a hundred-year storm surge.

“If I was only interested in dating Jews,” she said, “I would’ve been like Michelle and gone on J-Swipe or whatever.”

She blew a stray hair out of the corner of her eye.

“You and your dad aren’t exactly on the same page, then,” I said. “He wants me to convert. If we get married, I mean, he’d want me to convert.”

Steph’s forehead wrinkled and her eyebrows came down. With a quick movement of her fingers, she silenced the true-crime pod still coming quietly through the smart-car speakers.

“You talked to my dad? About marriage?”

I unbuckled my seatbelt. The car chirped at me to put it back on.

“We had lunch,” I said.

“I’m confused,” Steph said. Her mouth became a sharp em-dash as her big blue eyes swept over my face. “We’ve barely even talked about marriage.”

I looked at the map on the glowing console screen. The GPS had us clocked at 25.6920 degrees north by 80.2841 degrees west. We were 10 feet above sea level, and the humidity was 79 percent.

“It just came up,” I said. “He also wants to pay for me to go to grad school. And get a better job. The marriage thing was sort of contingent on that, too.”

“Whose idea was this? The lunch, I mean.”

“Your dad’s.”

Steph snatched her vape out of its USB port and brought it to her mouth in a clenched fist. The menthol liquid crackled.

“So like, do you want to marry me? And what the hell man, you’re just telling me this now?”

I knew that question was coming. I’d been balking at it for a while now, floating through the relationship without coming up with answers to any of those adult questions, like: Where is this going? What do we want? How will we be happy?

“I feel like your dad might be right,” I said. “Like I’m not in a position to be marrying anyone right now.”

“You’re so annoying.”

She got out of the car and slammed the door. I climbed out, too. There were several other luxury cars parked in the drive. Steph leaned against the driver’s side door. I went over to her. She looked beautiful in the Instagrammable neon blue hues of the landscaping lights.

“You were a barista when we first started dating.”

That was true. I’d been drawing milk circles in lattes while Steph started law school—University of Miami, just like Michael.

“I’m a PE teacher now,” I said.

Steph crossed her arms over her baggy black overshirt.

“So? If you’re happy with it, you’re happy with it. If you’re not, you’re not.”

“I thought I was happy with it,” I said. “But your dad fucked my head up.”

“My dad is a friggin fascist,” Steph said.

“He made me feel like a real piece of shit.”

“That’s what he does. He’s a fascist and a yenta. Imagine growing up with that.”

“What’s a yenta?”

“It means he meddles. And has a big-ass mouth.”

Steph dropped her vape into her purse.

“I really do wanna marry you,” I said.

She stared hard at the ground around my feet, looking like she was trying to make sense of a statute described in one of her legal texts. Thunderheads were purpling over the bay, and the breeze flicked salt into my mouth. Steph’s head snapped up.

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go in. I’m getting one of those barometric migraines.”

We climbed the steel steps that led up to the house, my legs and insides feeling gooey. Steph’s mom pulled open the door. The stench of Jo Malone rushed into my nostrils. Smooch, hug, smooch, hug. Inside, the same crew from last year: the gallery of University of Miami cousins around the kitchen island, the hard-of-hearing grandparents posted on an old-timey psychoanalytic couch in the corner, Steph’s sister and bro-in-law fawning over their precocious 15-month-old, and then the miscellany of aunts and uncles, lawyers, business school profs, Coconut Grove real estate sellers, the men vaguely plump, the women skinny and yogic, all tan, busy, cheery, buzzed.

Steph faced the family.

“You all remember Dan.”

I got a volley of head nods and did a big arcing wave in return. Steph scooped the baby off the floor and hoisted it above her head. Behind me a door opened. Michael.

“Do any thinking?”

“A bit,” I said.

“Good man.” One of his prodigious palms landed on my shoulder. He put a beer in my hand. Coors Light. I wasn’t sure if Coors was vegan or not. I twisted it open.

“Cheers,” Michael said.

“Cheers,” I said.

Clink.

A rolled-up Passover book made a thwack on the butcher’s block island. Aunt Peggy was glaring at us.

“Dinner, people. Let’s go, let’s go.”

“We’ll talk more later,” Michael said.

I turned to the dinner table. Steph was taking a seat next to down-from-Delray Uncle David. Michael grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me back.

“Here,” he said. He reached into his back pocket and produced a piece of blue fabric. “You need this.”

He pressed the yarmulke into my hand and took his place at the head of the table. I sat down next to Steph and swatted the skullcap against my thigh. Relatives were opening their Passover books. The Haggadah—that’s what it’s called. You read it backwards. The same spartan foods I remembered from last year were laid out on the table: a stack of unleavened bread, a pile of lettuce, a bowl of horseradish. In the big open concept kitchen was the real spread, the stuff everyone was looking forward to—the beef brisket and lamb, the fish, the noodles covered in dairy and the bone-broth soup.

Michael moved some mucus around in his chest. He was sorta gross. But the table got quiet, and the women looked at him with tenderness, and the men looked at him with respect, and his wife and daughters and granddaughter were healthy, and his brain must not have held a single neurotic or self-doubting synapse. Rain started to fleck soundlessly against the floor-to-ceiling windows. I’d once overheard Michael telling his son-in-law about those windows. An F-5 tornado, a global-warming-charged superstorm would be nothing against those puppies.

Michael looked over to me. I turned the yarmulke over in my hands.

“Dan,” he said. “You care to start?”

“Sure,” I said.

I mushed the yarmulke onto the top of my head. Steph squeezed my thigh and shot me a smile. I leaned over the Haggadah and opened to the first/last page. Michael nodded for me to start, and I did.

The post I’ll See You at Passover appeared first on The American Scholar.

Still, the more I can do without help, the better. Increasingly, however, I feel not strong and independent by managing on my own, but, rather, uncertain. It is a great comfort to find someone who will help me fill out a form or take my phone and swipe in all the right directions to activate whatever is needed. “Let me tell you” or “Let me show you” are music to my ears, but I prefer letting the kind person go one step further and do. It’s like the maxim: You don’t need the answers, just the number of the person who’s got them.

Many people, old and young, are more expert than I at using computers, tablets, and smartphones. I’m glad to let them exercise their expertise. Or fixing cars, heaters, chainsaws—I let them handle my mechanical contraptions. Or curing my back, my cat, my leaky hot water heater. Have at it! But what I need even more than these experts is the expert at living: the guru, swami, mentor, or life coach. I’ve also heard “selfhood consultant”—someone who can tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m not, to make the most of life. When you are young, parents serve this role. Then you grow up and should know how to live well. Yet the number of people turning to therapists and other “life experts” shows how hard it is to get it right. Why, there is even a Stanford course called “Designing Your Life”; the teachers wrote a book with the same name.

If you don’t have a custom-designed life but something patched together, as I do, you might feel insecure. Even if you don’t at first, once existential doubt creeps in, you may wonder where you went wrong. For some, boredom is the tell-tale sign something isn’t right; for others, anxiety—or loneliness. Some lucky few—or many?—never ask themselves questions about meaning or purpose, but I do. For me, the sign all is not well is a feeling of emptiness. I ask, “Is this all there is?” I seem to have no backbone; I begin to collapse.

Like someone responding to the first signs of a cold with vitamin C and extra fluids, I use distraction to head off my troubling inquiry at the first hint. “Interesting question!” I tell myself, “But I have no time for it!” Instead, I have a footrace to run, a friend to write to, or a baby to play with while its mother is busy—all substitutes for the backbone that lets a person stand tall and straight, that gives support and shape. Without that backbone of confidence and satisfaction, I am a clinging vine without a post. I cannot hold up.

My mother has no such feelings of purposelessness. When I report on my state, she reminds me that I once said if I had writing, I had purpose. I am lucky enough to have a venue for my writing. And yet, though I am kept busy by this column, I now know even writing is not enough. I still have that niggling feeling I am wasting my life. To paraphrase Townes Van Zandt’s 1971 song “To Live Is to Fly”: Most of life is wasting time; God knows I’ve wasted most of mine.

My fear is not that I have missed the turnoff into happy pastures, where worries evaporate like morning dew and time is gloriously replete. Because if I’m the one who’s gone astray, I could turn back and continue looking. No, my fear is that we all have missed it—because that lush green field doesn’t exist. So don’t ask your swami, guru, mentor, or life coach for directions. Especially don’t ask your selfhood consultant. They don’t know. But they may have good advice on surviving great disappointment.

The post Most of Life appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “Personal” by Tony Hoagland appeared first on The American Scholar.

Not surprisingly, I am not alone to worry: Not many subjects stir greater fear and dread among Americans than the seemingly irresistible rise of AI.  According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 64 percent of the public believes that AI will translate into fewer jobs. Small wonder, then, that only 17 percent of the same respondents expect that AI, even when humanized by names like Claude, will make their future brighter.

Were he alive today, Paul Lafargue would be among that 17 percent, and his voice would be both loud and funny. Born in Cuba in 1842 to parents of mixed race—part Jewish and part Creole—Lafargue was married to Laura Marx, one of Karl Marx’s four daughters. Even before this marriage, though, Lafargue, who had studied medicine in Paris, had thrown over a secure future as a doctor to devote (and pauperize) himself and his family to working on behalf of the shining (and classless) future glimpsed by his father-in-law.

Knocking out polemical and theoretical essays while striving to launch France’s first workers’ party, the Parti ouvrier français, Lafargue was a well-known figure on the radical left in fin-de-siècle Paris. Predictably, his activities also made him well-known to the French police, who repeatedly arrested him, including on one evening in 1883 when he was taking home a salad to his wife. (He managed to find a passerby to deliver the salad before the police hauled him away.)

Making wine from this bunch of grapes, Lafargue used his time behind bars at Saint Pélagie—a forbidding Parisian prison where many of the century’s most notorious writers, artists, and thinkers found themselves from time to time—to draft his most famous work, Le Droit à la paresse, or The Right to Be Lazy, translated into English by Alex Andriesse. Though he dashed off this pamphlet nearly 150 years ago, Lafargue asked questions that remain most pertinent to our current anxieties over the future of work.

During Lafargue’s own lifetime, the nature of work was undergoing a traumatic transformation. The seismic effect of the first and second industrial revolutions, as well as the quickening pace of globalization, proved an extinction event for traditional forms of production. “The gods and kings of the past,” declared the historian Eric Hobsbawm, “were powerless before the businessmen and steam engines of the present.” As factory workers and unskilled laborers replaced ateliers and artisans, the former struggled to organize themselves, a struggle into which Lafargue threw himself body and soul.

Or, perhaps, not his entire soul. His essay’s title reveals a dramatic divergence of goals he and union leaders held. He bemoans the demand of workers for shorter workdays (which often lasted as long as 12 hours), insisting that curtailing work hours did not represent victory but defeat: “Shame on the proletariat, only slaves would have been capable of such baseness” to have sought such an outcome. On the contrary, he declaims, workers should oppose the very notion of work.

If you are puzzled, don’t worry—so, too, were nearly all of Lafargue’s contemporaries on the left. How could they not be? Here was a committed Marxist—and the great man’s son-in-law, to boot—asserting that workers, rather than strike for the right to work, should instead protest for the right to be lazy. Machines, he believed, could become “humanity’s savior, the god who will redeem man from the sordidae artes [manual labor] and give him leisure and liberty.”

And yet, Lafargue exclaims, “the blind passion and perverse murderousness of work have transformed the machine from an instrument of emancipation into an instrument that enslaves free beings.” The reason workers spend so many hours shackled to their machines, he contended, was not from economic necessity. Instead, it was imposed upon them by their superiors, the captains of industry and finance, who were wedded to “the dogma of work and diabolically drilled the vice of work into the heads of workers.”

Of course, Lafargue never called for the eradication of work. The necessities of life, after all, would always require the labor of women and men to produce and provide. But he did press for the rationalization of work. Given the efficiency of machines, fewer hours were needed to provide the necessities of life. Maintaining the same excessive number of work hours inevitably flooded the market with superfluities and the era’s repeated economic crises stretching from 1873 to the end of the century.

The dramatic reduction of time at work would be a boon not just to the well-being of the economy, Lafargue concluded, but also to the well-being of both workers and owners, who would have more time to … well, to do what?

Karl Marx had an answer of sorts, suggesting that we would “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticism after dinner, just as I have a mind.” But Lafargue instead conjured a Rabelaisian future in which former workers would eat and drink their fill on holidays while their former taskmasters would entertain them by performing parodies of their now defunct roles as generals and industrialists. Et le voilà, Lafargue concludes, in this world turned upside down, “social discord will vanish.”

Though his tongue was firmly in cheek, Lafargue did imagine that these machines—perhaps the forerunners of the “machines of loving grace” invoked by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic—would lead us to a paradise we had lost. A paradise bathed in otium, the Latin word that can be translated as “idleness” as well as “laziness.” When Lafargue praises la paresse, he means not the latter, but the former. He makes this clear by quoting, at the start of his essay, a line from Virgil’s Eclogues that celebrates the pleasures of otium.

Although Lafargue does not flesh out his notion of a future filled with idleness, my guess is that he meant it would be devoted not to the pleasure of doing a particular hobby or specific activity, painting a landscape or swinging a gold club. Instead, it would be a life given out, quite simply, to the pleasure of faisant rien or doing nothing. As the Czech playwright Karel Capek wrote in an essay called “In Praise of Idleness,” this state is defined as “the absence of everything by which a person is occupied, diverted, distracted, interested, employed, annoyed, pleased, attracted, involved, entertained, bored, enchanted, fatigued, absorbed, or confused.” In a word, idling is the sentiment of being.

But even idlers, try as they might, cannot ignore the passage of time. In 1911, a dozen years before Capek published his essay, Paul Lafargue and his wife committed suicide—he was 69; she was 66. His reason, it seems to me, dovetailed with his philosophy: “I am killing myself before pitiless old age, which gradually deprives me one by one of the pleasures and joys of existence.” It might repay us to take a moment, not just from our jobs but also from our leisures, to make some to-do about doing nothing.

The post The Importance of Being Idle appeared first on The American Scholar.

Jack Buck, the fabled Voice of the Cardinals for almost half a century, described what he saw for the radio audience: “Orta, leading off, swings and hits it to the right side, and the pitcher has to cover.” A disbelieving Buck repeated the umpire’s call to his broadcast partner, Sparky Anderson: “He is safe, safe, safe, and we’ll have an argument. Sparky, I think he was out … He had the base and he had the ball, man, what else—that’s the rule, isn’t it?”

The Cardinals, seemingly unnerved by the injustice, blew the game. St. Louis second baseman Tom Herr remembered, “You’re already under enough stress and tension. Now you have this happen. It kind of blows the lid off your emotional stability.” But a whole series of events had to unfold for Kansas City to win. With Orta on first, Royals power hitter Steve Balboni singled to left, making the most of a second chance at the plate after his pop-up in foul territory was misread and dropped by Clark (only recently converted from outfielder to first baseman). The Royals now had runners on first and second, but their momentum briefly stalled when Worrell fielded Jim Sundberg’s bunt and cut down the lead runner at third. Then everything started to fall apart again. Catcher Darrell Porter, appearing to get crossed up with Worrell on a slider, allowed a passed ball, and the runners advanced to second and third. With first base now open, the Cardinals intentionally walked Hal McCrae, Kansas City’s designated hitter. The next batter, Dane Iorg, singled to right, knocking in the tying and go-ahead runs, the latter scored by Sundberg, who beat a good throw from the right fielder and slid deftly into home beneath Porter’s tag. The Royals won 2–1 and went on to trounce the Cardinals 11–0 in Game 7 to win the series.

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

Following Denkinger’s mistake, Cardinals skipper Whitey Herzog charged out of the dugout to argue. These days, however, in the event of a bad call, a manager doesn’t have to get in the umpire’s face or kick dirt around or throw his cap. He doesn’t even have to leave the dugout. Instead, he puts his hands up to his ears signaling that he wants to challenge the play. Even though the manager has gotten the go-ahead from people in the clubhouse who have already reviewed the footage, challenges are still a bit of a gamble because “clear and convincing evidence” is needed to overturn a disputed call. Officials back at Replay Command Center in New York review the call from multiple angles, at regular speed and in slow motion, forward and back, over and over, until they are satisfied. Today, any call as unambiguously bad as The Call would quickly be corrected.

A manager gets a limited number of challenges per game; if a challenge is successful, he retains it for use later in the game. The list of situations subject to a manager’s challenge has been steadily expanding since 2008. In the 2026 season, with the introduction of an artificial-intelligence technology called the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS), players will be able to request a limited number of pitch reviews, too. “Considered a middle ground between so-called ‘robot umps’ that could call every ball and strike and the long-standing tradition of the natural human error that comes with human umps,” MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince reported, ABS “gives teams the opportunity to request a quick review of some of the most important ball-strike calls in a given game.” How long will this “middle ground” between erring human and robot umpires last? It is not impossible to imagine a league that gradually cedes all umpiring to technology in a drive toward adjudicatory perfection.

Baseball fans are intolerant of certain kinds of imperfection, especially when their team loses. Umpires are hardly the only source of uncertainty in the game: broken bats, bad hops, and caught spikes can all disrupt design. Then there’s the weather, the lights, the nonstandard configuration and dimensions of a park itself. The odds were mighty slim, for example, in the bottom of the ninth in Game 6 of the 2025 World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers, that a line drive hit by Toronto’s Addison Barger would become wedged at the base of the centerfield wall in the Rogers Centre, resulting in a dead ball. The runner who thought he’d scored on the play had to return to third base.

Baseball has a rule for this eventuality. Rule 5.05(a)(7) accounts for any “fair ball which, either before or after touching the ground, passes through or under a fence, or through or under a scoreboard, or through any opening in the fence or scoreboard, or through or under shrubbery, or vines on the fence, or which sticks in a fence or scoreboard, in which case the batter and the runners shall be entitled to two bases.” Rule 5.05(a)(7) enumerates some of the strange hazards and permutations that might interfere with everyone’s expectations about how a play ought to turn out. The rule also announces an enduring pastoral quality to a game that has at times been as far removed from idyllic rusticity as are the urban sandlot and artificial turf. The critic Samuel Johnson once contrasted the styles of two great English poets, John Dryden and Alexander Pope, this way: “Dryden’s page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope’s is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.” Major League Baseball used to be a lot like Dryden’s page; now it seems to want to be more like Pope’s.

Rule 5.05(a)(7) provides for a freakish yet clearly not unprecedented type of intervention. The rulebook as a whole anticipates, and provides resolution for, as many causes of potential disorder as have been witnessed or imagined. Whenever confusion breaks out, the umpires must use their judgment to apply a rule or, should they be confronted by an unforeseen circumstance—pitcher Randy Johnson killing a dove with a fastball, say, during a spring training game in 2001—to invent one. The call in that case was “no pitch.” Rule 8.01(c) decrees, “Each umpire has authority to rule on any point not specifically covered in these rules.” But the rulebook can only mitigate the effects of chance, not eliminate it altogether. The rules can do nothing to legislate the flight of birds or human inconsistency and unpredictability: players who make errors, managers who make countless decisions over the course of a game, and on occasion, paying customers who interfere with a ball in play.

We live in an age highly skeptical of human judgment. Sometimes that skepticism expresses itself as contempt for expertise and a corresponding celebration of feeling, gut, or instinct. At other times, the ambient mistrust manifests itself as a surrender to various technologies that promise totality and perfection. One can hear both contradictory strains expressed in college classrooms, political arenas, ballparks, and barrooms everywhere.

Major League Baseball, perhaps self-conscious about its reputation for being slow and for the old-fashioned Casey-at-the-Bat wistfulness that clings to the game—blind or perhaps indifferent, with so much money at stake, to the idea that its idiosyncrasies are the very source of its poetic beauty—zealously embraces the realm of technology and statistics. Over the past two decades or so, teams throughout the league have relied increasingly on data analytics. Sabermetrics, an approach pioneered by Bill James in the 1970s, was put into action in the early 2000s by Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who was searching for a way to compete on a limited budget.

As Michael Lewis recounts in his 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Beane used statistical analysis to justify replacing the team’s marquee players with a combination of less expensive ones. Beane’s approach was remarkably successful, and the use of data analytics quickly proliferated, especially among small-market teams. Rich teams don’t want to waste their money, either. Baseball’s use of data science constitutes, among other things, an attempt to exert a measure of control over all aspects of the game: scouting, drafting, compensation, trading, training, hitting, pitch selection, defensive positioning.

Several scenes in the 2011 film made from Lewis’s book emphasize the battle between statistical analysis and traditional approaches. In one, Beane confronts his team’s scouts across a conference table. The scouts’ expertise, developed over years of watching young talent, is pitted against a spreadsheet. “You’ve got a lot of wisdom and experience in this room,” the frustrated head scout boasts to Beane, but the more we listen to their inane conversation about prospects who have “square jaws” and “look like” ballplayers—it reaches a low point when one proposes that a player’s “ugly girlfriend” is proof that he lacks confidence—the more the scouts come to seem like a bunch of geezers who operate on hunch and prejudice alone.

The scene suggests that all the “wisdom and experience” the head scout claims is at best quirky, at worst downright silly and offensive. The scouts, whom Lewis calls a “Greek chorus” in his book, are caricatured in the film as useless antiques, whereas Beane, who relies strictly on numbers (chiefly on-base percentage and salary), comes across as shrewd, resourceful, and adaptable. He is a man built for the future. Even though the A’s don’t win it all, the film works to vindicate his philosophy. It doesn’t hurt the cause of sabermetrics that Beane is played by Brad Pitt.

Remake such a scene today, and the discussion would center on the golden promise of AI algorithms in a more comprehensive indictment of whatever has passed for human intelligence over the benighted centuries. Human intelligence is the past; artificial intelligence is the future. Today’s widespread fervor for AI is further abetted by a presentist mindset that conceives of the past as something to be gotten over, something to be pitied, something filled mostly with human error. As a colleague who works on the philosophy of artificial intelligence pointed out to me, AI in some form or other has been with us for some time; it’s the definition that changes. Although there are different AI functionalities, the one that has garnered the most popular attention and that is flogged most insistently to the public is generative AI, which predicts the next linguistic or visual element in whatever string it is asked to produce. Large-language models such as ChatGPT aggregate information and discern patterns at speeds impossible for human brains. These platforms are becoming increasingly invasive, more and more difficult for those who don’t want to use them to tune out or turn off.

Proponents of AI, who stand to make heaps of money from their platforms, tout it as the answer to all our inadequacies—physical, intellectual, and emotional. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, likes to share his grand ambitions for the technology. Unsurprisingly, curing cancer is a favorite example. It is convenient shorthand for any monumental achievement long regarded as impossible. Even in those areas, such as medical diagnostics, where the processing speed and analytic capabilities of AI appear to show great promise, there remains considerable uncertainty about the most accurate and effective way to integrate artificial intelligence with human decision-making. Nor is this collaboration free from potentially debilitating dangers such as “automation bias”: experts’ tendency to defer, even when they are correct, to machines. Furthermore, as the physician Dhruv Khullar pointed out in The New Yorker, “Many medical questions—perhaps most of them—do not have a right answer.”

Institutional and individual consumers of AI have quickly learned to parrot the same unquestioning enthusiasm with which the technologies are marketed to them. The language of the convert tends to be irrational, or antirational, in its intensity. Find a way to use AI, we are told almost daily, or risk getting left behind. Evangelists who attempt to bludgeon us into submission ignore practical as well as epistemological and ethical problems. The perfectibility of generative AI, for example, is not a forgone conclusion. The more powerful it becomes, the worse its hallucinations seem to get. And if only an expert has a shot at spotting hallucinations or discerning more subtle errors, where does that leave a generation of novices in a whole range of fields now being indoctrinated into AI’s mysteries? In corporate settings, such as law firms, AI can now do much of the routine work that new associates once did. But as a partner at one large international firm told me, it doesn’t obviate the need for third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates. That’s a professional development problem he has yet to solve. Zealots likewise ignore AI’s irresponsible mining of intellectual property, violation of privacy, and deleterious effects on climate and the environment, as well as the various harms done to low-wage digital workers whose training of AI can involve labeling vast libraries of pornographic or violent images. Nor has the revelation that several vulnerable teens died by suicide after looking to AI chatbots (which combine generative AI and natural language processing to engage in “conversation”) done much to slow momentum.

We are told that we should not let anything stand in our way because AI’s promise is so great. But what, precisely, are we being promised? After all, most of us aren’t using AI to try to cure cancer or even to build self-driving trucks. And we don’t have bespoke platforms at our command. I have for several years now used a text-to-speech service to read drafts aloud. Hearing the prose in this way helps me revise, compare drafts, even spot typos. Once limited to the small library of voices available on my computer, some much better than others, I can now choose from a broad range of AI-generated voices offered by various providers. The quality of the voices is improving. Even actors, or deceased actors’ estates, have begun licensing their voices: Michael Caine, Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds, James Dean. My current favorite is Laurence Olivier. But listening to an artificial Olivier read my words isn’t remotely like hearing the real thing. The voice can’t reproduce the tone or emphasis I intend. It has no sense of timing or pace, and sometimes the very wrongness of its modulation proves distracting. It doesn’t understand what it is reading, and it doesn’t know that it is being criticized in this sentence. Even if, as some celebrants suggest, AI will continue to free me in other, similar ways from routine drudgery so that I can concentrate on meaningful, creative work, that would make it an asset, but one with all the romance of a dishwasher. One woman’s drudgery may be another’s vocation, but who is not glad for that particular labor-saving device? My dishwasher, which I just put on, allows me to spend more time working on this essay. I’m grateful, but I don’t confuse this appliance with a panacea or revere it as a god. Moreover, a study conducted by the MIT Media Lab found that AI is not enhancing productivity in many industries but is instead generating content that gives the illusion of finished work but in actuality lacks substance and is filled with meaningless diversions—what has come to be known as “workslop.” That sounds like something a malfunctioning dishwasher might produce.

There are people starting to write thoughtfully about aspects of AI and different kinds of labor, but they remain outliers. Ideally, the AI tsunami would provoke a serious public policy debate about work, autonomy, and human dignity in the 21st century as opposed to the mad scramble of adoption we are witnessing. Industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries provoked more than that. Among other things, it catalyzed machine-smashing Luddites, unions, strikes, safety regulations, and worker protections. In some countries, of course, it sparked murderous political revolution. Today, a substantive discussion might produce a taxonomy that helps us differentiate between the kinds of labor that alienate us from our humanity and the kinds that could potentially fulfill it. The new technologies might inspire us to devise a new philosophy about which activities ought to be outsourced to machines and which reserved for us. That intellectual revolution hasn’t happened because our culture is focused almost exclusively on speed, profit, and efficiency.

The economist Kyla Scanlon notes the rapidity with which big AI “dreams” such as “curing cancer, personalizing vaccines and medical treatment optimization … have already devolved into next-generation social media apps, like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s Vibes.” If you can resist the seductively vague promises while ignoring the unsubtle threats about human obsolescence and pay close attention to the way AI is actually being marketed to the average consumer, you will discover the deeply and paradoxically anti-intellectual nature of the intelligence gathering it touts. A commercial currently airing on TV tells me that if I need “a recipe that says, ‘I like you but want to play it cool,’ ” ChatGPT can provide me with a dish (lemon-garlic pasta with cherry tomatoes) that will precisely signal a moderate level of romantic commitment. While watching the World Series, I was repeatedly told that AI from Google Cloud could tell me whether “a bat tap untaps good mojo.” It could also answer another burning question: “Can turning your hat inside out turn the game around?”

How quickly “intelligence” has degenerated into nonsense. These ads remind me of Dr. Faustus’s pact with the devil, not because AI is inherently evil but because its rewards seem so meager. Frustrated with the limits of human knowledge, Faustus turns to the practice of “dark arts.” He sells his soul ostensibly to break boundaries and thereby to increase his store of wisdom. In Christopher Marlowe’s version of the tragic legend, Mephistopheles, who sounds rather like an ingratiating chatbot prototype, asks him, “Now, Faustus, what wouldst thou have me do?” And Faustus, rather than penetrating the mysteries of the universe, ends up ordering Mephistopheles to play tricks on the pope, conjure illusions for the emperor, and terrify a man by making him think he has pulled off the doctor’s leg.

Anyone who collected baseball cards as a kid—or still consults the Baseball Almanac from time to time—understands the thrill of statistics. But back-of-the-card connoisseurs take a reflective, not a predictive, joy in poring over all those numbers. They might marvel at the offense generated by Nap Lajoie and Honus Wagner in the dead-ball era or wonder at the innings thrown by Cy Young, Warren Spahn, or Sandy Koufax in the days before modern coaching theories severely curtailed pitchers’ workloads and a pitch count of 100 became a magic maximum.

To watch a baseball game on television today, however, is to be plunged into a world of predictive metrics and likely outcomes made possible by Statcast, which MLB describes as “a state-of-the-art tracking technology that allows for the collection and analysis of a massive amount of baseball data, in ways that were never possible in the past. Statcast can be considered the next step in the evolution of how we consume and think about the sport of baseball, encompassing pitch tracking, hit tracking, player tracking and even bat tracking for all Major League games.” Announcers increasingly fill the space that the inimitable Vin Scully once used to let a game breathe by reciting statistics that begin to sound more and more trivial, conflating correlation with causation, and drifting into the realm of random coincidence.

Anyone who expresses suspicion about AI forecasting is immediately branded an ostrich, but the ironic thing about our manic indulgence is that it seems to be plunging us back into the past. The ancient biographer Plutarch didn’t know much about baseball, bat taps, or rally caps, but he was quick to discern the psychological appeal of tracking coincidence: “There are people who take a pleasure in making collections of … fortuitous occurrences that they have heard or read of, as look like works of a rational power and design” (tr. by John Dryden, revised by A. H. Clough). To illustrate his point, Plutarch presents his reader with an utterly meaningless series of parallels: two men who shared a name and were both torn limb from limb (one by dogs, the other by his lovers), three sacks of Troy, and four capable generals who had each lost one eye.

Of a piece with in-game forecasting, meanwhile, is the flood of online sports betting ads in between innings. Many announcers even give odds at the beginning of a broadcast. It has perhaps never been so easy to turn soothsayer. We can pick up our phones and attempt to monetize our powers of prognostication, even as the line between wild guess and shrewd analysis grows increasingly blurred. Moreover, the prop bet and the microbet allow customers to wager on individual events, not just the outcome of the game or the total number of runs or points scored. Clearly, the profiteers would love us to become so many Frau Hessenfelds. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hessenfeld is the frivolous widow whose contagious “passion in life was betting on … anything and everything”: weather, dinner menus, the results of medical examinations, bobsledders, love affairs, and “a hundred other, often totally trivial and insignificant things” (tr. by John E. Woods).

A different class of company, the most prominent of which is Kalshi, trades “on the outcome of future events,” including sporting contests, while circumventing state gambling laws. The “prediction market” is regulated like a commodity futures exchange. Kalshi, which is facing a number of lawsuits from state gambling commissions and others, takes bets on everything from how many home runs Shohei Ohtani will hit to how many days a government shutdown will last. How quaint it now seems that Pete Rose had to call his bookie on a landline.

The mania for prediction expressed in betting, “statcasting,” and a superstitious reverence for AI’s pronouncements makes devotees seem less like futurists than revenants from some remote past. They are as uncritical of their tools and as dependent on the results as an ancient Babylonian guided by augury, a Greek reading the entrails of a sheep, or a Roman visiting the Sibyl at Cumae. The next time you ask AI for life guidance, you might think of the Lydian king Croesus, who tested the accuracy of oracles throughout Greece before asking the two he trusted most whether he should risk war against Persia. According to Herodotus, they predicted the same thing: “Croesus, if he did go to war with the Persians, would destroy a mighty empire.” Croesus digested this prophecy and went to war. What he couldn’t compass was that the empire he was about to destroy was his own. After Croesus’s defeat, when the Persian Emperor Cyrus asked him why he had undertaken such a foolish venture, Croesus told his captor that though he had launched the invasion, “the ultimate blame” belonged to the gods who had encouraged him to do it (tr. by Tom Holland).

Some months ago, I had an experience that suggested to me how far we have already traveled into a strange land. An acquaintance wrote me a very kind message of commiseration about something that he thought had happened to me. When I replied that I had no idea what he was talking about and wondered about the source of his information, he reported that he had asked about me. Whom had he asked? I persisted. He told me, in what struck me as a rather strange call and response, that when he had asked a question about me, AI had answered. I emerged from the exchange unsure whether I had convinced him that I, not AI, was the more reliable source for the facts of my own life.

Human beings are notoriously bad at predicting the future. No wonder we try to outsource the task. Forecasting, planning, and projection—these are the things that AI companies offer to corporate and individual consumers alike. Yet the more reflexively we give ourselves over to AI—the more we treat it like an oracle as opposed to a tool—the less likely we will be to harness whatever power it might have and the more rapidly our self-reliance, judgment, and ability to process the world’s ambiguous signals will deteriorate. Take the example of Albania, which is attempting to root out a history of corruption by turning itself into an “algocracy,” a country run by AI algorithms. “Algorithms can optimize efficiency, but they can’t decide between competing values—the very choices that lie at the heart of democratic politics,” Erick Schmidt and Andrew Sorota wrote in The New York Times. “When democracy struggles to deliver, people turn to strongmen, authoritarians and now algorithms, hoping for competence over chaos.”

As a few recent books have argued, grandiose claims about AI’s nature and capacities can sound like a long con. Americans aren’t the only ones susceptible to hucksters, but we do have a rich history of falling for swindles ranging from the mostly playful tricks of P. T. Barnum to the 19th-century Manhattan confidence man who made off with people’s watches, from the pyramid schemer to the patent-medicine salesmen promising life-giving elixirs to the sham preacher offering material and spiritual salvation exposed in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry (1927).

The willing surrender to all such cons stems from discontent, insecurity, and fear. It owes to the belief that the system is rigged against us. Despite the obvious incongruity, this belief appears to be shared equally by the mother of three who has just lost her job and the billionaire who feels threatened by government regulation. “It’s an unfair game,” Billy Beane tells the scouts in Moneyball, pronouncing the subtitle of Michael Lewis’s book. The Oakland A’s have to compete with big-budget teams like the Yankees and therefore approach the problem, in Lewis’s words, like “card counters at a blackjack table” intent on beating the house. In an age of dislocation and resentment, many of us feel like the A’s. We’ve been dealt a bad hand, and we would love to turn the tables on an unjust world.

The aggrieved and confused are ready prey for what is being called the “casino economy.” Speculation has always been an integral part of the markets, but the wager is now ubiquitous. Scanlon, the economist, declared in a New York Times op-ed, “Look and you will see gambling throughout the economy—in markets, policy and how we talk about the future. … In a real casino, the math guarantees the house wins over time.” In other words, the average investor is now participating in an economy ordered by the same rules as a casino. We are no longer risk takers, Scanlon concludes, but “reckless” gamblers.

Whenever we feel out of control, it becomes harder, paradoxically, to resist the self-defeating urge to cede even more in a gesture that might look like heroic defiance but is in fact abject submission. We forget the essential process of parsing the tractable and the intractable expressed so eloquently by the philosophical former baseball player Mickey Rivers: “Ain’t no sense worrying: If you have no control over something, ain’t no sense worrying about it—you have no control over it anyway. If you do have control, why worry? So either way, there ain’t no sense worrying.”

Our casino life involves certain fundamental human fantasies: that we can beat the house, that we can avenge ourselves on a world filled with the unfair and the unpredictable, that we can abdicate the arduous and time-consuming exercise of judgment and personal responsibility by outsourcing it to a machine. Along the way, of course, we end up writing ourselves out of the equation. That’s a problem that transcends the baseball diamond but finds few better provinces for working itself out.

In his article on the advent of ABS, the MLB reporter Castrovince referred to “the long-standing tradition of the natural human error that comes with human umps.” If we can fix it, should we fix it? When it comes to umpires, MLB seems to be saying yes. But why is an umpire’s error less forgivable than a player’s or a manager’s? Where should we stop? To what extent should we reduce the influence of human judgment in an attempt to eliminate its inevitable companion, human error? Minimizing or eradicating errors in brain surgery strikes me as ideal, but there might be creative, experimental realms—classrooms, artists’ studios, ballparks—in which human error could be construed as a positive good. And if we have designed the algorithms on which AI works, can it ever really be free from our mistakes? When does technology make us better, and when does it simply make us less like ourselves? These aren’t questions the evangelists want us to ask. Such is an oracle’s theatrically intimidating power.

In baseball and in writing, the poet and Brooklyn Dodgers fan Marianne Moore once proposed that not knowing “how it will go / or what you will do” is the very thing that makes the game “exciting.” Even a spectator who finds fallibility in umpiring intolerable, and perhaps looks forward to the increasing reliance on technology toward which Major League Baseball is tending, would never trade Mookie Betts, even when he struggles, for a robot.

Betts makes, on average, an annual salary of $30 million, but he plays with the hustle and intensity of a rookie fighting for a spot on the roster. In 2024, at 32, he moved from the outfield to shortstop, the most demanding position on the field. In 2025, he saved more defensive runs than any other shortstop in the game. For much of the season, Betts was in a batting slump so miserable—one of those fathomless baseball sloughs of despond—that he ran out of ideas on how to fix his swing. But when the Dodgers returned to their home at Chavez Ravine on August 4, after a long and difficult road trip, thousands in attendance gave Betts a standing ovation when he came up to the plate in the first inning. Those fans recognized that they were watching a valiant struggle, and they responded to it with the same encouragement they would excellence.

The Dodgers are known for using state-of-the-art simulation and other technologies to support players, and you can be sure that Betts, in addition to spending countless hours in the batting cage, took advantage of every tool, metric, and measurement the team could provide. Eventually, he found what he was looking for in a human being, former teammate J. D. Martinez, who joined him on the road in August. Working with Martinez on some of the mental aspects of the game, Betts narrowed his focus and stopped trying to salvage his offensive season. “J. D. … just helped with grace and patience,” he said. “That’s what has kind of gotten me out of it.” This isn’t the movies. Betts improved considerably in August and September but continued to be inconsistent at the plate throughout the playoffs. He remained unrattled on defense, however, and also had a timely hit early in Game 6 of the World Series to drive in what ended up being the winning runs to force a Game 7, which the Dodgers won 5–4.

Baseball aficionados understand that the occasional error, the strikeout, even the prolonged slump are the inseparable complement to the clutch hit or the acrobatic jump throw that seals the double play. Betts’s magnificent athleticism, tenacity, and resilience are meaningful and exciting precisely because we know that he is also capable of a lapse at any time. He knows it, too, and his personal elegance and clear-eyed connection to his own human mutability only add to his appeal. Major League Baseball assures me that Statcast is “the next step in the evolution of how we consume and think about the sport of baseball.” But as far as I’m concerned, Statcast can do nothing to enhance the majesty of Mookie Betts or to increase the joy I take in watching him play.

Jim Palmer was the television analyst for Game 6 of the 1985 World Series. When Jim Sundberg squared to bunt and Todd Worrell couldn’t seem to get the ball over the plate, Palmer, a former pitcher himself now in the Hall of Fame, suggested that a pitcher “almost wants” the batter to lay down the bunt in such a situation. “Boy,” he said after Worrell threw another ball, “the human element now comes into the ballgame.” But the human element had been there all along.

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On that first morning when, veering from my usual route to try a different one, I had encountered him, he first inspected me, then let me pass by. The second time that I took that way home, he was in his exact same spot, as if waiting. Again, he came trip-trapping slowly forward to meet me, neither hesitating nor hurrying, just serious, almost officious. “You again?” I could imagine him thinking.

The third time he didn’t slow but came right up to greet me, not wagging and frolicking but amiable even so. And his welcome has been steady ever since—not joyous but accepting, not Oh, finally! but Ah, there you are. The routine is the same: He meets me in the middle of the lane and briefly checks my credentials—one official sniff and once-over glance, top to bottom. That’s his welcome. Next, a step closer at the same time he turns away, obviously to allow me to rub his ears. I have to stop to do this properly, but I’m panting because of the hill, and the moment’s rest is a relief. “Hi, Bruno,” I say when I see him positioned squarely in front of me in the street. “How’s it going?”

He doesn’t answer but looks meaningfully at me, as if to say, “All’s clear. So far, so good.”

Is he pleased at the name I’ve given him, or does he dismiss it as just one of those silly human behaviors—this naming game? Name a thing to get a handle on it, from children to pets to endearments for sweethearts, and use the name to shape the other. Mackie, Tula, Oso, and Toby—four of my past or current dogs. Nothing imposing about any of those names, no Thor or Chief or Kaiser. Bruno fits in nicely, I think. “You are Bruno, aren’t you?”

Still no answer.

And then he turns and, two steps ahead of me, trots up the road, barking left and right, as efficient as an escort clearing the way. Still ahead, inches from the lane, are another three dogs, all barking vociferously from behind their gates, but Bruno is here to deal a sharp reprimand, as he proceeds, opening the path for me, safeguarding me along the lane. And I almost never wondered, after that first time with my honor guard, if I hadn’t made a mistake and he was really, secretly, a Brutus, and I had better watch my back. No, he is Bruno the billy goat, at his post, letting me through.

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This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “Field and Forest” by Randall Jarrell appeared first on The American Scholar.

Whether it’s felt or ceramic or assemblage, O’Brien gravitates towards “materials that are more accessible so that the audience has an easier relationship to them,” he says. “You could take something very cheap and make something beautiful out of it. It doesn’t have to be only made out of expensive oil paint or art materials. Art materials are the first gatekeepers of the art world.” The works at the KMAC, for example, began during the pandemic, when O’Brien could only access materials he already owned. He begins his larger, multimedia pieces with a sketch, but he also utilizes somatic grounding exercises to let the “play” happen. “I’m interested in this [idea] of the body being smarter than the mind,” he says, and tries to let his intuition guide the artistic process. O’Brien isn’t concerned with whether a viewer understands the works—it’s all about emotional resonance. “What I tell people is it’s whatever you want to experience. If you have a reaction, if you don’t, that’s enough,” he says. “Art’s just meant for you to stop and not be in your mind. It doesn’t mean you have to understand. Just asking questions is enough.”

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Go beyond the episode:

• James H. McCommons’s The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds
• Get to know the birds in your back yard with eBird from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Learn how to garden for wildlife
• Read this viral essay about keeping your cat indoors: “The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It” (1916)

Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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