“Where to start?” I asked myself, and then picked a place, took up my tools, and got going, as tough and determined as any miner or lineman, rancher or cabinet builder.

“This is exciting,” I thought to myself. And I thought it again, in one variation or another—satisfying, rewarding, gratifying—as the morning unrolled, items scratched off the list, new ones appearing almost as fast. I lost track of time, and the hours flew by. Pausing between emptying the recycling and making rice, I asked myself, “Who says work can’t be thrilling?”

After a quick bite for lunch and checking one last item from the list, I was ready to leave for work. “Goodbye,” I told my son. In a spasm of happiness, one foot out the door, I turned again. “Life is so fun,” I said.

He stared at me, then asked, “Why?”

“Why indeed,”  I thought. All I had done that morning was answer a few emails, hang the wash up to dry, make a meal out of the leftovers in the fridge, prepare rice to go with the assortment, wipe down some splashes of coffee on the white kitchen cabinet doors, and in the midst of all this activity, plan where to fit in the other 10 or 15 tasks of my day. What could be so very good about any of those activities? That was my question on my half-hour drive to work, along the motorway and into the city through light traffic and the 16 stoplights that keep drivers in check. We were like horses out of the chute at each signal. This, too, was fun.

It really was. But later, in a more controlled moment, I realized it wasn’t a collection of enjoyable moments that made the day exciting; rather it was the growing excitement of fitting everything into the day that made each moment a thrill. On that particular day, my recipe was how to make a hearty dish of the leftover tasks. First, empty the compost bin into the garden. Second, do the recycling. Third, the shopping. Like steps in a recipe, no single step afforded much satisfaction; it was the accumulation that made it fun. More than a recipe, a day is like a circus act: You’re successful when you keep the balls in motion, the plates spinning.

Once upon a time, such a day in my life, full of a million challenges, would have been more stress than success. So why, I wondered, the difference now? I allowed the question to flit across my mind. The answer is obvious: knowing when to toss things in the air like a juggler, and when to sit back and watch it all pass in front of one’s eyes.

Put another way, I finally recognize the venue (circus) and extrapolate the meaning (hardly any) and know what rests on success or failure (nothing). Try it yourself. All you need is your to-do list and its 20 balls to keep in the air, knowing that nothing will be permanently broken if you drop any or all of them.

And there is always a bright side.

“The rice is gummy.”

“You don’t know how lucky we are!”

“Because the rice is gummy?”

“Because it’s not burned! Gummy rice is a spectacular save. It’s stretching and half-stumbling to grab the ball that’s getting away.”

“You’re making this all up.”

“No, it’s true.”

But my son, in utter seriousness, pointed out that when you save the ball, it’s as good as ever. The same was not true of the rice. Is this, though, the moment for such careful, serious thinking? I ask you!

The post The List appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” by Robert Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.

The title of the exhibition comes from the Carpenters song of the same name. Gegenheimer herself is not a diehard fan of the duo, but she considers the song “to be almost painfully earnest in a way that I find really special.” The titular painting, among the first that viewers see upon entering the space, is of a few bars of sheet music in bubblegum-pink and white, set against swirling chartreuse and teal iconography. The piece took Gegenheimer almost three years to complete, a testament to the value of starting over, she says, and the hopefulness and optimism that underpins her art. In addition to the works displayed on the walls, Gegenheimer painted rainbow stripes on the baseboards of the room, a nod to the Romanesque-inspired architecture of the historic building (striping, often in the form of alternating red brick and white stone, is a hallmark of high Romanesque architecture), and added chartreuse paneling to create visual harmony throughout the space. The result is a room where joy practically jumps off the canvas and into the physical space itself, where Gegenheimer hopes visitors feel their moods change as soon as they walk in. A group of Girl Scouts attended the opening, she recounts, “and just seeing these Brownies look around and be enthused about the colors in the show was so exciting to me. It’s something I’ll probably never forget.”

The post Kati Gegenheimer appeared first on The American Scholar.

Go beyond the episode:

• Kate Davis’s Bring Cash: A Guide to Estate Sales in the Midwest and Beyond
• Her newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing
• For more on the afterlives of secondhand stuff, listen to our interviews with Adam Minter (on global thrifting) and Dana Thomas (on fast fashion)

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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The post Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing appeared first on The American Scholar.

The prevailing mood in Winona was, let’s just say, sincere. Besides Orwell, Kerouac, and school assignments, I was reading an anthology called 25 Minnesota Poets #2. The cover featured cream type against a brown background on sensible matte paper. It might as well have been printed directly on wheat. A few lines describing an oppressive shop teacher, excerpted from poet Stanley Kiesel’s contribution, give a sense of the tone: “Pop could see—plain as pliers— / poems swimming in my fingers.” The collection included some excellent poets, but it lived and died by the heartfelt declarative sentence. Even the local humor—think A Prairie Home Companion—was about as edgy as a quilt. Without knowing exactly why, I was unhappy with the literary culture that the anthology represented and yearned for something else.

Then, in 1978, I discovered Wilfrid Sheed. In an appreciative Rolling Stone review of the novel Transatlantic Blues, Greil Marcus wrote of Sheed that it must be frustrating to be the best book critic in America while having your novels dismissed as brilliant but minor. Wait, what? I’d never heard of Sheed before reading Marcus’s review. Now, in my adolescent way, I wanted to know everything about him.

Born in London in 1930, raised in England and the United States, and educated at Oxford, Sheed had published numerous works of fiction and criticism. I sensed that such a critic might point me toward what was lacking in my reading life, which had been limited to the American classics. Fortunately, Northern Lights Books, the new independent bookstore downtown, had a copy of The Good Word and Other Words, a recently published collection of Sheed’s essays. The title referred to the monthly column he wrote for The New York Times Book Review in the early ’70s. This was one of the most prestigious platforms ever offered to a Times critic.

The first thing I noticed was the sentences. I’m not sure that, for all my teenage literary enthusiasms, I had ever thought of the sentence as a separate thing, as something that could be crafted, with a value distinct from other narrative components, such as plot or argument. But Sheed’s sentences were engines of insight and something I didn’t recognize at first: joy.

A few examples. On Evelyn Waugh’s fascination with the landed gentry: “A writer who would rather be dined by Lord Chowderhead than praised by [Edmund] Wilson is a genius or he’s nothing.” On the disgruntled NFL star Dave Meggyesy’s evocation of fans watching football in a state approaching sexual frenzy: “At my place, aphasic torpor would be closer to it.” I had to look up both “aphasic” and “torpor,” and, when I did, I realized they were perfect. On the Watergate hearings, which everyone I knew had taken very seriously: “And so it went, each man a marvelous specimen of political comedy, which occurs whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of doing nothing; i.e., all the time.”

I had never encountered a writer so confident or a tone so elastic. So this is what happens when a Catholic, Oxford-trained mind intersects with a jaunty midcentury American voice. The elasticity didn’t simply apply to diction; Sheed’s syntax inspired envy. In an essay about the novel of manners, he speculates about one set in the counterculture: “And no dowager ever made one more conscious of saying the wrong thing or expressing the not-quite-right attitude as a hippie in full feather. ‘Oh, man, you just don’t know’—the strains of Emily Post still linger in that one.” But there was much more to his work than an agile, charismatic style. There was a brightness to this voice, and a crowded, convivial aspect to these collected columns that reminded me not of a lone poet on a matte prairie but of another touchstone of my childhood: the parties in my favorite sketch comedy TV show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. They were populated with jaunty celebrities grooving to ’60s cocktail music, then freeze-framing to exchange inane quips. It may seem an odd comparison and even a vulgar one. But Laugh-In was a memory of effervescence that I carried into the ’70s gloom. I was witnessing the last flashings of a midcentury energy that Sheed had glimpsed as a young man, coming to these shores during the Second World War.

The Good Word was a crucial part of my literary education. Sheed located his book reviewing in the personal, profound process of crafting a self, and it is precisely this grounding in the human journey that made the book so important to me. As he writes in his introduction:

This kind of reviewing is imprecise, speculative work like fiction, and its truths are the truths of fiction. The books are events that happened to me and are as open to misinterpretation as my neighbors or the Siege of Chicago in 1968. Along with one’s novels these pieces form a mosaic of someone coming of age at a certain time and place, and what he made of it.

I was someone coming of age in a certain time and place, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. And increasingly, books were things that happened to me. The process of encountering the world one book at a time, and of using those books to enlarge the self, is a subjective process. But what does subjectivity mean? It is not a disavowal of standards—far from it—but an acknowledgment of fallibility. As Sheed concludes in “The Art of Reviewing”: “Omniscience is on the calling card, along with the tricks and novelties; but between trash and Shakespeare, there is much uncertainty.” This sentence has informed my understanding of humility—and my disdain for brittle, overconfident opining—ever since.

He begins an introduction to a Paris Review Writers at Work volume with a specific confession: “This is partly an act of reparation. A few years back, I wrote a somewhat lofty piece about the second collection of Paris Review interviews, suggesting that the information therein was neither better nor worse than Hollywood gossip.” He then admits that it was “a dishonest piece (I was too young to be honest) in that I artfully concealed how much I had enjoyed the volume—which meant it had some kind of value, if not the kind I was looking for.”

Honesty is the crucial idea in that sentence. In my childhood, honesty was the opposite of subtlety, and subtlety was a bad thing, a slippery slope that led to sophistry. Honesty was instrumental: It enabled confession. Either you hit your sister, ate meat on Friday, or smoked dope behind the garage, or you didn’t. In my teenage years, honesty became brutal honesty: the affected grit and seedy posing that I sought in writers like Charles Bukowski. He’s, like, really honest, man. It took me a while to figure out that Bukowski’s honesty was really weaponized self-pity and sideways romanticizing.

Reading Sheed, I began to realize that adult honesty was only occasionally brutal. More often it was subtle and required intellectual labor. This subtlety was the opposite of sophistry. It didn’t evade the truth, it sharpened it. The purpose of this honesty was not the admission of guilt or whatever Bukowski was trying to do but the achievement of precision. And that precision had a spiritual aspect. It valued the complexity of creation over the dunderheadedness of the individual human mind with its sloppy categories and half-baked perceptions.

Of course, humility is no excuse for being mealy mouthed. Sheed knew the value of clear statement, especially in criticism. Of the critic Cyril Connolly, he wrote, adding italics for emphasis, that “for all his surly independence, he could not make the assertions that criticism requires.” Sheed could. Also of Connolly: “He had never been a good critic, because among other things, he could never pan a friend.” Or of a Walter Kerr study of silent film that Sheed admired: “Such a critic may be fine at good vs. bad, but untrustworthy on important vs. trivial.” When revisionists imputed genius to old studio-extruded movies, he reported what he actually saw: “The thirties, forties were an era of mass-produced junk, and all the auteurs and editors with tongue in cheek cannot alter that much.”

Some sentences have stayed with me because they said something in a way that stays said. When Sheed observed that Edmund Wilson possessed “an extraordinary gift for friendship in all its degrees, from the exchange of funny postcards to the complete opening of his mind,” he defined friendship for me with a precision that, decades later, I still return to. The micro-epiphanies of that sentence illuminated what friendship might be and, thus, what life might be. He dropped other parenthetical realizations. Of the tendency of LSD to moot speech: “Writers afflicted with vocation would refuse to enter heaven itself if they couldn’t describe it afterwards.” Or of football players who became authors: “Like all of us, they were raised on at least two completely contradictory moral codes, and can preach from either one interchangeably.” Beneath the jaunty and the jovial lived truth.

For me, growing up in the provinces, writers were part consumer brand, part Greek god—at any rate, something more than human. But Sheed understood that we are all flawed, God-sensing, metabolic puddings, and that doesn’t change just because you happen to write a novel. His fellow authors were not the producers of a consumer product but characters in a story he was writing. They could be deluded, trapped within assumptions they couldn’t see—in the case of the Beats, their assumption that writing faster, without revision or premeditation, taps into the subconscious: “It now seems possible that Kerouac wanted to bypass the subconscious by outrunning it. …  The words on the top of one’s head do not necessarily come from anywhere near the subconscious.” He suspected that speed writing was a psychological strategy, not a literary one: “Kerouac’s manicness was a necessary strategy for fighting off the forest-dark, French-American glooms.” Earlier in the same essay, he wrote, “I tend to believe he handled his tormented, overloaded temperament as well as it could be handled.” In the space of one essay, he moved between literary insight, psychological insight, and forgiveness.

Sheed was thinking as he was writing. I’d never seen that before. To the extent that I had any template for thinking, it was the high school debate model: You gather your arguments, which are a lot like everyone else’s arguments, on index cards and then repeat them with great pimply teenage confidence. In my experience, surprise, growth, qualification, and recalibration weren’t a part of the process.

Sheed ends an essay prompted by four new books about Ernest Hemingway with sentences that fold big-hearted praise over damning criticism. The result is a judgment that is not simply complex but also noble:

As early as The Sun Also Rises there are signs of potential freedom, of an exit into adulthood, that he never availed himself of. This was his last book before fame settled in to stay and clamped his style into place, where it grew warped and gnarled like a tree in a cave: but that it was a splendid style, and that his pursuit of it was honorable, if muddle-headed, to the end, I have no doubt.

When you view writers as humans, sentences distill into epitaphs. Elsewhere, Sheed heartbreakingly summarized Evelyn Waugh’s Catholicism: “He found God where he could, in the sum of what was left when you subtract the twentieth century; but he shouldn’t have tried to name Him.” There is something very humane in saying “they did the best they could.” The first responsibility of the humanist is to acknowledge that we’re human.

It is also one of the first worldly responsibilities of the Christian, and Sheed knew his Christianity—he was the son of Catholic publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. I also had been immersed in the church as a boy, spending my first decade in the Catholic town of Rollingstone, attending a Catholic grade school. But after the closure of our school, the death of my father, and our move into Winona, I drifted away. When, in an essay titled “Spock Mugged,” Sheed chastened the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge for mocking Doctor Spock’s protest of the Vietnam war as “something I would have expected a stand-up Christian like Muggeridge to appreciate,” he added this footnote:

William F. Buckley raised the Eyebrow high over this one. But the New Testament frequently emphasizes the simple moral test beside which all else shrivels. ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty … sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

A writer who was pointing me toward a greater literary sophistication sounded like my mother, who was a farm wife and nurse, and Sister Maureen, my favorite grade school nun. Sheed connected my emerging literary standards with my childhood values in a way that made both more vital.

The central character in the coming-of-age tale Sheed tells in The Good Word is the reviewer, and the reviewer’s central moral challenge is to treat books fairly. “The Art of Reviewing” provides a useful glimpse into Sheed’s mind at work. Book reviews in the United States are overstated, he contends, but there are good reasons for this: Reviewers need to get readers to pay attention. So they throw around sloppy opinions and take shortcuts by ranking authors and books within the author’s oeuvre. These compulsive rankings distract from any meaningful consideration of the book itself—its goals, triumphs, textures, and failures. Although we can, of course, learn about a book by looking at the books, authors, and culture that surround it, ultimately, our obsession with ranking authors diminishes our reading.

Any paraphrase of Sheed’s ideas, including the one I offer above, misses the indelible energy of his prose. To read him is to experience the power of idiom, its voltage and adhesiveness. I suspect his work would not translate well. Missing from my paraphrase, for example, is this: “What [the author] will not be called anywhere is probably what he is—‘our most middling author in his most middling achievement.’ … Excessive opinions excite the average reader to madness, or at least to attention. … Still, in the uproar certain decencies should be observed.” And this, which feels especially relevant to our age of listicles and tweets: “To read that Sven Angst may be the number-two Swedish novelist, surpassing even Igmar Klutz, may be O.K. It means we have five minutes to take in the Swedish scene before the guests arrive. But to find this applied to our own writers is to wonder where tourism ceases.” And most powerfully for me, this:

All this tends to confirm something cramped and anxious about our reading habits. … Eventually you have to tell your son that this is not the longest ball game ever played or maybe even the best. It is fatally flawed in the ninth inning. However, it’s the only game we happen to have right now, and it fills the moment just as full as a great game would, even sharing some of the same textures. If you don’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t enjoy a great game either, except for its damn greatness.

I cried when I reread “The Art of Reviewing.” Why would a nearly 50-year-old essay on book reviews make a 60-year-old man cry? Here’s the best I can do: I was an enthusiastic but clueless teenager who didn’t know how to read books, much less review them. And a stranger had just pointed me to a way of reading that would enrich my life from that moment on.

For me, The Good Word also served as a crash course in critical thinking. At Beloit College, the courses I took, while richer than my high school fare, failed to sharpen my critical faculties for a reason that seems obvious now: My professors had selected the best books in their field to teach in their introductory courses. What sane professor would say, “Tell me why the books I’ve shared with you are lazy, sloppy, confused, biased, incomplete, or blinkered”? Of course, Introduction to Economics and King Lear are as subject to critical thinking as anything, but if my 18-year-old self had taken them on, I would have been punching above my weight. College was about appreciation, comprehension, clarity, implication, and integration.

Sheed taught me how to read the books that weren’t classics, the vast middle ground between “trash and Shakespeare,” the great tide of uncanonized culture that constitutes my reading life and probably yours. He was especially good at the kind of books that claim to address serious subjects but deliver only platitudes and muddle.

The best example of this is “The Subject of Ethnics,” an evisceration of Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics and Peter Schrag’s The Decline of the WASP. Both books, which aim to celebrate ethnic cultures, are guilty of “flattening out our largest and most varied group, all the white Protestants from W. C. Fields to Huey Long.” The unfortunate consequence of this is that the ethnic groups that the authors celebrate “begin to look ominously alike. They are all simply un-Wasp—earthy, passionate, spontaneous, all that great stuff.” He suggested that instead of being simple fountains of joie de vivre, people who crossed the ocean in steerage to escape crushing poverty “did not need lessons in discipline and perseverance from the Whiffenpoofs.” As a Catholic, Sheed recognized a sin winking under the sloppiness: Novak and Schrag diminished complex human beings.

Sheed treated authors as human beings, with the limits of human beings, and it’s only fair he be treated similarly. In 2026, I can see how his subjects tend to be “male, pale, and Yale.” His essays on women’s liberation, as it was called then, haven’t aged well, and his review of a James Baldwin book ages much worse. Consider this wince-inducing throwaway: “I assume he is still a black spokesman in good standing.” Besides the snotty tone, there is the failure to think about how being a “spokesman” is a version of something Black people deal with every day—the corrosive pressure of being not simply themselves, but representatives of their race. His list of the great midcentury prose stylists doesn’t mention Baldwin, the most urgent and nuanced essayist since Orwell, or Pauline Kael, the most original and charismatic voice of her time.

The Good Word is Sheed at the height of his powers. As the midcentury energy that he loved peaked in the early ’70s, so did he. Transatlantic Blues (the novel that Greil Marcus had reviewed in Rolling Stone) showed the limits of the ironic style. When I tried to reread it, I found the first few pages so cloyingly urbane that I couldn’t go on. Reading In Love with Daylight, his often insightful but sadly defensive 1995 account of his afflictions (including an addiction to pills), showed the limits of the man. Given that my relationship with Sheed partook of mentoring—even though I never met him, he helped me find better ways of doing something very important to me—the book shocked me. The writer who taught me what grown-up honesty looked like was dishonest when it mattered most. But that is the essence of addiction.

Sheed’s accomplishment is his voice, which raises the question: What is voice? If my experience is representative, voice is something that writers think about far too much when they are young, and then, embarrassed by their own enthusiasm, don’t think about at all. I believe I actually told one of my creative writing professors that I was working on finding my voice. I’m also pretty sure he winced. As you learn to write, as you break through the received, the affected, and the incompetent, your voice finds you.

Voice is the deepest and most unconscious part of style, spiritual in that it reflects whatever makes the self unique. Yet voice is also steeped in one’s culture. It is more closely related to character than my college self ever suspected, which is why you can’t build one in a semester. The characteristics of Sheed that I celebrate—honesty, mercy—are moral qualities. But voice is what I sought, especially as a young man, in authors such as Sheed, Marcus, Kael, and John Updike: the self behind the sentences. The teenage me was not reading to find stories. Stories made me nervous. The teenage me was reading to find friends—fellow travelers making sense of the world. I gravitated to criticism because it is the literary form closest to conversation.

A fellow Sheed enthusiast pointed out that his voice is, among other things, breezy—and the canonical Elements of Style specifically proscribes breeziness. But it’s one of those violations that help sharpen what the rule really means. Strunk and White were railing against an affected breeziness—a put-on jauntiness in an alumni magazine that resembled no actual human voice. When rereading the relevant passage in The Elements of Style, I also sensed something else in Strunk and White’s advice: a certain pale preppie classicism. Adjectives aren’t really our kind of people, dear.

Sheed’s voice wasn’t fully unconscious, of course. He clearly worried about style. He wanted a prose as big as America or at least as big as American culture. Arriving from England—and wartime England, which is England squared—Sheed encountered the energy of jazz and pop, of wise guys and baseball, and it is this joyful, ironic miasma that influenced his prose more than anything else. Every Sheed sentence is a kind of love song to a version of America. That the English are better than us at irony simply heightened the effects.

The painful irony of Sheed’s career is that he is often categorized as brilliant but minor. Sheed himself wrote, “This country is merciless to good small talents.”  When he made similarly wistful observations about V. S. Pritchett, he might have been appraising his own career. One of his most trenchant essays, in his first book of criticism, is “The Minor Novelist.” You bleed a little after reading that one.

Personally, I’d suggest most so-called big talents are smaller than we think, and they often confuse public relations with subject matter. Faulkner knew Mississippi. Bellow knew Chicago and managed to trick us into thinking he knew America. Twain wrote well of one river, Melville of one ship. Fitzgerald wrote a great American epiphany. But when the subject grows larger, it often overwhelms the writer. Updike’s best writing was in his Talk of the Town pieces, short stories, and reviews. His explicitly ambitious Rabbit novels were so many pounds of anthropological sadness. Norman Mailer increasingly looks like a toxic clown.

Sheed’s subjects in The Good Word and Other Words—the voices and concerns of midcentury America, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Watergate, from Cole Porter to Mary Gordon—are plenty big. His consideration of the Beats, extending over two essays, and his brilliant first-person account of the 1968 Democratic National Convention are as vivid a portrait of a time and place as you will ever read. Add to that books about baseball and pop music, his affecting witness to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, his devastating takedown of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, and well-regarded novels about a presidential candidate and magazine publishing, and there’s a good case for his significance.

Sheed changed my life at a time it badly needed changing, when I was an earnest kid in an earnest place in an earnest time. And if changing someone’s life isn’t the definition of a big talent, there’s something wrong with our definition.

The post Spreading the Good Word appeared first on The American Scholar.

The first person—the only person—I’d told about the dog’s demise was my son. Both of us had felt sorry for the dog and made a point of stopping to pet him whenever we walked by his home.

“Wicas.” I repeated. “You asked the owner?”

My son said yes, one day when the owner happened to be outside. Wicas was what he remembered. Wicas sounds like whiskers, I thought. I shouldn’t forget.

I wondered aloud if the word meant anything in Spanish. My son didn’t think so.

The café was on a corner two blocks from our home, across the street from the high school. We were under the awning, though the day was cloudy, with neither rain nor sun to shelter from. Our German shepherd Toby was under the table, looking his usual mournful self. Once confident and assertive, he was now timid, meek. When the waitress arrived with our coffees, she cooed at him, as you would a baby, but Toby hardly looked up until she asked if she could give him a treat. Sure, we answered, and she produced a small dog biscuit about the size of a penny, and let him take it from her fingers. Then she offered another, cooing the whole time. Wicas, if that was really his name, had lived his life on an eight-foot chain. He could have used some of this gentle attention. Now that he was gone, the occasional three minutes I’d spent rubbing his head and back seemed piddling. I sighed. The waitress ran her hand over Toby’s head. She asked his name, and we told her. “Good Toby,” she said with a final pat before going back inside.

Three days later, out on a morning walk with Toby, I was nearing the farmyard when the white van belonging to the yellow dog’s owner drove up. The man was already unloading things when I reached the spot and greeted him, then commented on his dog’s death.

“He didn’t die.”

The man’s tone was brusque. He stopped his work and stood looking at me.

I was taken aback. Before I could ask where he was, the man told me they had stolen him. “They?” I said, stupidly.

“Someone.”

He told me that first they had reported him for keeping the dog on a chain, so he had moved the dog into an enclosed yard, behind a corrugated metal fence. He indicated with his hand. Then they had stolen the dog from that yard.

This seemed unbelievable. “Oh no,” I said. Then I asked how old the dog had been, automatically using the past tense. “Twelve,” the man said.

“He seemed so infirm. His legs trembled.”

“I was giving him pills for that. He was getting better.” The man sounded very bitter. “But they stole him.”

The man was tall and thin with a receding hairline and a beak nose, not handsome but arresting. He had been very curt but was softening with my obvious incredulity. My disbelief was not just for the dastardly interference of people but even more for the tale itself, though the man didn’t know that. I found it hard to believe anyone would steal a feeble old dog barely able to stand on his own legs. How had they even moved him? You’d have to scoop the animal up in your arms, and you’d have to be strong enough to do that. “Poor dog,” I said, meaning it.

I doubted very much that the dog had ended up coddled in someone’s living room or enjoying the freedom of a grassy lawn somewhere, doted on by a new family. The man’s strong emotion also struck me as off—I’d considered him more a lackadaisical owner than a conscientious one. There is a law prohibiting keeping dogs on chains, and I had once or twice thought of reporting the owner myself—like the rainy morning I had found the bedraggled dog in front of his doghouse, the chain twisted around his back leg so tightly that he couldn’t move. Bad enough to live on a chain, but one without a chain swivel is pure neglect.

That day I had unhooked the chain from the dog’s collar so I could unwind it from his legs. I inspected the swollen leg—no cut or abrasion—and urged him to try and stand. He took two wobbly steps into his doghouse, where he sank back down on the cold cement floor. At least he was out of the rain. I hooked the chain back to his collar.

The next day I checked the leg—no longer swollen—and then added a swivel snap to the hook, so that turning would not knot up the chain and shorten it. “No more nights in the rain,” I told the old yellow dog while Toby stood patiently by.

I had a chance a few days later to mention my intervention to the owner. I skipped the part about the neglect and went straight to the point: The new swivel clasp was there to keep the chain from twisting and shortening as the dog turned. The man, who had eyed me warily, ended up thanking me. “Yes, that swivel is a clever little gadget,” I commented. I saw no good coming from trying to shame the man.

That was about two months before the dog disappeared. So what little I did was done in the nick of time. The trick would be to apply the lesson to my own dog, and gladden his life all I could while I still could.

And here I was, on that morning several days after the dog had disappeared, listening to the owner’s tale. He was bitterly condemning whoever had caused this upset in his life.

“There are very bad people,” he said, which sounds simplistic in English but not so in Spanish: Hay gente muy mala.

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure. About the man, for example, I was up in the air. I asked, “What was the dog’s name?”

“Wilkin,” he told me, and I repeated it: “Wilken.” Wilken rhymes with silken. But what did the name really matter now that the dog was gone?

“Well,” I said. “Goodbye.” It sounded lame to me, but what else could I say? “I’m sorry,” I added.

“Yes,” he said, and repeated that bad people exist. Then he went back to unloading his van, and Toby and I continued down the lane. Maybe, I thought, the man had loved his dog. So I forgave him. And Wilken—Would he forgive the man too? If he’s found a place at the side of San Roque and is looking down from on high, I hope he sees his owner’s woe. A good heart isn’t an excuse, but it makes it easier for other goodhearted beings to forgive us. And who more goodhearted than a dog?

The post Where Is Wilken? appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Twilight: After Haying” by Jane Kenyon appeared first on The American Scholar.

New York City at the close of the 19th century thrilled to an early heyday in the erratic history of American classical music. The presiding conductor, Anton Seidl, was a charismatic protégé of Richard Wagner. More than leading American premieres of five Wagner operas at the Metropolitan (and espousing performances of the composer in English), he ultimately presided over a nationwide Wagnerism movement: an arts wildfire. Conducting the New York Philharmonic, he premiered the New World Symphony of Antonín Dvořák, with whom he met daily at Fleischman’s Cafe near Union Square. As director of the National Conservatory of Music, Dvořák in 1893 prophesied that “Negro melodies” would anchor a “great and noble school” of American music. His Black assistant Harry Burleigh would play a pivotal role in turning spirituals into art songs. Seidl, meanwhile, led American Composers’ Concerts. The creation of an American concert idiom, of an American canon, was the presiding priority. The culture of performance that came after World War I, hypnotized by foreign-born conductors and virtuosos, would be a sharp departure.

The same fin-de-siècle moment marked the apex of American musical journalism. The big three critics—Henry Krehbiel of the New York Tribune, W. J. Henderson of The New York Times, and James Gibbon Huneker, who mainly wrote for the Sun—were a study in contrasts. Krehbiel was an impassioned Germanic windbag who preached art as uplift. Henderson’s prose was atypically lean; his specialty was vocal art. Huneker was a virtuoso stylist (H. L. Mencken was a disciple) heralding the coming modernist moment. What they had in common was community—with one another, and with the artists whose activities they observed, adjudicated, and shared. Huneker’s responsibilities included doing publicity for the National Conservatory; a fabled raconteur, he once went drinking with Dvořák and declared “such a man [to be] as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon is to a shipwrecked sailor.” Henderson’s musicales hosted the city’s prominent singers and instrumentalists. But it was Krehbiel who knew everyone and did everything. He wrote program notes for the Philharmonic. He composed exercises for the violin. His books, more than a dozen of them, included the most published musical primer for laymen and the first book-length study of “African-American Folksongs.” During World War I, he translated Wagner’s Parsifal into English for the Met. He wrote that “the power of the press will work for good”—and proved it.

Half a century later, the big names in New York musical criticism were Virgil Thomson of the Herald-Tribune and Olin Downes of the Times—antipodes.  A chronic gadfly, Thomson was also a notable composer who thought nothing of praising conductors who programmed his own music. His first review, in 1940, blithely yet plausibly declared the New York Philharmonic “not part of New York’s intellectual life.” Downes was a populist who embraced mainstream tastes. His turgid prose was doggedly sincere. Compared to Thomson, he stood aloof from the artists and institutions he assessed.

When I arrived at the Times as a young music critic in 1976, “objectivity” had become a fetish. We were not to consort with musicians and administrators. We were never to perform. At the opposite extreme stood Michael Steinberg of The Boston Globe—a practitioner of maximum engagement. Steinberg’s range of local acquaintances was more catholic than Thomson’s. So was his knowledge, and not just of music. His prose was impassioned. His decrees, take them or leave them, were fundamentally informed. Oblivious of reputation, he abjured the tug of mainstream taste. He called Olin Downes “a pompous arch-boor.” Preeminent among the American newspaper music critics of his generation, he was also a throwback to another, more culturally assured era. He recalled the virtues of Krehbiel, Henderson, and Huneker.

Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1928, Steinberg was one of 10,000 Jewish children who in 1939 escaped via the Kindertransport. He lived in England, then Missouri. He obtained a master’s degree in musicology at Princeton. He was drafted and wound up in Germany. Upon returning to the United States, he headed the nascent music history department at the Manhattan School of Music. He was lured to The Boston Globe by its managing editor, Thomas Winship, and served as the paper’s music critic from 1964 to 1976.

The new Steinberg anthology, Defending the Music, collects some 500 pages of Boston Globe reviews, interviews, and essays. Scrutinizing a city’s cultural life, Steinberg is a terrific companion. His many causes included the composer Milton Babbitt and the pianist-scholar Charles Rosen, both of whom he knew at Princeton. His passion for the music of Arnold Schoenberg proved unquenchable. A master of infectious approbation, he raised a banner for Beethoven’s discarded 1805 version of Fidelio (“a work of surging vitality with a life all its own”), for Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (“a masterpiece, one of the nineteenth century’s very great ones”), and for Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina (with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress one of “two twentieth century operas I love most”).

These were all unpopular or esoteric enthusiasms, learnedly espoused. On the opposite ledger, Steinberg’s fundamental discontents included “the dry pseudo-Stravinskian crepitations that American neoclassicists were producing so plentifully in the ’30s and ’40s,” “the stupefied routiniers who run most of the world’s orchestras,” and “that claptrap about making concerts casual and friendly.” He castigated the inability of “the Boston public” to deal “even with the least forbidding sides of contemporary music.” He accused Puccini of taking “sadistic relish in the humiliation of his female leads, victims only of their own pitiful combination of passion and brainlessness.” He compared the smooth finish of Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra to the silken pops fare of Mantovani.

Steinberg had barely begun his first full season when on September 26, 1964, he threw down a gauntlet: “The 84th season of Boston Symphony concerts began greyly Friday afternoon, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting. The program consisted of the Brahms Academic Festival Overture, the Symphony No. 1 by Shostakovich, and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.” Of the Shostakovich, he wrote “When it is serious, it is merely gross”—and continued: “Neither [the Beethoven] nor the Brahms Overture was at all well performed, and for the reasons that often hamper Leinsdorf in the German classics. In the face of the expressive demands of certain kinds of music he becomes extremely inhibited—and he seems to fight off the inhibition with an irresistible desire to interfere with the natural flow of things.” Citing half a dozen specific passages in the Pastoral Symphony, including an even more specific measure number, Steinberg diagnosed both “technical” and “musical” carelessness. The previous February, in his third Globe review, Steinberg had skewered Leinsdorf’s predecessor, Charles Munch, who was making a guest appearance in his specialty: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique: “He gave it much as he always did, coarse in sonority, frenzied in temper. … All in all, I found it abominable.”

It was too much for the orchestra’s president, Henry B. Cabot, who in 1949 had been the man most responsible for hiring Munch rather than Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzky’s protégé and anointed successor. An outraged letter to the editor ensued. Steinberg replied with an “open letter” of his own, writing in part:

You say that “nobody in the field of musical criticism has a right to assume that he alone knows what is right and what is wrong.” I object to your implication that I have assumed that about myself. …

You write about the possible “damage Steinberg can do to the musical situation here in Boston.” You and I share deep concern for the musical welfare of the city. …

Last September … [y]ou made a speech in which you said … that since you did not wish to brag by claiming that the Boston Symphony was the best orchestra in the country, you would limit yourself to saying that there was none better.

Now any musician would like to live in a city that has the best orchestra in the country, and I am no exception. But I do not believe we can have the best orchestra in the country simply by saying that we do. …

There was a time, under Koussevitzky, when Boston orchestral playing represented, along with that in Philadelphia and New York, the best in America. That is no longer so. … I very much want Boston to regain the place it once held, but it is not likely to if no one points out what sometimes is wrong and if the only public statements are those which assume that our orchestra is the best around.

Steinberg’s subsequent reviews regularly praised and chastised individual members of the orchestra, most notably the concertmaster, whom he esteemed, and the principal clarinetist, whom he accused of “musical vacuity and bad pitch.” The reviews also disclosed personal relationships. When Leinsdorf departed in 1969, Steinberg’s farewell assessment, though not very favorable, was nonetheless fond: “In all, the seven years … are not likely to be remembered as the most glorious in the Boston Symphony’s history; neither, I suppose, will Erich Leinsdorf think of them as the happiest of his career. … His mission now is to rescue the musician in him, to let the musician function without the drain that goes with being a handcuffed administrator as well. In that, in everything else, and with gratitude for the beautiful and enlightening moments he gave us, we wish him the best.”

Steinberg’s tenure at the Globe happened to coincide with a historic decade at Boston’s New England Conservatory: the directorship of Gunther Schuller (1964–76). Schuller was a musical polymath—composer, conductor, and scholar—commanding a singular overview of American musical history, including jazz. Steinberg copiously covered the many NEC Jordan Hall concerts that purveyed repertoire unknown at the BSO’s Symphony Hall—an initiative another critic might have considered peripheral. These typically included the 1965 Boston premiere of Elliott Carter’s Double Concerto (1961)—“considered by many as the greatest achievement in American music so far.” The NEC faculty included the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, once a close associate of his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg; Steinberg was more than cognizant. Another galvanizing Boston fixture, at Harvard, was the composer Leon Kirchner, who was also a formidable pianist and conductor at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. A 1964 Steinberg review of Schubert, Stravinsky, and Kirchner hailed “three ‘classic’ masterpieces revealed as only a composer’s understanding can reveal them.” And then there was Sarah Caldwell, who presided over a renegade Boston opera company. Steinberg’s gratitude for her stagings of rare repertoire, including Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, was intense—and so was his frequent dissatisfaction with the manner in which her performances were realized. In short: Steinberg cut a wide and varied swath. Nothing important was out of the way.

Of all the Steinberg reviews and articles here collected, the most poignant are two dealing with Goeren Gentele, who was to succeed Rudolf Bing as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 1972. Steinberg credibly adduced an institution in decline, in need of new repertoire and better conductors, and burdened with a gargantuan Lincoln Center auditorium insensible to a growing shortage of big voices. It was not only Steinberg to whom Gentele seemed a veritable deus ex machina. But Steinberg had also quite obviously bonded with Gentele the man. For his opening night Carmen, restoring the original recitatives, Gentele  had lured Leonard Bernstein into the pit. He was to direct that new production, and also very possibly Alban Berg’s Lulu and Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust—major 20th-century operas never before staged in Manhattan. He appointed a seasoned Central European of high consequence, Rafael Kubelik, as the Met’s music director—a position that did not previously exist. His most fundamentally far-sighted priority was a planned mini-Met. He told Steinberg:

Yes, of course we must do contemporary opera, but you know, you really can’t count things like Wozzeck and Lulu and Rake’s Progress as ‘contemporary opera.’ I know it will not draw as well as Verdi and Puccini and so on, and it is depressing to do such things in a one-third empty house …but then why is it necessary to do them in this immense house? We must in any case have a small theater for chamber opera, experimental works, and so on. … Lincoln Center is full of good theaters of different sizes, but of course I cannot yet speak of going to this or that one, to Juilliard or the Beaumont, with this or that work—it is very delicate and we are very early in our conversations. I think it is important that Lincoln Center works as a unit, that we take advantage of the possibilities.

Three months later, Steinberg wrote:

The death Tuesday night in an automobile-truck collision in Sardinia of Goeran Gentele … was news to hear with shock and incredulity. The shock is perhaps greatest for us in the United States who stood just before the beginning of what we hoped and thought would be a long period of friendship and Gentele-watching. The pain is the greater for the personal tragedy that took the lives also of his 21- and 15-year-old daughters, Anna and Beatrice, like their mother, the former actress Maria Bergson, and their older sister Janet, who survived in serious condition, young women of exceptional beauty and vitality. …

Directing was Gentele’s profession, and he had done much of it, in opera, film, and theater, before becoming director of the Royal Swedish Opera in 1963. The Stockholm company was the most distinguished of the European ones—the others included those from Vienna, Moscow, and Milan—that showed their wares in Montreal at Expo ’67. They brought what for many was the operatic experience of a lifetime, Ingmar Bergman’s production of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, but also Gentele’s own productions of Blomdahl’s Aniara and Verdi’s Masked Ball, both profoundly intelligent, imaginative, and musical through and through. …

Gentele was a man of many parts. He knew theater and opera, but he also knew people and understood plenty about money. Quietly with tact and superb efficiency … he negotiated contracts with the nine unions the Met deals with, and without precedent, got everything settled before the expiration of the old contract. …

Everyone in the music world has seen Gentele’s appointment as a promise of life and excitement. Where the Met will go is impossible even to guess at, either in long range of in immediate terms.

Post-Gentele, Schuyler Chapin took over, then Anthony Bliss, Bruce Crawford, Joseph Volpe, and today’s Peter Gelb, not one of whom was or is an actual practitioner of operatic art. A mini-Met, more exigent than ever with ticket sales plunging, is no longer publicly discussed.

The hundreds of writings chronologically amassed in Defending the Music track an eventual leavetaking. For one thing, they disclose an impatience for systemic reforms not in the offing. For another, they increasingly question the place of the critic. In “Putting Reviews in Their Place” (June 21, 1973), Steinberg mulled:

It occurred to me that artists’ agents must be among the few people who care about keeping the review as in institution alive. It helps them sell, or they think it does. Other than that, who needs it? I submit that nobody does, really. … We must now question the assumption traditional to American musical journalism, the assumption that every concert—or as many as space in the paper and availability of writers permit—is followed by a review.

I shall not go to fewer concerts. … I do, however, want to find a new texture for these pages. … The traditional commitment to the review as the chief journalistic and critical form has … locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about.

Between the lines, Steinberg’s reviews confide increasing dissatisfaction with his job. In “The Power of Critics” (April 21, 1974), he writes to a disgruntled soprano unhappy with a review: “The critic can’t, for the sake of supporting a good cause, pretend to an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel. I wish it were otherwise. … Of course critics hope and like to persuade. We write to persuade, but even more to stimulate, to interest, to point out, to make people think. It’s a lot like teaching.” Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Koussevitzky’s birth (July 21, 1974), he peruses a career that mattered: “Koussevitzky was the first to see that an orchestra was more than a collection of players who gave concerts regularly, that it could be the nucleus of a musical university.” Steinberg took a leave of absence in 1975–76 to write a book about Elliott Carter—an unfinished project. He announced his resignation on September 19, 1976, in a low-key essay including a barbed aside: “By and large, journalistic criticism continues an irritant and a depressant.”

His new job, crossing over, was to write program notes for the Boston Symphony—in which capacity he also became an artistic advisor. He subsequently held the same dual position for the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra. His program notes were also regularly used by the New York Philharmonic. He coached young musicians at festivals in Menlo Park, California, and Round Top, Texas. He continued to write. His entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) were typically personal—not really dictionary entries at all. The most notorious was “Vladimir Horowitz,” ending: “Horowitz illustrates that an astounding instrumental gift carries no guarantee about musical understanding.” (The subsequent Grove Dictionary of American Music [2013] carried a substitute Horowitz entry by Harold C. Schonberg.)

Steinberg’s Boston reviews bristle with insights into specific compositions—a contribution transcending the ephemera of the daily press. Anyone sensitive to, say, the art of Edward Elgar would want to save and savor Steinberg’s October 4, 1969 review of Elgar’s Symphony No. 2, reading in part:

Elgar’s music is of disturbing emotional depth and complexity, and its subject often is pain. The most nearly comparable figure among his contemporaries is Mahler, but Elgar, lacking Mahler’s relish for agony in public, masks his Weltschmerz and allows his music to be outspoken and explicit only in its moments of triumph and of nobility. Those seem to have become almost alien quantities to us today, and their representation in music so patently sincere, not completely purged of doubt, is no easy thing to face.

And so, three program note compendiums—The Symphony (1995), The Concerto (1998) , and Choral Masterworks (2005, published four years before his death)—constitute Steinberg’s most lasting achievement. These essays seamlessly combine musical analysis, cultural history, and sagacious personal experience and reflection. Compared to his Globe reviews, they are also less confrontational, more catholic in taste. Though they are (alas) today too sophisticated for what symphonic audiences have become, there exists no superior published guide to the standard symphonic repertoire.

Michael Steinberg was never intended to make a career writing concert reviews. He was ever courageously drawn to what would do the most good.

The post The People’s Critic appeared first on The American Scholar.

In December 1998, with talk of impeachment disrupting the apricity of a Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., there was (as the Irish like to say) a wonderful commotion taking place at the Cosmos Club near Dupont Circle. Publishers had shuttled in from New York or Boston or come down on the Metroliner. Democratic socialists from the 1940s and 1950s had come, too (along with a smattering of radicals and red-diaper babies), remarking that the witch-hunt atmosphere of Kenneth Starr’s Washington was not unlike that of the McCarthy period years earlier. Fly fishermen had put down their rods and taken off their waders and drifted in from Montana; salmon fishermen had parted company for the moment from the banks of the Restigouche and the Miramichi; hunters had emerged from the Adirondacks full of tall tales; birders temporarily abandoned their binoculars and migrated from near and far. All manner of chefs were there, gourmands, meat-and-potatoes guys, a few westerners with Stetsons, science buffs, historians of various stripes, writers with only one book in them, colorful con men a mere city block ahead of the law, a Scot with a kilt but, alas, without his bagpipes, and a former foreign correspondent who stepped right out of a Graham Greene novel. They, this whole rich stew of generations that formed pieces of a life, had all come to this august establishment on Massachusetts Avenue for Angus Cameron’s 90th birthday party, and they would hear, among other things, a letter from Gore Vidal, faxed from Italy.

“Although I cannot say much good about the century Angus Cameron has lived through,” Vidal wrote in his legendarily dyspeptic way, “I have regarded him as a singularly bright paladin, or dare I use the phrase, wise centurion.”

I had come to Washington that day, along with my five-year-old daughter, and as I sat there, staring across the room at Angus, at the father I might have chosen had I had a choice, it was not hard, even after all the years, to recall my first memories of him: the walrus mustache, the blue button-down Oxford shirt (or his Safari brown number), the briefcase that was more like a trunk (battered and brown and containing many things you would not expect), the pinkish Santa Claus face, the big Stetson and huge overcoat, the little Dutch cigars, those Schimmelpennincks he loved to draw on as he leaned back in the chair in his office, always keeping his sport coat on, his tie never undone, peering at you, taking your measure, taking an interest in you, and always, with a wry half-smile, dispensing a special form of wisdom, wisdom gleaned over time and through the way life cuts facets on you, as he loved to say.

He would often begin his sentences with “By the way” or “Of course,” and say those words in such a manner of folksy authority and Hoosier flatness, shaped in part by the fine loam of the Indiana prairie, that I would forever after associate those phrases with him and no one else. So, for instance, when talking about Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—perhaps the only person he felt any lasting animus toward—he would say, in speaking of his thin physique: “By the way, I don’t trust a man with no ass.” Or of the time he got so exasperated with the New Haven Railroad that he offered this choice piece of advice: “What you should really do, of course, is turn this whole operation over to the Lionel people.” Or on the amorphous subject of disillusionment: “Oh, by the way. You can’t be disillusioned, you know, without having an illusion in the first place.”

Nearly 24 years earlier, the invitation had come unexpectedly. I looked up from my desk in my small cubicle at Alfred A. Knopf one March day in 1975, and there he was, saying, “By the way, I was wondering if you were free for lunch on Thursday?”

I didn’t know very much about Angus Cameron at that point. I was 23 years old and had only been at Knopf for a month. His office was across the hall from where I sat. I may not have known very much about him, but I could hear him, could hear that resonant midwestern voice that captured and commanded your attention whether you wanted it to or not. He was 66 when we met, and I had heard (and later learned in much greater detail) that he was thought to be a communist sympathizer and had been the first editor in book publishing to be blacklisted in the 1950s, that the FBI had begun a file on him in 1945 (and maintained it until 1968, J. Edgar Hoover himself becoming directly involved at one point), that he had lost his livelihood, and that after nearly eight years of being in exile, Knopf had offered him a job, a way back into mainstream publishing. During that period of time away from what might be considered the prosaic routines of daily life, he never felt more free and unconstrained. He packed up his Buffalo Kaiser and took his whole family to the farthest reaches of Alaska in order to make money fishing for the Inuits. He also returned east to testify before Senate committees, displaying a knowledge of Robert’s Rules of Order and of the Constitution that far surpassed that of anyone questioning him. (It no doubt helped that he had initially thought of becoming a lawyer—as well as a lion tamer.) It was during this period that he and a man named Albert Kahn (and later, Carl Marzani) ran a publishing house that put out books (such as Harvey Matusow’s False Witness) that no one else would dare publish, all the while pushing back against subpoenas and feeling a twinge when many of his friends kept a safe political distance from him. When a reporter at The New York Times asked Mr. Knopf why he was hiring Cameron after this period of exile, his reply was characteristically gruff: “Because he’s the best damn editor around”—only underscoring what Time had written when Cameron resigned his editor-in-chief’s job at Little, Brown in September 1951: that in the aftermath of Maxwell Perkins’s death, Cameron was the “foremost book editor in the U.S.”

When Thursday arrived, we headed off to lunch at La Toque Blanche on East 50th Street, a few blocks east of Knopf’s offices, where Cameron had a table, the first one on the left, held for him every day until one p.m. Ordering for both of us, he wasted little time in finding out that I was an impostor, a guy who talked a good game but didn’t really have what it took to back it up.

Between bites of salmon, he pressed me, gently but firmly, like the best of prosecutors.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, leaning forward, “did you see that piece in Scientific American about …?”

No, I sheepishly admitted, I hadn’t.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I guess because I have very little interest in science,” I said.

He didn’t like that answer, I could tell, but he continued on, apparently unwilling to give up on me.

“Well, what about that article in Natural History that discussed …?”

“Same answer, I’m afraid.”

I was being tested, and I was failing, miserably. What, I sat there wondering, could have motivated him to ask me to lunch in the first place?

The short answer is that he genuinely believed everyone should possess the same relentless curiosity and appetite for knowledge—not just information, but knowledge—that he did. So when copies of Scientific American and Natural History—the first issues of yearlong subscriptions, I later learned—filled my tiny mailbox not long after that, the picture slowly came into focus.

The morning after I received them, I stood at the door to his office and waited for him to look up from his manual typewriter. When he did, I asked (even though I knew the answer) if he, by any chance, had anything to do with all this.

“Of course,” he said, face breaking into a grin, then becoming serious again. “If you’re going to get anywhere in this life, you must always be a contemporary of yourself.”

 II

On the Saturday morning of September 8, 1951, Angus Cameron went to the post office in South Lincoln, Massachusetts, and received a letter in Box 105 that almost, but not quite, took him by surprise. The letter, from his employer, Arthur Thornhill of Little, Brown, informed him that he would need to let the firm know of any activities (i.e. political) he was engaging in when he wasn’t serving in his capacity as editor-in-chief. He was being asked to account for his time.

Angus had just gotten back from Maine the previous evening, having been delayed by weather and having missed a meeting on the Friday that was not supposed to have been held without him. But the notion of what is, or isn’t, supposed to occur is always tricky, and the tenor of the times only exacerbated all that. The minute you begin to say that certain things “should” or “shouldn’t” happen, you are alone out there in the blue, assuming a uniform logic and rationale that doesn’t exist and never has.

An August 31 article in the anti-communist newsletter Counterattack had brought the Little, Brown board of directors to a point of no return. Not only was Angus prominently mentioned in the piece, but the house itself was essentially being singled out as a place where all so-called communist authors could find a soft landing. Nuance was not of interest to Counterattack. Nor were any gray areas. If you were an author, you were your book, pure and simple. The unrelenting hysteria of the period made it even easier and far more conforming to paint everyone with the same brush. To honestly try and figure out the truth of what was actually going on—well, that required too much work. And besides, it didn’t fit with the prevailing wisdom, or more to the point, the lack of it.

For six years, Angus had been followed around by the FBI. Agents had insinuated themselves into every aspect of his life. They tapped his phone, tampered with his mail, went to meetings he had attended, and found people within Little, Brown and other places to report back on his movements and what he supposedly said and thought. Anne Ford, the firm’s publicity director, he would discover years later by his careful reading of his own file, had been one of the informants. John Woodburn, who owed his job at Little, Brown to Angus, had been one of them. Helen Jones, who Angus made sure became the juvenile editor, had been one of them. Even Martha, the woman who worked for the Camerons and whom Angus’s wife, Sheila, nursed back to health during an illness—she, too, had been one of them.

The irony is that Angus had always told his colleagues ahead of time if he was preparing to make a speech or sponsor a cause that might be potentially problematic to the firm. Always. But for Arthur Thornhill to ask what he was asking was, in Angus’s view, highly improper, the sort of request that “no free-thinking publisher would make and no self-respecting person would agree to.”

When Sheila read Thornhill’s letter, she did so without expression, and what she then said reflected perhaps the most important reason Angus had married her 15 years before:

“Oh well, Angus, next year at this time we’ll just be somewhere else, doing something else.”

This declaration of unconditional love is something one hopes for, but rarely finds. Any immediate worry about financial security was far less important to Angus and Sheila than their deeply shared belief that it was crucial to cling to one’s principles and reject conditions that would restrict their freedom. To do otherwise would have taken something vital from both of them.

In a letter to Jim Aldridge (one of his authors who lived in England) a year earlier, Angus had seen what was coming, displaying an uncanny ability he was blessed (some might say burdened) to possess. He could not only see to the end of the block but around the corner as well:

I have the feeling that time is running out for me at Little, Brown. The people there have been fine and courageous but the breaking point has to come sometime for men whose ideas are what theirs are basically. Little, Brown & Company is looked upon by all progressive people as the last standout of a free press here and Arthur Thornhill, the President, has been fine and we have some damned good books on the list. But the Westbrook Pegler smear of me [Pegler was a prominent red-baiting journalist] has let the devils loose and the talk is wild and general. Arthur had a bad time in New York last week and since he knows that I will not change my stand (I have come out as a member and officer of the Progressive Party against the [Korean] War), he is now searching for some beyond which nothing point. I feel sorry for him for he considers me his best friend and he also considers that I will someday soon become a luxury. The situation is tense for everyone but me for I have known for a long time that as good as LB & Co. has been, its chief people have a sticking point being good corporation men. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that business men like Arthur and the rest of them here are bringing about their own ruin by not taking a stand on events.

He then turned to a much more pleasant topic, all things being relative, of course:

I wish you were here to go deer hunting with me. I hope I will get to Colorado but that fell through so I am going to spend two weeks hunting in Nova Scotia and two more in New Brunswick. The limit in each province is two deer so I may get some winter’s meat. Hope I’ll be around to eat it.

But first he had some business to take care of, and he wasted little time in doing so. When he went to work that Monday morning, he told Thornhill how disappointed he was that the board had met without him the previous Friday, the implication being that Thornhill owed him more than that. He also could tell that the letter he had received had not been written by Thornhill but by Stanley Salmen, a man Angus considered bright but corrupt and a liar, a small figure (in the largest sense of the word) who worked behind the scenes, a man who was intent on seeing Angus go and had been scheming to bring about his departure. He knew it was Salmen because Salmen had tried to oust him before, back in 1948, while Alfred McIntyre (Thornhill’s predecessor) was still alive, drafting a similar letter for McIntyre to sign. McIntyre didn’t, just as he had never responded to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Gunfight-at-the-O.K.-Corral letter of December 1947 in which he basically said that it was Angus or him (that Angus’s rejection of George Orwell’s anti-communist parable, Animal Farm—which was also rejected by T. S. Eliot in England—only confirmed his communist sympathies). As it happens, Schlesinger was the one who ended up leaving. (When I spent time with him one evening at his Sutton Place apartment in 2001, he remained adamant that “people like me were right and people like Cameron were wrong.”)

Angus not only told Thornhill that he could not accept what the letter asked of him, he also told him why, giving voice to the same thoughts he had two days earlier when he received it. (Thinking about this exchange between Angus and Thornhill brought to mind his exchange with J. D. Salinger not long before that, when he assured Salinger that Little, Brown would not do anything shameful or untoward in the promotion and publication of The Catcher in the Rye. He knew that Salinger had walked out the door of Harcourt, Brace upon seeing a reader’s report that referred to Holden Caulfield as “a neurotic little boy,” and the intensely private Salinger had made it clear he did not want his photograph to appear on anything. The agreement he and Angus reached, though, was that Salinger would, painfully and reluctantly, allow his photograph to be on the jacket for the first printing, but that it would be removed for any printings after that—of which there would be many, Angus confidently predicted. Angus called Salinger’s bluff essentially, by saying he didn’t know of an author alive who didn’t want his book to be read by the public as opposed to winding up in some dark and musty space in a drawer somewhere. The refreshingly direct, unvarnished, look-you-straight-in-the-eye way he had of talking with people—the deep trust he was able to engender, the uncanny way he had of sensing, even knowing, your ineffable desire—was only one of the many things that set him apart.) What made this exchange between him and Thornhill both sad and difficult was that Thornhill, on some level, didn’t fully understand why Angus was taking the stand that he was, unable somehow to grasp and accept that the things that mattered to Angus—his bedrock principles, for one—mattered to him a great deal more than continuing to make a relative fortune ($40,000 a year in 1951!) with stock options and having his own restaurant table held for him until one p.m. As Angus had indicated in his letter to Aldridge, it was easier for him to understand Thornhill’s predicament than it was for Thornhill to empathize with Angus’s position. The Depression was—and yet was not—a distant memory. You either were used to having certain things and a certain way of life and were determined to hold onto all that no matter what secret doubts might gnaw at you (if they gnawed at you at all)—or you were prepared to walk away, regardless of the climate. You were either consumed with how you were going to make the next payment on the Buick or you couldn’t care less, secure in the knowledge that you wouldn’t allow yourself to be tyrannized in that fashion.

I have never met anyone who convincingly possessed that degree of self-confidence. Still haven’t.

III

I have had three mentors in my life, and Angus Cameron has been one of them. His was a life steeped in an intimate and overarching knowledge of history and an unwavering belief in freedom of speech and freedom of the press—a staggeringly rich existence lived with moral integrity and dignity, forever guided by flinty principle and, as Jim Aldridge said, “a cheerful fearlessness.” He was a man who never backed down and never backed up. He was equally at home discussing philosophy with Edmund Wilson as he was cooking up squirrel and venison stew with a couple of fur trappers named Didge and Bromey in the Canadian bush. He distrusted godheads, Henry II and Ted Williams chief among them. “A rational person loses interest in the godhead,” he said with conviction, “because they are usually bores.” And he despised bullies, all of whom, he became convinced after much time spent with the famed boxing figure Cus D’Amato, were both scared and worryingly insecure. He had an enduring belief in the importance of the campfire—and a dread of its ever disappearing.

Without his wholly intending it to be, given that he could be a terrible procrastinator, the life Angus Cameron lived serves as both a social, cultural, and political companion through the 20th century and as a recurring, emblematic thread through many people’s lives—from Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein to Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Woody Guthrie, it is fair to say, would never have written the autobiographical novel Bound for Glory in 1943 had Cameron not come across a short story Guthrie had published the year before in Common Ground and convinced him of the importance of doing so. The Joy of Cooking might never have become the country’s culinary bible had it not been for the trust and belief in him that Irma S. Rombauer developed. Angus, who worked for Bobbs-Merrill at the time the book was published in 1936, knew she didn’t want to do very much to promote it, if anything. But when he wrote to say he was “counting on your continued cooperation,” she went wherever the publisher asked her to. He would not take no for an answer when a Princeton historian named Martin J. Sherwin did not want to do a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That book, which eventually needed the help of Kai Bird, became American Prometheus and won the Pulitzer Prize. He waited 20 years for John K. Terres to complete The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, which would sell, as Angus often predicted to the sales force, “more in its second year than it will in its first, and more in the third year than it will in the second.” Were he still alive, it would give him immense pleasure to know that the book he cowrote with his colleague Judith Jones, The L. L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook, remains in print today, 43 years since it was first published.

When Angus walked away from Little, Brown in 1951, refusing the request of company executives to keep them apprised of how he spent his time outside the office, he met great resistance—one of those “breaking points” he referred to in his letter to Aldridge—to his belief in and desire to publish Spartacus by Howard Fast. Not only was Fast a target of McCarthy’s blacklist, J. Edgar Hoover also warned Little, Brown that it would be “unwise” to publish the novel. Not long after Angus left, he helped Fast self-publish Spartacus, which became, despite or perhaps because of the controversy, a success, and an even more successful movie.

Fifty years later, on an autumn day in 2002 not long before both of them died less than four months apart, Fast insisted on the notion that “Angus was a hero, almost a legendary figure. We both gave up a great deal, but his was a far greater sacrifice. He was faced with never being able to work again in anything but a menial job, but he was willing to set everything else aside for what he believed in.

“Courage is a rare ingredient,” Fast said emphatically on the phone. “The only virtue that mattered was courage. And Angus Cameron was stuffed full of it.”

He was who he was, and he knew who he was, and the person that he was and knew was afraid of no one.

The post What He Stood For appeared first on The American Scholar.

I am an unlikely sports parent. I was never on any kind of team; I spent my high school afternoons working at a health food store, creating self-bound books of poetry, and experimenting with various methods of mind expansion. Yoga and a few shuffles around the track are the closest I get to playing a sport these days. When I was a new parent and heard friends with older kids talking about the hectic swirl of tryouts and tournaments, I silently pledged that would never be me.

And yet.

Rec sports for grade-school children were the gateway. There were no tryouts. For $100, my husband and I could sit in a local park for eight weekends in a row and watch our children play softball and soccer. Some of the kids on their teams, forced by their parents to participate, stood forlornly on the field; others exerted themselves in earnest. A few seasons of this uneven patchwork made it clear that my children wanted something more intense. Both had inherited athleticism, apparently from other family members: My daughter was a fast baserunner good at catching softballs, and my son was scoring most of the goals on his soccer team. If we wanted them to have a chance at making their high school squads, friends counseled, we would need to get them on competitive teams.

Thus I was initiated into the vast network of private sports teams that, in a narrowing funnel, direct children into high school, college, and professional sports. These “travel teams” are fueled by families’ labor and cash; many coaches are minimally compensated parents. When my husband told me we’d have to pay $1,500 to the softball team our daughter had just qualified for to cover tournament entry fees, I was shocked. And that didn’t cover the uniforms, equipment, hotels, and ubiquitous gear that families haul in and out of their SUVs each weekend: canopies, WeatherPods, GCI Outdoor chairs, coolers, and double-decker collapsible wagons to trundle it all to and from the fields.

Let me pause here to say that I love what competitive sports have done for my kids, now 11 and 13 years old. All the platitudes I scoffed at as a teenager—that sports teach hard work, perseverance, and collaboration; that they can be inspiring, ennobling, and transcendent—are true. My children have built their confidence, learned how to lose graciously, and bonded with their teammates. Their coaches have mentored them into more capable and compassionate people.

Not only that, I love their teams. The first time I leapt from my seat screaming when my son scored a goal, my husband looked at me with wonderment. Hadn’t I been the one questioning whether the kids should even do this? Soon enough, I had bought team T-shirts that I, like other parents, wore to each event. When they won tournaments, I cried with joy.

Yet I’m willing to bet that most parents whose children play competitive sports have seen the darker side, too. Kids’ sports can be ugly, vicious, and elitist. I’ve watched parents throw things at umpires. I’ve heard coaches scream obscenities at their players. I’ve seen kids hurt each other on purpose. And I’ve witnessed friendships torn apart and parents divided over who gets how much playing time at what position. There are placards on each field at the softball complex in our local park that say something like, “I’m just a kid. It’s just a game. My coach is a volunteer. The umpires are humans. No college scholarships will be handed out today.”

Even when all parties are on their best behavior, travel-team competition is grueling. For outdoor sports in our slice of the Midwest, tournaments and games are mostly in the spring and fall. Frequency and travel time depend on the level of play—“C teams” play several weekends a month and travel one to three hours from home; “B teams” travel farther and play more frequently. “A teams” travel out of state and play every weekend. With even one kid on a C team, much less two or three at higher levels, this schedule would be extremely difficult for a low-wage worker or single parent to manage. Research shows that many working-class kids are structurally excluded, and my own work with refugee and immigrant teens indicates that without significant family resources, sports opportunities and college scholarships are often out of reach. A two-parent household with a comfortable income is practically required for travel-team participation. In fact, my husband and I sometimes jokingly observe, parents should divorce and then partner with childless people so that four adult drivers are available. But if the new partners have kids who also play competitive sports, it could be a total mess. Dating apps should catch up and offer filtering options.

The tournament schedules are not announced until several days beforehand, so you have to block off an entire weekend and be prepared to leave work early to get your kid to a Friday evening game. Tournaments could go through Sunday evening, or your team could be eliminated early on, making nonrefundable hotel reservations perilous. Or the games could be rained out—tournaments are rarely canceled because then the organizers have to offer refunds, so they delay or cancel games one by one. Oh, and unless your kids are among the best on the team, they may not even play that much.

This lifestyle is easily parodied and ripe for exposé journalism. David Gauvey Herbert’s article about Varsity Spirit, a conglomerate that has a stranglehold on competitive cheerleading, confirmed my suspicion that some people were making a lot of money off all this, and a New York Times article from 2025 expanded those findings to other sports. The uniform companies, hotels, and tournament organizers are all linked in a network that, whether through careful orchestration or happenstance, relieves families of their disposable income. “Stay to play” arrangements are common: All team families, for example, are required to patronize a certain hotel. As a result of these opportunities for profit, billions of dollars in private equity investment have begun flowing into youth sports over the past several years, and the Unrivaled Sports corporation has been buying up leagues and venues in hopes of establishing a youth sports empire. But to most parents, the economic links remain obscure, and they are easy to overlook when your kids are enjoying themselves while doing what all their friends are doing.

This particular type of family investment in kids’ sports is relatively new. The term “soccer mom” entered the lexicon during the 1996 presidential election to describe a voter demographic of mostly white, suburban, middle-class mothers. By 2010, writers such as Lorraine Duffy Merkl were proudly displaying their sports parent cred in The New York Times. Today, a quick Amazon search reveals T-shirts, mugs, and hats marketed to Softball Moms, Cheer Moms, Hockey Moms, Wrestling Moms, and in general, parents, siblings, and grandparents of players in any sport you can imagine. Sixty million kids in the United States currently play sports, and according to the Aspen Institute, the average American sports family spends a little more than $1,000 per child athlete per year—a 46 percent increase from 2019. There has been plenty of soul-searching about the costs and results of hyper-involved parenting, significant attention to the increase in youth sports injuries, and a bit of reflection on sports parenting in particular. But given how much space sports take up in my life and the lives of most parents I know, there is more to consider.

I graduated from high school the year “soccer mom” became a popular term; parental involvement in sports was different in my youth. This was confirmed by my mother’s surprise the first time I took her to a softball tournament. She looked around, confused. “You mean we just sit here for the whole weekend?” she asked. At first, she kept sneaking off to the car to listen to podcasts on her phone. Never, she alleged, had she spent a weekend watching my sister or me do anything. And my sister, unlike me, was sporty. She was on the track team and the soccer team—we think. Mom and I tried to remember, but it was hard, since we’d never attended any of her games or meets. She made her high school teams with no experience and went to the events with her classmates on a school bus.

By the end of my daughter’s softball tournament, Mom had learned all the kids’ names and was cheering them on from the sidelines. It doesn’t take long to be initiated into sports parenthood or grandparenthood (at least a quarter of the spectators are grandparents, some of whom attend every game). Once you commit to the lifestyle, it starts to feel inevitable. Sometimes, in the winter months, when the kids had no tournaments and only two practices a week, our lives felt empty, purposeless, and lonely.

Which raises the question: What would we be doing with our time if kids’ sports didn’t dominate our lives? Sometimes during a soccer game, I’ll look around at the hundreds of parents camped out in chairs lining multiple fields, and I’ll picture all the empty seats in city council meetings, houses of worship, community service organizations, and every other component of civil society. Kids’ sports are our volunteer work and our social life—and for the less religious, our Sunday service. Many families, including ours, try to “do it all,” chauffeuring children from serving at the soup kitchen to the church picnic to sports games to a neighborhood BBQ to music lessons. But often, the first priority, the immovable piece of the schedule, is sports.

Nonetheless, kids’ sports offer something unique: They may be the last great political melting pot in an increasingly polarized country. Friend groups, social media ecosystems, religious communities, and even workplaces tend to be politically segregated. Although I’d lived in a red state for more than a decade, working at a university and living in a college town, I had few conservative friends. Adults tend to avoid ideological tensions, and our kids’ friends were mostly our friends’ kids. In a world of  “chosen families,” kids’ sports allowed me a rare chance to spend time with people outside my bubble.

Because who cares about political differences when you’re hugging on the sidelines after a brutal defeat? The team families care about my kids, and I care about theirs. After spending countless hours on the sidelines, huddled under awnings to avoid the broiling sun or an icy rain, I could see what people brought beyond their politics: generosity, encouragement, and maybe some nachos from the concession stand. I even found that if I remained open to human connection, weighty topics could be broached respectfully. In the hours-long breaks between games, I got into friendly conversations with the more conservative dads about immigration, government spending, and the state of universities under the current administration. Occasionally, we would find common ground. When I explained, for example, how a graduate student I knew had his visa canceled due to a traffic ticket, one father agreed that this was not what he envisioned when he supported deportations. I admitted that although I didn’t agree with federal cuts to university funding, higher education was desperately in need of financial reform and I could understand why people had lost faith in the system. Outside the team setting, we wouldn’t have had much opportunity to interact.

My children also benefited from building connections across ideological divides. The first time the softball team gathered for a prayer, my daughter—the child of a Buddhist Quaker (me) and a secular humanist (my husband)—had no idea what to do. But it was important for her to navigate that tension. Sometimes she joined the prayers; sometimes she hung back with others. But she became more sensitive to religious difference and gained respect for her teammates’ strong faith.

When friends with younger kids ask me what they’re getting into with kids’ sports, I try to be honest about the benefits but also the costs (tens of thousands of dollars and most of your weekends for the next decade). The kids miss a lot for practices and tournaments: lazy afternoons, afterschool jobs, family game nights, hobbies, community involvement. Travel-team sports don’t make sense unless the kids are really committed and the parents go in with open eyes.

Though the macro level continues to unsettle me, competitive sports have become so woven into our lives that I’ve found ways to rationalize my family’s participation. I have my own equivalent of the placards at our local softball fields, the ones that remind parents that the umpires are human and the coaches are volunteers. These are reminders only to myself: Your kids are only young once. Give them this gift, and don’t let them forget how lucky they are. Take one for the team.

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The canal is more than its name suggests. Rather than a single waterway, it is a series of canals forming three branches and designed to carry wheat and other agricultural products. The hope was to connect the grain-rich northern plateau of Castile to the ports of Cantabria. Could such a system really succeed? The earlier Canal du Midi in France, completed in 1681, suggested that it could. Construction on the first branch of the Canal de Castilla began in 1753.

Why water? Before the steam locomotive, Castile was isolated and transportation was difficult on roads rough and rutted in the summer, often mired in mud in wetter months. On a typical road of the times, a horse pulling a wagon might move one ton of cargo. The same horse on a tow path pulling a boat could move as much as 30 tons. A principal visionary behind the canal’s design was Antonio de Ulloa, a Spanish naval officer, scientist, and Enlightenment figure. Today, a tourist boat bearing his name operates on the Campos branch of the canal, departing from Medina de Rioseco. Planners hoped to finish the project within two decades. Instead, the construction dragged on, interrupted repeatedly by wars and other financial crises. The Peninsular War between 1808 and 1814 was the biggest disruption but not the only one. Also straining the government’s coffers were the American War of Independence, in which Spain backed the colonies against Britain, and a civil war over royal succession, the First Carlist War, from 1833 to 1840.

Eventually, however, after almost 100 years of on-and-off construction, the canal opened in 1849. Two hundred and seven kilometers had been completed, with 49 locks along the route. At Frómista, a set of four locks in close succession forms a staircase, raising boats more than 14 meters. Here, the locks are oval rather than the standard rectangular shape, a design that better withstands water pressure and was considered particularly innovative at the time.

Northern Spain’s mountains made the original dream of connecting inland Castile to the coast at Santander extremely difficult. Though the canal never reached the sea, for a few decades it operated largely as intended, with 49 locks moving boats loaded with grain. But the coming of the steam locomotive changed everything: Railways were faster and cheaper, and soon transport by boat along the canal was mostly obsolete.

So the canal never became the great transport artery its planners envisioned. And yet, with the canal providing steady flowing water, milling became feasible, and water-powered flour mills, grain warehouses, and loading docks were built. A large milling industry developed in towns along the canal, especially near Palencia and Valladolid. The canal corridor became one of Spain’s most important flour-producing regions.

Ultimately, the canal’s economic success came not from transportation but power generation. Yes—the canal built for transport ended up providing industrial power. Today, when you drive through the area around Palencia, you see abandoned mills, some in ruins, that testify to this end. End? Not yet. As tourism grows, the canal built for transport and used for power now has a new life as a place of walking routes, boat trips, engineering displays, and, of course, history lessons. In Medina de Rioseco, a visitors center explains it all: the human ambition, ingenuity, and adaptability. Nothing so nuanced was my first impression on seeing the canal, when I leaned over the murky waters and turned to take in the crumbling building beside the canal at the town of Grijota, near the confluence of the three branches. My impression was of abandonment and desolation.

Abandonment and desolation. They exist hand-in-hand with imagination and renovation. Who’d have predicted that the steam locomotive would arrive to change everything about the canal? And what change to disrupt our times will someone in the future look back on with surprise and say, “Who’d have guessed?”

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

The post “Before the Loon Calls”  by David Mason appeared first on The American Scholar.

The project began when Shanks tore up their old dresses and skirts. Wearing these clothes used to feel like “an anachronistic drag show for nobody,” almost “trad-wife cosplay.” Shanks reconstructed those strips and squares of fabric into three-dimensional forms that take up an entire gallery room—an immersive installation of textile sculpture. Some of the works are meant to mimic snake skins, evoking the shedding and regrowth that occurs during a young snake’s ecdysis cycle. Other forms mimic spider webs, a nod to the “spider as weaver, as connector. I feel the resonance and the kinship” with these creatures, Shanks says, “because I, too, have done this [shapeshifting] to survive.” Constructing these pieces proved cathartic—a way of “honoring the learning and the growth, and the protection that that mask [of feminine clothing] served for me,” they say. “At that time, I was doing a lot of learning and growing within myself.”

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Go beyond the episode:

• Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
• For more about medieval women’s religious experience of food, you can’t do better than Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast
• Guillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrimage of Human Life, in scanned manuscript or translation
• Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride 
• Thomas Aquinas’s works are available online in a free side-by-side translation
• Don’t sleep on the early Christian mystics: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Catherine of Siena 

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.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora

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!

The post Safe From Sin appeared first on The American Scholar.

Amazon sells his hardbacks for $28.99, the paperbacks for $20.99, and the Kindle versions for a bargain $7.99. What you can’t buy from Amazon at any price, however, is Blake Whiting’s CV. Though the books claim to be copyrighted in his name, you won’t find an author picture or bio, nor will you find his website or Instagram. He does not belong to the faculty of any college or university, and he is unknown to those academics he cites in his books—which are not actually copyrighted.

Whiting, as you have guessed, is neither historian nor human. His fake persona is harbinger of an alarming trend threatening disaster to academics and journalists alike.

I know this all too well; I am a science and history author who has published extensively on many of the subjects covered in Whiting’s books. I have written magazine features that have been clearly reshuffled, reorganized, and supplemented with other freely available material to masquerade as the unique work of “Blake Whiting.” This is not plagiarism in the old-fashioned sense, in which a few sentences or paragraphs are lifted from a previously published work. This is word-laundering on a truly industrial scale, aided and abetted by one of the world’s largest corporations. Using AI tools and a pseudonym, unknown culprits are now profiting from my work and that of my colleagues. Worse, they are limiting what we can write about in the future. What publisher wants to publish a second book on an archaeological discovery, no matter how significant?

The volumes by “Blake Whiting” provide sophisticated analyses with up-to-date information, flashy covers, and introductions written in the first person. There is no hint that the author is not human. “I first encountered news of this discovery”—a large settlement recently found in Uzbekistan— “while researching trade networks for an entirely different project,” states the introduction to Archaeology of the Silk Road’s Forgotten Metropolises, “and like many historians, my initial reaction was skepticism.”

That book details the groundbreaking work of Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleague, Farhod Maksudov, of Uzbekistan’s Institute of Archaeology in Tashkent. The two men have spent more than a decade excavating remote Central Asian sites that shed fresh light on the medieval network of the Silk Road, and they have published their results in peer-reviewed journals. I have covered their research in Science and Smithsonian, visiting their excavations and interviewing them extensively. When I contacted Frachetti, he was not familiar with “Blake Whiting.” “Never met him,” he said. “I guess someone is making money off us.”

Likewise, Eric Cline, a George Washington University archaeologist and author of the popular 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which was published by Princeton University Press, is unfamiliar with the alleged author behind 1177 BC Revisited, published in November 2025. “Not a single footnote,” Cline notes of the new book. “No bibliography whatsoever. The ‘author’ does mention me in passing in the introduction, but nothing more than that.” Cline calls the work “a complete rip off” that is not plagiarism in the form of cut-and-paste, but a clever reshaping of his own material.

Readers, however, seem unaware that “Blake Whiting” is not a flesh-and-blood author. “Fascinating read!” wrote one Amazon reviewer of a book about the important Turkish archaeological site called Gobekli Tepe. “Well organized chapters, clearly explaining what has been discovered,” wrote another. “Speculations on all aspects are well grounded in real archaeology.” A reviewer on Goodreads gushed: “This was an EXCELLENT overview for the layperson about this site. It was a simple but well-balanced discussion of the site and its possible origins.”

AI projects designed to pose as real researchers, set in motion by unethical humans, with the cooperation of a powerful corporation, are now capable of fooling even careful bibliophiles. This is not the ChatGPT of 2022. “It reads beautifully and is accurate,” Cline says ruefully of 1177 BC Revisited.

The books are not listed in the U.S. Public Records System; works created entirely with AI cannot be copyrighted, since their authors are not human. Each of these books, however, has an Amazon Standard Identification Number. One 206-page volume about a recent high-tech effort to read ancient Roman scrolls that burned two millennia ago is even entitled, apparently without irony, AI Reads the Dead.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which prints “Blake Whiting’s” book to order, at a profit, insists that it carefully monitors its catalog. “We invest significant time and resources to enforce these guidelines, using a combination of machine learning, automation, and dedicated teams of human reviewers,” the company states on its website. Yet somehow, Amazon’s “careful monitoring” failed to detect an author with no bio or online presence who published more than a dozen books on a host of subjects within a week. The company claims to limit titles created by one author to 10 per week, a figure that Whiting exceeded without drawing Amazon scrutiny. “We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines, whether AI–generated or not,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant said. She declined to comment on Whiting’s works.

Amazon is, in essence, allowing the fox into its vast henhouse of authors, and profiting from a business that threatens the very livelihood of its traditional content producers. Of course, U.S. copyright law allows for “fair use” of copyrighted material for commentary or education. “Blake Whiting” goes far beyond this, making use of powerful AI tools to avoid overt plagiarism. Tellingly, the books are devoid of direct quotes, which would mean lifting directly from previously released publications—a sure mark of outright theft.

This development has startling implications not just for writers but for young academics struggling to break new ground. If an AI program accesses your just-completed dissertation and salts it with data and text from other sources, then that book you planned to write for a general audience, based on years of research, might be available online before you can get your proposal to a potential publisher.

This sort of cynical piracy has begun to thrive in today’s AI Wild West, a territory largely devoid of government regulations. Though Amazon may take down the offending volumes once it is informed by aggrieved authors like Cline and myself, it faces no consequence for its behavior. Will readers be informed? Will they be fully refunded? What is to prevent the book thieves from tweaking a title, altering the pseudonym, or rephrasing the text and republishing their pirated work?

Of course, legal action is always an option. But to whom do we serve legal papers? The identity or identities of “Blake Whiting” is information Amazon holds as confidential. How do I, as a freelance writer, continually monitor Amazon’s corpus, much less attempt to sue a behemoth that has armies of lawyers? Assembling a class-action suit like the recent one against Anthropic is a more palatable option, but it is also an expensive and time-consuming proposition.

For now, at least, the rapidly changing environment leaves writers like Cline and me in an increasingly grueling race. We are competing not just with other authors but also with smart and polished computer programs used by unknown actors eager to glean a profit from our years of work and who confront few obstacles. Before I can reach my desk with my morning coffee to labor on my next chapter, they can churn out a half-dozen books. “It’s enough to make me want to head for the hills and spend the rest of my days tending sheep or picking daisies,” says Cline.

According to Ernest Hemingway, “there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In our brave new world of AI, unless we very soon decide otherwise, such dogged effort won’t be necessary. All you will need is a dash of deceit and avarice, mingled with data, algorithms, and computing power, to fill that blank page.

The post Who Is Blake Whiting? appeared first on The American Scholar.