Editor's Journal: A special tour of our Winter 2024 issue

Hello again from Washington, D.C.:

I am delighted to bring you the second LinkedIn newsletter of The American Scholar, the venerable but lively magazine of public affairs, literature, history, science, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Our Winter 2024 issue is now out, and I wanted to call your attention to three articles in particular.

Our cover story, “In the Forest of the Colobus,” is a heartfelt reminiscence by anthropologist Dawn Starin, who spent years studying an endangered species of monkey in a Gambian nature preserve. Working amid crocodiles and venomous snakes and ever aware of the harsh violence of the natural world, Starin observed troops of western red colobus monkeys as they played, fought, ate, drank, and mated. Captivated by the daily soap opera enacted by these monkeys, she found herself growing attached to her subjects. Then one day, she encountered the lifeless corpse of her favorite, and her subsequent epiphany was so profound, it affected her very understanding of primates and evolution.

One of the most poignant essays I’ve read in recent years is Hugh Martin’s “Shooting a Dog,” about his time serving as an Army soldier in Iraq. Now an English professor at the Air Force Academy, Martin draws from many literary sources, principally George Orwell’s famous essay about shooting an elephant in Burma, in exploring his own conflicted experience during deployment. In so doing, he tries to understand our enduring fascination with stories of dogs in wartime.

I was out having dinner, our Winter issue about to be printed, when the news of Henry Kissinger’s death flashed across my phone. It just so happens that this issue contains Thomas A. Bass’s compelling account of Kissinger’s first journeys to Vietnam. In the mid-1960s, before he became Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, Kissinger made two unofficial fact-finding trips to Southeast Asia. He kept detailed diaries—now stored at Yale, where access is granted by permission only—documenting everything he saw and heard on the ground. Read Bass’s “Notes From the Front” and you’ll encounter Kissinger’s earliest impressions of a war he would later figure in so prominently.

This issue also features essays by Emily Bernard, Witold Rybczynski, and Thomas Swick; fiction by Nell Pierce and David Galef; and poetry by Edgar Garcia. Plus: our usual coverage of several of the season’s new books.

I’ll have more to share in the next edition of this newsletter. In the meantime, if you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to subscribe to The American Scholar, which you can do here.?

I want to wish all of you the best for a healthy and happy holiday season as well as for the new year to come.

Sudip Bose

Editor

The American Scholar