The American Scholar

In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, my parents moved to Vietnam. My father was in the CIA and had been posted to Saigon as part of the U.S. mission to drive out the North Vietnamese forces threatening to overtake the South Vietnamese government. He and two other CIA officials were to create and oversee a “black ops” radio station designed to spread propaganda that wou...

America may have been the home of that great innovator Henry Ford, but the inventor of the gas-powered automobile was Carl Benz, a German, and most early car technology originated in Europe. Cupholders aside, two innovations that are distinctly American stand out: the station wagon and the pickup truck. In the 1950s, suburban American families fell in love with the station wa...

Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind by Thomas Meyer (tr. Shelley Frisch); Penguin Press, 560 pp., $35 

Last year at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV spoke to a gathering of journalists from across the globe. He reflected on a “crisis of communication” brought about by the blurring between information, disinformation, and...

Víctor Manuel, my student repeated, yes, she liked his music. But not his politics, she added with a laugh. A few days earlier, she had mentioned some new scandal involving former president Zapatero and the millions of euros that politicians on the left were supposed to have taken.

“He was a socialist?” I’d asked.

“They’re the worst!”

She was packing up h...

Amanda Holmes reads Henry Sloss’s “Homecoming.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.

This episode was produced by Stephanie...