R.I.P. American Scholar

Erich Eichman laments the decision of new editor Robert Wilson to become relevant, as they say.

As for me, I haven't touched an issue of that august journal since Joseph Epstein left in 1997. As Eichman points out, it was the golden age:

It was Aristides [Epstein] who set the tone. He took up all sorts of subjects in the manner of Addison or Hazlitt, using anecdote, insight and non-Bartlett quotation to make a point about the way we live now or the way we've always lived. The voice was urbane but not pretentious, amused but not cynical. Aristides had read Henry James, of course, but also S.J. Perelman. As for politics, he saw it mostly as trumpery, worth addressing only when it threatened to do harm to something important--like Jane Austen. The rest of the magazine took its cue from this cultivated man ...