Welcome to The Daily Scholar for June 11, 2026.
In today's issue:
The forgotten naturalist Humboldt called his teacher
Benjamin Saltzman on why turning away from suffering can be a form of attention
A fresh review revisits who controls the American literary archive
Dave Eggers asks who gets to call themselves an artist
Matthew Parker's library, and a rule that would forfeit the whole collection over a few missing books
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Top Stories
- A fresh review revisits who controls the American literary archive. Thomas Sanfilip reviews Amy Hildreth Chen's Placing Papers in Literary Yard. The study shows that a few wealthy universities dominate the market by acquiring authors with "cultural capital." Most writers are left out entirely.
- Dave Eggers on Contrapposto and who gets to call themselves an artist. The novel follows two artists, Cricket and Olympia, on opposite sides of the art market. An NPR interview with Eggers explores what the book asks about the nature of art and the legitimacy of artistic identity.
- Alan Wald surveys new books on the Black radical literary imagination. The essay in Against the Current covers recent studies of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, including Nicholas Boggs's Baldwin: A Love Story. Its through-line is that life experience becomes art.
- Jesse Relkin reviews Naomi Kanakia's defense of the canon. Writing in the Metropolitan Review, Relkin covers Kanakia's What's So Great About the Great Books? Kanakia, who runs the Substack Woman of Letters, argues for the canon on aesthetic and moral grounds and addresses left-leaning skeptics directly.
- Gaius Konstantine on independent book reviewing. He is leaving the review site Reader's Favorite for stricter independent work: one or two reviews a month. He judges only the book as it stands.
- David Sedaris on how travel feeds his essay writing. A Sharp Magazine interview on his new collection The Land and Its People. He keeps a daily diary and turns observed moments into essays.
Untitled (Still Life with Lobster) by Jan Matulka (1930)
The Naturalist Humboldt Called His Teacher
Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature (2015) positioned Alexander von Humboldt as the founder of ecological thinking, the man who first understood nature as one interconnected living system. Her new biography, The Traveler, argues that Humboldt learned that idea from someone else. George Forster (1754–1794) sailed on Cook's second voyage as a teenage assistant naturalist and wrote A Voyage Round the World. He taught Humboldt to see nature as one connected whole. Humboldt later called it "a magic net of countless threads," where every element connects to every other. Humboldt at 88 still told people what he owed "to my teacher and friend George Forster." John Kaag's review in the Boston Globe frames the book as a necessary corrective: the man Wulf's earlier work celebrated as the originator was himself a disciple.
Forster's life outside the voyage was equally consequential. He challenged Kant's armchair claims about racial hierarchy, arguing directly against a philosopher who had never left his birthplace. He joined the Jacobin Club, led the short-lived Mainz Republic, and went to Paris as a diplomat. He died there in 1794 at 39, in poverty and political estrangement.
Sources: Boston Globe, Penguin Random House
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Odds and Ends
- The educated slaves and freedmen behind Roman literature. Princeton classicist Harriet Flower discusses the learned slaves and freedmen who did much of the actual intellectual work of Roman literary culture. The conversation asks how much of what we call "Roman literature" was produced by people with no legal freedom at all.
- Matthew Parker's library and the rule that could lose it all. Christian Donlan writes in the NYRB about the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Archbishop Parker imposed a rule: if too many books went missing in the annual audit, the entire collection would pass to another college. He built it to hold knowledge together during the Reformation.
- Edward Wilson-Lee's life of Pico della Mirandola comes to North America. The Grammar of Angels, Wilson-Lee's biography of the Renaissance prodigy who pursued a single philosophy of everything, is being published in the US by Pegasus Books.
- Clemens Apprich on what machine learning's errors actually reveal. The media theorist argues in Errant Intelligence that machine learning should be read through its mistakes. Deviation and errant behavior are the means by which these systems generate new knowledge. They are features, not failures.
Turning Away as a Form of Attention
White Crucifixion (1938) by Marc Chagall
Benjamin Saltzman, a literary scholar at the University of Chicago, has published Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (University of Chicago Press). The book traces gestures of aversion across art and literature from antiquity to the present. These gestures include covering the eyes and lowering the head. Saltzman's central argument is that turning away is not necessarily indifference. Blocking the senses turns attention inward. In art and literature, the figures who cover their eyes are usually the most deeply engaged with suffering. In Chagall's Crucifixion paintings, for instance, figures cover their eyes with the right hand, the hand used in Jewish practice to recite the Shema. That word means "to listen." The gesture clears the senses so the person can pay attention more fully.
Saltzman rejects the contemporary slogan "Don't look away." He argues that insisting on unflinching attention may rather produce moral paralysis and apathy.
Sources: University of Chicago News
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