Interviews

Will Leitch

Clayton Trutor

In the third edition of our monthly interview series, American Polymath editor Clayton Trutor chats with polymath Will Leitch. Straight outta Mattoon, Illinois, Leitch is the founding editor of Deadspin, the web’s premier sports blog. He is the author of three books: God Save the Fan (2008), an iconoclastic collection of sports essays; Life as a Loser (2005), a memoir inspired by his internet column of the same name; and Catch (2005), a novel. Currently, Leitch serves as a contributing editor at New York magazine. His enthusiasms include University of Illinois basketball, the St. Louis baseball and Arizona football Cardinals, the history of film, and Guns n Roses.
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Start Again: An American Volunteer in an Afghan Orphanage

Ian Pounds

The following are two excerpts from the journal of an American, Ian Pounds, who this year volunteered to teach children in an Afghan orphanage. He resided in the orphanage for five months, through the mounting tension surrounding the Presidential election, in a section of the city off limits to any westerner working in the city.
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Culture

Selling the Apocalypse: The Rise of Premillennialism from Fringe Belief to Growth Industry

Mark Powell

Over a decade ago, Ron Beers, the publisher of Tyndale House Publishers, a then mid-sized Christian press located in Carol Stream, Illinois, received a proposal for a novel titled Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. The novel was to be coauthored by Dr. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, two writers well known in the Christian book community. But for Beers—thinking (rightly) perhaps he had found a modern incarnation of Hal Lindsay’s apocalyptic The Late Great Planet Earth—the title was reason enough to snap up the proposal. His prescience was astounding. In 1995, Left Behind was released and promptly sky-rocketed to the top of the New York Times’ best-seller list. In 2005, the twelfth, and purportedly last (though prequels are in the works), of the Left Behind series was released. That Glorious Appearing pre-sold its entire 1.9 million print-run three weeks before release seemed somehow fitting: over ten years at least 70 million books had been sold; Tyndale had become a major publishing house, with sales of its flagship series rivaled only by the Harry Potter series; and Bible prophecy had (again) become mainstream suburban entertainment.
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Your Favorites

What’s Your Favorite Geographical Setting for American Fiction?

American Polymath’s panel of experts spent the first part of autumn 2009 dusting off their favorite paperbacks and figuring out where in the hell all the stories they like took place.
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Ideas

The Age of Awkwardness (or The Case for Guilt)

Clayton Trutor

I remember it well. The moment when people stopped being polite and started getting real, back in the summer of 1992 on MTV’s first iteration of The Real World. I remember watching Kevin, the New York cast’s stock erudite angry black male, go toe-to-toe with Julie, Season One’s wide-eyed Southern jailbait. They were all up in one another’s grill, talking candidly about race in America outside of their pre-Giuliani Manhattan brownstone. I remember thinking that this was some deep and profound adult stuff they were talking about, but I was only eleven at the time. A few years later, an MTV retrospective on the early seasons of the Real World commemorated this confrontation, using it as an example of what was so great about the show. Kevin and Julie had dropped their guards, quit it with the manners and niceties, and said what they really thought about one another, how they each symbolized something dangerous to the other person. It was an important moment in television history, said Kurt Loder or Tabitha Soren or Alison Stewart or Dan Cortese. If more Americans were honest about their feelings, like Kevin and Julie, America would be a better place to live.
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Fiction

Room Service

Mike Schindel

Usually, Joel had to work the graveyard shift. He liked working nights because there were never too many calls to the kitchen and no one really hassled room service until six, when people wanted breakfast before their flights. Some nights, he could go into the pantry and take a bottle of wine. The chef only checked the stockroom when he took inventory at the end of the month. Joel would sit on old milk crates, reading Hemingway and sipping wine until his shift was up at seven. This Wednesday night, Joel was finishing The Sun Also Rises when he got his first call. Whenever there was a room service call, it never went directly to the kitchen. First it went to the front desk, who transferred it to the “At Your Service” representatives, who then took the order and relayed it to the people in the basement kitchen.
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Politics

The Scandinavian Candidate

Andrew Beck

In 1959, Richard Condon delivered The Manchurian Candidate to an American public receptive to, and frightened of, the possibility that foreign powers were seeking to usurp their political power. This “Once Unbelievable, Now Unthinkable” tale, as a poster for the 1962 movie adaptation calls it, was unbelievable rather more for its psychology than its politics. Indeed, what else would communist China and the Soviets be doing other than undermining our sacred political institutions? This is what everyone believed and thought. What was unthinkable was that anyone might be the dreaded “sleeper agent” - a law abiding American one moment, a government overthrowing “pinko” the next.
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Politics

The Inclusive Nobel

Jocelyn Rousey

In July 2008, Senator Barack Obama spoke in Berlin about the necessity of tearing down ideological walls and fostering trust and cooperation in the international community. His message of unity, respect, and multilateralism, though simple, resonated in the crowded streets of a city whose recent history, after all, was marked by the rise and fall of a very real and physical wall. In a telling moment, the gathered crowds began to chant the American presidential candidate’s campaign slogan and the cries of “Yes we can!” echoed in the Berlin evening.
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Culture

Brendan Harris

Johnny Trutor

Editor’s Note: This essay was submitted last Friday evening, shortly after the Minnesota Twins’ heartbreaking extra-innings defeat by the New York Yankees in Game Two of their American League Divisional Series matchup. The defeat left the Twins down 2-0 in a best of five series.

Tonight, Brendan Harris gave the Minnesota fans, and fans of baseball across this country the game of his life, and nobody has said a damn thing about it. Harris is a journeyman role-player with stints in Chicago, Montréal, Washington, Cincinnati and Tampa Bay, who before he got to the Twins had struggled to find a role in an era of blind-eyed drug testing, and revenue-greedy managers. Harris had been given up on by everyone that had ever signed him, and he finally clicked with the "small ball" style of Gardenhire's Twins. Harris is not the fastest, strongest, or most dexterous guy on the field, especially when compared with the fantasy league team opposite him tonight.
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Hate Mail

American Polymath has received a fair amount of feedback over the past few months. Mostly far too kind. Some of it has been less than kind and far more amusing. Enjoy.
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Culture

Les Nessman Deserves a Statue

Clayton Trutor

I once saw a group of Badgers dry humping Mary Tyler Moore in broad daylight in Downtown Minneapolis. It was a football Saturday in the Twin Cities and some visiting Wisconsin fans were taking liberties, and pictures, with the life-sized, though frighteningly petite statue of the WJM-TV anchor on Nicolet Mall. While Mary tried throwing her hat into the wind, half of Madison tried unmentionable things on the unmarried thirty-something. It looked something like the group hug on the last episode of the series.
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