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February 17, 2019
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Aaron Sachs

Aaron Sachs teaches at Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition, which combines historical scholarship with memoir.

The Hidden Music of Words

Academics shouldn’t scoff at literary prose—they have much to learn from it

by Aaron Sachs | Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs

A calming influence

by Aaron Sachs | Monday, July 20, 2015

The Bookroom

by Aaron Sachs | Monday, February 23, 2015

Newsletter

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

School Survival

by Anne P. Beatty

As L.A. teachers prepare to go on strike, we’re revisiting an essay by Anne P. Beatty about her time teaching high school in South Central Los Angeles, where her homeroom class often paused for a moment of silence to mourn students who had died in drive-by shootings. Her students knew that this was not the case in wealthier school districts. “They knew that somewhere there were schools with computers that worked, just as they knew that somewhere it was safe to walk through the streets at night,” Beatty writes. “They knew it wasn’t normal for 16-year-olds to die.” But what she found shocking, her students had to learn to endure. “Apathy was involved in giving in to the violence, and there was despair over the prospect of a better future.”