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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

The man who invented psychopathy

August 28, 2015 by Terry Teachout

be744e8b8a56406ff77eb5050813c318In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I talk about a new government program designed to support works of serious scholarship that are aimed at a popular audience—and show how such scholarship, when done well, can change a culture. Here’s an example.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities recently announced a $1.7 million block of grants in its new “Public Scholar” program, whose purpose is to support the publication of “nonfiction books that will bring important humanities scholarship into book clubs and onto best-seller lists.”

Stop laughing! The NEH might—just might—be onto something.

According to the news release, the Public Scholar Program will support “books that use deep research to open up important or appealing subjects for wider audiences by presenting significant humanities topics in a way that is accessible to general readers.” In theory, that’s a great idea. As everyone knows who’s dipped so much as a toe into the murky stream of academic prose, much of what gets written by the professoriate these days is clotted with quasi-scientific jargon that renders it unintelligible….

Whether the initial recipients of the NEH’s bounty (most of whom received grants of about $50,000 apiece) will write anything that ordinary people would care to read is, of course, another matter altogether. I confess to wondering whether such project titles as “Bartolomeo Vanzetti and the Culture of Early 20th-Century Anarchism” and “Everybody Comes to Rick’s: How ‘Casablanca’ Taught Us to Love Movies” are likely to result in books that will be the better for being written in English instead of High Educanto. Still, we don’t need the NEH to tell us that genuinely humane scholars who choose to write in a manner comprehensible to the general public—and who have something worthwhile to say—can leave a permanent mark on society.

Consider Hervey M. Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality.” You’ve probably never heard of Dr. Cleckley, a professor at the Medical College of Georgia who died in 1984, or “The Mask of Sanity,” which was published in 1941 and is now largely forgotten save by historians of psychiatry. But if you’ve turned on your TV at any time in the last decade, you’ve felt his invisible pull, for he is the man who introduced the concept of what we now call “psychopathy” into general discourse—and who did so by writing a scholarly treatise that was as readable as a popular novel….

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Read the whole thing here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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