Smarty Pants

Hue and Cry

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:01:00 GMT

Defining words is hard, no matter what they are, but the difficulty only doubles when the word in question is a purely visual referent like color. How do you define blue? Or red, or green, or—God forbid—pink? Well, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has this to say about teal duck, sense two, which transcends its origin as waterfowl: “a dark greenish blue that is bluer and duller than average teal, averaging teal blue, drake, or duckling.” Elegant. Fun, even, for a dictionary, whose defining characteristic is kind of to be dull as dust—which raises the question of how and why some of these colorful definitions came to be. That’s the subject of lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink, which takes her from the pink and buff archives of Merriam-Webster’s offices to the warring color standards of the early 20th century, from the glossy pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalog to the trenches of World War I.

Go beyond the episode:

Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink
Read Scholar executive editor Bruce Falconer’s essay, “What Is the Perfect Color Worth?” on the inscrutable world of color forecasting

Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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Shotgun Ornithology

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:01:00 GMT

Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered habitats. Birders, not to mention scientists, are sounding the alarm. But true as these words are today, they also describe the 19th century, and the valiant—and occasionally violent—efforts to protect birds from the utter devastation of human activity. This is the subject of James H. McCommons's new book, The Feather Wars. Birds were threatened by aggressive logging, farming, hunting, sport, and the desire to put a feather in a woman's cap. But they were also imperiled by the very people who claimed to love them—ornithologists, and their kindred oologists, whose hobby consisted of killing thousands upon thousands of birds and collecting their eggs to fluff out their collections. McCommons takes us behind the battle lines of the first American effort to save the birds, in the hopes that some lessons might apply to our current circumstances.

Go beyond the episode:

James H. McCommons’s The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds
Get to know the birds in your back yard with eBird from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Learn how to garden for wildlife
Read this viral essay about keeping your cat indoors: “The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It” (1916)

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Eulogy for a Yenta

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:01:00 GMT

In a cramped rent-controlled apartment on the lousy end of the Upper East Side, a dying woman in a diaper writes the story of her life. She is Barbara Rosenberg, high on OxyContin and determined to explain herself, if not exactly apologize, to the two people she loved most: her estranged trans son and her best friend, Sugar Becker, whose betrayals she has yet to forgive. This delirious monologue is the heart of Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn, which gives voice to Barbara’s deepest disappointments about her friends, her family, her in-laws, and maybe, if she’s being honest, her own silver-screen aspirations. But Barbara’s most unhinged thoughts—about serving cold cuts at a funeral or the lesbian perils of a corduroy jacket; the schmucks of 1960s Flatbush or bad 1980s nose jobs; Karl Marx or yenta science—reach a crescendo with the unexpected reappearance of her long-lost loves.

Mentioned in this episode:

Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn
Gillian Rose’s Mourning Becomes the Law
Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice
Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms
Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, translated by Chris Andrews
Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (listen to our 2018 interview here)
Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt
Grace Byron’s Herculine
Zefyr Lisowksi’s Uncanny Valley Girls
Torrey Peters’s Stag Dance and Detransition, Baby
And, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (best read with an introduction)

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The Carnifex of Čachtice

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:01:00 GMT

Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have been the most prolific serial killer of all time, responsible for butchering as many as 650 virgins and bathing in their blood. Her Hungarian water castles are the sites of gruesome ghost tours, a metal band named itself for her, and for years she was in the Guinness Book of World Records. The number of women she’s said to have killed is four times the population of an average 17th-century village, but when it comes to Bathory’s story, even the Guinness Book concedes that “it is impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Shelley Puhak disagrees: In her new book,The Blood Countess, she contends that Bathory was instead the victim of possibly the greatest misinformation campaign in history, brought against a powerful, wealthy woman at a tumultuous time. Lutherans and Calvinists were at one another's throats at the height of the Protestant Reformation, the Ottoman Empire lurked just across the border, and medicine in upheaval, with both new and old practices bringing accusations of heresy and witchcraft. It was a dark time to be a woman—especially one with 17 castles to her name, and no husband to defend her.

Go beyond the episode:

Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Prehistory

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 05:01:00 GMT

Since 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which tells users whether their prehistoric genes predispose them to certain behaviors, like hoarding or not getting hangry. In the 1880s, Neanderthals were not being celebrated at all—they were depicted as little more than troglodytes with tools—and the 1980s weren’t much better: rough hair, swarthy skin, dull eyes, jutting foreheads … an evolutionary dead end. Today, armed with recently decoded Neanderthal DNA, researchers are reconstructing these archaic people as lighter-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. For historian Stefanos Geroulanos, however, this new account raises difficult questions. “Are Neanderthals now smart because they are no longer depicted as dark-skinned? Or, conversely, have they become blond and white because they are now believed to have been smart, able, quintessentially human?” Questions like these form the heart of his book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, which has just won Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. Geroulanos contends that our claims about the deep past—whether made in 1726 or 2026—tell us more about the moment we propose them than anything else.

Go beyond the episode:

Stefanous Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
Listen to Geroulanos in conversation at the Phi Beta Kappa 2025 Book Awards
Reconstructed ancient languages like Proto-Indo-European have been similarly weaponized for political ends, as Laura Spinney describes on an earlier episode
And our understanding of the more recent past—like Viking history, similarly prone—has been challenged by recent archaeological discoveries too, as Eleanor Barraclough explains in Embers of the Hands

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The Midwife of Black Nationalism

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 05:01:00 GMT

Audley Moore mentored Malcolm X, popularized reparations for African Americans in a 1963 essay, and advanced the cause of Black women in both the Black nationalist and civil rights movements. She rubbed elbows with the Mandelas, Jessie Jackson, and Rosa Parks. Once a household name in the mid-20th century, she has fallen out of the history books, despite a career of organizing and activism that spanned a century, her artifacts lost and her archives scattered. But more than 100 years after Moore's birth and 28 years after her death, Ashley D. Farmer has written the first biography of Moore, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore. Farmer brings together a decade of research spanning oral history, archival work from Louisiana to New York City, and, of course, reams of FBI documents to paint the fullest picture of this icon's life to date.

Go beyond the episode:

Ashley D. Farmer’s Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
Speaking of neglected Black figures: read Harriet A. Washington’s Winter 2026 cover story on Rudolph Fisher, Harlem Renaissance man

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Ground Truths

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 05:01:00 GMT

In ancient Greece, the view from on high was known as catascopos, or “the looker-down.” It's a privileged perspective, and in the modern world, one increasingly taken by machines: drones, satellites, spy cameras, airplanes, sentient doorbells. In his new book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View, Edward McPherson surveys the cultural history of top-down and far-ranging perspectives from aviation and warfare to quarantine and protest. “We continue to make decisions based on the big picture,” he writes. “Politicians and planners confront the challenges of today with lofty intelligence, always pointing to the forest, not the trees.” Often that view can be obscuring, even as its accuracy is hailed. Consider the dead civilians mistaken for combatants in drone warfare the world over, or the wrong face recognized on CCTV. And in some cases, the forest isn't even there, as in John B. Bachelder's birds-eye map of Gettysburg and its imaginary copse of trees. Is distance the straightest path to truth? What dangers lie in prioritizing the big picture? McPherson joins Smarty Pants to muddle through the trees.

Go beyond the episode:

Edward McPherson's Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Read “Lost and Found,” his essay about the house in Gettysburg built by his great-great-grandfather, also named Edward McPherson

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The Dangerous Dead

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 07:01:00 GMT

Stories of the undead tormenting the living supposedly entered the English-speaking world in 1732, with a report from the Hapsburg military of events in Serbia—events that would go on to inspire the most famous vampire of all, Dracula. But the count from Transylvania was neither the first undead man in England (British corpses went walking in 680, and again in 1090) nor the most emblematic of the folk tales that preceded him (that would be Carmilla, who embodies a type seen from China to the Eastern Roman Empire). In Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair uses examples from the far-flung ancient world—a “vampire belt” stretching from Scandinavia and the North Sea through central and eastern Europe, western Russia, the Near East, India, and China to Indonesia—to make the case that “corpse-killing is mainstream and not marginal, therapeutic and not pathological.” The undead have seemingly always been with us, as has our need to kill them to exorcise our own anxieties. “Killing the dead is better than killing the living,” Blair writes. “Like other extreme rituals, it is depressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.”

Go beyond the episode:

John Blair’s Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World
Listen to our interview about the modern vampire with Nick Groom, the Prof of Goth, and our conversation with Ronald Hutton about witch persecutions through the ages
You know we love horror—visit our episode page for a list of spookiest episodes

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Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) and 8bit Betty (“Spooky Loop”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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For the Love of Foraging

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 04:01:00 GMT

Foraging has been part of the human story forever, and its post-pandemic resurgence is a return to ways of living with the natural world that have only recently been forgotten. Gabrielle Cerberville, or the Chaotic Forager, as she’s known online, is one of the voices championing the practice on social media. Her videos distill the beauty of living with the seasons into bite-size videos, many of them including recipes, from pine-syrup mugolio to simple dry-sauteed mushrooms. Her new book, Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, combines personal essays with a kind of narrative field guide, along with—of course—dozens of wildly creative recipes, making for the book version of walking through the woods with a friend.

Go beyond the episode:

Gabrielle Cerberville’s Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life
Find foraging workshops and videos on her website, TikTok, and Instagram
Read Michael Autrey’s account of foraging for mushrooms, or Matthew Desmond’s reporting on the wild ginseng trade in Appalachia
Visit our episode page for a list of recommended field guides and cookbooks

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From Sofia to Chicago

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 04:01:00 GMT

Boxy Moskvitch and Lada cars, pastel-green concrete tiles, derelict playgrounds, intermittent hot water: these were the markers of Izidora Angel’s childhood in 1980s Sofia. “Banana-Yellow Trabants,” her essay for our Autumn 2025 issue, takes its name from the Duroplast car that her grandfather, and then her father, Solomon, drove in the 1980s. But bananas show up elsewhere, too: in the myths that young girls would tell each other about the diets of Bulgaria’s famed rhythmic gymnastics team and once, miraculously, on her family’s holiday table. The Angel family's antics suffuse the essay with warmth and humor, but churning beneath the surface is Solomon’s ambition. “He would be the boss, the creative vision and force behind all his future endeavors,” Angel writes, “opening the hottest nightclub in the capital, running five restaurants, renovating city landmarks, building the first manufacturing plant in the country after communism, developing plans to build a whole city.” That city was never built, and Angel lives in Chicago today, sent here alone on a plane more than 20 years ago. She joins us to talk about how her life has been an act of translation.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Izidora Angel’s “Banana-Yellow Trabants” in our Autumn 2025 issue, and an essay on translation and her father, “The Alphabet of Supposition”
For more on Angel’s translation, read this interview from Reading in Translation about her forthcoming translation of She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
In 2023, the Bulgarian novel Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize—here are more Bulgarian books in translation

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Why the Bronx Burned

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 04:01:00 GMT

From 1968 through the early 1980s, thousands of fires raged through the Bronx. The precise number is unknown and it’s uncertain who was responsible for setting them. But at the time, most fingers pointed to the working-class Black and Puerto Rican tenants who lived in the borough. The newspapers said as much, as did the Blaxploitation movies of the late 1970s. Politicians, too: in the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down.” The Bronxites who lived that history, however, have long identified a different culprit, and over the past decade, historians have arrived at a new explanation for the arsons. Bench Ansfield’s new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, is unequivocal: “The hand that torched the Bronx and scores of other cities was that of a landlord impelled by the market and guided by the state.” The story that unfolds is one of fire and a new FIRE economy, insurance and disinvestment, profit and privatization.

Go beyond the episode:

Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
Watch Decade of Fire, Vivian Vázquez Irizarry’s 2018 documentary, and Born in Flames (1993) from which Ansfield’s book takes its title
For a film on the pathologization of public housing, there’s no better place to start than Candyman (1992)
Across the Hudson, Hoboken was burning, too

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What Lies Beneath the Levee Camp Holler

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 15:34:48 GMT

“Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man,” Eric McHenry writes in our Summer issue. Mattison had found the tale in the writings of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose source identified a powerful Mississippi levee boss as the murderer of an SPCA officer. Not finding any existing ballads about the crime, Mattison wrote the eerily beautiful track “Charlie Idaho,” which caught the attention of McHenry, who specializes in poring over old newspapers for musical breadcrumbs about the blues. He quickly discovered that Mattison wasn’t the first person to put the story to song—and “Charlie Idaho” masked the name of the Mercy Man’s true killer.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Eric McHenry’s investigation, “Who Killed the Mercy Man?”
Listen to Mike Mattison’s ballad “Charlie Idaho”

Sampled in the episode:

Sampson Pittman’s “I’ve Been Down in the Circle Before”
Ed Lewis’s “Levee Camp Holler” and his commentary, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959 (Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity, from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)
Alger “Texas” Alexander’s “Levee Camp Moan Blues”

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The Art of Doing Politics

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:51:45 GMT

For the past few decades, American democracy has crystallized around the central importance of voting: making an informed decision about a candidate or a referendum, and expressing it at the ballot box. The marketplace of ideas—enshrined in our constitutional right to free speech—will ensure that the best arguments, and thus the best candidates, win the election. If that idea sounds a little tired, you’ve probably been paying attention. In her new book, Don’t Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano draws on everything from Aristotle to cutting-edge neuroscience to illuminate the surprising truth underlying our political behavior. Spoiler: we are far less rational than the marketplaces of ideas would suggest, whether we’re voting or doing something else. But, as Stein Lubrano contends, that’s not entirely a bad thing—and understanding the psychology behind our beliefs might just lead to better actions.

Go beyond the episode:

Sarah Stein Lubrano’s Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
Follow her on Instagram or Substack, where she writes articles like “In the Apocalypse, the Person Who Saves You is Your Neighbor”
Read “The Perils of Social Atrophy”

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The Linguistics of Brain Rot

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 04:01:00 GMT

Language is always changing, but these days it seems to be moving at warp speed. Whether it's the shift from 😂 to 💀 or the rise of “brain rot,” internet slang is taking over, and if you want to keep up with what's cool (another slang word, from another century), you need to be online. But if you aren’t keen on spending hours scrolling through TikTok, etymology nerd Adam Aleksic is more than happy to explain how social media is making new words go viral. In his new book, Algospeak, Aleksic expands on the ways the algorithm is shifting speech from the perspective of both a linguist and an insider: he scrutinizes influencer accents, memes, in-group slang, censorship evasion, subtweeting, and attention-grabbing morphology. And though these newfangled words and phrases may astonish you, what's most surprising is how fundamentally old the story of language change really is.

Go beyond the episode:

Adam Aleksic's Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
Follow @EtymologyNerd on Instagram or TikTok
Listen to our interviews with Gretchen McCulloch on how the internet changed language and Don Kulick on how a language dies
For two different takes on how the kids these days are handling social media, watch Adolescence (fiction) and/or Social Studies (documentary)

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Michael Douglas Explains It All

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 04:01:00 GMT

American men are having a hard time right now. They're behind in school, staying single, earning less, drinking more, and dying younger. They’re also taking out their anger on women online, in the home, and in mass shootings, and taking dubious advice from social media influencers pushing ice baths and raw meat diets. They'd be better off looking to the films of Michael Douglas, argues Jessa Crispin in her new book, What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Douglas’s characters were a mirror for our times, reflecting seismic economic and cultural shifts: “He was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine.” Not that these characters offer a how-to guide today (just as they didn’t a few decades ago). Rather, as Crispin writes, Douglas “embodied the torments and confusions of the modern man, letting the invisible trouble become discernible.” While feminists have spent the past half-century manifesting alternatives, however imperfect or in progress, to previous norms of femininity, men like Douglas have been stuck trying to play the same role as the stage they’d stood on changed. Crispin dares to ask: in a post-Michael Douglas world, of what will the men dream?

Go beyond the episode:

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Once in a Lifetime

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 04:01:00 GMT

On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of The Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music’s relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.

Go beyond the episode:

Jonathan Gould’s Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
Read about the origin of Stop Making Sense—and then watch it, of course
Check out the new “Psycho Killer” music video starring Saoirse Ronan, made in honor of the 40th anniversary of the first Talking Heads performance

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Family Values

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:47:37 GMT

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father's Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson's administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked. “As we know it,” Scholar contributor Augustine Sedgewick writes in his new book, “Father's Day is an unintended consequence of the fractious American politics of race, gender, and class.” Sedgewick's book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, is the story of how such politics ensnarled parental care, and of the men who expanded the domain of fathers across generations of crisis and change, from Aristotle and Henry VIII to Freud and Bob Dylan.

Go beyond the episode:

Augustine Sedgewick’s Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
The far right’s signature style is less about dad pants and more about fatherhood: read Sedgewick’s essay “Ku Klux Khaki”
“Thoreau’s Pencils,” Sedgwick explores the abolitionist’s relationship with his family—and his family business’s ties to slavery
For more on the Moynihan Report and political interventions on parenting, read Melinda Cooper’s Family Values

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Lingua Obscura

Fri, 23 May 2025 04:01:00 GMT

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin. But by 1786, the British judge and philologist Sir William “Oriental” Jones was applauded when he famously asserted that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek had “sprung from some common source.” Some 450 years later, linguists and archaeologists have filled in many of the gaps in our knowledge of this common source, called Proto-Indo-European, and sketched out its family tree, the branches of which extend from Scotland to China. But over the past two decades, the study of paleogenetics has radically advanced our understanding of this language—and the people who spoke it some 5,000 years ago. In her new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, science journalist Laura Spinney tells their story, and that of their linguistic—and in some cases, genetic—offspring, which constitute the world’s largest language family.

Go beyond the episode:

Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
One enduring Indo-European mystery? How Celtic got to Ireland
Read the two landmark 2015 studies in Nature identifying the Yamnaya’s genetic contributions to Europe
Previously on Smarty Pants: how a language dies, how to live like a Neolithic

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The Shipping News

Fri, 09 May 2025 04:01:00 GMT

In 1978, a Swedish shipbuilder began construction on two new barges, never anticipating that the journey of these vessels would come to exemplify enormous changes in international law and the global economy. In his new book, Empty Vessel, Harvard historian Ian Kumekawa follows the ships’ journey from the docks of Stockholm to offshore oil rigs in Scotland, across the North Sea to West Germany, to deployment in the Falklands War. One of them becomes a floating prison not only in New York City, but also in Portland, England, before once again serving as housing for offshore oil workers, 40 years after its construction and eight names later. The history of the Vessel, as Kumekawa dubs it, mirrors the rise of offshore markets, labor exploitation, the caprices of international law, and the earth-shattering changes in the past 40 years of the global economy itself.

Go beyond the episode:

Ian Kumekawa’s Empty Vessel
Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction

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Coming Home

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 04:01:00 GMT

In his award-winning 2003 graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson depicted his teenage love and his fall from faith in rural Wisconsin. Now he returns to the story of his life with Ginseng Roots, which focuses on a minor detail that Blankets omitted: namely, 10 summers he spent as a boy weeding and harvesting American ginseng for a dollar an hour. Thompson maps the roots of the 300-year-old global ginseng trade from China and Korea to Marathon, Wisconsin, and profiles the other people tangled in the industry’s whiskers: Hmong harvesters who migrated from Laos, American workers and industrial farmers caught up in the vicissitudes of global agriculture, and wild ginseng hunters the world over.

Go beyond the episode:

Craig Thompson’s Ginseng Roots: A Memoir
Read Matthew Denton-Edmunson’s essay about wild ginseng hunters, “The Root Problem”
Also mentioned: Scout McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisiible Art, Ted J. Kaptchuk’s The Orb That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, Joe Sacco’s breakthrough works of graphic journalism
More about the United States’s “Secret War” in Laos

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Muscle Memory

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 04:01:00 GMT

We take our muscles for granted: every time we step or stand—or even fall asleep!—we are experiencing a complex system of muscles moving in concert. And yet our notion of strength is still bogged down in stereotypes and preconceptions, some of them holdovers from 2,000 years ago. In our Spring 2025 issue, Michael Joseph Gross wrote about how the ancient Greeks perceived strength—and muscles themselves—in an entirely different way than we do. This week, Gross joins us to talk about his new book, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives, which looks at weight training through historical, social, and medical lenses to show its transformative power over time. His guides are leading scholars in the intersecting fields of kinesiology, classics, gender studies, and medicine, whose work has been shifting the narrative about strength for more than half a century.

Go beyond the episode:

Michael Joseph Gross’s Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives
Read an excerpt, “Mr. Olympia,” from our Spring 2025 Issue
Explore the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin

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The Most Famous Unknown Artist

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 04:01:00 GMT

Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan, and easily the most maligned. She’s spoken of (falsely) as the woman who broke up the Beatles—not the woman who co-wrote “Imagine.” She’s known as a woman who can’t sing—not as a woman who used years of classical music training to subvert norms on more than a dozen experimental albums. Why don’t more people know about her mischievous One Woman Show at MOMA, a performance piece staged outside the museum, without its permission, that slyly railed against its exclusion of female and Asian artists? Or about the clever all-white chess set she once sent to Reagan and Gorbachev at the height of the Cold War in 1987, simply titled Play It By Trust? “Everybody knows her name,” her Beatle husband once said, “but no one knows what she does.” Now, thanks to David Sheff’s new biography, simply titled Yoko, no one has an excuse not to know anymore: about her art, her activism, her music, and her astonishing journey from war-torn Tokyo to the avant-garde art scenes of London and New York.

Go beyond the episode:

David Sheff’s Yoko: A Biography
The artist's official website
Watch Cut Piece in its 1965 or 1966 incarnations
Visitors to the Kunsthaus Zürich reactivated Bag Piece, originally performed in 1966, in 2022
Traveling to Berlin before August 31, 2025? See Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Gropius Bau
Read the original Playboy interviews that Sheff conducted with Yoko Ono and John Lennon in September 1980

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The Root Cause

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 04:01:00 GMT

The Irish Potato Famine, which began in 1845, looms large not only in the imagination of that country, but also here in the United States, where so many Irish migrants arrived in desperation. Phytophthora infestans caused blight across Europe—but only in Ireland did crop failures result in devastation so vast that the period is known in that country simply as the “Great Hunger.” Why did the blight strike Ireland, newly part of the United Kingdom, so much harder than it did elsewhere in Europe? In Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, historian Padraic X. Scanlan identifies the policies of the British Empire as the primary reason for the deaths of roughly a million people and the exodus of two million more. But Britain didn’t perpetuate a genocide, Scanlan argues—its choices reflected deep political beliefs in market forces that would reveal themselves to be anything but natural.

Go beyond the episode:

Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
For more on the famines that struck the rest of the British Empire, check out Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
CATU Ireland organizes around housing and community issues across the island
It’s true: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is all about the Irish housing market

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Something New in the West

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 05:01:00 GMT

Lists of canonical works of fiction should inspire skepticism—we all bring our own notions of quality to the books we read. But every so often, we encounter an acknowledged classic that so captures our imagination as to make us wonder why we didn’t come to it earlier. Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek, for example, recently read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, originally published in 1929, for the first time. And she’s glad she waited: Kurt Beals’s new translation faithfully mirrors the original German. Beals brings an immediacy to what has been called the greatest war novel of all time, refreshing the text for a new generation of readers who might have only seen the Netflix version of Paul Bäumer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War. Reworking a classic is challenging, but, as Beals writes in his introduction, the greater ordeal was “to spend months with these young soldiers, in the trenches and in their heads, to know them intimately enough to give them new voices in a new language, and then to watch them die.”

Go beyond the episode:

Kurt Beals’s new translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Watch the original 1930 American adaptation of the novel
War poets who wrote in the trenches: August Stramm, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke

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Family/History

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 05:01:00 GMT

Since the publication of King: A Biography in 1970, the historian David Levering Lewis has been chronicling the lives of Black Americans in award-winning volumes that tell the American story from an African-American perspective. Now, for the first time, Lewis turns his attention to his own family history in a new book,The Stained Glass Window, inspired by a moment of reflection in the Atlanta church where his family has prayed for generations—and where, in the archives, he began a search that led to the discovery of a previously unknown forbear. Lewis's lineage reveals the tortuous and tortured racial history of our nation, as he follows the historical trail to two prominent white slaveholding families in Georgia, and a family of free persons of color who themselves owned slaves in South Carolina. Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, one for each volume of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, David Levering Lewis joins us from New York City to tell his own family's story.

Go beyond the episode:

David Levering Lewis’s The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
Read his 2021 essay on why Black biography matters ( “A Prophet and a President”) and “The Autobiography of Biography”

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The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 05:01:00 GMT

Vikings and Valkyries have captivated our imaginations for centuries, with greater and lesser degrees of historical accuracy. But as so often happens, the very people reading Snorri Sturluson or the Sagas of Icelanders today are the ones who were left out of history to begin with—the ordinary people doing the quietly heroic work of farming, midwifing, blacksmithing, and any number of difficult daily tasks. In her new book, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, the historian Eleanor Barraclough puts ordinary people at the center of the story. The sagas may tell of “warriors scrubbing beer kegs and Valkyries pouring glasses of wine in the afterlife,” but the exploits of the everyday Viking were just as interesting. Their stories bring to life a world of “wood, wool, flax, bone, stone, leather and antler, hand-wrought and fashioned”—a world that remains endlessly captivating, from the runes women carved to fetch their lovers home from the pub to the scribblings of a wee child.

Go beyond the episode:

Eleanor Barraclough’s Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
Visit our episode page for primary source links and historical fiction we love

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Keepers of the Old Ways

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:01:00 GMT

Pasta thin as thread, a mirror believed to show your true self, a history passed down for 27 generations of the same family—these may sound like elements of fairy tale, but they exist in our very own modern world. In his new book, Custodians of Wonder, BBC reporter Eliot Stein tells the stories of the people keeping traditions like these alive, across 10 countries and five continents, in an effort to save the cultures that shaped them. Far from being a litany of all the rites we’ve lost over the years, Stein’s book is a paean to human ingenuity in the face of evolving technology and culture, and to the creative spirit that continues to fuel the places that we call home.

Go beyond the episode:

Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive
Watch videos from Stein’s travels on the BBC’s “Custom Made”: the keeper of the 750-year old secret of soy sauce, Taiwan’s last film poster painter, Germany’s matchmaking tree, and, of course, Sardinia’s su filindeu
Interested in learning a traditional craft? Check out our interview with Alexander Langlands about his book Craeft

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Kinship and Contradictions

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 05:01:00 GMT

Identity can be difficult enough to navigate without bureaucratic interference. For Native people, the question of identity is mired in more than a century of federal intrusion in the form of tribal rolls, blood quantum, and boarding schools—not to mention genocide. And yet, the number of people who identify as Native has increased by 85 percent in just 10 years—from 5.2 million in 2010 to 9.7 million in 2020 according to the U.S. Census. But tribal enrollment, hovering at about two million, has not grown at the same rate. This phenomenon is just one of the things that Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz addresses in her new book, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America. Her own story of enrollment in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina opens the door to many more stories that reveal how Native life still reverberates with the consequences of 19th-century federal policy.

Go beyond the episode:

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America
For more on citizenship in the Creek nation, listen to our interview with Caleb Gayle on the complicated history of Black enrollment

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Overconsumed

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 05:01:00 GMT

In his previous book, Junkyard Planet, journalist Adam Minter went around the world to see what happened to American recyclables such as cardboard, shredded cars, and Christmas lights around the world as they became new things. In Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, Minter looks at what happens to all the things that get resold and reused, objects that end up in Arizona thrift stores, Malaysian flea markets, Tokyo vintage shops, and Ghanaian used-electronics shops. Who’s buying the tons of goods that get downsized, decluttered, or discarded every year? Does the fact that we can just pass something off to a thrift shop justify our buying more things? What about the sheer scale of it all? Minter joins us in the studio to talk about how we filled the world with all this stuff, and what really needs to change for us to get out from under it—no matter where we live.

Go beyond the episode:

Adam Minter’s Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale
Visit our episode page for further reading about fast fashion, the dark side of Goodwill, and the moral hazards of recycling
Abandon your idols: Mari Kondo has begun selling you junk to replace the junk you just KonMari’d
Read more about why local textile industries are dying in Ghana and African countries more broadly
Learn more about the Right to Repair movement

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Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 05:01:00 GMT

It's the summer after graduation, and Munir and his friends G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid for an idyllic summer picking grapes in the French countryside—because, as Munir writes in the sixth edict of his “decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital”: “What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something to say about it. So try living a little first. Not just in books or in bars, but out there, in real life. Wait until you've been scarred by the world, until it has left its mark.” But the scars end up a little deeper than Munir anticipated. There's no grape harvest—thanks to climate change—and the four friends end up working alongside the “etcetera of Europe” at a series of nightmarish factory farms where they do everything from injecting monstrous chickens with mysterious vaccines to artificially inseminating genetically modified corn. At least, that's the premise of Munir Hachemi's 2018 novel, Living Things, published earlier this year in an English translation by Julia Sanches. But how much of this tale is really fiction? And what’s the point of fiction in an inhumane world anyway? Hachemi joins us in the studio to talk about storytelling, machismo, and going vegan.

Go beyond the episode:

Living Things by Munir Hachemi
Some of Hachemi’s inspirations include Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia, Tomás Downey, María Sonia Cristoff, Pablo Katchadjian, Emiliano Monge, and, of course, Borges

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American Horror Story

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 04:01:53 GMT

Americans can’t look away from horror stories, whether it’s slasher films on the big screen, true crime on the TV screen, or viral videos on the small screens of our phones. And in a lot of ways, as the historian Jeremy Dauber argues, American history is one horror story after another—from the terror the Puritans felt and wrought in the dark of New England, through the atrocities of Native American genocide and enslavement, down to modern fears of nuclear war. Dauber’s new book, American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, plumbs the depths of the nation’s past to draw unexpected parallels between contemporary terrors and older ones, whether Frankenstein’s connection to Black history or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s veiled xenophobia. Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, joins the podcast to talk about old standbys, forgotten gems, and new classics of the horror genre.

Go beyond the episode:

Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond
Read Charles W. Chestnutt’s story about a white master’s worst fear, “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” from the collection The Conjure Woman (1899)
Watch The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s only feature and arguably the most American horror film
Read Alice Sheldon’s story “The Screwfly Solution,” first published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon in 1977
You know we love horror—visit our website for a list of our spookiest episodes

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The Writing on the Wall

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 04:01:00 GMT

Henry David Thoreau is known for Walden Pond, his writings on solitude and nature, and his staunch, even strident, abolitionism. He is not known for his pencils. But it’s his pencils, writes the historian Augustine Sedgewick in our Autumn issue, that have been overlooked by scholars for so many years, along with one particularly damning detail that Sedgewick discovered for the first time: the cedar in those pencils, which the Thoreau family manufactured to great success, was logged by enslaved laborers. That a connection to slavery was “discovered” in the unlikeliest of places—on the desk of an iconic American abolitionist—speaks to how limiting this idea of discovery is. Connections to slavery in 19th-century America, after all, were everywhere and rarely hidden. Sedgewick's essay has already been making waves in Thoreauvian circles, and it has the real potential to change the narrative not only about Thoreau, but also about how we talk about racial justice and reparations in this country.

Go beyond the episode:

Augustine Sedgewick’s essay “Thoreau’s Pencils”
Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”

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This Woman’s Work

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 04:01:00 GMT

In 1748, Lord Chesterfield told his son not to expect much from women: they “are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never knew in my life one who had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together.” In 1739, an anonymous pamphleteer laid out the case for Man Superior to Woman; or, a Vindication of Man’s Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman, writing that even if a woman was educated, “if this Lady is a scholar she is a very sluttish one; and the much she reads is to very little Purpose.” This was the terrain, writes the Irish historian Susannah Gibson in her new book, The Bluestockings, in which Elizabeth Montagu dared to host weekly salons about the intellectual debates of the moment—among the hottest of which was whether or not women should even be engaging in such discussions in the company of men. At Montagu’s table, Samuel Johnson rubbed elbows with the likes of the classicist Elizabeth Carter, the historian Catharine Macauley, and the novelist Frances Burney. Gibson’s new book paints a group portrait of these varied women, the polite challenge they posed to the patriarchy, and the forces that would eventually lead to the unraveling of their power.

Go beyond the episode:

Susannah Gibson’s The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement
We have too many links to the Bluestockings’ own books, so visit our episode page for the full list!

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Queen of the Night

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 04:01:00 GMT

We’re often reminded of the splendors of the night sky—lunar eclipses, blood moons, meteors, stars—but what of the nighttime splendors of the earth? In her Autumn 2024 cover story for The American Scholar, nature writer Leigh Ann Henion keeps her eyes closer to the ground, on the night-blooming tobacco at a North Carolina farm. As these white flowers slowly unfurl, their blossoms attract nocturnal hawk moths so large that they are often mistaken for hummingbirds. But jasmine tobacco isn’t the only attraction of the dark: in her new book, Night Magic, Henion witnesses the electric squirming of glowworms, the dance of fireflies, and the phosphorescence of foxfire. Henion, who begins her exploration just outside her front door in Boone, North Carolina, soon devotes her evenings to Appalachian adventures further afield—bats in Alabama, a moth festival in Ohio, lightning bugs in Tennessee—but returns to the wonders lurking in her back yard.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Leigh Ann Henion’s cover story for us, “Moondance,” adapted from her new book, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark
Explore Foxfire Books, a series of anthologies about Appalachian culture (and cookery!)
DarkSky International works to protect the night around the world
Keep an eye out for these annual nighttime events: Mothapalooza, Grandfather Glows, Glowworms in the Dismalites

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A Toothsome Tale

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 06:01:00 GMT

A tooth is not simply a tooth, as zoologist Bill Schutt writes in his new book, Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans. Teeth first showed up among vertebrates some 500 million years ago, and ever since, they’ve had much to do with the survival of many species. There are teeth that sharpen themselves with every snap (as with dogs and wolves), teeth that grow forever (as the poor babirusa knows all too well), and teeth that grow in a conveyer belt (ask a crocodile, but don’t get too close). The shape and appearance of teeth can tell us a lot about how animals evolved—and in the case of humans, where we stand on the social ladder. And there’s much more still to be learned, both about past life on this planet and future innovations in dentistry. Bill Schutt, a vertebrate zoologist and retired biology preofssor, is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural history, and he joins us today from New York.

Go beyond the episode:

Bill Schutt’s Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans
Visit our episode page to see some of Patricia J. Wynne's original illustrations for the book

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A Rebel to Remember

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 04:01:00 GMT

On August 22 1831, Nat Turner led a group of enslaved people in a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of more than a hundred people, Black and white, in Virginia’s Southampton County, near the border with North Carolina. Though the conflict only lasted a few days, Nat himself evaded capture for two months, until he surrendered on October 30. Before his execution on November 11, he spoke at length about his thoughts and deeds, which were written down by the lawyer Thomas Gray as The Confessions of Nat Turner. In a new book, the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and his collaborator Gregory P. Downs make the case that the religious dimension of Nat’s uprising has been underplayed or overlooked in popular accounts of his work—despite the prevalence of divine vision both in the Confessions and in prior rebellions. Nat Turner, Black Prophet aims to tell the full story of this “uniquely troublesome historical figure, too dangerous for some, too strange for others.”

Go beyond the episode:

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History by Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs
Nat’s bible is on view at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
For more on how the place of religion has changed in modern society—and how religious men like Nat saw themselves in theirs—see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Historians increasingly write about the Civil War as the largest (and most successful) slave rebellion in history—but W. E. B. DuBois said it first

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Going for Gold

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 04:01:00 GMT

At this year’s Olympics, the men’s gymnastics team made it onto the podium for the first time since 2008, winning bronze thanks to stunning overall performances and a perfect routine from Stephen Nederoscik, the Pommel Horse Guy. Team USA’s stars have, for many years now, been on the women’s team, with Simone Biles the most decorated American gymnast in history. But there’s one record Biles hasn’t beaten yet: the six medals that George Eyser won on a single day in October 1904—which he managed to do on one leg. How this incredible athlete accomplished his feat—and how much else has been forgotten about him besides his disability—is the subject of Joshua Prager’s Summer cover story for The American Scholar, “A Forgotten Turner Classic.” Prager, himself disabled, traces what little we know about George Eyser, from his troubled childhood in Germany to his new home in Denver, Colorado, from his incredible 1904 wins to his devastating 1919 suicide.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Joshua Prager’s cover story, “A Forgotten Turner Classic”
Meet the Team USA’s 2024 bronze winners

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Paradise Reclaimed

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 04:01:00 GMT

Who defines paradise, and who gets to live in its verdant incarnation on Earth? This is the question animating Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, which ranges across the history of the English landscape, from John Milton’s writing of Paradise Lost to Laing’s own restoration of a walled garden. Alighting on the heartbreaking pastorals of 19th-century poet John Clare and the queer visions of 20th-century artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, Laing pulls strands of history, literature, and resistance from the green blur that, for now, still surrounds us, even as it deceives us. Landscape architects like Capability Brown—so named for his capability to impose his will on any vista—were, as Laing writes, able “to fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring, though what has actually taken place is the seizure of once common ground.” The author of five books of nonfiction and a novel, Olivia Laing joins Smarty Pants this week to explore both the powers that shaped the garden as we know it, and the power it has to change how we treat the earth, and ourselves.

Go beyond the episode:

Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
Listen to John Clare’s “I Love to See the Summer Beaming Forth” on our sister podcast, Read Me a Poem
In the essay “Jane Austen’s Ivory Cage,” Mikita Brottman looks over the ha-has of Mansfield Park to see who else might be enclosed alongside the garden
We have visited stately houses and their grounds twice before on Smarty Pants: with Adrian Tinniswood, who discussed the history of the country house after World War II, and with Hopwood DePree, who was attempting to restore his crumbling ancestral pile

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Bathing Badasses

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 14:30:41 GMT

Synchronized, scientific, ornamental, fancy, pretty: so many adjectives have been attached over the years to performative swimming, especially when done by women. Now known at the highest level as “artistic swimming,” it was for decades one of the few athletic activities women could pursue, albeit in uncomfortable, baggy, and not exactly aerodynamic attire. Despite—or perhaps because of—its popularity, synchronized swimming's status as a legitimate, elite sport would be contested for just as long—until 1984, in fact, when it finally debuted at the Los Angeles Olympics in all its sparkly glory. In her new book, Swimming Pretty, Scholar contributor Vicki Valosik dives into “the untold story of women in water,” from Victorian starlets like Lurline the Water Queen to Annette Kellerman, the godmother of synchronized swimming and the woman we can all thank for not having to wear petticoats in the water.

Go beyond the episode:

Vicki Valosik’s Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water
Read all about the aquatic theater that Wilbert E. Longfellow devised in the name of safety
Learn some killer moves from Everard Digby’s 1587 manual The Art of Swimming
Dip your toes into the films of Esther Williams with this iconic scene from Million Dollar Mermaid, about the life of swimming Annette Kellerman
Visit our episode page to view more images

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Turning the World to Powder

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:01:00 GMT

Our lives are filled with dust: on our desks, under our couches, and in the air we breathe. If we’re very unlucky—like the residents of Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico—it includes uranium blowing off heaps of mining waste. Or the carbon particles carried along by the wood smoke of forest fires. Or microplastics rubbing off car brakes and tires as we screech across the 120 million miles of road in the world. Or a sandy cloud from the Sahara Desert, blowing across the ocean. You get the picture: dust coats the planet, and for the past few centuries, we've been the progenitors of increasing amounts of it. In her book Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, the London-based writer and researcher Jay Owens argues that we ignore these tiniest byproducts at our own peril, and she demonstrates their consequences in a variety of places: a California lake drained to service LA in the 1930s, the cracked bed of the Aral Sea, icy Greenland, and smog-choked Tudor England.

Go beyond the episode:

Jay Owens’s Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles
Sand is a kind of dust—and we’re running out of it
Jorge Otero-Pailos’s series The Ethics of Dust uses the latex sheets that conservationists use to clean grimy stonework
John Evelyn’s extraordinary 1661 treatise on air pollution, Fumifugium: or, The inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London dissipated together with some remedies humbly proposed by J.E. esq. to His Sacred Majestie, and to the Parliament now assembled
Owens Lake returns

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#292: Indiana Absurd

Fri, 17 May 2024 04:01:00 GMT

The late Budi Darma, one of Indonesia’s most beloved writers, spent a formative chapter of his life far from home, studying at Indiana University in the 1970s. He wrote a series of strikingly lonely short stories that would go on to form the collection People from Bloomington, first published in Indonesian in 1980. A man befriends his estranged father only to control him and ends up controlled himself. Someone steals his dead roommate’s poetry and enters it into a competition. Another character desperately tries to make contact with the old man across the street who may or may not be trying to shoot people from his attic room. With this absurd but oddly real little collection—and with his next novel, Olenka, also Indiana-inspired—Darma ascended into the pantheon of Indonesian literature, winning numerous awards, including the presidential medal of honor. Budi Darma may be barely known in the United States, but Tiffany Tsao—who has recently translated People from Bloomington for Penguin Classics—hopes that an English-language audience is ready to embrace this unparalleled Indonesian artist.

Go beyond the episode:

Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, translated by Tiffany Tsao
Read Tsao’s post in memory of Budi Darma, who died in August 2021
Check out these other Indonesian writers mentioned in the episode: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Umar Kayam, Chairil Anwar, Ajip Rosidi
Want to hear more about the art of translation? Listen to these conversations with German-English translator Susan Bernofsky, Bible translator Robert Alter, Malagasy writer Naivo and his translator Alison Cherette, and Tibetan-English translator Tenzin Dickie

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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Changing the Lens

Fri, 10 May 2024 18:04:45 GMT

Over the course of our miniseries Exploding the Canon, Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek has examined Reed College students’ efforts in 2016–2017 to fundamentally transform a mandatory freshman humanities course. Now, in the final episode, Bastek looks at how much has really changed since that time. The protestors were ostensibly successful—the Humanities 110 syllabus underwent significant revision. But though the college has bolstered several support programs for students of color, in the last decade Black, Latino, and Indigenous student enrollment at Reed has not increased. Some professors are satisfied with the current humanities program; others would like to see more change. Perhaps the fundamental lesson to be gained from Reed’s upheaval is that the work is hardly finished—and a way forward might be found in how classicists have radically reimagined their discipline in recent years.

Please visit our episode page for a full list of links

Reed College Office of Institutional Research data on historical enrollment by ethnicity (2002–2024)
The 2023–24 Hum 110 syllabus, with timelines and maps

Featured voices in this episode: Salim Moore, Brittany Wideman, Paul Marthers, Mary James, Nigel Nicholson, Kritish Rajbhandari, Pancho Savery, Milyon Trulove, alea adigweme, Mary Frankie McFarland Forte, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Jan Mieszkowski, Colin Drumm, Albert Kerelis, Peter Steinberger, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Addison Bates. Thanks to the Reed staff, faculty, and students—past and present—who made this series possible.

Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.

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In Memoriam: American Modernism’s Lost Boy-King

Fri, 03 May 2024 17:50:22 GMT

We were saddened to learn of Paul Auster’s passing on April 30, at the age of 77. In his memory, revisit this interview, which originally ran on November 5, 2021, on the late author’s favorite writer: Stephen Crane. Exploding the Canon will return next week.

In his decades-long career, the writer Paul Auster has turned his hand to poems, essays, plays, novels, translations, screenplays, memoirs—and now biography. Burning Boy explores the life and work of Stephen Crane, whose short time on earth sputtered out at age 28 from tuberculosis. Like his biographer, Crane, too, spanned genres—poetry, novels, short stories, war reporting, and semi-fictional newspaper “sketches”—striking it big in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage, which was widely celebrated at the time and is still regarded as his best work. But in Auster’s estimation, the rest of Crane’s output (and there is a surprising amount of it) is sorely neglected, and the pleasure of Burning Boy lies in reading one of the 19th century’s finest writers alongside one of today’s. Paul Auster joins the podcast to talk about the task of restoring Stephen Crane to the American canon.

Go beyond the episode:

Paul Auster’s Burning Boy
Read Steven G. Kellman’s review, “Poet of the Extreme”
Eager for a taste of Stephen Crane beyond the novels? We recommend The Black Riders and Other Lines and “The Open Boat”

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Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Theme music by Nathan Prillaman. Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us wherever you listen!

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Let Us Compare Mythologies

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:56:08 GMT

Reedies Against Racism’s protest of the Humanities 110 curriculum at Reed College reached a turning point in the 2017–2018 school year. After a year and a half of debate, dozens of faculty members voted on a revised syllabus, the second semester of which introduced brand new material from Mexico City and the Harlem Renaissance. But in September 2018, an entire department voted not to teach the spring syllabus—and as the years passed, discontent with the syllabus grew, among both faculty and students.

Visit our website for a transcript and links to documents and articles mentioned in the episode.

Featured voices in this episode: Addison Bates, Eden Daniel, Mary James, Libby Drumm, Roger Porter, Jan Mieszkowski, Pancho Savery, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Peter Steinberger, Nathalia King, Kritish Rajbhandari, Nigel Nicholson, and Albert Kerelis.

Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.

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Correction: The original episode misrepresented the faculty composition of the Religion department after it stopped teaching in Humanities 110; when the tenured faculty member in question retired, the relevant committee approved a visiting position rather than a tenure-track appointment.

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Interlude: The Idea of “The West”

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 04:01:00 GMT

This week, Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek revisits a conversation from 2023 that originally sparked her desire to return to the debate over Humanities 110 at Reed College. The idea of “Western civilization” looms large in the popular imagination, but it’s no longer taken seriously in academia. In her book, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won’t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the “clash of civilizations” and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day—“from Plato to NATO.” Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten—Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d’Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi—Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies. Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary “western” identity.

Go beyond the episode:

Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives
In “Claiming the Classical,” Mac Sweeney and her co-authors examine how classical antiquity is used by 21st-century political actors

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Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Theme music by Nathan Prillaman. Exploding the Canon returns next week.

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The Spirit of ’68

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 17:53:24 GMT

This week, Smarty Pants host and Scholar senior editor Stephanie Bastek delves into the history of Black Studies at her alma mater, Reed College, drawing connections between the fight for a Black Studies program in 1968 and the efforts of Reedies Against Racism to diversify the college’s mandatory freshman humanities course 48 years later. Speaking with former students and members of Reed’s Black Student Union, Bastek recounts the 1968 BSU occupation of Eliot Hall, one of the largest buildings on campus, as part of the campaign for a Black Studies program. The program was established, but not without backlash—and rifts among faculty members would threaten Reed's foundation for decades to come.

Read Martin White’s essay, “The Black Studies Controversy at Reed College, 1968–1970” in the Oregon Historical Quarterly
In Memoriam: Linda Gordon Howard, Calvin Freeman
Visit our episode page to see more of Stephen Robinson's photographs from 1968
Transcript available on our website

Featured voices in this episode: Andre Wooten, Mary Frankie McFarlane Forte, Martin White, Stephen Robinson, Roger Porter, George Brandon, Steve Engel, and Suzanne Snively. Ron Herndon oral history audio courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society. Archival recording of the October 28, 1968 BSU town hall featuring Cathy Allen and Ron Herndon courtesy of the Reed College Library.

Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.

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Reedies Against Racism

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 22:01:00 GMT

The autumn of 2016 at Reed College was tumultuous. On September 26, students organized a boycott of classes in response to recent police killings of Black people, both to allow time to mourn and to highlight the ways in which they felt Reed was failing people of color. They also put forward a list of demands—including an overhaul of the mandatory freshman humanities course, Humanities 110, which, they alleged, focused too narrowly on European history and ideas, wrongly discounting the contributions of other cultures. That same week, they would begin a year-long occupation of Vollum Hall, where lectures were held, thereby creating fissures among the faculty and kickstarting the process of changing the course.

RAR’s 25 demands
Reed’s November and December 2016 Progress Reports in response

Featured voices in this episode: Addison Bates, Eden Daniel, alea adigweme, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Peter Steinberger, Jan Mieskowski, Pancho Savery, Mary James, Nathalia King, and Mary Frankie McFarlane Forte. Newsreel: KOIN News.

Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.

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Transcript available on our episode page.

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Sing, Muse

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT

At Reed College in 2016, a student group named Reedies Against Racism began protesting the syllabus of the mandatory freshman humanities course and the college’s perceived failure to support Black students. After a year of sustained action, the students won the largest-ever revision of Humanities 110—but half a decade on, emotions are still raw. Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek graduated from Reed in 2013, and she returned last year to find out how much the culture had really changed.

Humanities 110 Syllabi: 2009-10, 2016-17, 2023-24

Visit our episode page for a visual representation of the regions of study in Hum 110, 1944–2015 (graph by Michael Song)

Featured voices in this episode: Nigel Nicholson, Jan Mieszkowski, Peter Steinberger, Nathalia King, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Pancho Savery, Libby Drumm, and Eden Daniel. Reed College documentary audio from Give Up Steam (1991) by Daniel Levin. Newsreel commentators: Michael Jones and Jennifer Kabbany. Transcript available on our episode page.

Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.

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Trailer: Exploding the Canon

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 20:25:29 GMT

Smarty Pants returns on March 29 with a new miniseries: Exploding the Canon, about an all-out culture war at Reed College. In 2016, a student group named Reedies Against Racism began protesting the syllabus of the mandatory freshman humanities course and the college’s failure to support Black students. After a year of sustained protest, the students won the largest-ever revision of Humanities 110—but half a decade on, emotions are still raw. Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek graduated from Reed in 2013, and she returned last year to find out how much Reed’s culture had really changed.

Trailer produced by Mickey Capper. Original music by Rhae Royal.

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#291: Dancing the Imperial Twist

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:08:34 GMT

In our Summer 2023 issue, Julian Saporiti writes about the George Igawa Orchestra, which entertained thousands of incarcerated Japanese Americans at a World War II internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. But Saporiti, who releases music as No-No Boy, has been singing about the “best god damn band in Wyoming” since 2021, when his album 1975 came out. No-No Boy—named for the Japanese Americans who twice answered “no” on a wartime loyalty questionnaire—has been releasing songs about forgotten pockets of Asian-American history for years: Burmese migrants, Cambodian kids whose parents survived the Khmer Rouge, Saigon teens, and his mother’s experience as a Vietnamese refugee of an American war. We caught up with Saporiti at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where he performed a set in celebration of the 75th anniversary of Smithsonian Folkways, to talk about reciprocity, scholars by waterfalls, and how to smuggle in history with a few strummed chords.

Go beyond the episode:

Listen to No-No Boy’s previous two albums, 1975 and 1942, and pre-order the next release
Read “Last Dance,” Saporiti’s story of the George Igawa Orchestra
Unfamiliar with the history of the no-no boys? Listen to our interview with Frank Abe about John Okada’s seminal novel No-No Boy about a Nisei draft-resister

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#290: Dying for Fashion

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Longtime style reporter Dana Thomas’s book, Fashionopolis, is an indictment of the true costs of fashion—like poisoned water, crushed workers, and overflowing landfills—that never make it onto the price tag of a dress or pair of jeans. Between 2000 and 2014, the annual number of garments produced doubled to 100 billion: 14 new garments per person per year for every person on the planet. The average garment is only worn seven times before being tossed—assuming it’s not one of the 20 billion clothing items that go unsold and unworn. It’s no surprise, then, that the fashion industry accounts for at least 10 percent of global carbon emissions and 20 percent of all industrial water pollution. Though the industry employs one out of every six people globally, fewer than two percent of them earn a living wage—more than 98 percent of workers are not only underpaid, they also toil in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. But change is underfoot: retailers are shifting their supply models, circular and slow fashion are on the rise, and new technology is making the manufacture of new and recycled fabrics cleaner. Dana Thomas joins the podcast to explain what will be required to fix a broken system. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes
Thomas’s tips for weaning yourself off fast fashion
Why donating secondhand clothes to developing countries can actually prevent development—and kill local textile industries
What is “slow fashion”? The New York Times explains
Martha Stewart teaches Clothing Repair 101

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#289: On the Line

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Atlantic bluefin tuna have been swimming in our oceans, and in the human imagination, for millions of years. Topping out at more than 1,500 pounds apiece, these apex predators face their greatest threat not from sharks or a dwindling food supply but from our unwillingness to stop overfishing them (to say nothing of the occasional catastrophic oil spill). But our understanding of how these majestic creatures navigate the ocean, defined by an imaginary line through the middle of the Atlantic, has been challenged by recent discoveries—and the life story of one tuna in particular. Karen Pinchin’s new book, Kings of Their Own Ocean, tells the story of that fish: an Atlantic bluefin named Amelia, tagged in 2004 by the fisherman Al Anderson off the coast of Rhode Island and recaptured twice more before her ultimate death in the Mediterranean. Pinchin joins the podcast to talk about what Amelia’s tale has to tell us about fishing and climate, science and commerce, and the future of the seas.

Go beyond the episode:

Karen Pinchin’s Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas
Let the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch do the work of choosing sustainable seafood for you (you can even download and print little pocket guides for each region—en español tambien!)
In our Winter 2023 issue, Juli Berwald considered what coral might teach us about avoiding ecological catastrophe
John Dos Passos loved fishing for tuna just as much as Papa Hemingway did
Anna Badhken spoke to us in 2018 about how overfishing and warming waters have devastated a Senegalese fishing community

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#288: Of Panic and Paranoia

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:01:00 GMT

The litany of contemporary conspiracy theories runs long: Pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails, “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” “birds aren’t real.” Some of these are funny—the rumor that Avril Lavigne and/or Paul McCartney have been replaced by doppelgängers—and some have deadly consequences, like the mass murders motivated by replacement theory or the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion. We might like to think this is a recent phenomenon, but the first American president to espouse a conspiracy theory was actually George Washington, a freemason who believed that the Illuminati caused the French Revolution. In his new book, Under the Eye of Power, Colin Dickey asks, “What if paranoia, particularly a paranoia of secret, subversive societies, is not just peripheral to the functioning of democracy, but at its very heart?”

Go beyond the episode:

Colin Dickey’s Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
Listen to our previous conversation about cryptids, aliens, and other weird encounters
Just a hop, skip, and a jump away from conspiracy theories? Belief in quack Covid cures and New Age elixirs, which Dickey wrote about for us last year
The “groomers” conspiracy draws on a long history of trans- and homophobia
For more about the Satanic Panic, listen to this episode of the You’re Wrong About podcast

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#287: Man vs. Mosquito

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Travel to any of the hundred-odd countries where malaria is endemic, and the mosquito is not merely a pest: it is a killer. Factor in the laundry list of other diseases that this insect can transmit—dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, filiaraisis, and a litany of encephalitises—and the mosquito was responsible for some 830,000 human deaths in 2018 alone. This is the lowest figure on record: for context, one estimate puts the mosquito’s death toll for all of human history at 52 billion, which accounts for almost half our human ancestors. How did such a wee little insect manage all that, and escape every attempt to thwart its deadly power? To answer that question, Timothy C. Winegard wrote The Mosquito, a book spanning human history from its origins in Africa through the present and toward the future of gene-editing. In its 496 pages and 1.6 pounds—the equivalent of 291,000 Anopheles mosquitoes—he outlines how the insect contributed to the rise and fall of Rome, the spread of Christianity, and countless wars—not to mention the conquest of South America, in which the mosquito both sparked the West African slave trade and, ironically, led to its end in the United States. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator
To help you sleep even less at night, here is the WHO’s list of mosquito-borne diseases and a 2019 report on how climate change puts billions more at risk
We recommend listening to this episode with a citronella candle at hand—and you can consult the CDC’s guidelines for preventing mosquito bites for more tips
Visit our episode page for a gallery of anti-mosquito efforts, courtesy of Dutton

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#286: The Falcon’s Odd Little Cousin

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th century; and modern falconers have used their understanding of language to train them to do dog-like tricks. The other nine species of caracara that span the rest of South America are just as odd in their own ways. In his book, A Most Remarkable Creature, Jonathan Meiburg follows their unusual evolutionary path across the continent and describes his encounters with these birds over the past 25 years. He joins us from his home in Texas to introduce us to some new feathered friends. This episode originally aired in 2021.

Go beyond the episode:

Jonathan Meiburg’s A Most Remarkable Creature
Read an excerpt about Charles Darwin’s encounters with the bird
Meet Tina, the striated caracara who can “find Nemo,” and a crested caracara named Kevin
Here’s some footage of a flock on Saunders Island in the Falklands

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#285: Imagined Cuisines

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Take any international trip, and the tourist-trap restaurants near the must-see landmarks will all be hawking the “national dish” you simply can’t miss: Greek souvlaki, Japanese ramen, Italian pasta, Mexican mole. Leaving aside the question of whether a restaurant with a laminated English menu could possibly serve good food, we must ask what makes a dish “national”—must it be an old recipe? A common one? Unique to that place? Anya von Bremzen poses these questions and more in her new book, National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home. Beginning in Paris with the 18th-century inauguration of modern French cuisine—and searching for the invention, or perhaps congelation, of pot-au-feu—von Bremzen travels across oceans and continents in search of what defines a country’s cuisine, unraveling notions of identity, nationhood, and politics in the process.

Go beyond the episode:

Anya von Bremzen’s National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home
In case you missed it, last week’s episode dealt with what might perhaps be called America’s quixotic national dish: the hot dog
Dig in to our culinary history, and you’ll find a collection of immigrant women who changed the way American eats
James Beard did, too
Picture the food of the future—specifically that of the climate crisis—in this immersive dinner party episode
And who could forget the inner organs of beasts and fowls that spill across the pages of Ulysses?

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#284: What Could Be Wurst?

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special; drive-through and deli; chili and chile: Loftus devoured them all. Her ensuing book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, brings the glory and the gory. It may be the first to detail not only the different genders of pickle jars one can buy at a gas station, but also the horrific treatment of animals and workers at slaughterhouses, conditions that got distinctly worse during the pandemic. Loftus—stand-up comedian, TV writer, and creator of such illustrious one-season podcasts as “My Year in Mensa” and “Ghost Church”—joins us to talk about the wild world of that iconic American food.

Go beyond the episode:

Jamie Loftus’s Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs
ProPublica’s exposé of the meatpacking industry during Covid revealed awful conditions, and government collusion
Delight your senses with PBS’s classic A Hot Dog Program
Visit our episode page for a list of the varieties mentioned in this episode

Loftus’s top five dogs are:

Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, New Jersey
Hot Dog Ruiz Los Chipilones in Tucson, Arizona
King Jong Grillin in Portland, Oregon
The hot dog carts across the street from the Crypto.com Arena, or near Union Station in Los Angeles, California
Texas Tavern in Roanoke, Virginia

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#283: Why the West Won’t Die

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 07:01:00 GMT

The idea of “Western civilization” looms large in the popular imagination, but it’s no longer taken seriously in academia. In her new book, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won’t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the “clash of civilizations” and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day—“from Plato to NATO.” Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten—Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d’Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi—Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies. Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary “western” identity.

Go beyond the episode:

Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives
We have covered Greece and Rome in previous episodes, as well as Njinga of Angola
In our Summer 2023 issue, Sarah Ruden considers how modern biographers distort Vergil

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#282: No-No Novel

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 13:21:07 GMT

In 1956, John Okada wrote the first Japanese-American novel, No-No Boy, a story about a Nisei draft-resister who returns home to Seattle after years in prison. It should have been a sensation: American literature had seen nothing like it before. But the book went out of print, Okada never published again, and the writer died in obscurity in 1971. That would have been the end of the story, were it not for a band of Asian-American writers in 1970s California who stumbled upon the landmark novel in a used bookshop. Frank Abe, one of the co-editors of a new book about Okada—and a friend to the “CARP boys” who discovered him—joins us to talk about the era in which No-No Boy was written and what the novel can teach us about our own moment in history. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy
No-No Boy by John Okada
Watch Frank Abe’s film about the Japanese-American draft resisters, Conscience and the Constitution
Read Julian Saporiti’s essay in our Summer 2023 issue, “Last Dance”

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#281: Music to Have Revelations To

Fri, 26 May 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Siblings Ruthie and Nathan Prillaman are classically trained musicians who have put their knowledge of counterpoint and unusual time signatures to use in their medieval-inspired folk band, Small Fools. Renaissance madrigal meets contemporary queer meme in songs like “Crying in My Subaru” (also the title of their debut EP) and “Horseradish,” inspired by the words on a pickle jar. Such strange musical pairings—the marriage of Gregorian chant with lighthearted lyrics about gnomes, for example—might sound gimmicky, but in the siblings’ hands, they somehow achieve transcendence. The Prillamans join the podcast this week to talk about Small Fools, big ideas, and which 16th-century mystics they find most inspiring.

Go beyond the episode:

Listen to Small Fools on Spotify or Apple Music
We dare you not to hum the hook in “Horseradish”
Check out the Small Fools TikTok
Read more about the lives of anchoresses in this article by Mary Wellesley, cohost of The London Review of Books’s Medieval Beginnings podcast (and a one-time guest on this podcast)
Polymath Hildegard of Bingen, one of the first named composers, is still one of the most famous female composers

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#280: Lines from the Front

Fri, 19 May 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but Vladimir Putin’s forces have been nibbling at the edges of the country since 2014. Or one could say that the war began “long before 2014 by way of colonial imperial politics, suppression of language cultures, mass hunger, and terror,” as the poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky write in the introduction to In the Hour of War, their new anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry. “This is a poetry marked by a radical confrontation with the evil of genocide,” they write. “Does poetry have the tensile strength to embody such a confrontation?” The anthology seeks to answer that question with the help of its diverse contributors: “soldier poets, rock-star poets, poets who write in more than one language, poets whose hometowns have been bombed and who have escaped to the West, poets who stayed in their hometowns despite bombardments, poets who have spoken to parliaments and on TV, poets who refused to give interviews, poets who said that metaphors don’t work in wartime and poets whose metaphors startle.” Forché joins us this week on the podcast to talk about the surprising “life-giving force of these poems.”

Go beyond the episode:

In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, edited by Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky
Listen to Serhiy Zhadan’s “Take Only What Is Most Important” on our Read Me a Poem podcast
Read Megan Buskey’s essay on the long, unfortunate history of Ukrainian displacement

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#279: Losing the Lot

Fri, 12 May 2023 04:01:00 GMT

In certain cities, parking may seem like a scarce commodity, especially when you’re circling the block in search of it. But in the United States, there are three to eight spots for every car, depending on whom you ask. Municipal codes that dictate how much parking buildings are required to offer have changed urban density, the cost of housing, and the amount of time drivers spend on the road. In his new book, Paved Paradise, Slate staff writer Henry Grabar makes the compelling case that the simple, rectangular parking spot has shaped the city as we know it. In the past two decades, many people have begun to question the parking paradigm and sought to banish outdated parking minimums, repurpose disused garages, and reimagine the way we use the space we’ve heretofore allotted to cars. Grabar joins the podcast this week to talk about what they’re up against, and what new world potentially awaits us.

Go beyond the episode:

Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
Read his report on “How Paris Kicked Out the Cars” and explanation of how the concept of the 15-minute city snowballed into a right-wing conspiracy
The Netherlands, now the cycling capital of the world, won traffic reform and bike lanes the old-fashioned way: through the civil disobedience of the Stop de Kindermoord movement in the 1970s and ’80s
Hot on its heels: Ghent and its ambitious 2017 “mobility plan,” which introduced free “park and ride” buses into town, moved long-term and commuter parking outside of downtown, and thereby increased public transportation use by 12 percent

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#278: The Pacifist and the Battlefield

Fri, 05 May 2023 04:01:00 GMT

W. E. B Du Bois is best known for his seminal collection of essays on the African-American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, and his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, which reframed the story of freed slaves in the Civil War and the brief window of political promise that followed. Du Bois is less remembered for his support for America’s entry into the First World War, an endorsement that surprised many of his Black and radical allies. Moreover, he pushed for African Americans to join the ranks, in the hopes of accelerating the fight for freedom at home. He would soon regret his decision, and he spent the next two decades of his life grappling with the complex legacy of the war, and African Americans’ experience of it. As the historian Chad Williams puts it, this manuscript—called The Black Man and the Wounded World—was “Du Bois’s most significant work to never reach the public,” and the struggle to write it would irrevocably shape his politics. Williams, a professor of history and African-American studies at Brandeis University, joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War.

Go beyond the episode:

Chad Williams’s The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War
Read Williams’s reflection on the centenary of Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
“War is organized murder, and nothing else,” Harry Patch maintained; the last surviving British soldier in World War I died in 2009 at the age of 111. He once told Tony Blair: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.”

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#277: A Home in Chinatown

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 04:01:00 GMT

In the 1860s, Chinese immigrants built vast stretches of railroad in the American West. But two decades later, they found themselves the targets of the first federal law restricting immigration by race and nationality: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained on the books until 1943. One of writer Ava Chin’s forefathers worked on the railroad, and much of her family suffered from the consequences of the Exclusion Act. The violence it enabled pushed both sides of her family east, to New York City. Chin, raised by her mother’s relatives in Queens, had grown up without meeting her father or his family—until years of research led her to a building on Mott Street where, she soon learned, both sides of her family spent decades living, squabbling, and loving. Chin’s new book, Mott Street, is the result of painstaking research across continents and oceans, into oral and written records, to trace five generations of Chinese-American history.

Go beyond the episode:

Ava Chin’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
Read her reflections on her railworker great-great-grandfather and contemporary immigration control
Her columns as the Urban Forager for The New York Times grew into Eating Wildly, her 2015 book
Visit our website for a selection of family photographs

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#276: Listening to the Dead

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 04:01:00 GMT

There are mass graves all over Latin America, but the concentration of dead and disappeared in Guatemala and Argentina is staggering: more than 200,000 killed by the state in Guatemala’s 36-year conflict, known simply as “La Violencia;” up to 30,000 disappeared by the Argentine military dictatorship over the course of its reign of terror in the 1970s and ’80s. How does a country reckon with crimes against humanity? How do the families of the missing find the truth? “Forensic exhumation is practiced at the crossroads of two ways of thinking about the body,” anthropologist Alexa Hagerty writes, “as a scientific object to be analyzed for evidence of crimes against humanity, and as a subject, an individual, someone loved and mourned.” In her new book, Still Life with Bones, Hagerty documents her training with forensic teams in Guatemala and Argentina, where members have devoted their lives to unearthing the bones of the disappeared, reconstructing not only their skeletons but the stories of their lives.

Go beyond the episode:

Alexa Hagerty’s Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains
Her latest on human rights and surveillance: “In Ukraine, Identifying the Dead Comes at a Human Rights Cost”
If in Buenos Aires, take a day to visit the Museum and Site of Memory ESMA
Guatemala’s dictator Efraín Ríos Montt slithered out of an 80-year conviction for genocide; Jayro Bustamante’s incredible film La Llorona imagines a different kind of justice for his fictional analogue
In the experimental film Los Rubios, Albertina Carri investigates what happened to her parents during the Argentine dictatorship

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#275: That Time of the Month

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 04:01:00 GMT

A visit from Aunt Flo, being on the rag, riding the crimson wave, girl flu, even the red wedding … menstruation is something that half of the world’s population experiences for a week at a time, for years on end, and yet we struggle to talk about it directly. But the uterus is capable of incredible things, as anthropologist Kate Clancy explains in her new book, Period: The Real Story of Menstruation: menstrual fluid contains chemicals that repair tissue, the cervix contains crypts for storing sperm for later use, and periods might even be the body’s way of improving its inner architecture. But shockingly, doctors viewed periods as useless—even toxic—well into the 20th century, and some still believe that it’s unsafe to swim with a tampon in (it’s not). Clancy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joins the podcast to challenge uterine myths, expose the eugenic roots of gynecology, and bring a feminist perspective to that special time of the month.

Go beyond the episode:

Kate Clancy’s Period: The Real Story of Menstruation
Read Emily Martin’s paper “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”
Anatomy is amazing: the cervix contains crypts to store sperm for later usage
A new generation of artists is making art with menstrual blood, The Guardian reports

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#274: Twenty Years of War

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 04:01:00 GMT

On March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, and shortly thereafter, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad became an accidental journalist. Originally trained as an architect, he fell in as a translator with a group of foreign journalists, then as a photographer and war reporter for The Guardian and The Washington Post. In his new book, A Stranger in Your Own City, Abdul-Ahad documents the devastation of Baghdad, from the sanctions of the 1990s to the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall. Punctuating his account are revealing interviews with his fellow Iraqis—Sunni commanders, schoolteachers, old high school friends, insurgents of every stripe—about the war and its effects, which continue to shape life in the region years after the American withdrawal.

Go beyond the episode:

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
Read the anniversary piece Abdul-Ahad wrote for The Guardian: “Guns, cash, and frozen chicken: the militia boss doling out aid in Baghdad”
Roughly 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, twenty years after the invasion
Some of Abdul-Ahad’s illustrations from the book

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#273: The Art of Doing Nothing Much, Together

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Hanging out. All of us could probably stand to do more of it, especially if it doesn’t come with a calendar invite. In her new book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Sheila Liming writes that she’s found herself “an accidental witness to a growing crisis: people struggling to hang out, or else voicing concern and anxiety about how to hang out.” The coronavirus may have heightened this struggle, but its root causes—our increased obsession with our phones, the shrinking of public spaces, widening income inequality, American individualism—predate the pandemic. Liming, a professor of communications at Champlain College, joins us on the podcast to discuss both what we have to lose by not spending unstructured time together and how we can get it back.

Go beyond the episode:

Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time
Liming learned a lot about the art of the hang through her time playing in the Catamount Pipe Band and the jam band The Armadillos
Ray Oldenburg celebrated all the “third places” where people hang out in The Great Good Place
You know what would make hanging out a lot easier? The 15-minute city
Practice doing nothing much with one of these great hangout films

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#272: Cherry Blossom Bonanza

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 04:01:00 GMT

Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endured repeated failures—to spread the sakura around the world. But there’s one naturalist in particular we can thank: Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram. Journalist Naoko Abe joins us on the podcast to share how this English eccentric saved some of Japan’s most iconic cherry blossoms—from the spectacular Great White Cherry to the pink Hokusai—from extinction. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Naoko Abe’s The Sakura Obsession
If you’re in Washington, D.C., you need not visit the (closed) tidal basin to view the cherries—here is a map trees blossoming all over the city
The National Park Service created a guide to the cherry blossom varieties in the city
Smithsonian’s list of the best places to see cherry blossoms around the world

Cherry varieties discussed:

Taihaku / Prunus serrulata taihaku / Great white cherry
Somei-yoshino / Prunus x yedoensis / Tokyo cherry

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#271: Filling in the Fragments

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 04:01:00 GMT

The Greek poet Sappho’s reputation looks something like a parabola: at the height of her powers, her lyrics were so beloved that grammarians quoted them as exemplars of the Greek language; Plato called her the “Tenth Muse.” Then, after a thousand years of exaltation, she tumbled from the pantheon. Today, we know very little of her life and precious few of her works remain, most of them recovered from ancient garbage heaps in the 19th century. The surviving 306 fragments of her verse—dozens of them but a single word or phrase—are compiled in a new and updated translation by classicist Diane J. Rayor, simply titled Sappho, out this month from Cambridge University Press. Rayor, Professor Emerita of Classics at Grand Valley State University, joins us on the podcast to discuss the difficulties—and joys—of rediscovering Sappho and translating her verse into English.

Go beyond the episode:

Diane J. Rayor’s Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, with an introduction by André Lardinois
Cambridge University Press has made professional recordings of all of the fragments available for free, performed by Kate Reading
Read more about the murky provenance of the newest Sappho papyri unearthed in 2014
The music used in this episode is the song “Seikilos Epitaph,” performed by Lina Palera on the Lyre of Apollo, a recreation of the ancient instrument by the Lyre 2.0 Project

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#270: Reading the Trail Trees

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 05:01:00 GMT

America in the 1830s was stranger than we might think: cities were made of wood, primeval forests towered above East and West coasts alike, and the Great Dismal Swamp still swallowed more than a million acres of Virginia. Alexander Nemerov, an art historian at Stanford University, brings this unruly and uncanny world to life in his new book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. Neither history nor fiction, the book offers dozens of gem-like stories of man’s last real encounters with these ancient forests: Nat Turner’s woodland hiding place, the inscription of the Cherokee language both in trail trees and on paper, Harriet Tubman’s view of the Leonid meteor shower, the painter Thomas Cole’s top hat of felted beaver fur. Nemerov joins us on the podcast to discuss what his unusual approach reveals about this turning point between civilization and the wild.

Go beyond the episode:

Alexander Nemerov’s The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a luminous work of historical imagination
You can walk along Chicago’s lone wooden block alley, a remnant of the world that went up in smoke in the Great Fire of 1871
The Great Dismal Swamp may have shrunk, but it’s still there
Visit the episode page for a selection of paintings by Thomas Cole and Sanford Robinson Gifford

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#269: Chaucer’s Leading Lady

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 05:01:00 GMT

We first spoke to Marion Turner, an English professor at Oxford University, in 2019, about her award-winning biography of Geoffrey Chaucer. In her latest book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Turner paints an unconventional portrait of Chaucer’s most famous—and clearly favorite—character: a bawdy, middle-aged, middle-class woman of multiple marriages. Alison of Bath is but one of the pilgrims Chaucer gathers around the table in his Canterbury Tales, but she is the only one to have inspired everyone from Shakespeare to James Joyce to Zadie Smith—and an equal number of misogynist critics, whether they were writing on vellum or in a 20th-century academic journal. Turner joins us on the podcast to discuss the Wife of Bath in her time and beyond, and why her voice still rings out with such force today.

Go beyond the episode:

Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography
Listen to our previous interview with Turner about Geoffrey Chaucer’s life
Watch Jean “Binta” Breeze perform her adaptation of Chaucer’s tale, “The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market”
Read Zadie Smith’s play, The Wife of Willesden (which you can see performed this month with its original star if you happen to find yourself in Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Read Patience Agbabi’s poem “The Wife of Bafa” or watch her perform it at the modern version of the Tabard Inn—a brewery

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#268: The Comic Queen of Metafiction

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 05:01:00 GMT

In the world of Gunnhild Øyehaug’s fiction, the mechanics of the short story are constantly being pulled apart and played with: characters we’ve followed on a bus turn out to be the inventions of the narrator on page four; an omniscient “analysis department” argues with the author about the validity of a story ending; Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil turn out to be real flowers growing by the side of the road and the cause of a woman’s broken foot. But the magic of Øyehaug’s latest collection, Evil Flowers, translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson, is how these subversions still manage to awaken us to the wonder of real, ordinary, corporeal life, whether our main character is a loner searching for connection on a travel forum or a girl who turns everything she touches into slime eels.

Go beyond the episode:

Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Evil Flowers, translated by Kari Dickson
Read “Nice and Mild,” from Knots, her first collection to be translated into English
Check out her two novels, Present Tense Machine and Wait, Blink, adapted into the film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts (sadly only available in Norwegian)

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#267: Justice, Arrested

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 05:01:00 GMT

The drumbeat of people being unlawfully killed by police officers continues. Not even the mass protests of 2020 could push Congress to enact federal legislation banning chokeholds or no-knock warrants. Why does reform remain so difficult? Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted more than two decades to analyzing how our legal system protects the police at every level, from the Supreme Court to municipal governments. Her new book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, details the dozens of ways in which civil rights plaintiffs, no matter their tax bracket, race, or zip code, can be thwarted: from the difficulties of acquiring a lawyer to the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, designed to protect police officers from personal liability.

Go beyond the episode:

Joanna Schwartz’s Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable
ProPublica ran a year-long investigation into America’s largest police department: the NYPD
Read more about the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Alexander Baxter’s case against the Nashville police, which was thrown out under the doctrine of qualified immunity. Baxter initially represented himself (and handwrote his complaint) but was later defended by the ACLU.
“Elite” police units, like the SCORPION Unit that killed Tyre Nichols this year in Memphis, are frequently the subject of scandals and complaints

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#266: Past is Present

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 05:01:00 GMT

Marie Arana is the award-winning Peruvian-American author of Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, a book about a whole continent that manages not to be a thousand pages long—even though it covers about a thousand years of history. She makes the compelling case that there are really three driving forces behind the entire region: exploitation and extraction; violence; and religion. Of course, all of these forces are deeply interrelated—and that’s the point. To drive home how tangled the past is with the present, Arana weaves the stories of three contemporary Latin Americans together with a millennium of history to ultimately show why you can’t really explain the rest of the world without first understanding the story of Latin America.

Go beyond the episode:

Marie Arana’s Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
Read Richard Moe’s review on our website (“a long-overdue and persuasive corrective”)
Here’s a less blood-soaked tale from the cloisters of Peru: librarian Helen Hazen on a clutch of rare books tucked away in an Andean convent

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#265: The Promised Land of the Pampas

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 05:01:00 GMT

In 1889, a group of Jewish families fleeing Russian pogroms arrived in Argentina, hoping for a new life—or at least a safe place to reside for a while before making their way to Israel. Moisés Ville, the town they founded, some 400 miles from Buenos Aires, was one of the first Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina and over the next 50 years would come to be called the “Jerusalem of South America,” replete with theaters, libraries, and two synagogues. But this sunny story of life in the new world has a dark underside, as Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay learned one day, upon reading a 1947 Yiddish newspaper article written by his own great-grandfather. The article detailed 22 murders of Jewish colonists in swift succession, all in the last decade of the 19th century. Why these people were killed—and what it says about the complex history of this once grand town—is the subject of Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll. Sinay joins us to talk about how a story from 100 years ago changed the way he saw his country, and his own relationship to Judaism.

Go beyond the episode:

Javier Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville
It’s never too late to connect with the language of your ancestors, as Phyllis Rose writes in “My Mother’s Yiddish”
Journey further afield into the driving forces of Latin America in our interview with Marie Arana
View historical images from Moisés Ville on our website

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#264: Medieval Madams

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 05:01:00 GMT

The codices and manuscripts of the Middle Ages are littered with the acts of kings and the edicts of bishops, full of tales of knightly romance and monkish devotions. Read between the lines, though, and you’ll find the women who made the medieval world run: bookkeepers and brewers, weavers and wine merchants, serfs and sex workers. They never got credit for it, and even their first names are often obscured by those of their husbands and fathers, but their lives were much richer and more varied than we have been led to expect. Eleanor Janega, who teaches medieval and early modern history at the London School of Economics, devotes her new book, The Once and Future Sex, to these ordinary and extraordinary women. Her analysis of the ways in which their lives were circumscribed shows how radically gender norms have changed—though not always improved—since the so-called dark ages.

Go beyond the episode:

Eleanor Janega’s The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society
On her blog, Going Medieval, read Janega’s take “On beer, or, why chicks rock” or peruse the index of medieval subjects
Janega’s podcast about the Middle Ages, “We’re Not So Different” considers “how we’ve always been idiots”
Smarty Pants has gone medieval itself: in this interview with Mary Wellesley about the ordinary lives in manuscripts, or this conversation with Jack Hartnell about physicality and the body
We also love The London Review of Books’s podcast miniseries, “Close Readings: Encounters with Medieval Women,” hosted by Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu

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#263: The Sensual Sargent

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 05:01:00 GMT

John Singer Sargent is often thought of as a quintessentially American painter. Born in Florence in 1856, he shuttled across the Atlantic, painting society divas and wealthy eccentrics, Venetian gondoliers and Spanish dancers, imbuing each of his canvases with a sense of life and movement beyond the frame. But in his new biography of the artist, The Grand Affair, Paul Fisher, a professor of American studies at Wellesley College, delves into the hidden half of Sargent’s life—the portraits of male models and the romantic friendships with men that he kept hidden. Fisher joins Smarty Pants to discuss what Sargent has to offer the contemporary art lover, and how our understanding of his work changed in the intervening century.

Go beyond the episode:

Paul Fisher’s The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World
Explore “Boston’s Apollo,” the 2020 exhibition at the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum devoted to Sargent’s late-life muse and model, Thomas McKeller
The National Gallery of Art’s “Sargent and Spain” exhibition is sadly past, but you can explore selected works online
Visit our website for a selection of the art discussed in this episode

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#262: Lost in Smog

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 05:01:00 GMT

In 2018, the novelist and poet Perhat Tursun disappeared into a Uyghur detention center somewhere in Xinjiang, China, where he is now serving a 16-year prison sentence for an unspecified offense. Between one and three million Uyghurs, including a number of academics, writers, and cultural figures, have been arrested by the Chinese government on similarly spurious or entirely opaque grounds. Tursun is the author of, among other works,The Backstreets, which never found a publisher in his homeland despite the success of his previous books. This extraordinary novel follows an unnamed narrator, who has left his rural village for a temporary office job in Urumqi, as he wanders through the night, the city smog, and his memories. The book was recently published in English, translated by the anthropologist Darren Byler and an anonymous co-translator, who was last seen in 2017 and is also presumed to be in a Chinese detention center. Byler, an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University and the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, joins us to talk about Tursun and his mesmerizing work.

Go beyond the episode:

Perhat Tursun’s The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang, translated by Darren Byler and anonymous
Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City
Read more about Tursun’s poem “Elegy,” translated by Joshua Freeman
The poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of Tursun’s closest friends, wrote about the crisis in his homeland for The Atlantic: “One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps”

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#261: Santa’s Slay Bells

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 05:01:00 GMT

For all the glühwein and good cheer, mid-December also marks the darkest part of the year, when families around the world gather to watch their favorite holiday ghost story: A Christmas Carol. Easily the most famous spooky Yuletide movie, it is by no means the only one: Black Christmas was arguably the first American slasher movie; the mischievous creatures from Gremlins squealed their way into many hearts in 1984; and the Alpine Krampus has more credits to his name than Santa has reindeer. For generations, the heart of winter—not Halloween—was when we told unsettling stories around the fire, whether they featured the ghosts of our own pasts or Gryla the Icelandic ogre and her evil Yule cat. This week on Smarty Pants, writer and director Kier-La Janisse offers a primer on how these stories have found their way onto the screen, from annual BBC television specials to big-budget Hollywood bloodbaths.

Go beyond the episode:

Kier-La Janisse’s Yuletide Terror, co-edited with Paul Corupe, is out of print, but her House of Psychotic Women, an “autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films” was just released in an expanded edition
Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a thorough history of folk horror, which makes its way to the holidays with movies like Krampus (2015) and Rare Exports (2010), and wintry tales like Marketa Lazarová (1967), The White Reindeer (1952), Hagazussa (2017), and November (2017)
You can watch the newest episode of the BBC’s anthology series A Ghost Story for Christmas on Britbox. Discussed in this episode: The Stalls of Barchester (1971) and A Warning to the Curious (1972), both based on M. R. James stories of the same name, and Stigma (1977)
Visit our website for a full list of links and trailers

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#260: By Land and By Sea

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 05:01:00 GMT

The line between land and water can take on so many moods: romance, danger, playfulness, despair; calm, or the storm that follows. In her first collection of nonfiction, A Line in the World, the Danish writer Dorthe Nors spends a year traversing the North Sea Coast, from where it meets the Baltic at Skagen, across the King River, and down to the nebulous Wadden Sea and Amsterdam. She describes her own life on the water, as well as the lives of others from the near and distant past. The Jutish ship that got stranded on the Vedersø dunes, spilling its cargo of tulips to bloom the next spring and leaving its captain to wed a local girl. The now-extinct matriarchy of Sønderho on the Island of Fanø, where women ran the village while waiting for their husbands to return from sea—or not. The empty space where Skarre Cliff used to jut into the water, and her father’s expression as he watched it collapse on television in 1978. In these 14 essays, Nors invites us into an inner landscape that can be as changeable as the borderlands she describes.

Go beyond the episode:

Dorthe Nors’s A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
Our introduction to her work was the darkly comic novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017
Watch the traditional dance of Sønderho described in the book—and then learn the steps
Tirpitz, the largest of the Nazi bunkers abandoned on the North Sea Coast has been turned into a museum

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#259: Girl Troubles

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 05:01:00 GMT

Michelle Gallen grew up in Northern Ireland’s County Tyrone amid the period of sectarian bloodshed known as the Troubles. By the time she left home for university in the 1990s, her town was neatly segregated, with Protestants sticking to their neighborhoods and Catholics to theirs. Gallen’s new novel, Factory Girls, takes place in a town much like this during the summer of 1994. While waiting for her final exam results, Maeve Murray lands a job at a shirt factory working alongside her best friends, Aoife O’Neill and Caroline Jackson—and a gaggle of Protestants. It’s the first time in their lives that the girls have spent time with “the other side” (let alone working under the thumb of a British boss). As tensions rise outside the factory, the temperature rises within it, too, and what started as a summer job ends up teaching—and costing—Maeve more than she imagined.

Go beyond the episode:

Michelle Gallen’s Factory Girls
Listen to Nicola Coughlan read Gallen’s debut novel Big Girl, Small Town
We do love Derry Girls, too
In 1993, Dolores O’Riordan wrote the most heartbreaking song about the Troubles: “Zombie,” which the Cranberries released in 1994 after the first ceasefire
There are dozens of books about the Troubles—we recommend starting with Richard English’s Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA

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#258: The Forgotten Radical

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 05:01:00 GMT

Whether it was to grandmother’s or grandfather’s house we went, most of us grew up with enough of the tune to get us “Over the River and Through the Wood.” Yet few know much about the poem’s author, Lydia Maria Child. A literary celebrity by the age of 23, she spent much of the 1820s publishing stories, fables, and riddles for young readers, in addition to her blockbuster first novels. But by 1830, Child became an early, and fierce, abolitionist, and in 1833 published one of the first book-length treatises advocating for the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans. How Child gained her convictions—and how she weathered the backlash—is the subject of philosopher Lydia Moland’s new biography, which brings renewed attention to Child’s incisive—and, until now, largely forgotten—critiques of racism and imperialism in 19th-century America.

Go beyond the episode:

Lydia Moland’s Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life
Read her essay “Freedom Tales” in our Autumn 2022 issue
Peruse our back catalog of conversations about the 19th-century: Hollywood influencer Elinor Glyn, the divorce capital of the United States, abortion, the Jerusalem of South America, Gilded Age cocktails, Russian spies in China, white women slaveowners, smells …

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#257: Roughing It

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 05:01:00 GMT

In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, five-acre lots of land go for less than $5,000, but protection against marauding cattle, blistering winds, and distrustful neighbors isn’t included. In 2017, Ted Conover began spending part of the year on the high prairie, volunteering with a local organization called La Puente, which tries to keep valley residents from falling into homelessness during the cold Colorado winters. Soon enough, Conover—who has previously explored the lives of prison guards, railroad tramps, and Mexican migrants—bought a parcel of land and immersed himself in life on this margin of society, where contradiction and conspiracy theories thrive. His new book, Cheap Land Colorado, is a window into a world that is too often overlooked.

Go beyond the episode:

Ted Conover’s Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge
Read “The Last Frontier,” Conover’s 2019 essay about the beginning of his experience
Our Autumn 2022 cover story explored another American margin: the wild ginseng hunters of Appalachia

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#256: The Abortion Underground

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 05:01:00 GMT

The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, codenamed “Jane,” performed an estimated 11,000 low-cost abortions in Chicago in the years immediately preceding the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Jane began in 1969 as a counseling service that connected people with doctors willing to terminate their pregnancies. But soon enough, its members started assisting with the procedures, and by the end of 1971, were themselves providing as many as 90 abortions a week in addition to basic gynecological care. None of the Jane volunteers—all of them women—were doctors. They simply believed that women should take reproductive care into their own hands, as they had done for centuries prior to the advent of bans on abortion. In The Story of Jane, activist Laura Kaplan tells the story of the legendary service, of which she herself was a member.

Go beyond the episode:

Laura Kaplan’s The Story of Jane
Watch Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’s 2022 documentary about the group, The Janes
You still might be able to catch the new feature film Call Jane, directed by Phyllis Nagy, in theaters
In December, the FDA permanently allowed abortion pills to be delivered by mail, which it had previously restricted
New underground networks are smuggling abortion pills north across the Mexican border into Texas and California, from which they can be mailed anywhere in the United States
Listen to “Free, Legal, On Demand,” our interview with Tamara Dean on the ubiquity—and safety—of 19th-century abortion
Listen to our interview with Scott Stern about the decades-long U.S. government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women

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#255: Tulsa 2022

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 04:01:00 GMT

In 1921, white citizens of Tulsa burned down the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, killing hundreds of residents, ruining dozens of businesses, and destroying a community of 10,000. For generations, the history was buried, surfacing only through the determined research of a professor here or a novelist there; it wasn’t until 2001 that the state of Oklahoma commissioned a report revealing the extent of the damage. One hundred years on, the Tulsa massacre is the most infamous of a number of 20th-century efforts by white mobs to destroy Black communities. RJ Young, author of the memoir Let It Bang and a Fox Sports analyst, offers his perspective in Requiem for the Massacre, both as a native Tulsan deeply embedded in its present and as a Black writer conflicted by the tone of the centennial events a year ago.

Go beyond the episode:

RJ Young’s Requiem for the Massacre: A Black History on the Conflict, Hope, and Fallout of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
For more history on the violence in Tulsa, read Scott Ellsworth’s The Ground Breaking; Cameron McWhirter’s Red Summer details the unprecedented anti-Black riots and lynchings of 1919
“How HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ Brought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to Life;” a descendent of the massacre reflects on watching the show
Just this week, even more unmarked graves were discovered in Tulsa’s Greenwood Cemetery

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#254: For the Love of Horror

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 04:01:03 GMT

Teenagers with knives, invading insects, vampire children, crazed surgeons, wronged actors out for revenge—the horror genre has a haunted house for everyone, no matter your taste. Despite treating women like disposable straws, or lumping the queer and disabled together as monsters, scary movies have long been celebrated by the people most likely to be before the opening credits are done. For this year’s season of scares, editor Joe Vallese asked 24 queer and trans writers to consider the horror movies that matter to them, from Halloween to Hereditary and all points in between. The resulting collection, It Came from the Closet, demonstrates the complicated relationship between the macabre and the marginalized.

Go beyond the episode:

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese
Read these essays from the collection: Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jen Corrigan on Jaws, Zefyr Lisowski on The Ring and Pet Sematary
If your taste runs to spooky books, too, we have several lists for that

Our host’s top horror picks, for every taste:

Not that scary if you’re trying to dip your toes into the genre: Les Diaboliques, The Devil Rides Out, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, The Cremator, Cure
Mild scares that come with a side of laughter: Sugar Hill, An American Werewolf in London, Throne of Blood, Rare Exports, Prevenge
Spooky silents, most memorably watched with a live score: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Häxan, Nosferatu
Beloved classics: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Alien + Aliens, The Thing, The People Under the Stairs, Candyman, The Wicker Man
Modern favorites: The Babadook, Get Out, Raw, His House, The Witch, The House of the Devil, The Descent
Underrated gems: Possession, The Appointment, Onibaba, The Lure, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Mother Joan of the Angels, It Follows

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#253: The Fantasy of Real Life

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 04:01:00 GMT

In 2018, the writer Ling Ma published Severance, which promptly won several literary prizes but only hit the big time in 2020. The novel follows Candace Chen, who continues to go to her unfulfilling job in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that slowly fills the world with slack-jawed zombies. You can guess why it was popular. This fall, Ma is back with a new collection of stories, Bliss Montage, which imagines a number of other surreal scenarios, such as a drug that makes you invisible, a dream job that just might open a literal door into a dream world, and a manual on Yeti lovemaking. One of Ma’s characters lives in an L.A. mansion with her 100 ex-boyfriends; another visits her husband’s homeland, where people bury themselves alive in an annual festival in hopes of curing their physical or psychic ills. Bliss Montage’s eight stories are, above all, about the fictions we tell ourselves to survive the delusions of modern life.

Go beyond the episode:

Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage
Read “Peking Duck” in The New Yorker and more about Ma’s time at Playboy
If you missed the pandemic boat: read Severance (if you’re an audiobook fan, Nancy Wu’s droll audiobook narration is perfect) and check out the Post45 discussion circle about the novel
Jeanine Basinger’s original formulation of the “bliss montage” in films, from her book A Woman’s View

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#252: Welcome to the Osmocosm

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Harold McGee’s 1984 book On Food and Cooking—revised extensively in 2004—changed modern cuisine, inspiring the molecular gastronomy of Ferran Adrià as well as the weeknight creations of humble home cooks everywhere. McGee’s latest book, Nose Dive, is a companion encyclopedia to On Food and Cooking, and it focuses on the most overlooked of our senses: smell. When we bring a fresh oyster or a glass of wine to our lips, what makes us detect minerality or grassiness? When did the molecules that we smell first appear? What happens to these volatile molecules when we transform our food, whether through cooking, fermentation, or some other process? Listen to McGee explain this universe of smells—which he dubs “the osmocosm”—and you’ll never breathe in the aroma of fresh-baked cookies the same way again.

Go beyond the episode:

Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells
If your copy of On Food and Cooking is also illegible from use—fear not! Copies abound, but be sure to grab the 2004 revision
McGee blogs at the Curious Cook
Get a whiff of 19th-century olfactory history in our interview with historian Melanie Kiechle
Imagine the future of food in our changing climate with novelist Alexandra Kleeman and chef Jen Monroe

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#251: Fifty Years of Song

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 04:01:17 GMT

In 2019, Joy Harjo was named the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, becoming the first Indigenous American to receive the honor. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Her unusually varied career has included painting, screenwriting, and playing the alto saxophone, as well as teaching and editing. Harjo is marking the occasion of her semi-centenary as a poet with two books: Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, which collects 50 poems for 50 years, and Catching the Light, a meditation on “the why of writing poetry.” Her work stands at the crossroads, evoking both the deeply personal and the shared experience of generations, and in it we find Creek spirits and missing women, creation myths and truck stops. Through it all, her voice is unmistakable.

Go beyond the episode:

Joy Harjo’s Catching the Light and Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years
Peruse her back catalog of books and music
Listen to our Read Me a Poem podcast

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#250: Ordinary Madness

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 04:01:00 GMT

There are so many things to fear in this world—water, choking, dark forests—and an equal number of things to obsess over—books, grief, things themselves. In The Book of Phobias and Manias, Kate Summerscale collects 99 such fixations, from the fanciful (hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a fear of long words) to the debilitatingly real (acrophobia, a fear of heights). No matter if dressed in Greek clothing (koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons) or bluntly named (social phobia), these obsessions account for many of today’s most common anxiety disorders. But Summerscale’s case studies, spanning 14th-century France to the contemporary psychology lab, reveal that our obsessions’ historical origins—and our fervor for categorizing our differences—tell us an awful lot more about modernity than our evolutionary past.

Go beyond the episode:

Kate Summerscale’s The Book of Phobias & Manias: A History of Obsession
Listen to our previous interview with Summerscale about The Haunting of Alma Fielding
Fear of the future is strikingly dramatized in Dorothy Macardle’s neglected Gothic tale The Unforeseen

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#248: Baba Yaga Comes to America

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 04:01:52 GMT

Somewhere among the dark forests of Eastern Europe, Baba Yaga, the crinkled crone of Slavic folklore, lurks inside a timber hut atop a pair of chicken legs. She hops through the woods, doing good or evil or just her own thing, depending on whom you ask. GennaRose Nethercott’s debut novel, Thistlefoot, reimagines the folklore of Baba Yaga in a contemporary American setting. Estranged siblings Bellatine and Isaac Yaga are brought together, somewhat unwillingly, by a surprising and mysterious inheritance: a sentient house on chicken legs, named Thistlefoot, who once belonged to their twice-great-grandmother, and with whom they embark on a cross-country puppet tour. But a shadowy figure from a century ago is stalking them, bringing the horrors of the Yagas’ ancestral shtetl with him. Nethercott is a writer and folklorist whose first book, The Lumberjack’s Dove, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She joins us to talk about the folktales and history that inspired her latest work.

Go beyond the episode:

GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot
Catch her on tour, with a live puppet show, this fall
Read the short story “A Diviner’s Abecedarian”
“Vassilissa the Beautiful” is one of the tales featuring Ivan Bilibin’s magnificent illustration in this collection of Russian fairy tales
Hear more Slavic folklore on our episode about the Snow Maiden

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. The music in this episode is “The Hut on Fowl's Legs,” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, performed by the Oslo Philharmonic with conductor Semyon Bychkov.

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#247: The Music of the Ancients

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 04:01:06 GMT

Imagine there’s a place where music exists as it was first created, thousands and thousands of years ago, a place where song and dance still glued communities together across generations. That place exists: Epirus, a little pocket of northwestern Greece on the border with Albania. There, in scattered mountain villages, people still practice a musical tradition that predates Homer. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Christopher King, an obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—who goes on an odyssey to uncover Europe’s oldest surviving folk music, and spins us some rare 78s.

Go beyond the episode:

Episode page, with R. Crumb’s original illustrations
Christopher King’s Lament from Epirus
Buy LPs, CDs, or MP3s of Chris’s Epirotic collections, from Five Days Married and Other Laments to Why the Mountains Are Black
Read Christopher King’s Paris Review essay, “Talk About Beauties,” about the lost recordings of Alexis Zoumbas
Listen to A Lament for Epirus (1926–1928) by Alexis Zoumbas on Spotify

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Other music in this episode graciously provided by Christopher King.

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#246: More Than a Mere Tastemaker

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Despite the rampant success of books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, intellectual circles tend to look down on anything that sells itself as self-help. And yet, in a certain light, the most original form of self-help might actually be philosophy—an older and more respected genre, even, than the novel. So this week, we’re going back to the past and asking that old chestnut: what is a meaningful life? The Stoics are awfully popular these days, but the philosopher Catherine Wilson joins us this episode to pitch a different kind of Greek: Epicurus, whose teachings live on most fully in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. For a few centuries, Epicurus was wrongly remembered as the patron saint of whoremongers and drunkards, but he really wasn’t: his philosophy is rich with theories of justice, empiricism, pleasure, prudence, and equality (Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, welcomed women and slaves into his school). Epicureanism advocated for a simple life, something that appeals to more and more people today with the return to artisan crafts, self-sufficiency, and, yes, the KonMari method.

Go beyond the episode:

Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean
Read A. E. Stallings’s recent translation of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things
Or read Karl Marx’s university thesis on Epicurus, “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”

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#245: The Butler Did It

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Long before the advent of true crime podcasts, 17th-century murder pamphlets sold like hotcakes in England, and dubious criminal “autobiographies” were sold at executions. On the eve of the 19th century, William Godwin published Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, identified by this week’s guest, Martin Edwards, as the “first thriller about a manhunt”—and a blueprint for how detective novelists would go on to construct the whodunnit. Edwards should know. He’s the eighth president of the Detection Club and the author of dozens of crime novels (and about a thousand articles about other people’s mysteries). Now he has written A Life of Crime, the first major history of the genre in more than 50 years, distilling two centuries of crime fiction from around the world, from the Golden Age of Agatha Christie and company to the realm of contemporary Japan.

Go beyond the episode:

Martin Edwards’s The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators
Read an excerpt here
We dare you not to snap up the entire collection of the British Library’s editions of Crime Classics, edited by Edwards, based on the covers alone
Three women stars of early crime fiction: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915; her 1862 book Lady Audley’s Secret was a “sensation novel” in every sense), Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935; her reputation as the “mother of the detective novel” began with The Leavenworth Case in 1878), and Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947; Alfred Hitchcock famously adopted her 1913 novel The Lodger to the screen)
Find a full suite of reading recommendations on our episode page
Further evidence that our host has a crime show problem

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#244: Don’t Forget the Death Workers

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Anglo-American attitudes toward burial have changed significantly over the past half century: today, most people choose to be cremated, and alternatives like natural burials and human composting are on the rise. Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, about the importance of getting your affairs in order, was a surprise bestseller, and American mortician Caitlin Doughty is but one of several popular YouTube personalities who speak about death. But largely absent from the conversations at so-called Death Cafes (coffee, crumpets, and the inevitable!) is any discussion of the people who devote their lives to caring for the dead. These death workers are the focus of Hayley Campbell’s new book, All the Living and the Dead. Campbell speaks to people doing jobs we tend not to consider: embalmers and executioners, of course, but also crime scene cleaners, mass fatality investigators, bereavement midwives, and others. What makes these people choose to surround themselves with death tells us a lot about what the rest of us lose when we relegate death to the shadows.

Go beyond the episode:

Hayley Campbell’s All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work
Read more about the Order of the Good Death, an organization of funeral professionals working to change attitudes about death
You can join the conversation at your nearest Death Cafe
Watch Caitlin Doughty’s series on your death rights (and listen to our interview with her about funerary practices around the world)

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#243: When Science Is Not the Answer

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 04:01:00 GMT

In pursuit of the natural laws of the universe, human beings have accomplished remarkable things. We’ve outlined the principles of gravity and thermodynamics. We’ve built enormous machines to dig into the deepest parts of the Earth, to understand what happens at the shortest quantum distances, and equally large machines to take pictures of the most distant parts of the cosmos. Still, there remain a number of foundational gaps in our knowledge—gaps that have allowed some wild ideas to take root. Some scientists hypothesize that, with every decision we make, our universe forks into multiverses, that consciousness arises from the quantum movements of microtubules, that the universe itself is conscious, or that there is this cat in a box and not in a box at the same time. These ideas, and related big questions about the nature of the universe, are the subject of particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Existential Physics. In it, she argues that many of these far-out theories, put forward without evidence, are on par with religious belief. Physics, she contends, does not yet provide the answers to all of our questions—and it’s doubtful that it ever will.

Go beyond the episode:

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions
And her previous book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
More questions (and answers) on Hossenfelder’s blog, Backreaction, and YouTube Channel, Science Without the Gobbledygook (or, you can try your hand at parsing her scholarly papers)
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are indeed impressive
For another physicist’s perspective, listen to our interview with Stephon Alexander about his experience as a self-identified outsider in the field

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#242: Mob Music

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Long before Wynton Marsalis arrived in the plush halls of Lincoln Center, jazz was often performed in far more dangerous venues. Greats like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday found their footing on the stages of America’s most notorious vice districts, where big players in the mob, such as Al Capone and Mickey Cohen, called the shots. In his new book, Dangerous Rhythms, journalist T. J. English explores the complexities of this corner of the underworld, where venues like the Cotton Club explicitly upheld the racial dynamics of Jim Crow America while simultaneously providing Black musicians with otherwise unavailable opportunities. But the emerging civil rights movement disrupted this “glorified plantation system,” as English calls it, just as it eventually upended both the music and the mob.

Go beyond the episode:

T. J. English’s Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld
Peruse his back catalog of books on organized crime
Listen to a playlist of songs to accompany the episode, and the book
You can still have a drink and listen to some tunes at Chicago’s Green Mill, which has a shrine to Al Capone
Other surviving clubs include the Village Vanguard in New York City and Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit (though beer is no longer 26 cents!)
Listen to Louis Armstrong playing with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band on “Canal Street Blues,” recorded in Richmond, Indiana, on April 5, 1923—and listen to more early jazz recordings now in the public domain
The song featured in this episode is “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” recorded by Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars in Chicago on December 9, 1927

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#241: The Original Influencer

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Picture the first “It Girl,” and you’re likely to imagine young, fun Clara Bow, sex symbol of the Roaring ’20s. But behind the frame is the woman who wrote It: Elinor Glyn, an English-gentlewoman-turned-Hollywood-screenwriter whose romantic novels inspired so much of the era’s glamorous aesthetic. Hilary Hallett, a professor of history at Columbia University, brings Glyn back into the spotlight in her new biography, Inventing the It Girl. Glyn’s story, like that of so many of her heroines—and unlike her contemporaries—begins after her marriage in 1892 to a spendthrift noble with a gambling problem. The blockbuster success of her scandalous 1907 sex novel, Three Weeks, catapulted her to literary stardom and, as it so often does, to Hollywood, where she worked on dozens of films and styled silent-era superstars like Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson. Hallett joins the podcast to discuss how Glyn paved the way for a century of sexual, romantic, and psychological independence.

Go beyond the episode:

Hilary Hallett’s Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood
Watch It, the “Elinor Glyn–Clarence Badger Production” that made Clara Bow a star in 1927
Meet more neglected Hollywood women: Dorothy Arzner remains the most prolific woman studio director in the history of cinema; start with Merrily We Go to Hell from 1932
Jean Smart will play a mostly accurate version of Elinor Glyn in Damien Chazelle’s upcoming film Babylon, about the decadence of the Roaring ’20s
Visit our episode page for more photographs of Glyn, including her scintillating turn as the Tiger Queen

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#240: Take Two Shots and Call Me in the Morning

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 04:01:00 GMT

The Pain Killer, the Penicillin, the Doctor—some cocktail menus lean heavily on the idea of “self-medication.” But for millennia, alcohol was medicine. Weak beer was safer to drink than water, and eau de vie was distilled from any number of fruits to treat colic or a cold. Though the ancient Greeks wrote at length about the medical applications of wine, even earlier uses for fermented beers and beverages appear on Sumerian tablets, Egyptian papyri, and Vedic texts. Cocktail connoisseur Camper English, who has been covering the drinks industry for more than 15 years, turns his attention to this long and storied history in Doctors and Distillers, which traces modern mixology back to its therapeutic roots.

Go beyond the episode:

Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails
Read English’s series on four bitter botanicals: cinchona bark, rhubarb root, wormwood, and gentian
English’s blog Alcademics has a wealth of cocktail-related articles, including how to make your simple syrup last for more than six months and how to dehydrate liqueurs (aka his Solid Liquids Project)
Ever had a drink with crystal-clear ice in it? Raise a glass to English, who discovered directional freezing in 2009

Camper English’s Preferred Gin & Tonic:

Keep your gin and tonic in the refrigerator for the crispest medicinal cocktail:

Start with a lime wheel at the bottom of a double Old-Fashioned glass and press down to express the citrus oil and a little juice
Fill the glass with ice, then add 3 ounces of gin
Top with 2 ounces of tonic water and gently stir
Resist the urge to add more garnishes!

And for the less gin-inclined, the Chrysanthemum:

Fill a mixing glass with ice
Add 2 ounces dry vermouth, 1 ounce Bénédictine, and 3 dashes of absinthe; stir until well-chilled
Strain into a coupe glass and garnish with an orange twist

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#239: You, Me, and the Deep Blue Sea

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 04:01:45 GMT

In Great Britain, some 3,000 villages and towns disappeared in the Middle Ages due to the effects of the Black Death alone. Zoom out on the time scale, then factor in storms and floods, economic or social shifts, climate change, and war, and the number of abandoned settlements balloons. The historian and broadcaster Matthew Green selected eight to visit in his new book, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages. From the mysterious Neolithic ruins of Skara Brae and the medieval city that fell off a cliff, Green takes us to the militarized STANTA villages of Norfolk and drowned Capel Celyn in the 20th century. As man-made climate change causes ever more extreme weather events and threatens to engulf our coastal cities, these places become more than a memorial to the past—but a harbinger of the future that awaits us.

Matthew Green’s Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages
And if you’re closer to London than we are, take a walking tour with Green featuring medieval wine, ghosts, gin, or coffee
There may be no more people on St. Kilda, but there sure are sheep: meet the Soay and Boreray breeds of this little land and buy some of their wool
Perhaps if you’re lucky, you too can spot the ruined spires of Dunwich on a tour of the Suffolk coast
Capel Ceylin and the STANTA villages are a precursor to our future in more ways than one: though it’s commonly said that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions, the military’s role as an obstacle to meaningful environmental policy is rarely mentioned. The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of oil in the world, and militaries around the world contribute some six percent of global emissions—though countries aren’t required to count armed forces data in their annual totals.
Visit our episode page for links to medieval primary sources—like the travelogues of the inimitable Gerald of Wales—and a map of all the places mentioned in the episode

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#238: How the Black Creek Lost Their Citizenship

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 04:01:00 GMT

The Creek chief Cow Tom was born around 1810 along the west coast of Florida. He survived the Trail of Tears, served as an interpreter between the Creeks and the U.S. government, and earned the title of Mikko, or chief, for his leadership of Creek refugees during the Civil War. In 1866, he served as an adviser during the nation’s treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. This treaty, in addition to banning slavery in the five First Nations who were party to it, granted full citizenship in the Creek Nation to Black Creeks who had been accepted into the community after marriage or had been previously enslaved by their Indian owners. Mikko Cow Tom was one of those Black Creeks. When he died in 1874, he bequeathed his considerable assets, including grist mills, cattle, and land, to his family—along with Creek citizenship and a degree of social prominence that was exceedingly rare for a Black family of the time. But in 1979, the Creek Nation expelled its Black members, and to this day refuses to recognize their citizenship. In his new book, We Refuse to Forget, journalist and Northeastern University professor Caleb Gayle tells the complex story of the Creek Nation’s ongoing reckoning with identity.

Go beyond the episode:

Caleb Gayle’s We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power
Read Gayle’s 2018 article on Damario Solomon-Simmons’s suit against the Creek Nation to restore Black Creeks’ citizenship
Solomon-Simmons lost the case, but in 2017 a U.S. judge ruled that Cherokee Freedmen had the right to tribal membership (a decision the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2021)
You can search the Dawes Rolls, which lists people accepted between 1898 and 1914 as members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw,and Seminole tribes. The Dawes Commission, pictured on our episode page, notably used blood quantum and race to define membership—which would sometimes vary within the same family.

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#237: Free, Legal, On Demand

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling immediately prohibited abortion in seven states, with 23 more either moving to make it illegal or likely to. At the heart of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in overturning Roe v. Wade is the notion that abortion is not “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” Since Roe was based on the 14th Amendment, Alito contends that we must consider the context in which the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. This week, to provide the context that Alito misrepresented, we are rerunning our interview with Tamara Dean about abortion in the 19th century, when it was common, and largely unprohibited. In the leather-bound death records of the county where Dean lives, only two abortions are mentioned, which she writes about in her essay “Safer than Childbirth.” The more common cause of death, Dean found, was giving birth. At the time, abortion was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Even the Catholic Church didn’t oppose ending pregnancy before “quickening,” usually around the fourth month, because no one believed that human life existed before a woman could feel the fetus move. Tamara Dean joins the podcast to talk about what gets forgotten in the contemporary battle over abortion.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Tamara Dean’s “Safer than Childbirth”
Watch Cecily Strong’s Saturday Night Live skit that captures the struggle to talk about abortion openly
Listen to our interview with Scott Stern about the decades-long U.S. government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women

Resources for those seeking an abortion, now or in future:

Before accessing any of these links, read the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide to digital privacy and security
Find out how to safely terminate a pregnancy at an abortion clinic at abortionfinder.org
Find an abortion fund that can provide financial support at abortionfunds.org
Medication to safely end a pregnancy can be mailed to you through plancpills.org
Get a prescription, in advance, for abortion medication in the mail through aidaccess.org
For guidance and support in taking this medication at home, call or text the Reprocare Healthline at 833-226-7821, and for confidential legal advice regarding abortion, contact the Repro Legal Helpline

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#236: Split City, U.S.A.

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 04:01:00 GMT

In 19th-century America, unhappily married couples faced divorce laws that varied wildly by state. Some states only allowed suits for “divorce of room and board”—but not the end of a marriage. In New York, divorce was permitted only in cases of proven adultery; South Carolina banned it entirely. But in South Dakota, things were different, and by the 1890s, people were flocking to Sioux Falls to take advantage of the laxest divorce laws in the country. In particular, the women seeking separation caught the most attention, as historian and senior Atlas Obscura editor April White writes in her new book, The Divorce Colony. These women—usually wealthy, almost always white, and trailing newspaper reporters—dared to challenge the status quo barely a generation after married women had won the right to own property, and well before they achieved the vote.

Go beyond the episode:

April White’s The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier
Read the Atavist article that started it all
Meet the women profiled in the book

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#235: The Joyce of Cooking

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 04:01:54 GMT

Today is June 16, Bloomsday, the day in 1904 on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place. But this year also marks the 100th anniversary of its publication, and to celebrate the occasion, The American Scholar asked five writers for their thoughts on Joyce’s modern masterpiece. One of them, Flicka Small, wrote about the food in the novel, from the inner organs of beasts and fowls that Leopold Bloom eats with relish to the Gorgonzola on his sandwich—not to mention Molly Bloom’s sensuous seed cake, Blazes Boylans’s suggestive peaches, and everything that Stephen Dedalus can’t afford to eat. Flicka Small came to her lectureship at University College Cork by way of her earlier career as a chef, giving her a singular perspective on the wild array of foods that appear on that famous day in Dublin, Ireland.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Flicka Small’s contribution to our Joyce centennial, “Know Me Come Eat With Me”
Read the other four essays: Robert J. Seidman on why Ulysses is as vital as ever; Keri Walsh’s celebration of the novel’s first publisher, Sylvia Beach; Donal Ryan on the three times he’s read it; and Amit Chaudhuri on just having fun with the flow
Bloomsday 2022 is on in Ireland and around the world
Whip up some pan-fried kidneys, a Gorgonzola sandwich, or some sugarsticky sweets
We borrowed the title of this episode from Alison Armstrong’s excellent 1986 cookbook, The Joyce of Cooking, which you can find in used bookstores

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#234: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 04:01:24 GMT

Humorist Sloane Crosley is best known for her witty essay collections, such as I Was Told There’d Be Cake and Look Alive Out There, both finalists for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her new book is a novel, Cult Classic—a mystery, romantic comedy, and conspiracy thriller rolled into one, with a sprinkling of mind control and A Christmas Carol for good measure. We first meet the novel’s heroine, Lola, as she sneaks out of a dinner with friends in Manhattan’s Chinatown for a cigarette and unexpectedly bumps into an ex-boyfriend. The next day, she runs into another one. Then another. What for many of us would merely seem like a bizarre series of uncomfortable encounters—or a personal nightmare—turns out to be something much stranger for Lola, who discovers that her very weird week has resulted from the machinations of a group that insists it’s not a cult. Sloane Crosley joins us to talk about love, psychology, and her new novel, Cult Classic.

Go beyond the episode:

Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic
Explore her back catalog
In case you seek a novel about love gone wrong ... we have you covered with these 14 bad romances

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#233: Once Upon a Time in Manchester

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 04:01:03 GMT

Most people who dig deep into their family histories tend to uncover the usual: an unexpected great-great-aunt, a familial home halfway around the world, maybe even a secret sibling. Hollywood producer Hopwood DePree found an ancestral English estate bearing his own name. But Hopwood Hall was falling apart, having sat empty since the Second World War and becoming the victim of age and vandalism. A visit to see the 600-year-old manor—and then another—and another—inspired DePree not only to try to save the hall, but also to trade movie scripts for a hard hat and move to Manchester. He describes his—and the house’s—journey in his new book, Downton Shabby.

Go beyond the episode:

Hopwood DePree’s Downton Shabby: One American's Ultimate DIY Adventure Restoring His Family's English Castle
Visit our episode page for vintage photographs of the Hall in its glory days
Experience a day in the life of the Hopwood Hall restoration efforts on DePree’s YouTube channel
Listen to our interview with Adrian Tinniswood on why so many English country houses are in ruins
Revisit the famed 1974 Victoria & Albert exhibition “The Destruction of the Country House,” or go visit Agecroft Hall and Gardens in Richmond, Virginia, one of several country homes dismantled and reassembled on this side of the Atlantic. In England? Visit Hopwood Hall itself later this month
Read Sam Knight’s essay about the National Trust’s recent report on colonialism and slavery: “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History”

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#232: Bird of America

Fri, 27 May 2022 04:02:00 GMT

Few birds enjoy the stature that the bald eagle has attained in the United States. It adorns our national seal, several denominations of currency, and T-shirts from coast to coast, with bonded pairs nesting everywhere from the National Arboretum to Dollywood. But not even 100 years ago, the bald eagle was hunted to the verge of extinction even while it was celebrated as a majestic symbol of independence. Children were taught that it was a threat to society or, worse, that it might kidnap and devour them. And just when we began to right our wrongs with the passage of the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, we nearly killed off our national symbol again with DDT. Pulitzer Prize–winner Jack E. Davis swoops through five centuries of history to tell the bird’s improbable story in The Bald Eagle.

Go beyond the episode:

Jack E. Davis’s The Bald Eagle
Peep bald eagle nest cams across the country
Smarty Pants loves birds: meet the caracara and the ravens of the Tower of London
Read Erik Anderson’s story of how a beguiling South American hummingbird ended up in the basement of a Pennsylvania museum
Watch Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, a 1908 silent short that dramatizes the (impossible) fear of an eagle carrying off a child

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#231: Life Is a Highway

Fri, 20 May 2022 04:02:17 GMT

Americans love their cars. But why? When did cars become so wrapped up in the idea of American identity that we can’t pull ourselves away from them, knowing full well that they’re expensive, emissions-spewing death machines? Why are we so wedded to the idea of cars that we’re now developing all-electric and driverless cars instead of investing in mass transportation? To answer some of these questions, we’re joined this episode by Dan Albert, who writes about the past, present, and future of cars, from Henry Ford’s dirt-cheap and democratic Model T to the predicted death of the automobile in the 1970s—and again, today. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Dan Albert’s Are We There Yet?
In our Summer 2019 issue, Steve Lagerfeld mourns what wonders might be lost with the end of driving
For more on how highways made modern America, read Albert’s essay “The Highway and the City” and more
Julie Beck reports on the decline of driving (and driver’s licenses)
An academic analysis of how different modes of transport shape urban travel patterns
For a deeper look at Tesla and Uber, Albert recommends Edward Niedermeyer’s Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors and Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (listen to our interview with Isaac here)
TimeOut ranks the 50 best road trip songs of all time (though we would have added Gary Numan’s “Cars”)

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#230: Crowdsourced Clairvoyance

Fri, 13 May 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Have you ever had a feeling that something bad was about to happen? Has it ever come true? On October 20, 1966, a young Welsh girl named Eryl Mai Jones recounted to her mother a dream in which she went to school and found it wasn’t there. “Something black had come down all over it,” she said. The next day, Eryl and 143 other people were killed when a pile of waste at a nearby coal mine collapsed and sent an avalanche of rubble into the village of Aberfan. After learning of Eryl’s dream—and others like hers—the psychiatrist John Barker teamed up with reporter Peter Fairley to establish a Premonitions Bureau at the Evening Standard newspaper to “log premonitions as they occurred and see how many were borne out in reality.” New Yorker staff writer Sam Knight tells the story of Barker’s experiment in his new book, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. Barker hoped that the bureau, which would receive more than 700 premonitions within 15 months (some of which proved true) might serve as a warning system for future calamities. But the gravest predictions that Barker received warned of his impending death.

Go beyond the episode:

Sam Knight’s The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold
Read the article that started it all: “The Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell the Future”
For just $183.45, this first edition of John Barker’s Scared to Death could be yours!
The Brits seem to have a thing for where the supernatural and the subconscious meet: listen to our interview with Kate Summerscale about The Haunting of Alma Fielding
Then again, so do we

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#229: The Intelligence Gatherers

Fri, 06 May 2022 04:01:29 GMT

Russia and China recently agreed to be partners “without limits,” but from the 17th to the 19th century, their relationship wasn't so warm. As Georgetown historian Gregory Afinogenov writes in his recent book, Spies and Scholars, pencil-pushing Russian bureaucrats posted in China or along the border doubled as spies. These career apparatchiks succeeded at gathering intelligence on the Qing dynasty from their quotidian positions at diplomatic offices, religious missions, and frontier outposts, though they never seemed to get much credit for their work. The irony is that while the intelligence they shared bought Russia greater prestige among European powers, these encounters with European ideals of intellectualism also radically changed what kind of “intelligence” was considered worthwhile. This episode originally aired in 2020.

Go beyond the episode:

Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power
Itching to learn Manchu? Check out the Manchu Studies Group, which includes examples of Manchu script
For 20th-century Russian spying, no one beats John le Carré, in life or fiction

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#228: New Name for an Old Ceremony

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Long before the current spate of legislation aimed at transgender people—and long before 1492—people who identified as neither male nor female, but both, flourished across hundreds of Native communities in the present-day United States. Called aakíí'skassi, miati, okitcitakwe, and other tribally specific names, these people held important roles both in ceremony and everyday life, before the violence wrought by Europeans threatened to wipe them out. In his new book, Reclaiming Two-Spirits, historian Gregory Smithers sifts through hundreds of years of colonial archives, art, archaeological evidence, and oral storytelling to reveal how these Indigenous communities resisted erasure and went on to reclaim their dual identities under the umbrella term “two-spirit.”

Go beyond the episode:

Gregory Smithers’s Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal, and Sovereignty in Native America
Read Smithers’s essay on the hidden history of transgender Texas
Watch Sweetheart Dancers, Ben-Alex Dupris’s short documentary about a two-spirit couple trying to rewrite the “one man, one woman” rule for powwow couples dances
Explore the speculative Indigenous fiction of Daniel Heath Justice
Cree artist Kent Monkman paints his two-spirit alter-ego into Western European art history

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#227: Indiana Absurd

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, translated by Tiffany Tsao
Read Tsao’s post in memory of Budi Darma, who died in August 2021
Check out these other Indonesian writers mentioned in the episode: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Umar Kayam, Chairil Anwar, Ajip Rosidi
Want to hear more about the art of translation? Listen to these conversations with German-English translator Susan Bernofsky, Bible translator Robert Alter, Malagasy writer Naivo and his translator Alison Cherette, and Tibetan-English translator Tenzin Dickie

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#226: Portrait as Performance

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:06:53 GMT

If you’ve ever been sucked into the world of Tudor England, whether by Wolf Hall, The Tudors, or one of the novels about Anne Boleyn, you’ve likely met Hans Holbein. Born in 1497, he learned to paint from his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, and went on to become arguably the finest portraitist of the 16th century. Now Holbein: Capturing Character, the first major show dedicated to the artist in the United States, is being held at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City through May 15. Smarty Pants jetted to the Big Apple to bring you on an audio tour of the exhibition with Austėja Mackelaitė, the Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator at the Morgan and a co-curator of the exhibition.

Virtually follow along our stops on the tour:

Erasmus of Rotterdam
Images of Death
Sir Thomas More
Richard Southwell (and preparatory drawing)
Simon George (and preparatory drawing)
Portrait of a Woman

Go beyond the episode:

Take a virtual walk through Holbein: Capturing Character
Read the first few sample pages of Hilary Mantel’s letter to Sir Thomas More
“The Story of a Stare Down”: Penelope Rowlands investigates how two antagonists from Tudor England ended up facing each other on Fifth Avenue
You should really (re)read the Wolf Hall Trilogy

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#225: Hashtag Lit

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 04:01:56 GMT

When we look back to what we imagine to have been the golden age of reading—say, before the invention of the smart phone—could it be that we’re really misreading book history? That’s what literary critic and Rutgers professor Leah Price argues in What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, using material history and social history to explore both how people read in the past and how most of us read today. Gutenberg printed more papal indulgences than Bibles, and until the past century or so, most reading was done aloud—in fact, too much reading was discouraged because of the deleterious effect it supposedly had on one’s character! Price joins us this week to discuss how, just maybe, social media and books aren’t enemies after all, but merely different forms of the same literary tradition.

Go beyond the episode:

Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
How does your Zoom background stack up against those on Bookshelf Credibility?
For those of us who always check out a new friend’s bookshelf first, look no further: https://bookshelfporn.com/
You could page through the British Library’s digital copies of Gutenberg’s Bible … or gasp at the papal indulgences he printed to pay for it
The Library of Congress has an entire digital reading room for rare books and special collections, including some wild medieval medical books
Need dinner ideas? Check out Martha Brotherton’s 1833 recommendations from Vegetable cookery, with an introduction, recommending abstinence from animal food and intoxicating liquors

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#224: No Place Is Perfect

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 04:01:55 GMT

When Thomas More wrote Utopia in the 16th century, he ensured that all those who would seek out a perfect society, inspired by his book, would have to answer for the literal Greek meaning of its title: “no place.” So, has there ever been a utopia? It depends on whom you ask. Adrian Shirk, who joined Smarty Pants several years ago to talk about her previous book, takes utopia to mean communities that “have intentionally understood themselves as world-building a way out of a death-dealing system, in the service of making, if only briefly, some idea of heaven on earth—not just for themselves, but however foolhardy, for all of humankind.” From that definition—and from the bop by Belinda Carlisle, of course—comes the title of her new book, Heaven Is a Place on Earth, an exploration of moments and movements in American utopianism then, today, and tomorrow, from the Shakers to the rebuilding of the Bronx to a Waffle House by the side of the road.

Go beyond the episode:

Adrian Shirk’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
Read essays that became part of the book: “A Brief History of American Utopian Communities,” “Odd Fellows at the Rockland Palace,” and “A Visit to Charlotte Street.”
Also mentioned: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
Even The New York Times is profiling the “new generation” of intentional communities
You can, of course, still visit the classics

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#223: The Promised Land of the Pampas

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Javier Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville
Visit our episode page for images from Moisés Ville
It’s never too late to connect with the language of your ancestors, as Phyllis Rose writes in “My Mother’s Yiddish”
Journey further afield into the driving forces of Latin America in our interview with Marie Arana
Scholar senior editor Bruce Falconer reported from a very different kind of religious community in southern Chile

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Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)

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#222: Sakura Fever

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 04:03:05 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Naoko Abe’s The Sakura Obsession
If you’re in Washington, D.C., you need not visit the (closed) tidal basin to view the cherries—here is a map trees blossoming all over the city
The National Park Service created a guide to the cherry blossom varieties in the city
Smithsonian’s list of the best places to see cherry blossoms around the world

Cherry varieties discussed:

Taihaku / Prunus serrulata taihaku / Great white cherry
Somei-yoshino / Prunus x yedoensis / Tokyo cherry

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#221: The Sound of Science

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 05:00:00 GMT

Bacteria made the first sounds on Earth, dinosaurs likely belched and bugled instead of roared, and for millennia, the Earth was largely silent. Why it took so long for communicative sound to emerge—and how it flourished into the coos, croaks, cries, and cacophony of today—is the subject of David George Haskell’s new book, Sounds Wild and Broken. While documenting the sonic marvels of the world, Haskell arrived at the alarming conclusion that we’re in an acoustic crisis. Manmade sounds and behavior are causing insects and songbirds to die out, disrupting whale song and silencing shrimp, creating stress in our own minority communities, and generating countless other aural ills. David George Haskell, a professor of biology and environmental studies at Sewanee: The University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow, joins us on the podcast to talk about why sound matters.

Go beyond the episode:

David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
Listen to more sounds from the book in this playlist
“The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” Brook Jarvis writes in The New York Times Magazine
Despite a 2008 U.S. Navy report in which it admitted that its sonar killed whales, whale beachings and deaths from military sonar continue even today
In The Conversation: “Urban noise pollution is worst in poor and minority neighborhoods and segregated cities”
See also: Scholar contributor Harriet A. Washington on environmental racism in A Terrible Thing to Waste
Explore the sounds of different decades and countries on Radiooooo, “the musical time machine”

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#220: Normalized Abortion

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 05:01:00 GMT

On December 16, 1876, a 35-year-old woman named Nancy Ann Harris died in rural Wisconsin of complications from an abortion. Only one other abortion is mentioned in the leather-bound death records of the county where Harris died and Tamara Dean lives, which she writes about in her essay “Safer than Childbirth,” in the Spring 2022 issue of The American Scholar. The more common cause of death, Dean found, was giving birth. With new challenges to safe and legal abortion coming hard and fast in recent years, it can be instructive to remember that, in the 19th century, abortion was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Even the Catholic Church didn’t oppose ending pregnancy before “quickening,” usually around the fourth month, because no one believed that human life existed before a woman could feel the fetus move. Tamara Dean joins the podcast to talk about what struck her about this one woman’s story, and what gets forgotten in the contemporary battle against abortion.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Tamara Dean’s “Safer than Childbirth”
Watch Cecily Strong’s Saturday Night Live skit that captures the struggle to talk about abortion openly
In December, the FDA permanently allowed abortion pills to be delivered by mail, which it had previously restricted
Listen to our interview with Scott Stern about the decades-long U.S. government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women

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#219: Immortal by Mistake

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 05:01:00 GMT

The birth of religion is commonly held to lie far back in human history, with the occasional exception of an angel Moroni or the borderline godhood of a cult leader. But in Accidental Gods, Anna Della Subin documents how a surprising number of 20th-century men (it’s almost always men) found themselves labeled divine, sometimes without their knowledge and nearly always without their consent. Some, like General Douglas MacArthur, were even crowned four different ways, on three separate continents. Subin joins the podcast to explore the urges that lead us to declare a mortal man a god, and what this desire tells us about modernity.

Go beyond the episode:

Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
Read “Philip’s People” in The London Review of Books
A corollary to the book: a brief history of objects turned into gods
Meet the balsa wood carving of General Douglas MacArthur from the Guna people of Panama

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#218: The Frigid Fringe

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 05:01:00 GMT

The North has been a blank, snowy canvas for our best and worst fantasies for thousands of years, home to biting winds, sea unicorns, fearsome Vikings, and even a wintry Atlantis. And it is also home, of course, to Indigenous communities, whose existence and culture could be inconvenient to myths of Aryan purity. Historian Bernd Brunner explores this curiosity cabinet of a region in his new book, Extreme North, translated by Jefferson Chase. Brunner argues that the North was as much invented as it was discovered by the European explorers, colonists, and armchair enthusiasts who ventured there. Encounters with the cultures of the North would inspire epic storytellers (Tolkien, Wagner), grifters (James Macpherson and his Poems of Ossian), racists (Hitler), and countless other complicated figures (Franz Boas, Nanook of the North). Brunner joins us on the podcast to explore the outer, icy limits of the known world and why it still has a hold on us today.

Go beyond the episode:

Bernd Brunner’s Extreme North, translated by Jefferson Chase
Full show notes on our episode page
Rosamond Purcell re-created the Museum Wormianum of Arctic curiosities
You can read all the extant Icelandic family sagas for free online
The Poems of Ossian has been called the “Harry Potter of the 18th century”—except the boy wizard wasn’t a literary hoax
How the handshake came to Nunavut
Why the top of the map faces north

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#217: Ode to Antwerp

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 05:01:44 GMT

Antwerp, the other port city on the North Sea, is frequently overshadowed by its Dutch big brother, Amsterdam. But long before the latter was dubbed the “Venice of the North,” Venetians—and Germans, Britons, Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, and others—flocked to Antwerp, the wealthiest European city of the 16th century and a huge beneficiary of the Age of Exploration. Pepper, silver, wool, sugar, salt, books, wine, and diamonds all passed through Antwerp in the complex web of trade spanning the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires, India, the Americas, and Africa. The city’s star burned brightly for a century, and then was snuffed out first by Spanish soldiers in 1576 and then the Calvinists in 1577. In his new book, Europe’s Babylon, Amsterdam-based writer Michael Pye brings Antwerp’s golden age to life in all its scandalous, sparkling glory.

Go beyond the episode:

Michael Pye’s Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age
Visit the episode page for images of the paintings described in the episode
See the shadows of the age with a visit to today’s Antwerp
A beginner’s guide to Belgian beer styles
Get to know genever, the Low Countries’ answer to gin and whiskey
Antwerp’s golden age of fashion came in 1986, with the Antwerp Six

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#216: Changing How America Eats

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 05:01:00 GMT

It’s hard to imagine an American city without a Chinese restaurant, a pizza parlor or three, and at least one taco joint. But the cooks who originally made American tastebuds salivate at the thought of a good stir-fry or a curry are hardly household names, even though their impact on our cuisine lingers. Mayukh Sen’s new book, Taste Makers, chronicles seven immigrant women, each from a different country, who transformed American cookery but have since faded from memory: Chao Yang Buwei (China), Elena Zelayeta (Mexico), Madeleine Kamman (France), Marcella Hazan (Italy), Julie Sahni (India), Najmieh Batmanglij (Iran), and Norma Shirley (Jamaica). He joins us on Smarty Pants to talk about why these women mattered, and why they have been unjustly forgotten.

Go beyond the episode:

Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers
Read excerpts from the book in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones
Get the full set of links on our website

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Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)

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#215: Murder, He Wrote

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 05:01:27 GMT

The third novel from John Darnielle, the creative force behind the band The Mountain Goats, draws on the surprisingly fertile combination of freeway towns, goth teenagers, Le Morte d’Arthur, and Chaucer. Devil House followstrue-crime writer Gage Chandler, who, at the urging of his editor, moves into the newly renovated “Devil House” of Milpitas, California, once an abandoned porn shop and the site of a grisly, unsolved double murder on Halloween in 1986. News clippings about the crime point to disaffected teenagers who transformed the old shop into a kind of clubhouse, replete with pentagrams, video art, and schlocky monsters, but no arrests were ever made. Gage struggles with the nature of his work and how to tell the story of Devil House fairly: “What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?” Darnielle joins the podcast to talk about Devil House, a novel less about the crime than the search for truth.

Go beyond the episode:

John Darnielle’s Devil House
Dip into The Mountain Goats’ discography (our host’s go-tos are usually Tallahassee, All Hail West Texas, and The Sunset Tree)
Mentioned in the interview: “Unicorn Tolerance” from the album Goths, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (read it all online or try your hand at deciphering the British Library’s 15th-century manuscript)

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#214: Strokes of Genius

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 05:01:00 GMT

Learning Chinese is intimidating: four tones, 3,000-odd characters or ideograms to carry on a basic conversation, a completely different orientation of words on the page … oh, and about a dozen languages classified as “Chinese” whose speakers wouldn’t understand one another. Becoming literate in any Chinese language was even more difficult at the turn of the 20th century than it is now. Then, no standard pronunciation system existed to get you started on the road to learning one of them. The story of how Mandarin won out—and how its tens of thousands of ideograms survived threats of colonization, simplification, and Romanization—is the subject of Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale. She joins us on the podcast to discuss the rebels, novelists, engineers, librarians, and fringe reformers who made modern Mandarin what it is today.

Go beyond the episode:

Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters
Something else that radically changed Chinese culture: modern art
Not all languages survive encounters with the West: listen to our interview with Don Kulick about the death of Tayap

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#213: Aww, Phiwosophy!

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 05:01:37 GMT

Between Hello Kitty, anthropomorphized Disney candlesticks, and the prevalence of doe-eyed sticker-comments on Facebook, it’s safe to say that cuteness has permeated everything. But what makes something “cute,” and how might there be something disquieting going on beneath all the sugar and spice and everything nice? The philosopher Simon May has spent a lot of time thinking about what cuteness has to tell us about the shifting boundaries between ourselves and the outside world, and how it plays with the dichotomies of gender, age, morality, species, and even power itself. After all, cute is adorable, and kind of harmless—but for all that, it’s also a little bit unnerving. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Simon May’s The Power of Cute
The sweet and sinister art of Yashimoto Nara
Art historian Elizabeth Legge wrote about Jeff Koons’s Baloon Dog and the Cute Sublime in her paper “When Awe Turns to Awww …”
And here is an entire book on Hello Kitty: Christine R. Yano’s Pink Globalization
For a primer on cute scientific research, see Natalie Angier’s article “The Cute Factor”

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#212: Good and Angry

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 05:01:15 GMT

According to the prevailing logic, America has an anger management problem: it’s counterproductive, destructive, and, unchecked, might lead you to storm the Capitol. But not all anger is made equal, and perhaps the best way to master its uses and abuses is to understand its differences. In her new book, The Case for Rage, University of California philosophy professor Myisha Cherry contends that this misunderstood emotion—wielded successfully in the past by figures like Audre Lorde, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ida B. Wells—can fuel today’s fight against racism. Cherry joins us on the podcast to discuss how to cultivate the kind of rage we need to make a better world.

Go beyond the episode:

Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage (read an excerpt here)
Read Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, “The Uses of Anger,” which inspired Cherry’s coining of the term Lordean rage
Listen to our interview with Pankaj Mishra about the ressentiment that fuels our Age of Anger
Down with the Stoics, up with Epicureanism!

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#210: Ho Ho Horror

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 05:01:59 GMT

A few years ago, we ran a special winter episode on the Snow Maiden, an adored figure from Slavic folklore. Today, we travel to Austria for an encounter with the Krampus. Each December, this devil clad in sheepskin and goat horns wanders the Alpine valleys of Bavaria and Tyrol. The Krampus lurks in other parts of Austria, as well—and some of his cousins pop up even farther afield in Eastern Europe—but the specter of this dark Christmas legend is strongest in the mountains. You might have met some version of him in the 2015 Hollywood horror movie Krampus or the 2010 Finnish film Rare Exports. But the real story of the Krampus is better than the movies. Here to tell us about it is Al Ridenour, host of the dark folklore podcast Bone & Sickle and the author of the book The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas.

Go beyond the episode:

Al Ridenour’s The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas
Listen to the Bone & Sickle podcast, co-hosted by Ridenour and Sarah Chavez
Looking for more winter folktales? The Snow Maiden awaits.
Rare Exports (2010) is our host’s favorite holiday horror flick
Krampus (2015) is not entirely true to the myth, but we love it anyway
And there’s always Santa slashers

This episode features an arrangement of “Carol of the Bells” performed and recorded by myuu.

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#209: How to Lose a War

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 05:01:33 GMT

Elizabeth D. Samet teaches English at West Point, where future Army officers learn how not to lose. There, as in any U.S. military setting, everything can be won—and should be won—unequivocally, whether it’s a sports match, an exam, or a war. But what happens when, as Samet writes in our Winter 2022 cover story, “The ambiguities of life are confused with the clarity of sport?” What are the stakes when the ambiguities of war are disguised by the very institutions sending young people to fight, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, on time scales that can be measured in decades? Samet, the author of the recently published book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, joins us to discuss the hazards of never owning loss.

The opinions expressed here are Samet’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

Go beyond the episode:

Elizabeth D. Samet’s Winter 2022 cover story, “The Art of Losing”
Read her new book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
Her past writing for The American Scholar expands on the meaning of Civil War monuments, the scourge of military sexual assault and the masculine code, and the long history behind the Army’s Jim Crow forts

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#208: Paleolithic Passions

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 05:03:52 GMT

Some time ago, the legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and Homo sapiens Charles Foster spent a few weeks in the woods trying to live like a badger, a deer, a swift, an otter, and a fox, hoping to understand animal consciousness. That book, Being a Beast, now finds its unlikely sequel in Being a Human, in which Foster attempts the perhaps more difficult task of reconstructing the human consciousness of millennia ago. He settles on three pivotal turns in our history: the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, and, far more recently, the Enlightenment. How does one escape the constraints of modern thought—of written language, digital technology, creature comfort—in pursuit of the origins of modern consciousness? Foster joins the podcast to report on his quest in the woods of northern England, and beyond.

Go beyond the episode:

Charles Foster’s Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, and Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide
For another complicating view on humanity’s adventures in and out of agriculture, check out David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything
Thinking in words has its perks: read Emily Fox Gordon on “How I Learned to Talk”
If our current era is an extension of the Enlightenment, as Foster argues, we might need to cling to our ideals of humanism a bit more in the struggle against social media, per James McWilliams in “Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie”

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#207: Spinning a Good Yarn

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 05:03:42 GMT

If you’re a person who has despaired over ever finding a nice 100 percent wool sweater and decided to knit your own, odds are you’ve heard of Clara Parkes. Parkes, who started out in 2000 with a newsletter reviewing yarn, now has six books under her belt, including the New York Times best-selling Knitlandia. Her seventh book, Vanishing Fleece, is a yarn of a different kind—the unlikely story of how she became the proud proprietor of a 676-pound bale of wool and, in the process of transforming it into commercial yarn, got an inside look at a disappearing American industry. Parkes journeys across the country from New York to Wisconsin and Maine to Texas. Along the way, she meets shepherds, shearers, dyers, and the countless mill workers who tend the machinery that’s kept us in woolens for more than a century, but which for the past 50 years has been on the verge of collapse.

Go beyond the episode:

Clara Parkes’s Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool
Peruse her reviews of yarn and other woolly wares on the Knitter’s Review website
Watch yarn company Brooklyn Tweed’s gorgeous video series on how woolen-spun and worsted-spun yarn is made—and how greasy fleece is scoured into clean, fluffy combed wool
Some of the woolly companies mentioned in this episode: Allbirds wool shoes, Farm to Feet wool socks, Catskill Merino yarn (the source of her 676-pound bale), Lani Estill’s carbon-neutral Bare Ranch, ElsaWool breed-specific yarns

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#206: Nature’s Pharmacy

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 05:03:17 GMT

Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University, searches for plants that may be used to treat life-threatening illnesses. Her lab has discovered compounds—found in chestnuts, blackberries, and a host of other plants—that can help treat antimicrobial resistance by stopping bacteria from communicating with each other, adhering to our tissues, or producing toxins. In her new memoir, The Plant Hunter, Quave discusses how a childhood staph infection and its lifelong complications motivated her deeply personal fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In her quest for new treatments, she has explored the rainforests of the Amazon, the mountains of Italy, Albania, and Kosovo, and the swamps of Florida. Quave joins us on the podcast to talk about how she discovered why and how plant-based folk medicines work.

Go beyond the episode:

Cassandra Quave’s The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines
Tune into her Foodie Pharmacology podcast
Explore (or volunteer with!) the Emory University Herbarium, which Quave curates
Read Ellen Wayland-Smith’s essay from our Spring 2021 Issue, “Natural Magic,” on modern medicine’s roots in alchemy, astronomy, and the apothecary shop
You may have noticed that Smarty Pants has a predilection for plants: some of our other favorite nature-centric episodes include an interview with plant psychology evangelist Lucy Jones, forestry legend Suzanne Simard, rewilding queen Isabella Tree, plant messiah Carlos Magdalena, and cherry blossom enthusiast Naoko Abe

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#205: People of the Parchment

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 05:02:07 GMT

Manuscript scholars have long marveled over the marginalia left in books, particularly handwritten books, and what the different layers of a text tell us about the people who made it. Look beyond the pages—to the bindings, the illustrations, the pages themselves—and a surprising material history reveals itself. Mary Wellesley, a tutor at the British Library, has written an ode to the ordinary people who wrote such manuscripts by hand, illustrated them, bound them, preserved them, and did all of the necessary labor to ensure that they survived the centuries intact, or perhaps only slightly nibbled by mice. She joins us on the podcast to talk about her new book, The Gilded Page.

Go beyond the episode:

Mary Wellesley’s The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts
You can flip through the only known copy of Margery Kempe’s autobiography on the British Library website
Or peruse Anne Boleyn’s elaborately illuminated Book of Hours, in which Henry VIII scribbled love notes, and her miniature girdle Book of Psalms:
Geoffrey Chaucer’s manuscripts are so well-known to us because they were great, yes—but also because of his social and financial standing. Listen to our interview with Marion Turner, author of the first biography of Geoffrey Chaucer in a generation

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#204: American Modernism’s Lost Boy-King

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 04:04:16 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Paul Auster’s Burning Boy
Read Steven G. Kellman’s review, “Poet of the Extreme”
Eager for a taste of Stephen Crane beyond the novels? We recommend The Black Riders and Other Lines and “The Open Boat”

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#203: The Sorceresses’ Amanuensis

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 04:01:29 GMT

Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel, Practical Magic, is the story of two sisters, Sally and Gillian Owens, who are born into a family of witches. The catch is that their ancestor, Maria Owens, cursed the family, so that any man one of them falls in love with dies an untimely death. It’s a classic fairy tale, and like most fairy tales it didn’t have a sequel—until this year. After going back to the 1960s generation of the family with The Rules of Magic, and all the way back to the 1600s with Magic Lessons, Hoffman returns this year to the present with the fourth and final story of the Owens family, The Book of Magic, which sees the youngest Owens, Kylie, maybe—finally—break the curse for good.

Go beyond the episode:

Alice Hoffman’s The Book of Magic, and her 40-odd other magical tales
The original trailer for Practical Magic, starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and the most beautiful house in Massachusetts
From New England to Catalonia, people are campaigning to memorialize—and legally pardon—the tens of thousands of people burned as witches
Read more about the Jewish pirates that sail into the Owens story in the 1600s

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#202: Bite Club

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 04:02:54 GMT

You may have heard of them before: those pale creatures with suspiciously sharp canines that sleep in coffins during the day, hunt people at night, and occasionally transform into bats. Stories of bloodsucking monsters have haunted humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years—but the modern vampire was arguably born when Enlightenment rationality met Eastern European folklore. That’s Nick Groom’s argument: he’s known as the Prof of Goth, and he makes the case that vampires rose from the grave at the same time that philosophy, theology, forensic medicine, and literature were beginning to question what it meant to be human. Why have vampires lingered in the imagination for hundreds of years? Nick Groom joins us on the podcast to open some coffins for answers. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Nick Groom’s The Vampire: A New History
The London Library reported that it located some of the dog-eared books Bram Stoker used during the seven years he researched Dracula
Watch the trailer for The Hunger (1983), in which David Bowie and Susan Sarandon both suffer the love of an immortal vampire
We are also fond of Only Lovers Left Alive (2014), in which a glamorous Tilda Swinton and a depressed Tom Hiddleston puzzle out their place in modern society
Here’s a montage of all the bite scenes from Christopher Lee’s classic turn in Dracula (1958)
And, of course, there’s always Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003), which inspired Slayage, a peer-reviewed journal from the Whedon Studies Association

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#201: Haunting the Homeland

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 04:02:48 GMT

Between 1947 and 1956, at least 77 recorded witchcraft trials took place in West Germany. Wonder doctors and faith healers walked the land, offering salvation to the tens of thousands of sick and spiritually ill wartime survivors who flocked to them. People hired exorcists and made pilgrimages to holy sites in search of redemption. The Virgin Mary appeared to these believers thousands of times. Monica Black, a historian at the University of Tennessee, found these stories and many others in newspaper clippings, court records, and other archives of the period that testify to West Germany’s supernatural obsession with ridding itself of evil—and complicate the conventional story of its swift rise from genocidal dictatorship to liberal, consumerist paradise. Black joins us on the podcast to describe the spiritual malaise lurking in the shadows: the unspoken guilt and shame of a country where Nazis still walked free. This episode originally aired in 2020.

Go beyond the episode:

Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted Land
There’s a three-part, five-hour documentary about the German mystic and faith healer Bruno Gröning on YouTube, presented by the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends, which is probably not the most unbiased source
National Geographic has compiled an extensive map of sightings of the Virgin Mary (note the big upswing in 1950s Germany)
East Germans also fell prey to the influence of West German faith healers: the preacher Paul Schaefer promised people salvation if they followed him to South America. Read Scholar senior editor Bruce Falconer’s 2008 essay, “The Torture Colony,” on the troubled (and Nazi-ridden) Colonia Dignidad

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#200: A Literary Love Letter to Egypt

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 04:01:46 GMT

In 2002, literacy was at an all-time low in Egypt, revolution was a few short years away, and Nadia Wassef opened an independent bookstore named Diwan in Cairo. With her sister Hind and her friend Nihal, Wassef built an oasis for lovers of the written word, whether Arabic, English, French, or German. Diwan now has seven locations—and two mobile book trucks—having survived recessions, censorship, misogyny, and political turmoil. Wassef joins the podcast to talk about the story of the store in her new book, Shelf Life.

Go beyond the episode:

Nadia Wassef’s Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller
If you’re ever in Egypt, visit Diwan
Read your way through Egypt with these recommendations in The Guardian
Dive into the golden age of Egyptian cinema, or watch Souad, the first film by a female Egyptian director to be screened at Cannes

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#199: The Late, Great, Country House

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 04:02:40 GMT

The English country house has been on the brink of ruination since at least the start of World War I—or perhaps the first chug of the Industrial Revolution—or was it the end of serfdom …? Propping up this dying, decadent institution has been a favored pastime of preservationists, architecture buffs, and earls for about as long as the institution has been around. In his new book, Noble Ambitions, historian Adrian Tinniswood peels back the wallpaper to show how these ancestral piles survived both World War II and the sunset of the British Empire—and in some ways, are more relevant than they ever were.

Go beyond the episode:

Adrian Tinniswood’s Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II
For the completionist, his previous book: The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939
Revisit the famed 1974 Victoria & Albert exhibition “The Destruction of the Country House,” or go visit Agecroft Hall and Gardens in Richmond, Virginia, one of several country homes dismantled and reassembled on this side of the Atlantic. In England? Check out Sudbury Hall, which gets a shout out in the episode
The first bestselling nonfiction book about the country house? Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House
Read Sam Knight’s essay about the National Trust’s recent report on colonialism and slavery: “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History”
If you haven’t yet, you simply must watch Downtown Abbey

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#198: Between the Sheets and In the Streets

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 04:01:42 GMT

In March 2018, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan wrote a provocative essay for the London Review of Books asking, “Does anyone have the right to sex?” Three years later, the essay forms the backbone of a bold new collection that probes the complexity of sex as private and political act, moving beyond the simplicity of yes and no and the hashtags of #girlboss feminism. Srinivasan joins the podcast to discuss the ideas that animate The Right to Sex, whether it’s pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, or pleasure and power.

Go beyond the episode:

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Read the essay that started it all: “Does anyone have the right to sex?”
Relatedly, her essay on pronouns: “He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita”
How many other philosophers have been profiled by Vogue?
Smarty Pants is no stranger to feminism: listen to our episodes on feminist book collecting, rock criticism, war, science, and religion
Listen to historian Scott Stern on the origins of criminalizing sex work, and read his essay, “Sex Workers of the World United”

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#197: Nature on Trial

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 04:01:09 GMT

A bear burrowing through the trash bin. Rats on a home invasion spree. Elephants barreling through Indian villages. Caterpillars munching through crops. Once upon a time these offenders would be put on trial and dealt with in a court of law, however ineffectually. Today, conflict management between humans and the natural world is an entire industry that grows with every incursion we make into the wilderness. Mary Roach returns to the podcast to talk about what it was like to be mugged by a macaque while working on her new book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.

Go beyond the episode:

Mary Roach’s Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
Flash back to 2016, when Roach was our very first guest
Yes: we really did put animals on trial, and it did not go well
Are the parrots of Western cities pests? San Francisco thinks not; Amsterdam disagrees
What to do when 30-50 feral hogs run into your yard (OK, but they are actually a problem)

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#196: Drawing in Young Readers

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 04:01:54 GMT

For many of us, our very first book wasn’t one that we read ourselves—it was one read to us, the pages pawed by grubby hands eager to flip back to a favorite illustration. The very best children’s books combine a good story—however simple—with enchanting illustrations that can spark a love for reading, writing, art—or all three. Elizabeth Lilly, the author-illustrator of a new book for children called Let Me Fix You a Plate, joins us on the podcast to talk about the process of inviting the littlest readers into a new world.

Go beyond the episode:

Elizabeth Lilly’s Let Me Fix You a Plate: A Tale of Two Kitchens and Geraldine
Read Scholar assistant editor Jayne Ross’s list of “10 Classic Books for Cooped-Up Kids” and her ode to the late Beverly Cleary
The science of how children learn to read, from linguist and Scholar contributing editor Jessica Love

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#195: Outsider Physics

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 04:01:00 GMT

The most groundbreaking ideas in modern physics—the Earth is round, special relativity, the uncertainty principle—were once seen as shocking, impossible, even deviant (recall Galileo’s trial). Even today, wild ideas can be laughed out of a conference, especially if they come from someone perceived as an outsider. Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander, one such self-identified outsider, joins the podcast to talk about his new book, Fear of a Black Universe, and his own experiences as a Black man in science who has made major contributions, “not in spite of [his] outsider’s perspective, but because of it.”

Go beyond the episode:

Stephon Alexander’s Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics
Read an excerpt from his first book, The Jazz of Physics
Listen to the whole of Here Comes Now, Stephon Alexander’s album with Rioux
Science writer Priscilla Long explains what’s so great about the Higgs boson
Medical doctor Robert Lanza steps out of his lane to propose “A New Theory of the Universe”
Jethro K. Lieberman bemoans the state of physics education in “The Gravity of the Situation”
Math and philosophy team up in Cristopher Moore and John Kaag’s exploration of “The Uncertainty Principle”

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#194: Skater Boy

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 04:34:19 GMT

As of this summer’s Tokyo Games, skateboarding is an Olympic sport—and those of us who didn’t grow up popping ollies and skinning our knees might be wondering how that happened. Originally known as “sidewalk surfing,” skateboarding was invented in midcentury California and Hawaii by surfers looking for something to do when the waves weren’t great. Since the first commercial skateboard was sold in 1962, the sport has ballooned to a billion-dollar industry including magazines, movies, and merchandise. Kyle Beachy, the author of The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life, and a devoted skateboarder and skateboarding critic, joins the podcast to explain how the pastime became a global sensation.

Go beyond the episode:

Kyle Beachy’s new book, The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life
Behold: skateboarding at the Olympics
For a taste of feature-length skate documentaries, try Dogtown and the Z-Boys (2001) or Minding the Gap (2018)

Three “high-reward skate films” recommended by our guest:

Mouse: Spike Jonze directs a street skateboarding video from the latter days of the so-called “golden era” of the mid ’90s. A perfect example of what the traditional “skate video” form can yield.
Paving Space: A 12-minute documentary about a collaborative art project between the Isle skateboard team and artist Raphael Zarka.
Atlantic Drift Episode 11: Jacob Elliot Harris has defined a style for his Atlantic Drift project, and this one, featuring his lifetime friend Tom Knox, reveals just how vital the relationship between filmmaker and skater-subject is.

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#193: All the Pretty Horses

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 04:44:54 GMT

Black Beauty, Flicka, Secretariat, National Velvet, Misty of Chincoteague, and all the rest—horse books are a genre unto themselves, occupying an entire shelf (or more, should you add the 112 books in The Saddle Club series) of girls’ bedrooms everywhere. For all of the girls who lived and breathed horses (on the page or in the barn), the infatuation meant something that is difficult—or even embarrassing—to explain outside of the stable. Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, the executive director of Electric Literature, smashes all the stereotypes you might hold about riders and the way they relate to their horses, with diverse essays from the literary likes of horsewoman Jane Smiley and aspiring horse girl Carmen Maria Machado.

Go beyond the episode:

Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond, edited by Halimah Marcus (read her introduction here)
“I Hate Horses” by T Kira Madden, excerpted from the book
“How Horses Helped My Ancestors Evade Colonizers, & Helped Me Find Myself” by Braudie Blais Billie, another excerpt
“Horse girl energy” (and all the memes) explained
Though during the pandemic many people turned to riding—during which riders stayed six feet apart long before social distancing—horse fever has a long history
Our host outed herself as a horse girl once before, in an interview with The Age of the Horse author Susanna Forrest

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#192: Age of Arthurs

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 04:07:16 GMT

If you were to distill the story of King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot down to its essence, you might alight on three nouns: Sword Stone Table. That’s the title of a new collection of Arthurian retellings, edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington, that imagines the legends of yore in a London coffee shop, a dystopian Mexico City, Anishinaabe country, and even on Mars. Krishna and Jenn Northington join the podcast to talk about the Arthurs, Merlins, Guineveres, Lancelots, Morgans, and more who populate the once and future land of our imagination.

Go beyond the episode:

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices, edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington
Reacquaint yourself with the magic of Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy
Even the BBC wants to know: King Arthur and Camelot—Why the cultural fascination?
The boy king is no stranger to television, but “good adaptations of the King Arthur myth to screen are far out-numbered by the unsuccessful ones”
A good one from the Arthur extended universe: The Green Knight

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Music featured from Strobotone (“Medieval Theme 02”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#191: Nature on the Brain

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 04:06:25 GMT

In her cover story for the magazine’s summer issue, Lucy Jones writes about “a renaissance of love for nature” that took place during the pandemic in the midst of so much isolation and death. Why is it, exactly, that going into nature is so therapeutic? Jones’s new book, Losing Eden, examines the wealth of scientific literature on the psychological effects of nature, from neurons to the whole nervous system. She joins us on the podcast to talk about her research into what we lose when we lose contact with nature.

Go beyond the episode:

Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul
Read her Summer 2021 cover story, “Rewilding Our Minds” and an essay in Emergence on “The Druid Renaissance”
A 2020 instance of a white woman calling the police on a Black birdwatcher sparked new studies and stories on the problems minorities face in parks and other public spaces, but racism in outdoor pursuits is nothing new. Groups like Outdoor Afro aim to make nature more welcoming.
Find solace (and food!) in foraging responsibly: @blackforager Alexis Nikole on Instagram, “Wildman” Steve Brill on your bookshelf, Falling Fruit on the map, meetups in your own back yard
Call us Smarty Plants: some of our other favorite nature-centric episodes include an interview with forestry legend Suzanne Simard, rewilding queen Isabella Tree, plant messiah Carlos Magdalena, and cherry blossom enthusiast Naoko Abe.

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

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#190: Here for the Beer

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 04:01:27 GMT

The experimental archaeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern, known casually as the “Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages,” and Sam Calagione, master brewer and founder of Dogfish Head Brewery, have spent years resurrecting the beverages of the past. In 2017, we sat down with them before an event at the Smithsonian to discuss what it takes to turn millennia-old booze samples at the bottom of a jug into mead fit for a king—or jiahu for an emperor—or tahenket for a pharaoh.

Go beyond the episode:

Try not to spill any beer on your copy of Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-Created
Explore Dr. Pat’s work on the intoxicating science of alcohol at the University of Pennsylvania Museum
Watch Patrick McGovern and Sam Calagione work on a recipe for a new ancient ale
And if you’re in the area … pop over to Dogfish Head Brewery to check out what’s on tap

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#189: Positively Sweaty

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 04:01:00 GMT

Love it or hate it, sweat is the reason why you don’t die of heatstroke in the summer—though you might want to die of embarrassment if you work up too much of it. But perspiration also contains a trove of secrets about our body’s inner workings, from sexy pheromones and disease markers to what we had for lunch. In her new book, The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration, science journalist Sarah Everts explores what it reveals about our biology and behavior, debunking overheated myths—and maybe even some stigma—along the way.

Go beyond the episode:

Sarah Everts’s The Joy of Sweat
Dip into the world of custom perfume, which can smell quite different depending on who wears it
Don’t cancel your gym membership, but do give your heart a workout in the sauna
Yes, you really do smell your hand after shaking someone else’s: here is the experiment with the videos to prove it
Try out the first “mail odor dating service”

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#188: Skin Deep, Only Deeper

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 04:05:17 GMT

For something that seems so simple, the act of adorning one’s face with a smudge of lip color or a flick of eyeliner can mean getting a promotion, getting home safely, and being taken seriously—or not. As journalist Rae Nudson writes in her new book, All Made Up: The Power and Pitfalls of Beauty Culture, from Cleopatra to Kim Kardashian, makeup has, for better or worse, shaped cultural narratives and standards of beauty for centuries. Red lipstick is patriotic—and it’s an act of protest—and it’s a sign of sex appeal—all depending on when you lived, and who and where you are. Nudson joins us on the podcast to talk about the choices we make when we wear makeup, and whether those choices are ever entirely ours to make.

Go beyond the episode:

Rae Nudson’s All Made Up: The Power and Pitfalls of Beauty Culture, from Cleopatra to Kim Kardashian
Nudson wrote about the camouflage paint industry and the the makeup mogul crafting the U.S. Army’s exclusive supply
Read more about Sabella Nitti, whose 1920s makeover saved her from the death penalty
For decades, women have been inspired by Elizabeth Taylor’s iconic blue eyeshadow from Cleopatra–which she applied herself
“Everything We Know About Beauty We Learned From Drag Queens,” writes Kristina Rodulfo in Elle

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#187: The Feminine Critique

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 04:01:52 GMT

In her 25 years as a music journalist, Jessica Hopper has profiled the doyennes of modern rock and pop music: Björk, Kacey Musgraves, St. Vincent, Liz Phair, Robyn, and many more. Her reviews run the gamut from the latest Nicki Minaj album and the “mobile shopping mall that is the Vans Warped Tour” to the only album by D.C.’s first all-women punk band, released three decades after they broke up. The new second edition of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic expands on the 2015 one. That the provocative (and mostly accurate) title still works six years later points out that rock criticism has even fewer women in it than rock music does. Hopper joins us on the podcast to discuss her writing, from her beginnings as a local Chicago critic to her expansive oral histories of Hole and the women who transformed Rolling Stone in the 1970s.

Go beyond the episode:

Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
Read “Building a Mystery,” her oral history of Lilith Fair, and her reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, 50 years on
Listen to her eclectic playlist of music that came out of Chicago
Hopper hosted Season 2 of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast, looking at artistic legacies of the likes of The Freeze and Cat Power

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#186: Shelling Out

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 04:01:00 GMT

If you were a small child who grew up near a coastline—or maybe especially if you didn’t—nothing was more enchanting about summer than collecting seashells on the beach. People have been using conches and scallops and whelks as musical instruments, jewelry, canvas, and even money, pretty much since we evolved enough to pick them up. But the future of seashells and the creatures who make them is uncertain. The smallest shells are dissolving in an acidifying ocean, and today mollusks that have survived 500 million years of ice ages and heat waves are facing an enemy undeterred by their hardened exteriors: humans, and the climate change we've created. Science writer Cynthia Barnett's new book, The Sound of the Sea, is a plea to listen to what shells are telling us, both about the ocean and ourselves.

Go beyond the episode:

Cynthia Barnett’s The Sound of the Sea (watch the book trailer here)
Listen to the haunting sound of the conch horn found in the temple of Chavín, and read about Miriam Kolar’s archaeoacoustic investigations into the instruments
Ever wonder how a mollusk repairs its shell?
Evolutionary biologist Gary Vermeij explains how to read a seashell
Probably most famous poem about a shell ever written: “The Chambered Nautilus” by Oliver Wendell Holmes

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#185: The Devils’ Books

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 04:01:00 GMT

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won’t ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs, Saddam Hussein’s hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family’s film theory. This show is about that kind of very long book, and the man who decided to read all of them: Daniel Kalder, who joins us on the show to talk about his journey through The Infernal Library and what these books tell us about the dictatorial soul, assuming there is one. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Daniel Kalder’s The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy
Dive into Turkmenbashi’s Ruhnama, if you dare.
Daniel Kalder reviews Saddam Hussein’s prose—he “tortured metaphors, too”—or you can read it yourself
Or check out Kalder’s dispatches from The Guardian’s “Dictator-lit” archives
While we couldn’t find a video of Fidel Castro’s four-hour-and-29-minute address to the United Nations in 1960, you can read it here

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#184: Listening to the Trees

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 04:01:00 GMT

Suzanne Simard, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forests and Conservation Sciences, has dedicated her life to mapping the relationships between trees: how they send nutrients to one another, remember the past, warn their neighbors of disease or drought, and support their offspring. Her new memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, tells how her work has unfolded from her first discoveries of mycorrhizal fungi in the “wood wide web” to the inheritance left behind by dying trees and the life-giving force of the largest elders. Simard used isotopes and mass spectrometers to quantify the Indigenous knowledge that inspired her to study the interconnectedness of forest communities—and our human ones. She joins us on the podcast to discuss what we might all learn from trees.

Go beyond the episode:

Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree
Read Miranda Weiss’s review from our Summer 2021 issue here
Explore the Mother Tree Project, an experiment on forest resilience in the face of climate change
Smarty Pants loves trees: listen to our interview with Isabella Tree on rewilding, Naoka Abe on cherry trees, and Carlos Magdalena on what life is like as the Plant Messiah

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#183: Has Electronic Dance Music Lost Its Soul?

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 04:01:00 GMT

In the past 30 years, electronic dance music (or EDM) has gone from underground culture to a global phenomenon. Journalist Matthew Collin drew on the British rave scene for his earlier work—a book called Altered State. But in the 20 years since that book came out, and even in the time it took to write it, EDM and its culture have completely transformed. The tunes on the radio and the DJs who put on giant shows in places like Ibiza look—and sound—very different from the originators of the genre, like the musicians who invented acid house in 1980s Chicago. Collin traveled around the world to figure out whether the EDM of today still holds onto its liberating roots—or whether commercialization killed the music. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Matthew Collin’s Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music
Read about the clash between techno fans and extremists in Tbilisi
Read some of the many effusive obituaries commemorating Frankie Knuckles, “Godfather of House Music”
Watch a trailer for the 1990 movie Paris Is Burning (streaming on Netflix) and the trailer for the 2017 film Kiki (available here)
Listen to the full tracks featured in this episode: “Can You Feel It” by Fingers Inc and “Halcyon On and On” by Orbital

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#182: Eat, Pray, Love Like an Ancient

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean
Read A. E. Stallings’s recent translation of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things
Or read Karl Marx’s university thesis on Epicurus, “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”

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#181: The Author’s Accomplice

Fri, 28 May 2021 04:01:00 GMT

If when you read a work of fiction you are never alone, since you can hear the voice of the author, then when you read in translation, you're in sort of a threesome. The translator, as Cervantes is said to have said, is there at the edge of the frame, revealing the other side of the tapestry. Susan Bernofsky has been translating from German into English for decades, focusing on the writers Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her latest book is a biography of Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, and she is now translating Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a (very) brief excerpt of which we published earlier this year. Bernofsky directs the literary translation program at Columbia’s School of the Arts. She joins us on the podcast to talk about the joys and struggles of bringing another writer’s words into English.

Go beyond the episode:

Susan Bernofsky’s latest book is Clairvoyant of the Small, a biography of Robert Walser
You can find her translations on her website and on her long-running blog, Translationista
Subscribe to the magazine to read an excerpt from The Magic Mountain
The Bible was translated, too: listen to our interview with Robert Alter
It took until 2017 for a novel in Malagasy or a short story collection in Tibetan to be translated into English—and we talked to both translators

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#180: Two Parts Gin, One Part Sin

Fri, 21 May 2021 04:01:00 GMT

The first Gilded Age was a time of rampant corruption, the big business crooks of Tammany Hall, and lavish displays of wealth rivaled by abject poverty. It was also the period when America’s elite mastered the art of crafting the perfect cocktail. Though there were a few missteps along the way—including the Black Velvet, which included equal parts champagne and, disturbingly, porter—the era birthed the classic cocktails that we drink to this day. But what parties, what people, were around for the debut of the Manhattan? Or the martini, the daiquiri, the pisco sour? Cecelia Tichi, professor of American literature and culture at Vanderbilt University, tells all in her new book, The Gilded Age of Cocktails.

Go beyond the episode:

Cecelia Tichi’s The Gilded Age of Cocktails
Tichi mentioned a few other keepers of bartending history: David Wondrich, who wrote Imbibe!; and our own Wayne Curtis, who wrote And a Bottle of Rum and Neutral Ground, a long-running column on our website about all things New Orleans (including alcohol)
For a reminder on how to partake with class, Michael Fontaine graced the podcast last year to talk about his book How to Drink
Here’s a great article on how to rustle up vintage cocktail books, like Jerry Thomas’s 1862 classic, The Bar-Tender’s Guide
A few more how-to manuals to grace your bar: Mittie Helmich’s The Ultimate Bar Book, Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology, Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist, David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (which pairs well with Wayne Curtis’s great essay on reconciling Embury’s legacy with his bigotry)

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#179: Godmother to Poets

Fri, 14 May 2021 04:02:00 GMT

Each week on our sister podcast, Read Me a Poem, Amanda Holmes reads suggestions from listeners around the world. Recently, a listener requested a longer work by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry is not as widely known 40 years after her death as it should be. Holmes joins us this week to discuss why Rukeyser’s work speaks to her and then to read the long poem cycle “Letter to the Front,” written in 1944.

Go beyond the episode:

Listen to Amanda Holmes each week on the Read Me a Poem podcast
Read “Letter to the Front” by Muriel Rukeyser
Try not to chuckle as Rukeyser reads her poem “Waiting for Icarus,” written from the perspective of the ill-fated man’s wife
The Book of the Dead (1938), reissued in 2018 by West Virginia University Press, was written in response to the 1931 Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, in which hundreds of miners, mostly Black, died of silicosis. Rukeyser combined her own observations with trial testimony from the surviving miners’ lawsuit against their employer.
“In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory,” writes Sam Huber in The Paris Review, of Rukeyser’s “Poem” from 1968 that begins “I lived in the first century of world wars”

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#178: A Verray, Parfit Gentil Knyght

Fri, 07 May 2021 04:23:47 GMT

Geoffrey Chaucer was born a wine-merchant’s son in 1340s London. He survived the plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Rising, and an adolescence spent wearing tight pants in a rich woman’s house to become one of the most celebrated poets in English. In the first biography of Chaucer in a generation, historian Marion Turner makes the case that the man we think of as a great English poet was, in fact, a great European one. He was inspired by the literature of Italy, Spain, France, and elsewhere—but more importantly, he drew on his interactions with the people he encountered during his travels, and from the places he visited. For example, how did the frescoes of Florence give rise to the perspectives in The House of Fame? Did Chaucer’s visits to his daughter’s none-too-chaste nunnery influence the bawdy Nun’s Priest’s Tale? Marion Turner takes us back to the Middle Ages to find out. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life
Brush up on your Middle English with the Norton edition of The Canterbury Tales or The Riverside Chaucer

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#177: Between Science and Séance

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 04:02:00 GMT

On the eve of World War II, a young housewife named Alma Fielding found herself in the grip of a poltergeist hell-bent on flinging china through the air, toppling over dressers, and leaving no egg uncracked in her London home. Her case caught the attention of the Hungarian ghost hunter Nandor Fodor, whose tests at the International Institute for Psychical Research led to ever-odder phenomena from Alma: a bird flew from her skirts, beetles crawled beneath her gloves, stolen jewelry materialized on her fingers. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Kate Summerscale tells the story of an investigation that combines the supernatural and subconscious, revealing the very real anxieties of a changing society.

Go beyond the episode:

Kate Summerscale’s The Haunting of Alma Fielding
If you haven’t seen it yet, you must: Poltergeist
Also Carrie: because Alma’s story is in many ways a mashup of both
In a reversal of Alma’s story, the unexpectedly excellent Ouija: Origin of Evil follows a family whose fraudulent tricks end in real possession
In an earlier episode of Smarty Pants, “Scientists and Saints,” we covered women’s roles in American spiritualism and other fringe religions
Read Sudip Bose’s essay on how a séance lead a connoisseur of the occult to discover a lost Robert Schumann concerto

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#176: The Lingo of LOLcats

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 04:03:00 GMT

Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you responded to work emails solely using ?? Is ~ this ~ your favorite punctuation mark for conveying exactly just how much you just don’t care about something? Welcome, Internet Person—you’re using a different kind of English from the previous generation. But these conversational norms weren’t set on high, and how they evolved over the past decades of Internet usage tells us a lot about how language has always been created: collaboratively. Or, as Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch puts it, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” She joins us to analyze the language we use online and off—how it got this way, where it’s going, and why it’s a good thing that our words are changing so quickly. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet
Read her Resident Linguist column at Wired, formerly at The Toast (you may remember reading about the grammar of doge, perhaps? Much wow) or catch up on the Lingthusiasm Podcast
Phone calls have been supplanted by text messages—will voice texting be next? Or are the people using voice texting pointing out a fundamental lack, in language or keyboard support?
Inevitably, Godwin’s Law states, “as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” Read creator Mike Godwin’s explanation for why he created his counter-meme, and why, in the case of actual fascists, calling someone a Nazi is well within the norms of discourse
Peruse the LOLCat Bible or the Creepypasta Wiki, deemed worthy of archive by the Library of Congress (file under folklore)
If all these memes confuse you, you can always find your footing at Know Your Meme

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#175: Caracara, Caw Caw

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 04:01:00 GMT

Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th century; and modern falconers have used their understanding of language to train them to do dog-like tricks. The other nine species of caracara that span the rest of South America are just as odd in their own ways. In his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature, Jonathan Meiburg follows their unusual evolutionary path across the continent and describes his encounters with these birds over the past 25 years. He joins us from his home in Texas to introduce us to some new feathered friends.

Go beyond the episode:

Jonathan Meiburg’s A Most Remarkable Creature
Read an excerpt about Charles Darwin’s encounters with the bird
Meet Tina, the striated caracara who can “find Nemo,” and a crested caracara named Kevin
Here’s some footage of a flock on Saunders Island in the Falklands

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#174: Hope Against the Storm

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 04:04:00 GMT

So many tropical storms and hurricanes hit Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles that native residents talk about them as if they’re family members: “Who broke that window—Rita? Gustav? It wasn’t Katrina or Ike.” Rising sea levels and increasingly volatile storms bring other, no less harmful consequences, too: groundwater salinization, disappearing wetlands, decimated wildlife and fishing. The choice for people and animals in these places is stark: retreat or die. In her book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, environmental reporter Elizabeth Rush tells the stories of the life-altering changes happening right now in our own back yards. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Elizabeth Rush’s book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
Episode page, with a slideshow of Elizabeth Rush's photographs from the book
“The Marsh at the End of the World,” an excerpt from the book, published in Guernica
Read an excerpt from Rush’s previous work, Still Lives from a Vanishing City, on disappearing homes in Yangon, Myanmar, in Granta

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#173: Oh, Cruel Stagolee

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 04:01:00 GMT

Stagger Lee is “The Baddest Man in Town,” as poet and critic Eric McHenry writes in our Spring 2021 issue. The man behind the myth—“Stack” Lee Shelton—was a real person, who did many if not most of the things ascribed to him in song (except, perhaps, go down to hell and take over for the devil). The bar, the hat, the gun, all have become mainstays of African-American folklore in the 120 years since Lee made his debut in song. McHenry joins us on the podcast for a look into the life and legend of Stagger Lee, which he exhumed through newly digitized newspaper records and troves of archival recordings—including the conversation between an elderly St. Louis musician and a 1970s graduate student that plucked Lee from a rich oral history tradition and back into the written record.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Eric McHenry’s essay “The Baddest Man in Town”
Compare the oldest known lyrics (from 1897) to Mississippi John Hurt’s definitive 1928 version—or Nick Cave’s depraved one
Listen to our Spotify playlist of selected Stagger Lee renditions (here is the Beck cover mentioned)
Read this primer on murder ballads, which can be found in all sorts of musical traditions, from African-American songs like “Stagger Lee” that are arguable precursors to gangsta rap to white Appalachian songs that drew on a Scots-Irish tradition
Country murder ballads most often had women victims—which has led some female country musicians to flip the script

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#172: The Cherry Blossom Evangelist

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Naoko Abe’s The Sakura Obsession
If you’re in Washington, D.C., you need not visit the (closed) Tidal Basin to view the cherries—here is a map trees blossoming all over the city
The National Park Service created a guide to the cherry blossom varieties in the city
Smithsonian’s list of the best places to see cherry blossoms around the world

Cherry varieties discussed:

Taihaku / Prunus serrulata taihaku / Great white cherry
Somei-yoshino / Prunus x yedoensis / Tokyo cherry

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#171: Our One-Click World

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 04:02:00 GMT

In the past year of the pandemic, Amazon has added more than 500,000 jobs, mostly in its various warehouses. During the same period, more than 20,000 of its frontline workers tested positive for Covid-19. Their boss, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, saw his net worth rise by $67 billion. Amazon’s shadow extends beyond the warehouses, though, to the cardboard factories that supply its packaging, the local stores it’s crowded out, and the affordable housing that’s flipped to luxury condos near its headquarters. In his new book, Fulfillment, ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis uses Amazon as a frame to chronicle the widening gap between winner-take-all-cities and the regions left behind.

Go beyond the episode:

Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Read his piece in The New York Times, “Amazon and the Breaking of Baltimore”
German novelist Heike Geissler worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet—and wrote about the brutal experience in her novel Seasonal Associate
Learn more about the high-stakes fight for a union at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama; ballots are due for the first-ever warehouse-wide union vote by March 29

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#170: Women at War

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Women in wars on land and sea, whether queens or foot soldiers, rarely get their due—yet their lives are at least as interesting as their male counterparts’, not least because they had to leap through so many hoops to fight. Historian Pamela Toler wants us to know their names, and her book Women Warriors is a global history covering everyone from the Trung sisters, who led an untrained, 80,000-strong Vietnamese army against the Chinese Empire, to Cheyenne warriors like Buffalo Calf Road Woman, who knocked General Custer off his horse. There are at least a hundred killer screenplay ideas lurking in the history books—if only we bothered to look. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Pamela D. Toler’s Women Warriors: An Unexpected History
Read an excerpt about the Russian First Women’s Battalion of Death
Read Toler’s piece for us on Peggy Hull, the first woman accredited as a war correspondent by the U.S. military
Learn about the lady pirates time forgot, including one who gave birth in the middle of a sea battle (and still won) and Cheng I Sao, who negotiated a sweet retirement package with the Chinese government when the Navy couldn’t take her out
And meet Njinga, the West African queen who fended off the Portuguese (start at minute 21:30)

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#169: How to Be a Grown-Up

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 05:01:00 GMT

Once upon a time, you turned 30 and you already had it all: a spouse, a house, a job, and a passel of kids. But even before the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our lives, thirtysomethings’ expectations for their own lives were changing, both by choice and by necessity. Today, they’re getting married later if at all, having fewer kids, taking on more debt, and moving back in with their parents. Is economic upheaval and inequality the primary force behind these shifts? And why do traditional landmarks like getting married still exert such a pull on our psyches? Journalist Kayleen Schaefer conducted hundreds of interviews with researchers and millennials across the country to understand how this generation is redefining adulthood.

Go beyond the episode:

Kayleen Schaefer’s But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood
One landmark millennials do seem to be hitting? Burnout. Read Anne Helen Petersen’s essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”
Read Paula Marantz Cohen’s essay “This Side of Paradise,” or Edward Hoagland’s “A Country for Old Men” about the final landmark one traverses: seniority

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#168: The Many Faces of Aeneas

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Aeneid has a reputation: it’s the founding myth of Rome, used down the centuries to justify conquest, colonization, and the expansion of empire the world over. Although Virgil includes many voices in his epic, Aeneas’s is the one that tends to be remembered—and celebrated, especially by his putative descendant, the Emperor Augustus. But with her new translation of The Aeneid, classicist Shadi Bartsch reveals the many ways that Virgil undermines both the glory of Aeneas and the authority of collective memory, down to the very verb used to begin and end the poem. Bartsch joins us on the podcast to untangle how the story of Aeneas is actually many stories, all in conversation with one another.

Go beyond the episode:

Shadi Bartsch’s translation of The Aeneid
Read her essay in The Washington Post, “Why I won’t surrender the classics to the far right”
Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay “Lost Classics” reminds us that the study of ancient texts is the study of things that are no longer: lives, songs, stories, poems, memories, and the ordinary people who preserved their memory
In case you missed it: listen to our interview with historian Kyle Harper on the discomforting parallels between our current moment and the end of Rome

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#167: Red Star Avant Garde

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 05:01:00 GMT

So much of the story we hear about China today concerns Covid-19, or the economy—how over the past few decades, it has risen from poverty and ruin to become a global powerhouse. But there’s a story beneath the surface, of the artistic avant-garde that resisted rule from above and inspired generations of ordinary Chinese citizens to seek freedom of expression. From their countryside re-education posts to the abandoned warehouses of Beijing and the short-lived Democracy Wall, Chinese artists flourished at the edge of acceptability—until the entire edifice came crashing down with the Tiananmen Square massacre. Madeleine O’Dea joins us to talk about her book, The Phoenix Years, which follows the lives of nine contemporary Chinese artists to tell the story of how art shaped a nation.

Visit the episode page for portraits and archival images of the artists and their work.

Go beyond the episode:

Madeleine O’Dea’s The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China
Peruse the exhibition catalogue for the seminal 1993 Hong Kong show, “China’s New Art, Post-1989” (now out of print)
Guo Jian’s artist website
Xhang Ziaogang’s work on artnet
Aniwar’s work on Artsy, if you’re looking to buy
Listen to our first China-focused episode, “Unlikely Encounters,” for an interview with Julian Gewirtz the least likely visitor to the People’s Republic: Milton Friedman

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#166: What’s Happening in Myanmar

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:45:12 GMT

On February 1st, the Burmese military detained high-ranking officials of the National League for Democracy and the leader of the country, Aung San Suu Kyi. It was a coup, haunted by memories of past coups: 1962, when the military first seized power, and then 1988, when student-led protests against that government led to another coup that killed at least 6,000 people. In 2007, hundreds of thousands of monks protested in what became known as the Saffron Revolution, and the military cracked down again, arresting hundreds of people, some of whom still remain in prison. Despite that bloody history, today tens of thousands of people are returning to the streets as part of the so-called Civil Disobedience Movement. It feels like we're all waiting to see what will happen next. Is this the end of Myanmar's decade-long experiment with democracy, or could it be the catalyst for a new movement? To give us a better picture of where things stand, and how they've gotten to this point, we're joined by Columbia University anthropologist Geoff Aung, who has spent years working in Burma and has written about the country for more than a decade.

Go beyond the episode:

Read “The Lady and the Generals,” Aung’s 2016 analysis of the relationship between democratic reforms and economic justice; “Three Theses on the Crisis in Rakhine” on the Rohingyan genocide; and “Until the End of the World: Notes on a Coup”
Organized labor has been a strong presence at the protests so far—read an interview with a labor organizer in a garment factory
The story behind Naing Myanmar’s “Kabar Makyay Bu” (“We Won’t Be Satisfied Till the End of the World”), the unofficial anthem of the 8-8-88 uprising
Many protest videos are circulating on Facebook, including the page Civil Disobedience Movement
For ongoing coverage on the ground, check out The Irrawaddy
For more context on ethnic conflict in Myanmar, particularly the Rohingya, check out our 2018 episode, “Burmese Daze”

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#165: Home Alone, with 200,000 Friends

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 05:04:00 GMT

As we in the United States approach a full year of spending even more time than usual at home, and away from friends and family, we’re all a little bit lonely. But even though it might feel as if your immediate family and your pets are the only signs of life in your house—you're not as alone as you might think. The modern American house is a wilderness: thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants lurk in our floorboards, on our counters, and inside our kitchen cabinets—not to mention the microbes that flavor our food itself. The trouble with wilderness, however, is that we always want to tame it. Cleaning, bleaching, sterilizing, and killing the organisms in our houses has had unintended—and dangerous—consequences for our health and the environment. Biologist Rob Dunn, a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, joins us to impart some advice about how to graciously welcome these unbidden guests into our homes. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Rob Dunn’s Never Home Alone
Dig deeper into the experiments mentioned in the show, like the sourdough project or the world’s largest survey of showerheads
Cat people: track your cat to reveal its secret life—and what it brings into your home—in this citizen science project
More opportunities to participate in scientific research about everything from belly button ecology to counting the crickets in your basement through Your Wild Life

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#164: All in the Family

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 05:01:00 GMT

Every family has things they don’t talk about: those regrettable beliefs espoused by your great-grandmother, or why your uncles don’t speak to each other anymore. Sometimes these are remnants of the old social order, things that were considered shameful 50 years ago that are perfectly normal today (or the opposite). And sometimes, members of your family just happened to be small-time mobsters. The acclaimed writer Russell Shorto, author of such histories as Amsterdam and The Island at the Center of the World, always knew his grandfather and namesake was involved with the Italian mafia, but Shorto never quite got around to digging up the whole tale until now. He joins us on the podcast to discuss his new memoir, Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob.

Go beyond the episode:

Russell Shorto’s Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob
Inspired to dig up your own family dirt? Shorto developed an online course called Tell Your Family Story
Itching for a history of the big-time mafia? Check out Thomas Reppetto’s American Mafia, John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra, or Salvatore Lupo’s History of the Mafia
And you can’t forget the movies: the British Film Institute ranks the 10 best mafia movies

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#163: Death in Papua New Guinea

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 05:07:00 GMT

The tiny village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea is home to an equally tiny language called Tayap. No more than a few hundred people have lived in Gapun, so no more than a few hundred people have ever spoken this isolate language, unrelated to any other on the planet. Our guest this episode, the anthropologist Don Kulick, has been visiting the village since 1985, at one point living there for 15 months to document the Gapun way of life, eat a lot of sago palm pudding, and study Tayap—which, even when he arrived more than 30 years ago, was dying. Today, only about 40 people speak it, and Kulick predicts that the language will be “stone cold dead” in less than 50 years. How did that happen? Perhaps more importantly, what cultural and economic losses paved the way? The answer might lie in the backward way we’ve been framing language death. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest
Kulick returned to Gapun one year—proudly bearing a copy of his new dictionary—only to learn that all of the village’s young men had possibly rendered themselves impotent
Explore these dazzling maps of the 851 individual languages of Papua New Guinea (including Tayap, listed as number 187)
Watch the arduous process of harvesting sago palm, a staple food in the country
National Geographic reports on various initiatives to save the world’s disappearing languages, including the Rosetta Project and Wikitongues

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#162: Looking In, Looking Out

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 15:36:23 GMT

As an artist and activist, Betty Yu has spent her career focusing on the community around her: Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where she was born and raised. Whether, as a member of the Chinatown Arts Brigade, engaging art galleries on their role in gentrification, or projecting tenants’ life stories on the sides of buildings slated for redevelopment, Yu’s work has stressed the connection between art and social change. But what happens when Covid-19 makes interacting with your neighbors life-threatening? Yu, who first began turning the camera on her parents’ family life in 2019, joins us on the podcast to talk about getting even more personal in the pandemic.

Go beyond the episode

Betty Yu’s website features a selection of film and videos exploring her family history
In our Winter 2021 issue, we ran a photograph from (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park, an ongoing multimedia installation about urban gentrification, which includes this short video about Yu's own story
Intimate / Distant, an interactive project documenting several generations of Yu's family
Videos from Resistance in Progress, a group show that opened during the pandemic

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#161: The Father of Art History

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 05:01:00 GMT

Giorgio Vasari has been variously called the father of art history, the inventor of artistic biography, and the author of “the Bible of the Italian Renaissance”—a little book called The Lives of the Artists. It’s a touchstone for scholars looking to get a peek at life in Michelangelo’s day, and quite fun, too, depending on whose wildly embellished life you’re reading. Ingrid Rowland joins us on the podcast to tell the story of the man behind the men of the Renaissance that we know so well—and, of course, to gossip a bit about Florentine egos, and even a few naughty monkeys. Visit the episode page for a slideshow of Vasari’s work.

Go beyond the episode:

Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney’s The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art
Page through a scanned 1568 copy of The Lives of the Artists on Archive.org (beautiful even if you don’t read Italian)
Explore the Palazzo Vecchio, which includes dozens of Vasari’s works, on the Google Art Project
Or take a hilarious video tour of the Palazzo Vecchio—which Vasari renovated and lined with his own paintings—with “Giorgio Vasari” (played by an actor far more attractive than Vasari was in real life)
Can’t book a ticket to Florence? The Uffizi offers a virtual tour of its halls, also designed by Vasari

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#160: A Solstice Send-Off

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 05:05:00 GMT

The Snow Maiden—not to be confused with the Snow Queen, Snow White, or Frosty the Snow Man—is a popular Slavic folktale about an elderly couple and a miraculous child born from snow. In addition to being a charming story about the passing of seasons, it references a number of folk rituals, from jumping over fires on the summer solstice to mock funerals marking the Yuletide. Philippa Rappoport, a lecturer in Russian culture at George Washington University, explains how folktales and rituals overlap, and reads aloud her own version of this wintry tale. This episode originally aired in 2018.

This is our last episode of the year, and we want to hear from you about what you’d like to hear in 2021! If there are any subjects or guests you would especially like to have on the show, send us an email at podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And, of course, help us find more listeners by rating us on iTunes and telling all your friends.

Go beyond the episode:

Read six versions of “The Snow Maiden,” classified by folklorist D. L. Ashliman as tales of “type 703,” or, relatedly, nine different spins from across Europe on “The Snow Child” (“type 1362 and related stories about questionable paternity”)
Watch the 1952 animated film The Snow Maiden, based on the Rimsky-Korsakov opera of the same name
Listen to Kristjan Järvi conduct an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Snow Maiden with the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#159: Pencil-Pushing Spies

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 05:03:00 GMT

The phrase “Russian spies” conjures up all sorts of Cold War thrills: hidden cameras, dastardly poisons, The Americans, John le Carré. But from the 17th to the 19th century, the best Russian spies were pencil-pushing bureaucrats along the long border with China, as Georgetown historian Gregory Afinogenov argues in his new book, Spies and Scholars. These career apparatchiks succeeded at gathering intelligence on the Qing dynasty from their quotidian positions at diplomatic offices, religious missions, and frontier outposts, though they never seemed to get much credit for their work. The irony is that while the intelligence they shared bought Russia greater prestige among European powers, these encounters with European ideals of intellectualism also radically changed what kind of “intelligence” was considered worthwhile.

Go beyond the episode:

Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power
Itching to learn Manchu? Check out the Manchu Studies Group, which includes examples of Manchu script
For 20th-century Russian spying, no one beats John le Carré, in life or fiction

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#158: If I Only Had a Brain!

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 05:01:00 GMT

The most unusual brains are not the largest, nor the ones that can remember the most digits of the number pi. What fascinates Helen Thomson—a neuroscientist by training, a journalist by trade—are the brains that see auras, feel another’s pain, or play music around the clock. In her new book, Unthinkable, she travels the globe to find out what life is like for these people who perceive a completely different world than she does. How does a man who believes he’s a tiger live in a human community? How can a father who believes that he’s dead go to dinner with his kids? What’s it like to be lost in your own living room? Thomson joins us on the podcast with answers that might teach you something about your own noggin. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable
Read her interview with a dead man—or at least, a man who thinks he’s dead
Scientific American lists 10 of the biggest ideas in neuroscience of the 21st century
Meet the scientists who discovered the brain’s internal GPS
Think you might be a synesthete? Take neuroscientist David Eagleman’s “Synesthesia Battery” questionnaire to measure your perception

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#157: I Will Not Make Any More Boring Podcasts

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 05:01:00 GMT

John Baldessari is one of America's best-known conceptual artists, noted for pieces that pushed the boundaries of art, language, and the idea of the image. His 1971 work, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, is perhaps his most famous; it was executed long-distance, for the cost of a postage stamp. Sierra Bellows, who wrote about the artist for our Winter 2021 issue, joins us on the podcast to discuss this seminal work as “an emblem of the Covid era”—particularly poignant given that Baldessari died in January 2020, just before the pandemic began.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Sierra Bellow’s essay, “Long-Distance Punishment,” from our Winter 2021 issue
Watch John Baldessari’s 1971 video edition of the piece and the 2012 short film A Brief Introduction to John Baldessari
View more of Baldessari’s works on his website, or at MOMA
Read Calvin Tomkins’s 2010 New Yorker profile of the artist

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#156: Sitting Down With Witold Rybczynski

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:01:00 GMT

A few years ago, Witold Rybczynski, one of The American Scholar's frequent contributors, happened to be coming to town for—of all things—a chair symposium. Not really having considered the chair as more than a functional object, we arranged to meet up at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to track down some classics of global chairmaking. And, of course, to sit in them.

Go beyond the episode:

Witold Rybczynski’s Now I Sit Me Down
On his blog, Rybczynski reviews quite a lot of chairs
Watch a video on the making of Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7 chair from 1955
Scope out Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair from 1929 at MOMA, or buy your own for the low, low price of $5507!

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#155: Four-Legged Friends

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Humans have been accompanied by horses for thousands of years. They’ve carried us across the plains, farmed our fields, marched us into battle, fed us, clothed us, soothed us—in short, done so much to make life a little easier. But the horse is tucked away in our history, always present but never quite center stage. Susanna Forrest’s book, The Age of the Horse, puts Equus caballus squarely in the spotlight, from our first encounters to the dazzling array of skills we’ve developed alongside them. This episode originally aired in 2017.

Go beyond the episode:

Susanna Forrest’s The Age of the Horse
Peruse her blog about horse history and news
Our host has definitely read every horse book on this list
Move over, Secretariat: the best horse movie of all time is Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron (2002)
For a dark, dreamy twist on equine friendship, watch Horse Girl (2020), starring Alison Brie

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#154: The Ghosts of Nazi Germany

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted Land
There’s a three-part, five-hour documentary about the German mystic and faith healer Bruno Gröning on YouTube, presented by the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends, which is probably not the most unbiased source
National Geographic has compiled an extensive map of sightings of the Virgin Mary (note the big upswing in 1950s Germany)
East Germans also fell prey to the influence of West German faith healers: the preacher Paul Schaefer promised people salvation if they followed him to South America. Read Scholar senior editor Bruce Falconer’s 2008 essay, “The Torture Colony,” on the troubled (and Nazi-ridden) Colonia Dignidad

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#153: Berlin Bops

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 05:01:00 GMT

When disaffected teens in East Berlin first heard the Sex Pistols on British military radio in 1977, they couldn’t have known that those radio waves would spark a revolution. In the DDR, or East Germany, everyday life was obsessively planned and oppressively boring. To be punk was to be an individual, someone who wasn’t having any of the state’s rules. That didn’t exactly endear punks to the Stasi, the DDR’s dreaded secret police. Punks lost their jobs and families, were spied on for years by their own friends, had their homes searched and trashed by the police, and were even thrown in prison for dissidence. But every time the state cracked down, the punks only fanned the flames of resistance, ultimately firing up a nationwide, mainstream protest movement. American writer, translator, and former Berlin DJ Tim Mohr joins us on the podcast to tell the story of how punk rock brought down the Wall. This episode originally aired 29 years to the day after it came tumbling down, November 9, 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus
For photographs of East German punks, peruse the online gallery for the exhibition Ostpunk! Too Much Future
We’ve compiled a playlist of DDR punk songs—many of them demos or live recordings from the ’80s—which include hits from Namenlos, Schleim Keim, Planlos, and Müllstation, of varying sound quality
For something a little less scratchy, check out this 2007 remaster and rerelease of Feeling B’s songs from the Ostpunk era, Grün und Blau
If you understand German, check out the documentary Too Much Future: Punk in der DDR. Another good one, sadly only available on DVD from Germany, is Flüstern und Schreien, which was released in 1989.

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Music featured from Namenlos (“Alptraum”) and Schleim Keim (“Kriege machen menschen”). Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#152: Morbid and Misunderstood

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 04:01:00 GMT

About 50 books are known to exist in the world that are allegedly bound in human skin—and it’s possible that there are many more. Believe it or not, these dark books were not made by Nazis, serial killers, or occultists, nor were they churned out in a nightmare factory during the French Revolution. No, they were made mostly by doctors in the 19th century. How and why such books came to be is the subject of Dark Archives, by rare-books specialist and UCLA medical librarian Megan Rosenbloom. She’s one of the founders of the Anthropodermic Book Project, whose team has used a simple protein test called peptide mass fingerprinting to confirm that, as of October 2020, 18 books were bound in human skin. What sort of person would do this? How did they get away with it, and what does this ghoulish practice tell us about the clinical gaze? Megan Rosenbloom joins us on the podcast this week to discuss the history of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the evolution of medical ethics and consent, and the controversial question of what we do now with the very human remains of this grim legacy.

Go beyond the episode:

Megan Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin
Currently, the Anthropodermic Book Project has tested 31 books,
The first anthropodermic book to be confirmed using peptide mass fingerprinting was at Harvard’s Houghton Library; the same year, 2014, its other book suspected of having human skin binding turned out to be made of sheep leather
Explore the anthropodermic book collection at the Mütter Museum, which has the largest known collection (of five books)
Follow librarian Beth Lander’s quest to learn more about Mary Lynch, the woman whose skin binds three of those books
Si vous pouvez lire le français ... here is the story of a French edition of The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, the 18th book confirmed by the Anthropodermic Book Project

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) and Dead End Canada (“Witch Hunt”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#151: In Search of the Good Death

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 04:03:00 GMT

Caitlin Doughty is the death professional behind the Internet’s favorite show about death, Ask a Mortician, and founder of the Order of the Good Death, which works to overcome our culture’s anxiety about dying, grief, and the afterlife. She runs her own funeral home, Undertaking LA, which offers alternatives to traditional, formaldehyde-soaked approaches to burial. In her book From Here to Eternity, she travels the world in search of the good death, from Mexico and North Carolina to Japan and Bolivia, learning about the ways in which other cultures have approached the end of life. We originally spoke to her in 2017, digging in to the subjects of corpse interaction, alternatives to the casket, and what death means to her.

Go beyond the episode on our website: https://theamericanscholar.org/in-search-of-the-good-death/

Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity
Check out Landis Blair’s illustrations for the book on our episode page
Ask a Mortician all about coffin birth, ghost marriage, and the iconic corpses of the world on Caitlin’s YouTube channel
Read more about the Order of the Good Death, an organization of funeral professionals working to change attitudes about death
Virtually visit the high-tech Ruriden Columbarium in Tokyo, Japan with head monk Yajima Taijun

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#150: Do You Believe in Magic?

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Magic has gotten a bad rap for the past few hundred years: in our haste to become rational, logical creatures of the Enlightenment, we’ve disavowed magic of all kinds (and burned a few hundred thousand women as witches along the way). Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden wants to change the way we think about magic, starting with its definition: a connection with the universe that allows us to directly influence its workings. Gosden considers it the oldest and most neglected form of human engagement with the world, wrongly condemned by adherents of science and religion. His new book, Magic: A History, runs from the stones of prehistory to the apps on our smartphones to explore practices on every inhabited continent. What might we learn by considering the sentience of trees, or the connections between the living and the dead? Who is excluded from the hierarchies of religion or science? And might a 21st-century magic lead us to a better response to climate catastrophe?

Go beyond the episode:

Chris Gosden’s Magic: A History
We covered the darker side of the practice in a previous interview with Ronald Hutton about witchcraft
Our host’s guilty pleasure is reading astrologist Chani Nicholas’s sometimes eery horoscopes
One of the most profound forms of magic still practiced today is found in the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, especially the concept of the Dreaming (much confused by Bruce Chatwin and valued today by art collectors)
Or consider herbalism, which has been put to use in kitchens from prehistory to today, and has already led to significant pharmaceutical developments

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#149: Quoth the Raven

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 04:01:00 GMT

What’s spookier than the Tower of London, home to the ghosts of queens and the rest of Henry the VIII’s enemies? How about the half-dozen black ravens that inhabit it—without which, as legend has it, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall? Since there haven’t been dead bodies littering the Tower Green for centuries, someone has to keep the ravens alive—and that person is the Ravenmaster, Christopher Skaife. As a Yeoman Warder, Skaife is one of the custodians of the Tower’s rich history and traditions, and he joins us to offer a bird’s-eye view of his life among the ravens. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Christopher Skaife’s The Ravenmaster
Read an excerpt about the birds’ daily routine
Follow Merlina the raven (with help from the Ravenmaster) on Twitter
For more scary tales, read ex-Yeoman Warder Geoffrey Abott’s book, Ghosts of the Tower of London
For photographs that Skaife says “come very close to capturing the true majesty and mystery of the birds,” see Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens series
Behold, the funerals of crows
For one of the “best books in the world on bird behavior,” according to Skaife, see Nathan Emery’s Bird Brain, and for dozens more recommended books on the Tower and its inhabitants, see the “Suggested Reading” section at the back of The Ravenmaster

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Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#148: Meet the Dean of American Cooking

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 04:01:00 GMT

If you’ve ever made a salad from tender greens picked up from the farmers’ market, slurped an oyster cultivated at a regenerative farm, or sliced into a hearty loaf of rye bread—then raise a glass of California wine to James Beard, the dean of American cooking. For more than 35 years and in nearly two dozen cookbooks, Beard swept aside stuffy imported notions of epicurean haute cuisine on the one hand and processed and freezer food on the other to reveal the real flavors that were available to American cooks: ham from Kentucky hogs, old-world loaves from immigrant bakeries, obscure Washington apples. As John Birdsall writes in the first biography of the chef in more than 25 years, Beard “remembered what food tasted like before supermarkets killed off local butchers and produce stands”—and he spent his whole life trying to share that memory with the public. But while he gave home cooks permission to put pleasure and flavor at the center of the American table, Beard kept his own struggles with self-doubt and his sexual identity in the closet (while winking at his own persona as a “gastronomic gigolo” in his books). Birdsall’s biography, The Man Who Ate Too Much, explores the paradox of Beard’s life as a beloved national figure who kept so much of himself hidden, “a man on a lonely coast who told us we could find meaning and comfort by embracing pleasure.”

Go beyond the episode:

John Birdsall’s The Man Who Ate Too Much
Read his first essay on James Beard in Lucky Peach (RIP), “America, Your Food Is So Gay”
Watch the PBS American Masters documentary of Beard’s life, America’s First Foodie
Chefs like Alice Waters took Beard’s lessons for the home cook to the restaurant kitchen, as she recalls in this clip
Watch some moments from his short-lived show, I Love to Eat
Check out one of our favorite James Beard cookbooks, Beard on Bread, which still holds up.

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#147: Who’s the Nerd Now?

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole scenes from Star Trek? If so, then good news: it might have taken a few broken eyeglasses and shoves in high school, but geek culture has finally triumphed. Dragons are cool, Star Wars has never had more fans, and everyone is geeking out over the latest sci-fi release on Netflix. How did this happen? And how have the changing demographics of geekdom affected it, for better or worse? Lifelong nerd and critic A. D. Jameson, whose geek cred is stronger than the Force itself, joins us to figure it out. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

A. D. Jameson’s I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
Read A. D. Jameson and Justin Roman’s article on sexism in gaming, “If Magic: The Gathering Cares About Women, Why Can’t They Hire Any?”
For more on how franchises have changed Hollywood’s structure, check out Stephen Metcalf’s article, “How Superheroes Made Movies Expendable”
If you’re looking for an escape this holiday weekend, please binge watch Marvel’s Jessica Jones (reading a book would be fine, too)
Listen to the queer history of comics in our second podcast episode, “Superheroes Are So Gay!”

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#146: How to Save Farming From Itself

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMT

For decades, we’ve been filling our plates with fruit and vegetables from California’s Central Valley and with meat fattened by the golden fields of the Corn Belt. But the future of almonds and soybeans looks grim. Industrial agriculture yields massive crops, but in the process destroys its own foundations: groundwater and topsoil. In his new book, Perilous Bounty, journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott explores the contradictions in our food supply by narrowing his focus to these agricultural essentials—water and earth. He reveals a “quiet emergency” happening on our fruited plains, profiles the farmers adapting old ways to a new era, and suggests ways we might reimagine not only the future of food, but that of the people who grow, pick, and package it.

Go beyond the episode:

Tom Philpott’s Perilous Bounty
Read his Guardian essay, “Unless we change course, the US agricultural system could collapse”
Philpott’s recent reporting has focused on the meatpacking industry, especially poultry production
And his recent article for Mother Jones features none other than Rob Wallace, the epidemiologist we interviewed back in March on “How Global Agriculture Grew a Pandemic”
If you’re missing dinner parties (we are!) listen to this immersive episode with Alexandra Kleeman and Jen Monroe, who served a futuristic menu set 30 years into our climate crisis

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#145: How Architecture Shapes Our Emotions

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Everywhere but where we live—and maybe where you live?—it seems like things are slowly creeping back toward how they were before the pandemic, or at least slowly getting less awful. In New York City, the High Line is reopening a little bit more of its 1.5 mile length to a socially distanced public, bringing a few more blocks of that beloved, reclaimed railroad to visitors. So this week, we’re looking back to an interview from the spring of 2017, when we walked along the High Line with architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Her book, Welcome to Your World, is about how people experience the built environment, not just as individuals but as groups of people living together in cities or towns. She weaves together research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to explain how the buildings we encounter every day shape our feelings, our memories, and our well-being.

Go beyond the episode:

Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives
If you’re a New Yorker, plan your own (socially distanced) visit to New York’s High Line park

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#144: Jeremy Irons Reads T. S. Eliot

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent Millay boomeranging from heartbreak to revelry. Or T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Waste Land,” itemized the neuroses of unrequited love in “Prufrock,” and then turned around and set to verse the antics of cats like Growltiger and Rumpleteazer. You could say that the same range exists in the best of actors—like Jeremy Irons, who’s played everyone from starry-eyed Charles Ryder to Humbert Humbert himself. Irons’s iconic voice has lent itself to animated lions and audiobooks before, but now, he joins us to talk about perhaps his most ambitious project yet: narrating the poems of T. S. Eliot. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Jeremy Irons reads The Poems of T. S. Eliot from Faber & Faber and BBC Radio 4
Read more about T. S. Eliot’s life at the Poetry Foundation
May we suggest Juliet Stevenson’s portfolio of Jane Austen’s novels for your next road trip?
Listen for yourself: T. S. Eliot reads “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”and “The Waste Land”
On the other hand, we love W. H. Auden’s reading of “As I Walked Out One Evening” (and his collaboration on the Night Mail documentary)

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Excerpt of “The Rum Tum Tugger” used courtesy the BBC, which owns the production copyright.

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#143: Studying Stones

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:30:16 GMT

Twenty-five years ago, anthropologist Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within weeks of each other. “Soon after,” he writes in his new book, “I started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories—geological, archaeological, histories before history.” The Book of Unconformities is his meditation on the unlikely human stories unearthed in some of the oldest things in the earth—Manhattan marble, the Cape York meteorite, Icelandic lava, petrified whale blubber—and the questions they raise about the very nature of anthropology and memory itself.

Go beyond the episode:

Hugh Raffles’s The Book of Unconformities
Starting in the 9th century CE, Chinese philosophers began to study and collect gongshi, or scholars’ rocks
Behold the standing stones of Callanish
The Cape York meteorite is still part of the collection of the American Museum of Natural History
Outside Svalbard, a 17th-century whaling station became a crucible for processing whales—and the remnants of that isolated society are preserved in the solidified blubber on its shores
And read Neil Shea’s Letter from the Barents Sea, in which he traveled through the Svalbard archipelago in polar night

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#142: All the Fish in the Sea

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Journalist Anna Badkhen has immersed herself in the lives of Afghan carpet weavers, Fulani cow herders in Mali, and other people often ignored or forgotten—especially in the Global North. Yet our lives are entwined with others’ across the continents, and in ways that we may not even realize. Consider, for example, the dire situation in Joal, Senegal—the subject of Badkhen’s latest book—where artisanal fishermen are facing the consequences of an ocean depleted by climate change and overfishing. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Anna Badkhen’s Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea
“Magical Thinking in the Sahel,” an essay about gris-gris and good luck in the The New York Times
“The Secret Life of Boats,” a dispatch from Joal in Granta
A Voice of America video report on overfishing in Senegal
“Tackling illegal fishing in western Africa could create 300,000 jobs,” The Guardian reports
It’s not just West Africa: how territorial disputes have put the South China Sea’s fishery on the verge of collapse

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#141: This Is How an Empire Falls

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Living in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic feels like watching the sun go down on a crumbling empire. The world’s wealthiest country has experienced more deaths and suffered a greater economic shock than any of its peers. Staggering levels of unemployment and eviction are looming, not to mention a potentially chaotic November election. We can’t help but think back to our 2017 interview with classicist Kyle Harper, who in his book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, advanced a new theory about why and how the empire fell … under circumstances alarmingly similar to our own. Though the decline of Rome has been a favored subject of armchair theorists for as long as there have been armchairs, Harper's hypothesis points to many of the same problems we're wrestling with today.

Go beyond the episode:

Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
Read an excerpt from the book on how the Huns laid waste to the Eternal City
How we can learn from Rome’s experience with epidemics to contend with emerging diseases today
Pandemics should scare you: here’s how tropical diseases are on the rise in our own back yard
Our interview with epidemiologist Rob Wallace, who points to how climate change and factory farming led to the Covid-19 pandemic

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#140: I Want to Believe

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 04:06:46 GMT

Whether it’s Lemurians making their home on Mount Shasta, aliens alighting in the middle of Illinois, meat falling from the Kentucky sky, or cows being drained of blood in Oregon, accounts of unexplained phenomena are on the rise. Why have so many Americans opened themselves up to fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, even as our empirical understanding of the world has increased? Cultural historian Colin Dickey joins us on the show this week to talk about his new book, Unidentified, in which he traverses the country in search of the cryptids and conspiracies that have stuck with us for the past few centuries, evolving alongside the dramatic changes in our frontiers, scientific knowledge, and cultural mores.

Go beyond the episode:

Colin Dickey’s Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained
Read an excerpt from his previous book, Ghostland, about America’s haunted places
Learn about the Altamaha-ha, the sea monster of the Georgia coast
NPR gets in on the cow mute game in October 2019: ‘Not One Drop Of Blood’: Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon; Kansas reported a spate of the same phenomenon in 2016; the FBI investigated in the 1970s and concluded it was scavengers, but not everyone was convinced

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#139: The Oldest Living Music in the World

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Episode page, with R. Crumb’s original illustrations
Christopher King’s Lament from Epirus
Buy LPs, CDs, or MP3s of Chris’s Epirotic collections, from Five Days Married and Other Laments to Why the Mountains Are Black
Read Christopher King’s Paris Review essay, “Talk About Beauties,” about the lost recordings of Alexis Zoumbas
Listen to A Lament for Epirus (1926–1928) by Alexis Zoumbas on Spotify

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Other music in this episode graciously provided by Christopher King.

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#138: Twin Pandemics

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 04:01:00 GMT

As we enter month five of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, while many countries around the world slowly ease back into some semblance of normality, it can be difficult not to despair. Infection and death rates are rising, especially in states that rushed to reopen, and now some states that did open too fast are putting restrictions back in place. One of the few lights in the darkness has been Philip Alcabes, whose birds-eye view of the pandemic in essays on our website has paid particular attention to how its effects play out in the unequal society in which we live. His most recent essay, “Bodies and Breath,” connects Covid-19’s disproportionate effect on Black communities to the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests. The essay draws on the work of longtime Scholar contributor Harriet Washington, who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her writing on racism and medicine. We invited them to join us for a discussion about how public health cannot be divorced from the fractures in society.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Philip Alcabes’s essay “Bodies and Breath,” and his previous coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic
Harriet Washington’s latest book is A Terrible Thing to Waste, which considers the devastating effects of environmental racism
Read her cover story on how infectious diseases disproportionately affect the poor and minorities, “The Well Curve,” which was expanded into her book Infectious Madness

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#137: Preaching the Floral Gospel

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 04:06:46 GMT

When we talk about climate change and conservation, animals tend to steal the show. Yet the organisms whose extinction would affect us the most are actually plants. Horticulturalist Carlos Magdalena has become known as the Plant Messiah for his work using groundbreaking, left-field techniques to save endangered species. First captivated by the bogs and flowers of his native Spain, Magdalena has spent much of his professional life in greenhouses and laboratories—and traveling the world, from the Amazon to Australia—to resurrect plants of all shades. He joins us this episode (originally aired in 2018) to share his mission to change the way we see the flora around us, by spreading the good word about green things.

Go beyond the episode:

Carlos Magdalena’s The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species
Get a daily dose of flower power through Kew Gardens’s Instagram account
Check out images and background on the Café Marron plant at the Global Trees Campaign
Watch a clip from the BBC’s Kingdom of Plants, including a glimpse of Carlos tending to some water lilies
Read the wild story of how several samples of the world’s smallest water lily—the one Carlos saved—were stolen in a grand heist
Kew Gardens highlights other plants on the brink in this YouTube video

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#136: Read Me A Poem, Won’t You?

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 04:01:00 GMT

For the past year and a half, Amanda Holmes has been delighting readers around the world with The American Scholar ’s podcast Read Me A Poem. She has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives. So this week, we peer behind the curtain of our sister show, speaking with that voice that has been brightening all our lives with weekly poems.

Go beyond the episode:

View the Read Me A Poem archives on our website
Subscribe to Read Me A Poem: iTunes • Feedburner • Google Play • Acast
Read Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the Washington Independent Review of Books

Poems mentioned:

Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”
W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
Rabindranath Tagore, “Dungeon” and an excerpt from Gitanjali
Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”
Emily Dickinson,“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
Kamala Das, “Summer in Calcutta”
Toru Dutt, “Our Casuarina Tree”
Leonardo Sinisgalli, “Elderly Tears”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

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#135: Whale Song

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 04:01:00 GMT

It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest and oldest creatures of the planet is also the most mysterious. But whales have been around for 50 million years, and in all that time, we still haven’t figured out how many species of whales have existed—let alone how many exist today. How did these creatures of the deep get to be so big, and how did they make it back into the sea after walking on land? Most importantly, what will happen to them as humanity and its detritus increasingly encroach on their existence? The Smithsonian’s star paleontologist, Nick Pyenson, joins us this episode (originally aired in 2018) to answer some of our questions about the largest mysteries on Earth, and how they fit into the story of the world’s largest ecosystem: the ocean.

Go beyond the episode:

Nick Pyenson’s Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures
Take a 3D tour of the Cerro Ballena site, where dozens of intact whale fossils were found by the side of the road in Chile
Check out Phoenix’s website at the Smithsonian, where you can learn all about this right whale (to search for sightings of her, follow this link to the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog and enter “Whale Name: Phoenix” on the “Search for Individual Whales” page)
Explore the hidden lives of minke whales, who live in rapidly warming Antarctic waters
Tag along on marine biologist Ari Friedlaender’s trips to tag whales in the ocean(“extreme field science in action!”)
Listen to an incredible story about one woman and a baby whale on the “This Is Love” podcast
There are some amazing, tear-jerking whale videos on YouTube that we stumbled upon in our research for this episode. To get you started, here’s the story of how a whale saved biologist Nan Hauser’s life
The inimitable David Attenborough mingles his voice with the dulcet tones of humpback whale song in this clip from the BBC’s Animal Attraction
And listen to our interview with Marcus Eriksen, who sailed the Pacific on a “junk raft” to raise awareness about aquatic plastic pollution—one of the leading causes of death in marine creatures
We used whale songs in this episode that were recorded by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Check out their archive the “Sea of Sound” here.

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#134: Founding Falsehoods

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Farah Peterson is a law professor and legal historian at the University of Virginia School of Law. In her first essay for the Scholar, published in our Winter 2019 issue, she examined John Adams’s defense of eight British soldiers, charged with killing Crispus Attucks, an unarmed black man, on March 5, 1770. Despite how they have long been characterized, Adams’s arguments, she wrote, were hardly the ultimate expression of principle and rule of law. In our new issue, Peterson turns to yet another dangerous myth of the Revolutionary era: namely, that black Americans in bondage did not want to be free. Given the ongoing protests against police brutality, here and around the world, Peterson’s work feels all the more vital as we enter into a newly invigorated national conversation about race and how to rectify historical injustices.

Go beyond the episode:

Farah Peterson’s “The Patriot Slave”
And “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre”
Listen to our interview with Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in which she corrects the record on white women slave ownership

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#133: The Antebellum Feminine Mystique

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 04:01:00 GMT

This week on our website, we unlocked an essay that appears in our new Summer issue: “The Patriot Slave,” written by University of Virginia law professor Farah Peterson. In it, she explores the ways in which we’re still haunted by the dangerous myth that African Americans chose not to be free in revolutionary America. Peterson will be joining us for an interview next week to talk about her essay and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. In preparation, let’s revisit this episode from last year, in which the historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers revises another dangerous myth—namely that wealthy white women in the South were separated from the ugly reality of slavery both by their own disenfranchisement and their intrinsic sweet nature. Since women often inherited more slaves than land, they were deeply invested, in a social, moral, and economic sense, in the trade of enslaved people. A white woman could cordon off her property from her husband’s in a prenuptial agreement, preserve her right to manage her own property, and fend off her husband’s debtors in court. She also ensured the continued reproduction of the institution by engaging in the market for wet nurses who were often coerced into serendipitous pregnancies through sexual violence, and whose breast milk was then used to nurse white children. How does the power of women slave owners change our understanding of the relationship among gender, slavery, and capitalism in the 19th century? Why were these relationships obscured for so long?

Go beyond the episode:

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
Read Farah Peterson’s essay, “The Patriot Slave” about the dangerous myth that blacks in bondage chose not to be free in revolutionary America
Read the interviews with formerly enslaved people collected by the WPA, in the Library of Congress’s thorough online archive
And explore the complicated relationship that historians have had with these testimonies

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#132: Still Junk Science

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 04:01:00 GMT

With protests now in every state over the murder of George Floyd and ongoing police brutality, we're revisiting an episode from last year with the science journalist Angela Saini, whose work explains how scientific inquiry has been complicit in, or explicitly aligned with, racism and white supremacy. Despite the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2020, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us.

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#131: Reading Together, Alone

Fri, 29 May 2020 18:01:58 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
How does your Zoom background stack up against those on Bookshelf Credibility?
For those of us who always check out a new friend’s bookshelf first, look no further: https://bookshelfporn.com/
The Book of Kells is sadly offline right now, but you can learn about the hundreds of hours that went into digitizing it
You could page through the British Library’s digital copies of Gutenberg’s Bible … or gasp at the papal indulgences he printed to pay for it
The Library of Congress has an entire digital reading room for rare books and special collections, including some wild medieval medical books
Need dinner ideas? Check out Martha Brotherton’s 1833 recommendations from Vegetable cookery, with an introduction, recommending abstinence from animal food and intoxicating liquors

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#130: Cræft in the Time of Corona

Fri, 22 May 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Sure, you’ve gotten really into sourdough during quarantine—but have you ever thatched your own roof with grasses that you grew in your own back yard? Or spent hours researching the secret behind making the perfect haystack? Alexander Langlands has. The archaeologist and medieval historian has been on BBC shows like Edwardian Farm and Tudor Farm, recreating the life of yore, and his book, Cræft, takes DIY to a whole new level. Part how-to, part memoir, the book gets at not only what it means to make things with your own hands, but how this experience connects us to people and places across time. Also, how everyone should set fire to their leaf blowers.

Go beyond the episode:

Alexander Langlands’s Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Old meets new in this Pinterest board of traditional tools to complement the book
Watch Alexander Langlands re-create early 20th-century life on the BBC’s Edwardian Farm, preceded by Victorian Farm
Or there’s Wartime Farm, which returns an English estate to its condition during the Second World War
Can’t get enough of the BBC? There’s also Tudor Monastery Farm, featuring one of our past guests, Ronald Hutton

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#129: Spy Games and Secrets

Fri, 15 May 2020 15:08:45 GMT

Our guest this week is New York Times best-selling novelist Matthew Quirk, who went from being a reporter at The Atlantic to writing thrillers about government fixers and special agents. His latest book is Hour of the Assassin, about an ex-Secret Service agent who tests the security protecting public officials for weaknesses that might allow killers to break through. That is, until his latest assignment ends in … a setup! Quirk’s previous books have dealt with every manner of agent, from the FBI and special ops to con men and consultants. He joins us to talk about his approach to writing thrillers, how he avoids getting scooped by the news, and what fiction of all kinds has to offer us in dark times.

Go beyond the episode:

Matthew Quirk’s Hour of the Assassin
Read Quirk’s essay for Vox on how the Trump era keeps spoiling his books
We love John le Carré too: read senior editor Bruce Falconer’s review of the master’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel
For an escape of a different kind, check out our editors’ favorite British detective shows

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#128: Trouble Brewing

Fri, 08 May 2020 17:38:14 GMT

Today, almost 90 percent of the world’s population is hooked on coffee or its most addictive component, caffeine. But 500 years ago, hardly anyone drank it, and the story of how coffee came to grace so many breakfast tables, office kitchens, and factory breakrooms speaks volumes about the very unequal world we live in. Our guest this week is Augustine Sedgewick, whose new book, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, uses the global history of the Hill family, a coffee dynasty in El Salvador, to unravel how societies, rural and urban alike, were recast in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately, that restructuring led to many of the inequalities we still see today between the global North that drinks coffee and the global South that farms it.

Go beyond the episode:

Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
Read his recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, “How Coffee Became a Modern Necessity”
Check out the recent documentary Black Gold, about the trading practices of multinational coffee companies

Commonplace Book, Celebrity Coffee Fan Edition:

“Without my morning coffee, I’m just like a dried-up piece of goat”—J. S. Bach
“I never laugh until I’ve had my coffee”—Clark Gable
“I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless.”—Napoleon Bonaparte
“Coffee: the favorite drink of the civilized world”—Thomas Jefferson
“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move ... similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”—Honoré de Balzac
“Among the numerous luxuries of the table ... coffee may be considered as one of the most valuable. It excites cheerfulness without intoxication; and the pleasing flow of spirits which it occasions ... is never followed by sadness, languor or debility.”—Benjamin Franklin
“Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.”—Isak Dinesen
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”—Albert Camus

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#127: Tropical Troublemakers

Fri, 01 May 2020 15:11:19 GMT

Sometimes, historical truth is so strange that it demands to be turned into fiction. Such is the story of William Sydney Porter, better known as the American short-story writer O. Henry. Before he made it big with tales about Magi gifts and the Cisco Kid, he embezzled some money in Texas and fled for Honduras, which at the turn of the 20th century had no extradition treaty with the United States. There, Porter observed the machinations of American robber barons that inspired him to coin the term "banana republic"—which also happens to be the title of a new novel by Eric Sean Rawson, a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California and our guest this week. Inspired by the true life and crimes of O. Henry, Rawson's novel vividly depicts the banana republics of the 20th century, and the troubled U.S. interventions therein, through the ironical, often drunken eyes of a fictionalized William Sydney Porter.

Go beyond the episode:

Eric Sean Rawson's Banana Republic
For more on real-life banana republics and the men who made them, Rawson recommends The Incredible Yanqui by Hermann Deutsch and The Fish that Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen
Explore the classic stories of O. Henry here

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#126: The Queen of American Folk Music

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 19:13:49 GMT

You may not know her name, but Odetta was one of the most influential singers of the 20th century: called “the voice of the civil rights movement” by The New York Times and anointed “queen of American folk music” by Martin Luther King Jr., himself. Our guest this week is music journalist Ian Zack, author of the first in-depth biography of Odetta, whose incredible voice rang out at some of the most pivotal moments in the struggle for African-American equality, including 1960s marches in Washington and Selma.

Go beyond the episode:

Ian Zack’s Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
Zack recommends that new listeners begin with of Odetta’s first two albums: Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues and Odetta at the Gate of Horn (or her lone rock album, Odetta Sings)
Or to get a feel for the effect she had on audiences, listen to a live album like Odetta at Town Hall—or watch her 1964 concert on YouTube

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#125: Here’s to Drinking at Home

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 04:01:00 GMT

In 1536, a now obscure poet named Vincent Obsopoeus published a long verse called The Art of Drinking, or De Arte Bibendi, filled with shockingly modern advice. Moderation, not abstinence, is the key to lasting sobriety, he writes—and then turns around and teaches us how to win at drinking games and give a proper toast. Joining us this week is the man who brought this sound advice to modern English—Michael Fontaine, professor of classics at Cornell University, whose newly rebranded How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing is the first proper English translation of Obsopoeus’s ode to mild inebriation.

Go beyond the episode:

Michael Fontaine’s How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing (read an excerpt here)
Read his series of posts on the Best American Poetry blog, run by friend of the magazine David Lehman: “We Have Sex Education. Should We Teach Drinking Education, Too?”, “What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger,” and more
Ready to pour one? May we recommend the sazerac, per Wayne Curtis, which Fontaine also recommends in his list of “Quarantinis” for drinking at home?

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#124: Dressing for Disaster

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes just how connected the world is, while, at the same time, circumscribing our individual worlds much more. How do we dress for these new circumstances, where our trips outside the house are limited to neighborhood walks and forays into the yard? Our guest today, Shahidha Bari, has been thinking deeply about how we interact with our clothes since long before the current pandemic. She’s a professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at the London College of Fashion and a fellow of the Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her new book, Dressed, is what you get when you cross a philosopher with a fashion critic. She writes about the feeling you experience when your feet are mercifully dry in a pair of yellow rain boots, or what the subtle pull of a tie can do to your spine and your personality.

Go beyond the episode:

Read an excerpt for Shahidha Bari’s new book, Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes
Follow these historical clothing accounts on Instagram for a bite of fashion history: @defunctfashion, @katestrasdin, @coraginsburg, @lagrossetoile, @tatterbluelibrary, @georgian_diaspora, @fidmmuseum, @museumatfit, @metconstumeinstitute, @the_art_of_dress

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#123: A Good Time for Opera

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 22:08:23 GMT

Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird … and at the end of the day, who really understands sung Italian anyway? The barriers aren’t just financial: there are hundreds of years of musical history at work, along with dozens of arcane terms that defy pronunciation. But opera has been loved by ardent fans for centuries, and the experience of seeing it—once you know what to listen for—can be sublime. So we asked Vivien Schweitzer, a former classical music and opera critic for The New York Times, to teach us how to listen to opera. This episode originally aired in November 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Vivien Schweitzer’s A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera
Catch a free nightly stream of a Metropolitan Opera production
Listen to the accompanying Spotify playlist
Ready? Find an opera performance near you by searching the National Opera Center of America’s database of upcoming offerings
Listen to the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts or catch it live in a movie theater near you
At The Guardian, Imogen Tilde explains “How to find cheap opera tickets”

Songs sampled during the episode:

“Possente spirito,” the first famous aria in opera, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo
“Pur te miro,” the first important duet in opera, from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
“Svegliatevi nel core,” an example of da capo aria and a rage aria, from Handel’s Giulio Cesare
The Queen of the Night’s first-act aria, an example of very high soprano notes, from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte
“O Isis und Osiris,” an example of very low bass notes from the same opera
“Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!” an example of very high tenor notes, from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment
“Casta diva,” an example of bel canto style of singing, from Bellini’s Norma
“Bella figlia dell’amore,” an example of ensemble singing from Verdi’s Rigoletto
The infamous Tristan chord from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (and here is the resolution of the chord, hours later)

For a taste of contemporary opera's eclecticism, here are three examples:

Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern by Helmut Lachenmann, an example of an opera with no actual singing
Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an example of minimalism
Saint Francois D’Assise by Olivier Messiaen, a composer who imitated birdcalls in his music

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#122: Coronavirus vs. the Urban Commons

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 04:01:00 GMT

One thing we’re thinking about at the Scholar as we’re all shut away, working from home, is how much we depend—emotionally and logistically—on contact with other people. As coming together in public parks, offices, arts hubs, and community spaces has become verboten in the age of social distancing, what will happen to the urban commons in cities? Amanda Huron, an associate professor of interdisciplinary social sciences at the University of the District of Columbia, was thinking about the urban commons long before we started longing for it. She joins us on the show for a conversation about what “the commons” is and how we can protect it in the midst of a pandemic.

Go beyond the episode:

Amanda Huron’s Carving Out the Commons and her other research
Read about the disappearance of our host’s beloved punk rock houses
“Our Cities Are Designed for Loneliness,” says Vice, while The Guardian asks, “What’s the world’s loneliest city?”
There’s even a Loneliness Lab working to fight the problem of alienation in cities
In an earlier issue, we wondered whether coffeeshops encourage conversation or isolation

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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#121: What Zombie Movies Can Teach Us About Viruses

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 04:00:00 GMT

In her book Going Viral, pop culture critic and film professor Dahlia Schweizer asks why, and when, outbreak narratives became such a part of our culture. She divides these narratives into three distinct waves of film starting in the early 1990s: first globalization, then terrorism and conspiracy, and then post-apocalypse and zombie films. What's surprising about these outbreak narratives, though, is that they aren't just limited to movies—we've got zombie video games and novels, of course, but we've also got infection and plague narratives saturating news media and government budget documents even before the current coronavirus pandemic made it all real. Journalism, movies, and governments all influence each other, blurring the line between fact and fiction. In her book, Schweizer explores why these outbreak narratives have infected the public conversation and how they have affected the way we see the world, from our neighbors to the government. Dahlia Schweizer joined us in the studio to talk about zombie viruses and bioengineered plagues. A previous version of this interview aired in February 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

Dahlia Schweitzer’s Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World
Check out this chart of the three film cycles of outbreak narratives
Want to be comforted after all that terror? Here’s an outline of all the female scientists who save the day in these films
Watch a how the film Pandemic (2016) blurs fact and fiction with actual news footage
In case you had any doubts about Dawn of the Dead (1978) was about consumerism: here’s the mall scene
And check out the whole “syllabus” for Going Viral

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#120: How Global Agriculture Grew a Pandemic

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 17:46:13 GMT

We are all inundated with news about the COVID-19 pandemic, but one thing is glaringly missing from the coverage: the underlying structural reasons for why this is happening. Yes, in our globalized economy, travel has increased exponentially in the past 20 years, not just for pleasure, but also for profit. Still, that alone does not explain why we’ve had a litany of infectious disease outbreaks over the same period, each one coming hot on the heels of the last and doing nothing to alter our public health response. What does? Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, has some answers. For the past 25 years, he’s been studying the evolution and spread of influenzas and other pathogens. His research shows that if you really want to understand the nature of global outbreaks, you have to look at global agriculture. Where are large industrial farms or monocultural plantations encroaching on the habitats of wild animals that are the natural hosts for pathogens, like bats and civets and pangolins? Who has pushed people on the margins of society off their subsistence farms and deeper into hinterlands that used to regulate themselves before their ecosystems were destroyed? Who is really to blame for our current predicament?

Go beyond the episode:

Rob Wallace’s Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agriculture, and the Nature of Science
Read his article connecting coronavirus to agriculture, “Notes on a novel coronavirus”
Check out “How to Think About the Coronavirus,” the first in Philip Alcabes’s weekly updates on the spread of COVID-19
For more of Wallace’s work on Ebola, check out “Ebola’s Ecologies,” co-written with RodrickWallace (or these two academic articles)
The most critical thing we can do now: flattening the coronavirus curve
“Inequalities of US health system put coronavirus fight at risk, experts say”
“This is where universal health care coverage and security intersect”: Read W.H.O. official Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the team that visited China, on how its free medical care stacks up against the U.S.
Yes, there really is facial recognition technology for pigs

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#119: All Your Friends Are Listening to This Podcast

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Social science research confirms what seems obvious: our decisions don’t occur in a void, but rather are hugely influenced by our peers and social context. Society influences our behavior but, in turn, our behavior influences society. To put it another way, our social behaviors are contagious. Because of our respective environments, we may feel compelled to cheat on our taxes, drive heavy cars, or waste energy, because that’s what our peers are doing. In his new book, Under The Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, Cornell economist and New York Times columnist Robert H. Frank combines psychological insight with economics to argue that we can’t build public policy on the assumption that individuals will make completely independent decisions. Most of our choices—whether it’s to buy an SUV or an electric car, to bike or drive or take the bus to work, to smoke or quit—are shaped by the society we live in. So why don’t we use the insights of behavioral contagion to push society in the direction we want it to go? Frank argues that we should, by using government policies—and especially taxes—in a much more clever and targeted way than before.

Go beyond the episode:

Robert H. Frank’s Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work
Read his essay about how individual decisions can produce cascading effects: “How peer pressure can stop climate change”
For more on how behavioral cascades happen, check out the 1992 study, “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades”
Why tax evasion is trendy: read Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel’s story, “The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn’t Go Well.”
People who buy bigger houses aren’t happier, those who spent more on lavish weddings don’t stay married longer, and other examples of why spending money on material goods can’t buy you happiness

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#118: Gimme Shelter

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 05:01:00 GMT

As of 2019, 49.7% of American renters spend more than a third of their household income on rent. One quarter of all renters are spending at least half their income on rent. Whole generations are being shut out of the housing market by the skyrocketing price of buying a home. How did we get here? To find out, you have to go much further back than the 2008 financial crisis, which was infamously built on the shaky foundations of subprime mortgages. In his new book, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty uses the current housing crisis in California as a case study for the rest of the country, chronicling the building-level struggles, municipal policy fights, and sweeping economic changes that continue to rattle our notion of home.

Go beyond the episode:

Conor Dougherty’s Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
Read a 2019 report on just how much rent is eating into America's pocketbook
Tenants used rent strikes to win rent control in post–World War I New York City. Today, rent strikes are on the rise nationally, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
The rent control debates: a Stanford study from September 2019 blamed rent control for rising rents (though noting that it did lower displacement); another 2019 study from the Columbia Business School begged to differ; tenant advocates blamed industry-created loopholes in the law instead
Why can’t we just build more affordable housing? Blame the Faircloth Amendment, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1999.
For ideas from further afield, check out Berlin’s five-year rent freeze (or as a recent Bloomberg headline memorably put it: “No City Hates Its Landlords Like Berlin Does”)

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#117: Past is Present

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:49:41 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Marie Arana’s Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
Read Richard Moe’s review on our website (“a long-overdue and persuasive corrective”)
Here’s a less blood-soaked tale from the cloisters of Peru: librarian Helen Hazen on a clutch of rare books tucked away in an Andean convent

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#116: The Meaning of Minimalism

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 05:01:00 GMT

Everywhere, all the time, it seems like we’re being sold on the idea that getting rid of things will solve our problems—from the life-changing magic of Marie Kondo to the streamlining of all those DVDs into digital subscriptions—and it’s all being sold under the label of minimalism. In his new book, The Longing for Less, Kyle Chayka criticizes this trend as a kind of upscale austerity designed to get you to buy and consume things. Maybe fewer things, but things nonetheless. Have we lost the true meaning of minimalism? Chayka takes readers through a history of art, design, and philosophy that goes much further back than the 1960s work of Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, and John Cage, to show that maybe the most meaningful part of “minimalism” is the search for meaning. Chayka has written for The New York Times Magazine, n+1, and The Paris Review, and he joins us in the studio to offer up a brand of minimalism that won’t bankrupt you, emotionally or financially.

Go beyond the episode:

Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism
Watch a short documentary about the painter Agnes Martin from the Tate
View Donald Judd's massive installations in Marfa or New York, and be sure to stop by Walter De Maria’s The Earth Room while you're at it
Poke around Philip Johnson’s Glass House
Listen to Julius Eastman's hypnotic composition “Stay on It” (and read more about him here)
Two Japanese touchstones of minimalism: Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book and Junichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows

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#115: The Global Garage Sale

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 21:11:04 GMT

In his previous book, Junkyard Planet, journalist Adam Minter went around the world to see what happened to American recyclables such as cardboard, shredded cars, and Christmas lights around the world as they became new things. In his new book, Secondhand, Minter looks at what happens to all the things that get resold and reused, objects that end up in Arizona thrift stores, Malaysian flea markets, Tokyo vintage shops, and Ghanaian used-electronics shops. Who’s buying the tons of goods that get downsized, decluttered, or discarded every year? Does the fact that we can just pass something off to a thrift shop justify our buying more things? What about the sheer scale of it all? Minter joins us in the studio to talk about how we filled the world with all this stuff, and what really needs to change for us to get out from under it—no matter where we live.

This is our last episode of 2019. We’ll be back at the end of January, refreshed and ready to introduce you to some of the most interesting voices writing today. See you in 2020! ’Til then, take care, and stay sharp.

Go beyond the episode:

Adam Minter’s Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale
Want to learn more about the impacts of fast fashion on consumption and waste? Listen to our episode “Fashion Kills” with Dana Thomas
For our Autumn 2019 issue, Rob G. Green visited Kumasi, Ghana, to write about another problem created by the secondhand market—toxic scrap-tire fires
Where does the money that Goodwill makes from selling donations actually go?
Learn more about the staggering scale of Anglo-American consumption in Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
Abandon your idols: Mari Kondo has begun selling you junk to replace the junk you just KonMari’d
Read more about why local textile industries are dying in Ghana and African countries more broadly
Might recycling pose a similar “moral hazard” to wearing seat belts? Some consumer psychologists suspect that the option to recycle might actually increase resource consumption
Learn more about the Right to Repair movement

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#114: House of Mirrors

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 05:01:00 GMT

Two years ago, Carmen Maria Machado pushed the weird and gothic into the mainstream with her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and made her a Guggenheim Fellow. Now she’s back with In the Dream House, a memoir of a harrowing relationship told in a splintered, fractured style. The list of chapters reads like an introduction to literary tropes 101: dream house as an exercise in point of view, as a memory palace, as a stranger comes to town, as a plot twist. Ultimately it is, as one title puts it, an exercise in style, but one in which Machado considers all the territory surrounding the dream house: stereotypes about lesbian relationships as safe or as hysterical, her religious adolescence, the insufficiency of the law, and the absence in the archives of stories that don’t fit traditional demographics of abuse.

Go beyond the episode:

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (and read the prologue)
Read the collection that inspired the devious chapter, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” Kevin Brockmeier’s The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device
Read about the 1940s thriller that gave us the phrase “gaslighting” in J. Hoberman’s essay, “Why ‘Gaslight’ Hasn’t Lost Its Glow”
Two essays Machado cites in her afterword, both about intimate partner violence: Conner Habib’s “If You Ever Did Write Anything About Me, I’d Want It to Be About Love” and Jane Eaton Hamilton’s “Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers”

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#113: Getting Physical

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 19:02:52 GMT

When thinking of the past, one of the hardest things is to imagine what it would have been like to inhabit a physical body in a world so different in look, smell, and feel from our own. What was it like to go to the doctor 800 years ago? If you cut your finger and bled, what would that blood mean to you? What about the blood of saints—would that be different? What about exercising, eating, giving birth, having sex, burying the dead? The way we think about these experiences fundamentally changes how we experience them. So how has our thinking changed since the Middle Ages? Jack Hartnell’s new book, Medieval Bodies, explores the answers to these questions through a series of vivid objects, stories, texts, and paintings, starting with the head and meandering through skin and heart and stomach all the way to the feet. Along the way, he constructs a living, breathing body of evidence that helps us understand our physical past.

Quick note: In our sign off, we promised a Thanksgiving episode—but a holiday cold has made liars of us, and we cannot put one out! We'll be back with a brand new interview on Friday, December 6th. Til then, take care, and stay warm!

Go beyond the episode:

Jack Hartnell’s Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages (read an excerpt here)
View a slideshow of related bodily medieval images on the episode page
For more on medieval women’s medicine, check out Monica Green’s Making Women’s Medicine Masculine or her paper, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare”
For another unusual angle of medieval history, check out our interview with Marion Turner, who wrote an innovative biography of Geoffrey Chaucer

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#112: A Good Yarn

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 17:14:54 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Clara Parkes’s Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool
Peruse her reviews of yarn and other woolly wares on the Knitter’s Review website
Watch yarn company Brooklyn Tweed’s gorgeous video series on how woolen-spun and worsted-spun yarn is made—and how greasy fleece is scoured into clean, fluffy combed wool
Some of the woolly companies mentioned in this episode: Allbirds wool shoes, Farm to Feet wool socks, Catskill Merino yarn (the source of her 676-pound bale), Lani Estill’s carbon-neutral Bare Ranch, ElsaWool breed-specific yarns

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#111: A Rather Haunted Episode

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 04:01:00 GMT

To get into the Halloween spirit, we’ve invited Assistant Editor Katie Daniels and Editorial Assistant Taylor Curry, the hosts of [Spoiler Alert], our online book club, to interview the literary critic Ruth Franklin. Their October book is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the suspenseful tale of the two Blackwood sisters and the mysterious murder that took place at their house. For a long time, Jackson’s hard-to-categorize novels and humorous parenting memoirs took the backseat to her (in)famous short story, “The Lottery.” That’s starting to change, thanks to film and television adaptations—and Ruth Franklin’s critically acclaimed biography, Shirley Jackson, which argued that her writing is an important contribution to the American gothic tradition.

Go beyond the episode:

Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for biography (and read our glowing review)
Join [Spoiler Alert], our monthly online book club and tune in today at 5 PM EST for a live discussion
Watch the spooky trailer for the 2019 adaptation of Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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#110: From Black Cabs to Blacklisted

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 04:01:00 GMT

This week, WeWork got a huge bailout from an investor after its plan to go public went belly-up amid disclosures of rampant mismanagement. Now the company can’t even afford to lay off the thousands of employees it would like to because it can’t afford to pay their severance packages. The parallels to Uber, which did go public this fall, are striking: just like WeWork, Uber was a unicorn startup—lavishly funded and poised to take its place in the tech pantheon. And like WeWork’s Adam Neumann, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted by investors and made millions on the way out the door. When that happened in 2017, Uber went through a public reckoning, but the full details of the company’s misdeeds were only revealed this fall. Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac has reported on Uber from its beginnings, and his new book, Super Pumped, tells the whole story of how Uber came to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with Silicon Valley. Isaac joins us in the studio to take us inside Uber, while it was rising and as it was falling.

Go beyond the episode:

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
Listen to “Get Rich or Die Trying,” our podcast interview with reporter Corey Pein on his experiences in Silicon Valley
For more on Adam Neumann’s downfall, read Matt Stoller’s take on “WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism” in his newsletter

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#109: Where the Wild Things Are

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Two decades ago, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell turned their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex, England, into a massive outdoor laboratory. They decided to cede control of their land to nature and watched it slowly grow wild again. Now, at what they call Knepp Wildland, herds of fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, and longhorn cows do battle with scrubland and tree branches, while Tamworth pigs rustle in the hedgerows and strengthen mycorrhizal networks in the soil. The result of this experiment is burgeoning biodiversity and resilience, as endangered species like turtledoves, nightingales, and rare butterflies inhabit a landscape unseen in England since the Middle Ages. Isabella Tree joins us to talk about what life is like in a wild world, and how Knepp has ignited a reckoning with traditional methods of land stewardship and conservation. We are re-running this episode to celebrate the U.S. release of Wilding, her book about the project.

Go beyond the episode:

Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm
View photos and video from Knepp Wildland on our episode page
Read more about Knepp (and plan a visit!) on their website
Watch a short video about Knepp’s beaver-like efforts to return the River Adur to a rewilded state
Check out the whole range of “Kneppflix” wildlife videos
Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Frans Vera’s work at the Oostvaardersplassen
Learn more about rewilding efforts across Europe, from Portugal to Poland

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#108: Live, Laugh, Love Ancient Philosophy

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Despite the rampant success of books like Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, intellectual circles tend to look down on anything that sells itself as self-help. And yet, in a certain light, the most original form of self-help might actually be philosophy—an older and more respected genre, even, than the novel. So this week, we're going back to the past and asking that old chestnut: what is a meaningful life? The Stoics are awfully popular these days, but the philosopher Catherine Wilson joins us this episode to pitch a different kind of Greek: Epicurus, whose teachings live on most fully in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. For a few centuries, Epicurus was wrongly remembered as the patron saint of whoremongers and drunkards, but he really wasn't: his philosophy is rich with theories of justice, empiricism, pleasure, prudence, and equality (Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, welcomed women and slaves into his school). Epicureanism advocated for a simple life, something that appeals to more and more people today with the return to artisan crafts, self-sufficiency, and, yes, the KonMari method.

Go beyond the episode:

Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean
Read A. E. Stallings’s recent translation of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things
Or read Karl Marx’s university thesis on Epicurus, “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”

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#107: The Banjo and the Ballot Box

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Love it, hate it, or refuse to listen to anything released after 1980—however you feel about country music, you can’t drive across the United States without hearing it. Even people who don’t appreciate the genre have been thinking about it lately, as the controversy over Lil Nas X’s exclusion from the Billboard country music charts has inspired discussion of country music, racism, and who gets to use trap beats on their tracks. It looked to a lot of people as if a genre that had traditionally celebrated outlaws and outsiders were locking its gates against a new kind of outsider. But as this week’s guest, the historian Peter La Chapelle, points out, none of this is new. Country music has been deployed to political ends since its birth in Appalachia. Nowhere is this more striking than on the campaign trail, where scores of politicians have used country music to appeal to voters. On the show, La Chapelle explains how fiddler-politicians and politician-fans have used this oddly flexible genre to advocate for the poor and dispossessed, fight for racial justice, fight against racial justice, lobby for gun rights, and articulate a whole range of sometimes contradictory positions.

Go beyond the episode:

Peter La Chapelle’s I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music
For an exhaustive introduction to the stars of old school country—from Ernest Tubb to Loretta Lynn—check out our host’s favorite music show, the Cocaine & Rhinestones podcast, or follow the crowds to Ken Burns’s Country Music
Read “Canon Fodder,” Shuja Haider’s impassioned critique of country music’s constant exclusion from “Best Of” album lists—and “The Invention of Twang,” his take on Lil Nas X (you can read Billboard’s defense of their decision to exclude Lil Nas X from the country charts here)
For more on country music’s relationship with race (and racism), check out Charles L. Hughes’s book Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South
And read “The Roots of Country Music,” Dahleen Glanton’s essay on the country music establishment’s attempts in the 1990s to honor black country musicians
Listen to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an old-time string band highlighting black country songs fronted by Rhiannon Giddens; Dom Flemons used to be a member

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. This episode features a song by the Downtown Mountain Boys recorded at KBOO and available at the Free Music Archives.

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#106: What Makes a Refugee?

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 17:14:23 GMT

The United States has an uneven record when it comes to refugees. It infamously refused to accept a boatload of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust; at other times, it took in huge numbers of refugees from all over the world. As recently as 1980, we admitted more than 200,000 people. But that number has plummeted to its lowest level in 40 years: in 2018, only 22,491 people were permitted to resettle here, less than half the number admitted the year before. Why do we treat refugees differently today? Why do we distinguish between refugees and immigrants? These are some of the questions at the heart of Dina Nayeri's new book, The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina and her family fled Iran as refugees in 1989, first landing in Italy, and later in Oklahoma, before continuing her nomadic journey across the world. On the podcast, Dina shares her own story and those of others to reveal “what immigrants never tell you”: that being a refugee is painfully disorienting and excruciatingly boring—and it mostly involves waiting around for the chance to tell a government official the right story in the right way.

Go beyond the episode:

Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee
Read a long excerpt in The Guardian
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has figures on current numbers of internally displaced people, refugees, and asylum-seekers (and explains the difference between these categories)

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#105: Why Has American Classical Music Ignored Its Black Past?

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 04:01:00 GMT

More than a century ago, Antonín Dvořák prophesied that American music would be rooted in the black vernacular. It’s come true, to a certain extent: when we think of American music—jazz, blues, rock, hip hop, rap—we are thinking of music invented by black musicians. The field of classical music, however, has remained stubbornly white. At one point in the last century, classical music was on the cusp of a revolution: the Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was writing works like his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, Dvořák’s own assistant Harry Burleigh was reimagining black spirituals for the concert stage that would be performed by the likes of Marian Anderson. And the lineage continued with William Grant Still, Nathaniel Dett, Florence Price, and Margaret Bond. The arrival in 1934 of William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony seemed to usher in the imminent fulfillment of Dvořák’s prophecy—and yet Dawson never wrote another symphony. Why not? Joseph Horowitz, a cultural historian and the executive director of the PostClassical Ensemble, joins the podcast to explore why. Scholar managing editor Sudip Bose guest-hosts.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Joseph Horowitz’s essay, “New World Prophecy,” from our Autumn 2019 issue
And read more about Antonín Dvořák’s time in Spillville, Iowa, in Tom Zoellner’s essay, “No Harmony in the Heartland,” about how the national struggle over immigration has hit an American town built by immigrant Czechs
Listen to Leopold Stokowski conduct the American Symphony Orchestra’s 1963 performance of William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony
Listen to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, played by David Shaffer-Gottschalk
Listen to Marian Anderson perform Harry Burleigh’s composition of the spiritual “Deep River”
Listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau perform Charles Ives’s extraordinary setting of “Feldeinsamkeit”
Read about the rediscovery of the composer Florence Price

And keep an eye out for Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony at the following events:

Georgetown University’s PostClassical Ensemble will perform the second movement on April 25, 2020
The Brevard Music Festival may perform the complete symphony next summer

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#104: Fashion Kills

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 04:01:00 GMT

To mark New York Fashion Week, longtime style reporter Dana Thomas is ripping the veil off the industry. Her new book, Fashionopolis, is an indictment of the true costs of fashion—like poisoned water, crushed workers, and overflowing landfills—that never make it onto the price tag of a dress or pair of jeans. Between 2000 and 2014, the annual number of garments produced doubled to 100 billion: 14 new garments per person per year for every person on the planet. The average garment is only worn seven times before being tossed—assuming it’s not one of the 20 billion clothing items that go unsold and unworn. It’s no surprise, then, that the fashion industry accounts for at least 10 percent of global carbon emissions and 20 percent of all industrial water pollution. Though the industry employs one out of every six people globally, fewer than two percent of them earn a living wage—more than 98 percent of workers are not only underpaid, they also toil in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. But change is underfoot: retailers are shifting their supply models, circular and slow fashion are on the rise, and new technology is making the manufacture of new and recycled fabrics cleaner. Dana Thomas joins the podcast to explain what will be required to fix a broken system.Go beyond the episode: - Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes - Why donating secondhand clothes to developing countries can actually prevent development—and kill local textile industries - What is “slow fashion”? The New York Times explains - Some of our host’s favorite sustainable fashion Instagram accounts to follow: @aboubakarfofana, @ajabarber, @notbuyingnew, @tomofholland, @katrinarodabaugh, @little_kotos_closet - Martha Stewart teaches Clothing Repair 101What can you do? Dana Thomas’s Tips - Launder your clothes less frequently: Try to break the habit of tossing a pair of jeans into the wash after wearing them once. Get several wears out of clothes before washing, spot-clean small stains, and use cold, short washing cycles. You’ll reduce water usage, cut household expenses and elongate your clothes’ lifespans—a win for the planet, your wallet, and your laundry hamper. - Shop your closet: Before buying those new jeans or another black T-shirt, look inside your closet to see if you already have these pieces. Or try gathering some friends for a clothing swap party. - Rent your wardrobe: There’s a growing number of websites and programs today that make it easy to rent high-quality fashion, tailored for your fit. Renting will keep your wardrobe fresh and ward off so much waste. You’ll be more daring in your choices—becoming more fashion forward—since you aren’t investing in the items and keeping them forever. If you do fall in love with a look, you can always buy it. - Take a Second Look at Secondhand: For a long time, consignment shops were filled with passé, dowdy clothes—but no more. Over the past two decades, as Hollywood stars began walking red carpets in vintage clothing, there’s been a revolution in the secondhand market. Today, you’ll find great deals on stunning, quality garments in thrift shops and on consignment websites. - Consign Online: Have any gently worn garments lurking in your closet that you never seem to wear? Consider consigning them online. You’ll make some money back, and your clothes will have a second life. Many online consignment sites will give you credit for other items, so you too can refresh your wardrobe. - Skip the plastic bags: You may be in the habit of taking your canvas tote on a grocery run—but don’t forget to take it along when shopping for clothes, as well. - Repair and re-wear: Rather than tossing out stained or torn garments, think about overdyeing, or camouflaging with cool embroideries. Such treatments personalize items—making them one of a kind!—and give them a longer life. - Pick up a needle yourself: The maker revolution has brought hom...

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#103: The Next Menu

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 04:01:00 GMT

This week, with the world's forests burning from the Amazon to Indonesia, we’re revisiting a 2017 episode about the future of food—the production of which, whether beef or palm oil, has caused an unprecedented number of deliberate fires. Centuries of colonialism and resource extraction have transformed continents and the waters between them. Oceans are rising and acidifying, resulting in the extinction of some species and the proliferation of others. What will the act of eating be like 30 years from now? Fifty? One hundred? To imagine that future, we’re joined in this episode by a novelist and a chef—Alexandra Kleeman and Jen Monroe—who dreamed up what a dinner party might look like in the future, on the border between science fiction and reality … and then threw that dinner party, in the corner of a Brooklyn restaurant.

Go beyond the episode:

Read about the indigenous fight against Jair Bolsonaro and his agribusiness interests in the Amazon
Check out Bad Taste, Jen Monroe’s experimental food project, and read this article from “Balling the Queen,” a series of essays and dinners exploring honey bees, consumption, and collapse
Read “Choking Victim,” a short story by Alexandra Kleeman
Explore the unusual artistic encounters of The Bellwether, which put on The Next Menu, and read Jordan Kisner’s essay on the massive aspen grove threatened by climate change

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#102: One Job Should Be Enough

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 15:59:20 GMT

Steven Greenhouse was the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times for 19 years. His last book, The Big Squeeze, is a detailed report on how American workers are being abused by corporations and bosses: freezing wages; replacing long-term employees with contractors, subcontractors, and freelancers; reducing hours. And where full-time employees are to be found, bosses are replacing pensions with 401Ks; trimming down paid holidays, vacations, and sick days; pressuring workers to do more per hour; forcing arbitration instead of lawsuits; mandating non-compete causes—not to mention off-shoring jobs to countries with fewer labor or environmental protections and cheaper wages. In the 10 years since Greenhouse’s book appeared, corporations haven't exactly changed their tune—but the labor movement has. There’s been a surge in organizing from the service industry to Silicon Valley: the Fight for Fifteen, #REDforED teachers’ strikes, walkouts at Google and Wayfair, and, this month, 11,000 airline catering workers across 28 cities voting to authorize a strike for better conditions. Where did this momentum come from? In his new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up, Steven Greenhouse tries to answer that question, alongside its corollaries. Why did worker power decline so much over the past 50 years? And what can we do to rekindle that collective power?

Go beyond the episode:

Steven Greenhouse’s Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
Explore labor statistics for the 35 industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic and Co-operation and Development—including the United States’s damning absence of paid parental leave
Read a comparison of working at McDonald’s in three starkly different countries
And read more about the U.S. airline catering workers at American, Delta, and United Airlines who are demanding a living wage

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#101: Bloodsuckers

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 04:00:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator
Visit the episode page on our website for a gallery of sometimes amusing warnings against the mosquito’s dangers
If it seems like we’re linking to Harriet A. Washington’s essay “The Well Curve” with every other episode—you’d be right! The majority of the neglected tropical diseases she identifies are borne by—you guessed it—mosquitoes.To help you sleep even less at night, here is the WHO’s list of mosquito-borne diseases and a 2019 report on how climate change puts billions more at risk
We recommend listening to this episode with a citronella candle at hand—and you can consult the CDC’s guidelines for preventing mosquito bites for more tips

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#100: Junk Science

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 04:01:00 GMT

For our 100th episode, we welcome back science journalist Angela Saini, whose work deflates the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum. With far-right nationalism and white supremacy on the rise around the world, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2019, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us.

Go beyond the episode:

Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science
Meet the Cheddar Man—and the many puns about his discovery in Cheddar Gorge—the first prehistoric Briton of his era whose genome was analyzed
Learn how recent archaeological evidence discredits the idea that Native Americans were decimated solely due to European diseases. As with health disparities today, these outbreaks were more connected to government policies leading to poverty and malnutrition.
In this excerpt from Saini’s book, she investigates the scientists behind the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly, which has a network of contributors who sit on the editorial boards of more widely trusted scientific publications
Read Harriet A. Washington’s cover story for us on “The Well Curve,” which points to the social inequalities that lead to health disparities, especially with regard to tropical diseases

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#99: A Delicate Elephant Balance

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 04:01:00 GMT

There are 40,000 Asian elephants left in the world, tucked into the mountainous forests of the continent. They used to roam all over India and far up into China, almost as far north as Beijing—but as humans have expanded into their habitats, the elephants have retreated further into the forests. Nearly a quarter of those elephants, around 9,000, are doing work alongside humans that is invisible to the urban eye: carrying people and supplies across remote areas, going where roads cannot, especially at the height of monsoon season. Paradoxically, the logging industry relies on the work of elephants that need the very forest being cut. The balance of that unseen work—and the complicated, often life-long relationship between the elephant and its handler—is the subject of Jacob Shell's new book, Giants of the Monsoon Forest. He joins us on the podcast to document a disappearing way of life, and to explain how these centuries-long traditions might hold the key to the Asian elephant's survival.

Go beyond the episode:

Jacob Shell’s Giants of the Monsoon Forest
Watch (and read) a New York Times report on “Myanmar’s Unemployed Elephants”
Watch footage of elephants rescuing stranded people during the devastating 2017 floods in Nepal
NPR reports on a new elephant refuge in Laos

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#98: You Never Step Into the Same Internet Twice

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 16:14:06 GMT

Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you responded to work emails solely using 😃? Is ~ this ~ your favorite punctuation mark for conveying exactly just how much you just don’t care about something? Welcome, Internet Person—you’re using a different kind of English from the previous generation. But these conversational norms weren’t set on high, and how they evolved over the past decades of Internet usage tells us a lot about how language has always been created: collaboratively. Or, as Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch puts it, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” She joins us to analyze the language we use online and off—how it got this way, where it’s going, and why it’s a good thing that our words are changing so quickly.

Go beyond the episode:

Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet
Read her Resident Linguist column at Wired, formerly at The Toast (you may remember reading about the grammar of doge, perhaps? Much wow) or catch up on the Lingthusiasm Podcast
Phone calls have been supplanted by text messages—will voice texting be next? Or are the people using voice texting pointing out a fundamental lack, in language or keyboard support?
Inevitably, Godwin’s Law states, “as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” Read creator Mike Godwin’s explanation for why he created his counter-meme, and why, in the case of actual fascists, calling someone a Nazi is well within the norms of discourse
Peruse the LOLCat Bible or the Creepypasta Wiki, deemed worthy of archive by the Library of Congress (file under folklore)
If all these memes confuse you, you can always find your footing at Know Your Meme

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#97: Aida’s Story

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a politics professor at Whitman College with decades of history working on the U.S.-Mexico Border. His new book, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez, mixes nonfiction and novel, ethnography and essay, to tell the tale of a single woman as she’s pulled back and forth across this imaginary line. Aida Hernandez—which is not her real name—was brought to the United States when she was in elementary school, ferried across the border from the Mexican town of Agua Prieta to its other half: Douglas, Arizona. She grew up there and had an American son, but she was deported—without him—and only made it back to Douglas after enduring immigration court, for-profit detention, family separation, gendered violence, and a host of attendant traumas. Aida’s is not a Cinderella story, and she’s not a bootstrap immigrant fantasy. Bobrow-Strain joins us on the podcast to talk about how Aida’s life illuminates the everyday consequences of our immigration policy.

Go beyond the episode:

Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez
Looking to support groups doing work on the border? Bobrow-Strain offers a list of worthy organizations
“Rape Trees and Rosary Beads,” by Brendan Linehan, a former Border Patrol agent and current civil rights attorney
“Paying to Be Locked Up,” by Keramet Reiter, about the criminalization of uncharged detainees

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#96: How a Language Dies

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest
Kulick returned to Gapun earlier this year—proudly bearing a copy of his new dictionary—only to learn that all of the village’s young men had possibly rendered themselves impotent
Explore these dazzling maps of the 851 individual languages of Papua New Guinea (including Tayap, listed as number 187)
Watch the arduous process of harvesting sago palm, a staple food in the country
National Geographic reports on various initiatives to save the world’s disappearing languages, including the Rosetta Project and Wikitongues

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#95: Crimes Against Sexuality

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 04:01:00 GMT

On June 28, 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn rebelled against a police raid and lit the spark for the gay liberation movement. Stonewall patrons were among the poorest and most marginalized people in society: the queens and queers who tended not to show up in the papers of record, because society would have preferred that they didn’t exist at all. But when queer existence was acknowledged, it was criminalized—and never so explicitly as in the true crime stories that exploded in popularity after World War I. Newspapers reported on the murder of men by other men in lurid detail, and breathlessly repeated the suspect’s defenses—that he was driven to violence by the victim’s “indecent advances,” to which the only appropriate response was murder. James Polchin joins us on the podcast to discuss how these stories shaped the public imagination about “deviant” behavior, and were fuel for homophobic discrimination from the sex panics of the 1930s to the Lavender Scare of the 1950s—and even today, when queer and trans people are still subjected to conversion therapy and newspapers underreport the murders of trans women of color.

Go beyond the episode:

James Polchin’s Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
Peruse the scrapbooks of Carl Van Vechten, which inspired Polchin’s work, through the digital collection of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale
Read an interview with artist William E. Jones, whose 2007 film Tearoom presents 1962 police surveillance footage of an Ohio crackdown on “homosexual depravity,” as the local Mansfield News Journal reported
Watch the just-released PBS series The Lavender Scare, about the FBI campaign to fire tens of thousands of queer government workers for their sexuality (and presumed communist sympathies)

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#94: Stick Shifts and Safety Belts

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 17:04:01 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Dan Albert’s Are We There Yet?
In our summer issue, Steve Lagerfeld mourns what wonders might be lost with the end of driving
For more on how highways made modern America, read Albert’s essay “The Highway and the City”
Julie Beck reports on the decline of driving (and driver’s licenses)
An academic analysis of how different modes of transport shape urban travel patterns
For a deeper look at Tesla and Uber, Albert recommends Edward Niedermeyer’s Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors and Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
More on how cars shape the way we view the world from Gijs Mom, and how driverless cars might change the world from Samuel Schwartz
TimeOut ranks the 50 best road trip songs of all time (though we would have added Gary Numan’s “Cars”)

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#93: The Wine-Merchant’s Son’s Tale

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 15:03:43 GMT

Geoffrey Chaucer was born a wine-merchant’s son in 1340s London. He survived the plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Rising, and an adolescence spent wearing tight pants in a rich woman’s house to become one of the most celebrated poets in English. In the first biography of Chaucer in a generation, historian Marion Turner makes the case that the man we think of as a great English poet was, in fact, a great European one. He was inspired by the literature of Italy, Spain, France, and elsewhere—but more importantly, he drew on his interactions with the people he encountered during his travels, and from the places he visited. For example, how did the frescoes of Florence give rise to the perspectives in The House of Fame? Did Chaucer’s visits to his daughter’s none-too-chaste nunnery influence the bawdy Nun’s Priest's Tale? Marion Turner takes us back to the Middle Ages to find out.

Go beyond the episode:

Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life
Brush up on your Middle English with the Norton edition of The Canterbury Tales or The Riverside Chaucer

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#92: Meat Made

Fri, 31 May 2019 17:34:48 GMT

The production of beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas than the cultivation of beans, and seven times more than that of chicken. We're not eating as much beef in America as we were in the 1970s, but we’ve held steady at over 50 pounds per person a year, and beef consumption is rising exponentially in places like Brazil and China. How did having cheap beef become so desirable that we were willing to overlook environmental degradation, worker safety, and animal welfare, in order for the average American to eat 220 pounds of meat a year? The historian Joshua Specht thinks the answer lies with 19th-century cattle. In the span of just a few decades, American beef production flipped from a small-scale, local operation to a highly centralized industry with its heart in the meatpacking plants of Chicago and railroad supplies veining the United States. Modern agribusiness as we know it today was born in the cattle-beef complex, and those meatpacking conglomerates did such a good job of aligning their interests with those of consumers that the system has remained largely unchanged for the past hundred years. The model is now used in the entire industry, from poultry to pig farming.

Go beyond the episode:

Joshua Specht’s Red Meat Republic
Read an excerpt from the book that takes you inside the slaughterhouse
And Specht’s op-ed about how hamburgers have been conscripted into the fight over the Green New Deal
The Guardian reports on the cost of working in a U.S. meat plant
Two books that Specht recommends for further reading: Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
An abundance of statistics on contemporary meat consumption

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#91: The Space Between Your Ears

Fri, 17 May 2019 15:38:42 GMT

The prevailing view on how we think is that we use language: through writing our thoughts down, or debating them with friends, or reading other people’s words in books. But might there be some concepts, some feelings, some images, that are beyond words? After all, what’s the point of visual art or design or classical music if they don’t have meaning without the words to describe them? What are our thoughts really made of? The psychologist Barbara Tversky has a wrench to throw in the argument that language is behind cognition. She makes the case that movement and spatial reasoning are the real keys to understanding our bodies and their place in the world, as well as the wildly abstract thoughts we come up with.

Go beyond the episode:

Barbara Tversky’s Mind in Motion
Listen to our interview with Alexander Todorov about the science of first impressions—an example of how the speed of our visual thinking can compromise its accuracy
The method of loci—or using a memory palace—is ancient evidence for spatial reasoning
Australian aboriginal songlines—written about most famously in Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines—are used to navigate physical and spiritual space

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#90: Totes Adorbs

Fri, 10 May 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Simon May’s The Power of Cute
The sweet and sinister art of Yashimoto Nara
Art historian Elizabeth Legge wrote about Jeff Koons’s Baloon Dog and the Cute Sublime in her paper “When Awe Turns to Awww …”
And here is an entire book on Hello Kitty: Christine R. Yano’s Pink Globalization
For a primer on cute research, see Natalie Angier’s article “The Cute Factor”

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#89: Little Boxes, Big Ideas

Fri, 03 May 2019 20:12:45 GMT

The mythology of the 1950s American suburb—mom, dad, white picket fence, two-car garage, two-point-five kids—doesn’t align with the reality of who lives in suburbs today. Suburbs are bustling with multigenerational families, immigrants, and multiracial residents who defy the Stepford stereotype. While it’s true that after WWII, the federal government heavily invested in the creation of middle-class suburban havens for nuclear families—slashing funding for downtowns and forcing de facto segregation through redlining and community covenants—in the decades since, the suburbs have become more diverse than ever. With affordable housing currently in crisis, climate change ascendant, evictions on the rise, and a flood of people abandoning the suburbs for rapidly gentrifying cities, can this pocket of the American dream evolve? For solutions to the present-day problems of suburbs, Amanda Kolson Hurley, senior editor at CityLab, looks to the suburbs hidden throughout American history that did something a little different: forgotten places where utopian planning, communal living, socially conscious design, and integrated housing flourished.

Go beyond the episode:

Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City
Matthew Desmond’s Eviction Lab chronicles one aspect of the housing crisis whose solution might be informed by the model of the Greenbelt suburb, built with renters in mind
“How the Suburbs Gave Birth to America's Most Diverse Neighborhoods” in CityLab
Read Tracy Jan’s analysis for The Washington Post, “Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It’s still hurting minorities today.”
An April study found that low-income residents in Washington, D.C., are being pushed out of the city at some of the highest rates in the country
Read about how some tenant organizers in Washington, D.C., are using rent strikes to combat eviction and gentrification
Visit Old Economy Village, where the Harmonists lived, or Six Moon Hill, now on the National Register of Historic Places, where a home recently sold for a cool $1.5 million

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#88: “Making Books Is a Countercultural Act”

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Restless Books devotes itself to publishing books you don’t usually find in English—from Cuban science fiction and illustrated retellings of the Ramayana to doorstopper Hungarian novels. Its catalog features classics, like Don Quixote and The Souls of Black Folk, new immigrant writing from Abu Dhabi, and the mind-boggling prose of Chilean-French novelist Alejandro Jodorowsky. Only three percent of books published in English are in translation, most from European languages. So what does it take to transform a book from one language to another? To answer that question, Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison, co-founders of Restless Books, give us a crash course in Publishing 101.

Go beyond the episode:

Peruse the growing list of titles in the Restless Books catalogue
Read an excerpt from Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing, his memoir of a whirlwind trip to every country in Latin America, and from Githa Hariharan’s Almost Home, a collection of essays about finding a place in the world when you’re not exactly from a single place
Listen to our interview with Naivo, author of Beyond the Rice Fields (the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English) and his translator, Allison Charette
Check out the University of Rochester’s Three Percent project, which frequently reviews new books in translation
Read new stories in translation (including bilingual versions!) on Words Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature
Cross a prizewinner off your reading list by exploring the Man Booker International Prize

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#87: The Ten Commandments of Bible Translation

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Few people have read the Hebrew Bible all the way through—maybe you memorized a portion for your bar or bat mitzvah, or read parts of it in Sunday school or a college course. But the whole thing? Hardly. Fewer people still have read it as a work of literature, treating every sentence as an expression of literary style. Even fewer have read the Bible all the way through in the original language, gotten frustrated with available English translations, and then decided to blaze ahead with their own. One such person is award-winning translator and literary critic Robert Alter, who between books of literary criticism on the modern novel has been translating the Hebrew Bible for more than two decades. Last year, he finished: all 24 books of the Bible—a three-volume set weighing 10 pounds and three ounces.

Go beyond the episode:

Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible, and his follow-up, The Art of Bible Translation

His Ten Commandments for Bible Translators:

Thou shalt not make translation an explanation of the original, for the Hebrew writer abhorreth all explanation.
Thou shalt not mangle the eloquent syntax of the original by seeking to modernize it.
Though shalt not shamefully mingle linguistic registers.
Thou shalt not multiply for thyself synonyms where the Hebrew wisely and pointedly uses repeated terms.
Thou shalt not replace the expressive simplicity of the Hebrew prose with purportedly elegant language.
Thou shalt not betray the fine compactness of biblical poetry.
Thou shalt not make the Bible sound as though it were written just yesterday, for this, too, is an abomination.
Thou shalt diligently seek English counterparts for the word-play and sound-play of the Hebrew.
Thou shalt show to readers the liveliness and subtlety of the dialogues.
Thou shalt continually set before thee the precision and purposefulness of the word-choices in Hebrew.

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#86: Daughters of War

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 04:01:00 GMT

Women in wars on land and sea, whether queens or foot soldiers, rarely get their due—yet their lives are at least as interesting as their male counterparts’, not least because they had to leap through so many hoops to fight. Historian Pamela Toler wants us to know their names, and her new book, Women Warriors, is a global history covering everyone from the Trung sisters, who led an untrained, 80,000-strong Vietnamese army against the Chinese Empire, to Cheyenne warriors like Buffalo Calf Road Woman, who knocked General Custer off his horse. There are at least a hundred killer screenplay ideas lurking in the history books—if only we bothered to look.

Go beyond the episode:

Pamela D. Toler’s Women Warriors: An Unexpected History
Read an excerpt about the Russian First Women’s Battalion of Death
Learn about the lady pirates time forgot, including one who gave birth in the middle of a sea battle (and still won) and Cheng I Sao, who negotiated a sweet retirement package with the Chinese government when the Navy couldn’t take her out
And meet Njinga, the West African queen who fended off the Portuguese (start at minute 21:30)

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#85: Not Ready to Make Nice

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 16:38:58 GMT

Lillian Smith was the most radical writer you’ve never heard of—a novelist, essayist, civil rights activist, and general bomb thrower, as Tracy Thompson describes her in “Southern Cassandra,” an essay from our Spring issue. Born in 1897, Smith grew up among what she called “the best people”—the wealthy, southern aristocracy—but she betrayed every value of her social class until the day she died in 1966. She pushed for immediate desegregation in an era when the notion made most white people balk, drew a straight, damning line between race and sex, and argued that there was no way to untangle the rationale of Jim Crow from the supposed need to protect the purity of white women. Nobody listened to her at the time. But as Thompson argues, maybe if we had we’d be a little better off.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Tracy Thompson’s essay, “Southern Cassandra”
Watch the trailer for Breaking the Silence, a documentary about Smith
Visit some of Smith’s haunts on the Southern Literary Trail
Check out Smith’s books: Strange Fruit, Killers of the Dream, How Am I to Be Heard, or for a taste of all three, A Lillian Smith Reader

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#84: The Man Who Changed the Face of Spring

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:50:11 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Naoko Abe’s The Sakura Obsession
If you’re in Washington, D.C., check out the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Peak bloom is now expected on April 1!
The National Park Service created a map and a list of the cherry blossom varieties in the city
Smithsonian’s list of the best places to see cherry blossoms around the world

Cherry varieties discussed:

Taihaku / Prunus serrulata taihaku / Great white cherry
Somei-yoshino / Prunus x yedoensis / Tokyo cherry

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#83: White Like Me

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 04:01:00 GMT

This week, we’re exploring another overlooked angle of antebellum American history: how photography transformed the abolitionist movement—and in particular, how a photograph of one seven-year-old girl was used to gain a white audience's sympathy. Jessie Morgan-Owens, a photographer and a historian, has written a book about that little girl, Mary Mildred Williams: Girl in Black and White, so named for the tones of daguerreotype, and of Mary herself—who looked white, though she was born into slavery. The story of how Senator Charles Sumner used Mary to advance his antislavery cause tells us a lot about the politics of the 19th century.

Go beyond the episode:

Jessie Morgan-Owens’s Girl in Black and White
Read Frederick Douglass’s speech, “Pictures and Progress,” delivered in Boston in 1861, and the introduction to Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Williams’s anthology of Douglass’s writing on photography (and if you’re feeling particularly brave, try parsing Douglass’s own manuscript at the Library of Congress)
As the most photographed man of the 19th century, Douglass left behind a voluminous photographic record, collected in Picturing Frederick Douglass
Check out Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida for a French post-structuralist spin, or W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory for a contemporary take on visual representation
Sojourner Truth supported herself by selling cartes de visite, in which she’s pictured wearing an iconic white cap and shawl (which she probably knit herself, given that she spun 100 pounds of wool to buy her freedom)
The Mirror of Race is an online collection of early photographs about race in America, including critical commentary
Morgan-Owens also edited the 2017 reissue of Mary Hayden Green Pike’s novel Ida May, about a girl whom Charles Sumner compared Mary Mildred Williams

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#82: A Woman’s Place

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 15:36:47 GMT

In her explosive new book, They Were Her Property, historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers corrects the record about white women slave owners in the American South, proving that slavery and its associated markets were far from the sole domain of men. Since women often inherited more slaves than land, they were deeply invested, in a social, moral, and an economic sense, in the trade of enslaved people. A white woman could cordon off her property from her husband’s in a prenuptial agreement, preserve her right to manage her own property, and fend off her husband’s debtors in court. She also ensured the continued reproduction of the institution by engaging in the market for wet-nurses, who were often coerced into serendipitous pregnancies through sexual violence, and whose breast-milk was then used to nurse white children. How does the power of women slave owners change our understanding of the relationship among gender, slavery, and capitalism in the 19th century? Why were these relationships obscured for so long?

Go beyond the episode:

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
Read the interviews with formerly enslaved people collected by the WPA, in the Library of Congress’s thorough online archive
And explore the complicated relationship that historians have had with these testimonies

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#81: The Backdoor to Equality

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 05:01:00 GMT

The concept of equality has been with us since the founding of the United States, and it's been revised and fought over and debated for about as long, from the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment to the culture wars and the legalization of same-sex marriage. But not every argument for equality that is brought up in a court of law goes well. In fact, equality arguments often backfire, ending up affirming inequality: Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States … or just last year, Trump v. Hawaii. Losing the battle in court for an abstract concept like equality has tangible consequences for people on the ground, from trans soldiers to Iranian kids seeking lifesaving medical treatment. But what if there’s a way to fight for equal treatment without sending current laws backsliding? American University law professor Robert Tsai joins us on the podcast to argue for what he calls “practical equality.”

Go beyond the episode:

Robert L. Tsai’s Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation
Read his essay on how another approach would be not only to broaden the variety of arguments, but also to expand the venues for those arguments.
For a steamier episode on the law, check out our interview with Geoffrey R. Stone in the episode “Out of the Closet and Into the Courts”
Listen to the More Perfect episode “The Imperfect Plaintiffs” about how certain cases—like Plessy v. Ferguson—were manufactured by individuals to challenge existing law
For another spin on how public action influences the courts, check out this interview with lawyer Darryl Li about the mass protests of the Muslim travel ban, as well as Barry Friedman’s The Will of the People

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#80: A Different Sort of Superhero

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 05:01:00 GMT

On Sunday, Black Panther made history as the first superhero movie with a Best Picture Oscar nomination. And though it didn’t win that one, the film did win the most Oscars in the history of superhero movies. Given those historic firsts, and the inevitable onslaught of superhero movies that 2019 will bring, we're revisiting one of the first episodes from the podcast. Professor and comic book fan Ramzi Fawaz joined us to talk about origin stories, the X-Men, and what the queerness of the original mutant family can tell us about comic book heroes today.

Go beyond the episode:

Ramzi Fawaz's The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics
Read his essays “Notes on Wonder Woman” and “The Difference a Mutant Makes”
Watch the trailers for The New Mutants and Dark Phoenix, both coming out this summer
Read the case that William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, makes for superheroes—and “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics”
Check out our interview with lifelong nerd and critic A. D. Jameson on how geek culture entered the mainstream in the ultimate “Revenge of the Nerds”

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#79: The Gray Edges of Blackness

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 05:01:00 GMT

Emily Bernard has offered her essays to The American Scholar since 2005, when we published “Teaching the N-Word.” She's written a lot of essays since then, essays that prove their etymology: the French word essayer—to try. She tries on different ways of thinking about what it means to be black, or the mother of daughters adopted from Ethiopia, or married to a white man, or the American daughter of a Trinidadian father. She joins us on the podcast to sort through the questions—and some of the answers—that form the heart of her new collection, Black Is the Body.

Go beyond the episode:

Emily Bernard’s Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine
Read her essays in The American Scholar: “Teaching the N-Word,” “Interstates,” “Scar Tissue,” and a bonus from our archives about friendship, “Fired.”

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#78: Postcolonial Punchlines

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 05:01:00 GMT

Alain Mabanckou is an award-winning Congolese essayist, novelist, and poet with a string of darkly funny books to his name. His work pokes at taboos and the borders between literary traditions with glee and irreverence—while subverting what it means to be an African writer, educated in Congo-Brazzaville and in France, now living and writing in America. His second novel, Broken Glass, is narrated by a former schoolteacher turned drunk, also named Broken Glass, who records the irregular lives of the regulars at his local bar, Credit Gone West. It’s a potent apéritif for the dark humor of his work—just mind you don’t drink too deep.

Go beyond the episode:

Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass
Read Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, the first African novel published in English outside of Africa (and the wild ups and downs of its critical reception)
Read The Paris Review interview with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, like Tutuola, an inspiration for Mabanckou
Of the Latin American writers Mabanckou named, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa have both won the Nobel Prize. But Horacio Quiroga (after whom a species of South American snake is named) wrote many books, only a few of which are translated into English—like The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories.

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#77: Heroin’s Long History

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 15:25:36 GMT

Opiates have gone by many names in their millennia-long entanglement with humans, in an ever-refined chain of pleasure: poppy tears, opium, heroin, morphine. With the advent of synthetic opiates like fentanyl, we’re seeing addiction and devastation on a scale unmatched in the 5,000-year history of the drug—but also a return to some of the same patterns and failed attempts at regulation that have haunted our efforts to control it. Cultural historian Lucy Inglis tells the painful, pain-fighting story of opium, and how its history is really our history—from trade and war to medicine and money.

Go beyond the episode:

Lucy Inglis’s Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium
“Opioids and Paternalism” by David Brown, considers how doctors and patients need to find a new way to think about pain
“The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe, profiles the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma—the makers of OxyContin
“Dying To Be Free” by Jason Cherkis, which explores Suboxone treatment
“What the media gets wrong about opioids,” reports Maia Szalavitz in the Columbia Journalism Review

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#76: Searching for the Spirit of Acid House

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 05:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Matthew Collin’s Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music
Read about the clash between techno fans and extremists in Tbilisi
Read some of the many effusive obituaries commemorating Frankie Knuckles, “Godfather of House Music”
Watch a trailer for the 1990 movie Paris Is Burning (streaming on Netflix) and the trailer for the 2017 film Kiki (available here)
Listen to the full tracks featured in this episode: “Can You Feel It” by Fingers Inc and “Halcyon On and On” by Orbital

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#75: The Snow Maiden

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 05:01:00 GMT

This is our last episode of the year, and we want to hear from you about 2019! If there are any subjects or guests you would especially like to hear on the show, send us an email at podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And, of course, help us find more listeners by rating us on iTunes and telling all your friends.

Go beyond the episode:

Read six versions of “The Snow Maiden,” classified by folklorist D. L. Ashliman as tales of “type 703,” or, relatedly, nine different spins from across Europe on “The Snow Child” (“type 1362 and related stories about questionable paternity”)
Watch the 1952 animated film The Snow Maiden, based on the Rimsky-Korsakov opera of the same name
Listen to Kristjan Järvi conduct an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Snow Maiden with the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir

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#74: The Microscopic House Guest

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 16:17:04 GMT

The modern American home is a wilderness: there are thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants that lurk in our floorboards, on our counters, and inside our kitchen cabinets—not to mention the microbes that flavor our food itself. The trouble with wilderness, however, is that humans always want to tame it. Cleaning, bleaching, sterilizing, and killing the organisms in our homes has had unintended—and dangerous—consequences for our health and the environment. Biologist Rob Dunn, a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, joins us to impart some manners about how to welcome these formerly unknown guests into our homes.

Go beyond the episode:

Rob Dunn’s Never Home Alone
Dig deeper into the experiments mentioned in the show, like the sourdough project or the world’s largest survey of showerheads
Cat people: track your cat to reveal its secret life—and what it brings into your home—in this citizen science project
More opportunities to participate in scientific research about everything from belly button ecology to counting the crickets in your basement through Your Wild Life

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#73: Opera 101

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 05:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Read Vivien Schweitzer’s A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera
Listen to the accompanying Spotify playlist
Ready? Find an opera performance near you by searching the National Opera Center of America’s database of upcoming offerings
Listen to the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts or catch it live in a movie theater near you
At The Guardian, Imogen Tilde explains “How to find cheap opera tickets”

Songs sampled during the episode:

“Possente spirito,” the first famous aria in opera, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo
“Pur te miro,” the first important duet in opera, from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
“Svegliatevi nel core,” an example of da capo aria and a rage aria, from Handel’s Giulio Cesare
The Queen of the Night’s first-act aria, an example of very high soprano notes, from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte
“O Isis und Osiris,” an example of very low bass notes from the same opera
“Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!” an example of very high tenor notes, from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment
“Casta diva,” an example of bel canto style of singing, from Bellini’s Norma
“Bella figlia dell’amore,” an example of ensemble singing from Verdi’s Rigoletto
The infamous Tristan chord from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (and here is the resolution of the chord, hours later)

For a taste of contemporary opera's eclecticism, here are three examples:

Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern by Helmut Lachenmann, an example of an opera with no actual singing
Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an example of minimalism
Saint Francois D’Assise by Olivier Messiaen, a composer who imitated birdcalls in his music

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#72: Through a Lens Darkly

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 05:01:00 GMT

You've probably seen the photographs that Lynsey Addario has taken, even if you don't necessarily know her name. For more than 20 years, she’s covered life in conflict zones around the world, from Afghanistan under the Taliban and the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, to the genocide in Darfur and maternal death in the Philippines—too much suffering, in too many places, to name, or even imagine. But in her images, Addario captures the small joys, too, of the ordinary experiences lived between the cracks of war: children playing, young couples getting married, births, deaths, cooking, going to the movies, even sleeping. In the contrast between these ordinary moments and their extraordinary, often brutal circumstances, Addario manages the impossible, and holds together all the fragments of human life she's witnessed in her two decades of conflict photography.

Visit our episode page for a slideshow of Lynsey Addario’s work.

Go beyond the episode:

Lynsey Addario’s Of Love and War
The New York Times cover story about the U.S.-sponsored war in Yemen, with Addario’s photographs (and a note from the writer, Robert F. Worth, about the local networks that kept them safe)
Read Addario’s memoir, It’s What I Do, and peruse online galleries of her work

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#71: Too Much Future

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 05:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus
For photographs of East German punks, peruse the online gallery for the exhibition Ostpunk! Too Much Future
We’ve compiled a playlist of DDR punk songs—many of them demos or live recordings from the ’80s—which include hits from Namenlos, Schleim Keim, Planlos, and Müllstation, of varying sound quality
For something a little less scratchy, check out this 2007 remaster and rerelease of Feeling B’s songs from the Ostpunk era, Grün und Blau
If you understand German, check out the documentary Too Much Future: Punk in der DDR. Another good one, sadly only available on DVD from Germany, is Flüstern und Schreien, which was released in 1989.

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Music featured from Namenlos (“Alptraum”) and Schleim Keim (“Kriege machen menschen”). Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#70: Bad Blood

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 18:43:08 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Nick Groom’s The Vampire: A New History
The London Library reported this week that it located some of the dog-eared books Bram Stoker used during the seven years he researched Dracula
Watch the trailer for The Hunger (1983), in which David Bowie and Susan Sarandon both suffer the love of an immortal vampire
We are also fond of Only Lovers Left Alive (2014), in which a glamorous Tilda Swinton and a depressed Tom Hiddleston puzzle out their place in modern society
Here’s a montage of all the bite scenes from Christopher Lee’s classic turn in Dracula (1958)
And, of course, there’s always Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003), which inspired Slayage, a peer-reviewed journal from the Whedon Studies Association

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#69: The Future Is Feminist Book Collecting

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 04:01:00 GMT

A. N. Devers is a writer and rare book dealer whose business, The Second Shelf, centers on all the women writers that time forgot. When she first entered the trade, she noticed that these writers were getting second shrift: sold for less money, not sold at all, and left out of the archives. Why were so many award-winning, well-reviewed books by women sliding out of print? Since rare book dealers are often the ones who shape the collections of archives and libraries—and thus the materials scholars and researchers have to work with—the Second Shelf aims to flood that pipeline with women’s work. Shift the bookshelves, and you just may shift the canon. We spoke with a number of booksellers to get a picture of the trade today, and with Devers about how she’s hoping to change it.

Go beyond the episode:

Peruse The Second Shelf website and preorder a copy of its first quarterly
Check out Honey & Wax Booksellers, a woman-owned enterprise founded in 2011
Get to know Bette Howland, in A. N. Devers’s “Tale of a Forgotten Genius”
Preorder A Public Space’s reissue of Bette Howland’s work and read its issue devoted to forgotten women writers
The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America has an archive of video interviews with collectors from several generations
Read Michael Schneier, of The New York Times, who once again discovers Barbara Pym (in 2017)
The Scholar has been lamenting neglected books since the 1950s, when the editors polled 64 “distinguished men and women” to name “that book published in the past quarter of a century that they believed to have been the most undeservedly neglected.”

Special thanks to the minds behind the Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair, which put on such a welcoming show, and to the booksellers who humored us: Rachel Furnari of Graph Books; Bryn Hoffman of Pyewacket Books; Garrett Scott, Bookseller; Jason Rovito, Bookseller; and Heather Whitney.

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#68: Black Birds of the Tower

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Christopher Skaife’s The Ravenmaster
Read an excerpt about the birds’ daily routine
Follow Merlina the raven (with help from the Ravenmaster) on Twitter
For more scary tales, read ex-Yeoman Warder Geoffrey Abott’s book, Ghosts of the Tower of London
For photographs that Skaife says “come very close to capturing the true majesty and mystery of the birds,” see Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens series
Behold, the funerals of crows
For one of the “best books in the world on bird behavior,” according to Skaife, see Nathan Emery’s Bird Brain, and for dozens more recommended books on the Tower and its inhabitants, see the “Suggested Reading” section at the back of The Ravenmaster

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#67: Something Witchy This Way Comes

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Not everyone believes in witches: in Siberia, after all, locals blame misdeeds on ghosts, and the Irish have fairies. But for those who do, witchcraft can be incredibly threatening—and an accusation of witchcraft can be a powerful tool to control people and entire societies. To get you into the Halloween spirit, we’re revisiting our interview with one of the world’s foremost experts on witchcraft, the historian Ronald Hutton.

Go beyond the episode:

Ronald Hutton’s The Witch
For the flip side of witchcraft, watch Ronald Hutton’s dramatic documentary about the good ones—A Very British Witchcraft, about the founder of modern Wicca
Frances F. Denny’s exhibition “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” on view at the ClampArt gallery in New York, explores the contemporary idea of witches through portraits of those who identify as such. One of Denny’s foremothers was accused of witchcraft in 1674, and 20 years later another of her ancestors presided as a judge in the Salem Witch Trials.
And for some spooky Halloween viewing, watch The Witch, our host’s favorite movie about witches—featured on Vulture’s list of top 15 witch movies, if you’re dying for more

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) and 8bit Betty (“Spooky Loop”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#66: Threepenny Thriller

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 15:20:51 GMT

Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer and scholar who focuses on 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory. His first novel, Confessions of the Fox, smashes those two disciplines together by retelling the story of two notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers: Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess, both real people who lived and breathed the fetid London air. But in Rosenberg's imagining, Jack is trans and Bess is the daughter of a South Asian sailor and an Englishwoman from the soon-to-be-drained fen. Confessions of the Fox is the title of both the novel and a long-lost manuscript that may or may not be their confessions, discovered by a scholar named Dr. Voth. He obsessively annotates the novel and presents it to us, the reader, with an introduction and footnotes that unspool into a conspiratorial tale of surveillance, resistance, and suspense. Rosenberg joins us on the podcast to talk about what it’s like to rewrite history.

Also, we have a copy of the novel to give away! So please, tell one person that you're a fan of the podcast, write us a pithy review on iTunes, and email podcast@theamericanscholar.org to tell us you’ve done so for your chance to win a copy of Confessions of the Fox. We will randomly select a winner on October 12.

Go beyond the episode:

Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox
Proof that Jack Sheppard is, in fact, real, and not a fantastical invention: his Encyclopedia Britannica entry
Listen to the 1958 recording of The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay
For more about how the spectacle of capital punishment was used in the 18th century, check out Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. This episode features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

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#65: Shifting Sands

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Someday soon, you might be finally able to count all the grains of sand on the beach, because there might be no beaches—and no sand—left. With the global population and its attendant consumption booming, we’re running out of sand in our quest to build larger cities and better smartphones. This essential resource, so easy to overlook, ranks just below air and water on a global scale of how much we use. But as journalist Vince Beiser explains in his new book, The World in a Grain, its over-extraction is harming us, whether in the form of murder in the black markets of India, pollution from fracking sand mines in Wisconsin, or islands that have simply disappeared.

Go beyond the episode:

Vince Beiser’s The World in a Grain
Read his article on India’s black market in Wired, “The Deadly Global War for Sand”
For more on how sand mining works, watch this aerial video (from a sand mine worker) of a quarry in Central Texas
Visit our episode page to see photographs from Adam Ferguson, who accompanied Beiser on his visit to India

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#64: Weirdo Capital of the West

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 04:01:00 GMT

How much do you know about Oklahoma City? Probably you know about the bombing, the Dust Bowl, and the Trail of Tears. Maybe, if you’re a basketball fan, you know about the drama of their basketball team, the Thunder. A feeble history, then, of a flyover city in the public imagination. Sam Anderson wants to change all that. As a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, he was sent off to O.K.C. a few years ago to write about a stolen basketball team, and fell so hard for what he calls “one of the great weirdo cities of the world” that he wrote a whole book about it.

Go beyond the episode:

Sam Anderson’s Boom Town
Read his original reporting on the Oklahoma City Thunder, “A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America”
And his Summer 2004 essay for us, “Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Joyce,” as strange a travelogue of Dublin as you’ll ever read
Peruse the Oklahoma Historical Society’s materials on the Land Run of 1889
Read the original coverage of the Land Run in the May 18, 1889 edition of Harper’s Weekly (click here for a more legible text-only version) or in The New York Times

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#63: Smell Ya Later

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Why does New York City smell? Is its smell distinguishable from that of other large cities? Does that smell tell us something about the world that our other senses cannot? Last year we spoke to historian Melanie Kiechle, who has devoted a considerable amount of brain- and nose-power to our long relationship with the scents around us. Her book, Smell Detectives, is an olfactory history of 19th-century urban America, from delightful scents to foul stenches, including those that everyday citizens used to bolster the budding environmental movement.

Go beyond the episode:

Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
On our episode page, we've got sanitary surveys of New Orleans and New York, along with sketches of the early respirators people used to protect themselves from foul odors
Check out a modern-day smell map of the City of Light (and odor), from graphic designer Kate McLean
Live in Pittsburgh? Download Smell PGH, the app that tracks pollution odors (read more here)

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#62: Long Live the Library

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 04:01:00 GMT

In case you missed it, last month Forbes published an op-ed that stoked so much public outrage that the editors felt compelled to delete it. Libraries, it argued, should be replaced by Amazon to save taxpayers money. Yet Panos Moudoukoutas’s piece was based on a common misconception: that libraries are only repositories of books, whereas in truth, they provide myriad other services—and generate an enormous return on investment. To bust the myth that libraries could ever be replaced by a for-profit enterprise, we hit the stacks ourselves and spoke to librarian Amanda Oliver about the services that libraries don’t get enough credit for.

Go beyond the episode:

Read Amanda Oliver’s stirring defense of the library
Here are some of the Twitter highlights in response to Moudoukoutas’s op-ed (be sure to grab some popcorn)
Read Ray Bradbury’s 1971 essay, “How, Instead of Being Educated in College, I was Graduated From Libraries,” fittingly published in the Wilson Library Bulletin
Explore the DC Public Library’s Punk Archive documenting the singular Washington music scene
Learn more about the services that social workers provide to libraries
A New York Times reporter spent a year reporting the life of a homeless woman who was a fixture at her local library
If you really love libraries, move to Finland: in addition to cutting-edge architecture and dazzlingly democratic services, Finnish kirjasto also offer library royalties to Finnish writers—nearly as much per borrowed book as per paperback sold

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

This episode features a beloved song from PBS’s Arthur. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#61: Strange Fruit and Stolen Lives

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 04:00:00 GMT

Forsyth County, Georgia, is infamous for being—for a remarkably long stretch of the 20th century—one of the only all-white counties in America. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Patrick Phillips, whose book Blood at the Root is both a history of the county where he grew up and a personal reckoning with the “ghost story” that he heard for most of his childhood: the racial cleansing of 1912, when white night riders violently drove all 1,098 black citizens out of their homes, and out of the county. But the people who pushed out Forsyth’s black residents weren’t Klan members: their identities might well surprise you.

Go beyond the episode:

Read more about Forsyth in Patrick Phillips’s new book, Blood at the Root
View a slideshow of images from the book on our episode page
Watch Oprah Winfrey’s televised 1987 visit to Forsyth County, Georgia
Learn more about Forsyth, and other black citizens driven out of their communities, in the documentary Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

This episode features Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#60: Call of the Wild

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Eighteen years ago, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell turned their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex, England, into a massive outdoor laboratory. They decided to cede control of their land to nature and watched it slowly grow wild again. Now, at what they call Knepp Wildland, herds of fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, and longhorn cows do battle with scrubland and tree branches, while Tamworth pigs rustle in the hedgerows and strengthen mycorrhizal networks in the soil. The result of this experiment is burgeoning biodiversity and resilience, as endangered species like turtledoves, nightingales, and rare butterflies inhabit a landscape unseen in England since the Middle Ages. Isabella Tree joins us to talk about what life is like in a wild world, and how Knepp has ignited a reckoning with traditional methods of land stewardship and conservation.

Go beyond the episode:

Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm
View photos and video from Knepp Wildland on our episode page
Read more about Knepp (and plan a visit!) on their website
Watch a short video about Knepp’s beaver-like efforts to return the River Adur to a rewilded state
Check out the whole range of “Kneppflix” wildlife videos
Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Frans Vera’s work at the Oostvaardersplassen
Learn more about rewilding efforts across Europe, from Portugal to Poland

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#59: Making the Most of #MeToo

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 04:01:00 GMT

In her summer cover story for the Scholar, “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo,” Sandra M. Gilbert looks at how far the newest feminist movement has come—and how far we have to go yet to achieve feminism’s goals. Her essay places the latest wave in the mythic feminist tradition, expresses her qualms about certain directions the movement has taken, and asks how we should regard the work of artists whose offensive behavior has been revealed. On our podcast, she these questions and much more.

Go beyond the episode:

“An Open Letter from Dylan Farrow,” and her first television interview detailing her sexual assault allegations against Woody Allen
The full letter that the survivor in the Stanford rape case read at Brock Turner's trial
Roxane Gay, “Can I Enjoy the Art but Denounce the Artist?”
Hadley Freeman, “What does Hollywood’s reverence for child rapist Roman Polanski tell us?”
A. O. Scott, “My Woody Allen Problem”
Claire Dederer, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”
Jason Farago, “Gaugin: It’s Not Just Genius vs. Monster”

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#58: Wonderbrain

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 04:01:00 GMT

The most unusual brains are not the largest, nor the ones that can remember the most digits of the number pi. What fascinates Helen Thomson—a neuroscientist by training, a journalist by trade—are the brains that see auras, feel another’s pain, or play music around the clock. In her new book, Unthinkable, she travels the globe to find out what life is like for these people who perceive a completely different world than she does. How does a man who believes he’s a tiger live in a human community? How can a father who believes that he’s dead go to dinner with his kids? What’s it like to be lost in your own living room? The answers can teach you something about your own noggin.

Go beyond the episode:

Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable
Read her interview with a dead man—or at least, a man who thinks he’s dead
Scientific American lists 10 of the biggest ideas in neuroscience of the 21st century
Meet the scientists who discovered the brain’s internal GPS
Think you might be a synesthete? Take neuroscientist David Eagleman’s “Synesthesia Battery” questionnaire to measure your perception

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#57: No-No Novel

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 04:01:00 GMT

In 1956, John Okada wrote the first Japanese-American novel, No-No Boy, a story about a Nisei draft-resister who returns home to Seattle after years in prison. It should have been a sensation: American literature had seen nothing like it before. But the book went of print, Okada never published again, and the writer died in obscurity in 1971. That would have been the end of the story, were it not for a band of Asian-American writers in 1970s California who stumbled upon the landmark novel in a used bookshop. Frank Abe, one of the co-editors of a new book about Okada—and a friend to the “CARP boys” who discovered him—joins us to talk about the era in which No-No Boy was written and what the novel can teach us about our own moment in history.

Go beyond the episode:

John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy
No-No Boy by John Okada
Watch Frank Abe’s film about the Japanese-American draft resisters, Conscience and the Constitution

An incomplete list of the best literature about the hyphenated American experience:

Americanah by Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
The Comfort Women by Nora Okja Keller
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (close enough!)

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#56: Wimbledon Unwound

Fri, 06 Jul 2018 04:01:00 GMT

In case you missed it, the grassy courts of Wimbledon are open once again for the annual championship—the oldest tennis tournament in the world. Seven-time Wimbledon champion Serena Williams is back in action, moving through the singles bracket and joining sister Venus in the doubles, and Roger Federer is looking for his ninth win. To commemorate the most famous fortnight in sports, we’re revisiting our interview with Elizabeth Wilson, an English tennis fan and cultural historian. Among her surprising insights, given the pay gap between genders in modern tournaments: the game’s Victorian reboot found men and women on the same playing field.

Go beyond the episode:

Elizabeth Wilson’s Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
Your place for live scores and other updates from the BBC
“At Wimbledon, Married Women Are Still ‘Mrs.’”
“Roger Federer, $731,000; Serena Williams, $495,000: The Pay Gap in Tennis”
And Claudia Rankine’s superb profile, “The Meaning of Serena Williams”

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#55: A Whale of a Show

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 04:01:00 GMT

It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest and oldest creatures of the planet is also the most mysterious. But whales have been around for 50 million years, and in all that time, we still haven’t figured out how many species of whales have existed—let alone how many exist today. How did these creatures of the deep get to be so big, and how did they make it back into the sea after walking on land? Most importantly, what will happen to them as humanity and its detritus increasingly encroach on their existence? The Smithsonian’s star paleontologist, Nick Pyenson, joins us to answer some of our questions about the largest mysteries on Earth, and how they fit into the story of the world's largest ecosystem: the ocean.

Go beyond the episode:

Nick Pyenson’s Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures
Take a 3D tour of the Cerro Ballena site, where dozens of intact whale fossils were found by the side of the road in Chile
Check out Phoenix’s website at the Smithsonian, where you can learn all about this right whale (to search for sightings of her, follow this link to the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog and enter “Whale Name: Phoenix” on the “Search for Individual Whales” page)
Explore the hidden lives of minke whales, who live in rapidly warming Antarctic waters
Tag along on marine biologist Ari Friedlaender’s trips to tag whales in the ocean(“extreme field science in action!”)
Listen to an incredible story about one woman and a baby whale on the “This Is Love” podcast
There are some amazing, tear-jerking whale videos on YouTube that we stumbled upon in our research for this episode. To get you started, here’s the story of how a whale saved biologist Nan Hauser's life
The inimitable David Attenborough mingles his voice with the dulcet tones of humpback whale song in this clip from the BBC's Animal Attraction
And listen to our interview with Marcus Eriksen, who sailed the Pacific on a “junk raft” to raise awareness about aquatic plastic pollution—one of the leading causes of death in marine creatures
We used whale songs in this episode that were recorded by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Check out their archive the “Sea of Sound” here.

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#54: Go Tell It On the Mountain

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 04:01:00 GMT

For more than 100 years now, we’ve been blessed with National Parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872; Pinnacles, created in 2013, is the 59th and most recent National Park to join the list. Other kinds of natural national treasures exist, though—protected monuments and seashores and recreation areas, plus an abundance of state parks and lands. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Terry Tempest Williams, who marked the centennial of the National Park Service with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. From the Grand Tetons to the Gulf Islands, Alcatraz to the Arctic, each place is imbued, in Williams’s telling, with the depth of history, a sense of longing, and her indelible, close observation of the peaks and twigs around her.

Go beyond the episode:

Episode page
Terry Tempest Williams’s The Hour of Land
Go find a park at the National Park Service website’s interactive map.
Check out Ansel Adams’s historic black and white portraits of our National Parks
Read “How an Obscure Photographer Saved Yosemite,” a profile of Carleton Watkins (whose photograph of El Capitan adorns Williams’s book) in Smithsonian magazine
Read our Summer 2016 cover story by David Gessner about learning to love the crowds at America’s National Parks, “The Taming of the Wild”

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#53: Letter From Underwater

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 03:48:04 GMT

So many tropical storms and hurricanes hit Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles that native residents talk about them as if they’re family members: “Who broke that window—Rita? Gustav? It wasn’t Katrina or Ike.” Rising sea levels and increasingly volatile storms bring other, no less harmful consequences, too: groundwater salinization, disappearing wetlands, decimated wildlife and fishing. The choice for people and animals in these places is stark: retreat or die. In her new book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, environmental reporter Elizabeth Rush tells the stories of the life-altering changes happening right now in our own back yards.

Go beyond the episode:

Elizabeth Rush’s new book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
Episode page, with a slideshow of Elizabeth Rush's photographs from the book
“The Marsh at the End of the World,” an excerpt from the book, published in Guernica
Read an excerpt from Rush’s previous work, Still Lives from a Vanishing City, on disappearing homes in Yangon, Myanmar, in Granta

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#52: Lock Her Up

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 04:01:00 GMT

There’s a dark chapter in American history that gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of women from the 1910s through the 1950s. Conceived in WWI to protect soldiers from “promiscuous” women and the diseases they possibly carried, women were surveilled, picked off the street, detained without due process, imprisoned sometimes for years, and forcefully injected with unproven mercury treatments for sexually transmitted infections they were merely suspected of having. The American Plan laid the groundwork—and sometimes, the literal foundations—for the women’s prisons and mass incarcerations of today. Progressive luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Earl Warren endorsed the plan, so its victims, more often than not women of color, were often forced to fight back on their own. Historian Scott W. Stern joins us to tell the story of Nina McCall, one of the women who defied a system that locked her up even though she was a virgin, experimented on her, and then tried to silence her.

Go beyond the episode:

Episode page, featuring a slideshow of sexist government PSAs against STIs and images of American Plan institutions
Scott W. Stern’s The Trials of Nina McCall, based on his master’s thesis in American Studies at Yale
Read Stern’s opinion piece for The Washington Post on “Why hero worship is a mistake for the left”

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#51: An Epirotic Odyssey

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Imagine there’s a place where music exists as it was first created, thousands and thousands of years ago, a place where song and dance still glued communities together across generations. That place exists: Epirus, a little pocket of northwestern Greece on the border with Albania. There, in scattered mountain villages, people still practice a musical tradition that predates Homer. In his new book, Lament from Epirus, the obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—Christopher King goes on an odyssey to uncover Europe's oldest surviving folk music, and spins us some rare 78s.

Go beyond the episode:

Episode page, with R. Crumb’s original illustrations
Christopher King’s Lament from Epirus
Buy LPs, CDs, or MP3s of Chris’s Epirotic collections, from Five Days Married and Other Laments to Why the Mountains Are Black
Read Christopher King’s Paris Review essay, “Talk About Beauties,” about the lost recordings of Alexis Zoumbas
Listen to A Lament for Epirus (1926–1928) by Alexis Zoumbas on Spotify

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Other music in this episode graciously provided by Christopher King.

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#50: Revenge of the Nerds

Fri, 25 May 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

A. D. Jameson’s I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
Read A. D. Jameson and Justin Roman’s article on sexism in gaming, “If Magic: The Gathering Cares About Women, Why Can’t They Hire Any?”
For more on how franchises have changed Hollywood’s structure, check out Stephen Metcalf’s article, “How Superheroes Made Movies Expendable”
If you’re looking for an escape this holiday weekend, please binge watch Marvel’s Jessica Jones (reading a book would be fine, too)
Listen to the queer history of comics in our second podcast episode, “Superheroes Are So Gay!”

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#49: Stitching History

Fri, 11 May 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Rachel May's new book, An American Quilt, has an innocuous enough title, invoking an innocent American pastime. But sometimes ugly secrets can be hidden in the stitchwork—or even, as in the case of the quilt at the heart of May’s book, behind it. The paper-pieced quilt was stitched together from fabric basted onto hexagon-shaped paper templates. These scraps, which turned out to be letters and documents dating all the way back to 1798, tie together one family from the abolitionist North and one from the slave-owning South. This paper trail led May to stitch together the stories of the women behind the quilt, enslaved and free. In the process, she shows how dependent the “free” North was on the enslaved labor of its southern neighbor.

Go beyond the episode:

Rachel May’s An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery
For a peek at the global history of the stuff quilts are made of, read an excerpt from Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton
Peruse the National Museum of American History’s extensive National Quilt Collection
The National Park Service offers a brief visual history of quilting in America, with a special focus on quilting in the West
The Library of Congress has oral recordings with Appalachian quiltmakers, who discuss the social history of quilting
The Whitney Museum’s 1971 exhibition of “Abstract Design in American Quilts” ignited our contemporary quilting renaissance. To view these, and hundreds of others, you can peruse the online collection of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum

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#48: Get Rich or Die Trying

Fri, 04 May 2018 04:01:00 GMT

When there's a gold rush on, the thing to do is not to dig. Instead, sell shovels to all the suckers who think they'll get rich digging for gold. This is one of the lessons that investigative reporter Corey Pein learned when he moved to San Francisco at the height of the Silicon Valley start-up boom. In his analogy, the gold rush is the tech boom, and the suckers are all the start-up wannabes who flock to the Bay Area for a slice of the venture capital pie. And all of us, the consumers, who fell for the excitement of the gig economy and the lure of a free social network that promised to never sell our data? We’re suckers, too.

Go beyond the episode:

Corey Pein’s Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley of Death
And an excerpt from the book on web fraud
Read his exposé of the alt-right/tech connection, “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich” and the followup, “The Moldbug Variations”
Wikipedia’s page on “Uber protests and legal actions”

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#47: When the Chicken Hits the Fan

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Bobbie Ann Mason's short story “Live-Hang,” from our Spring Issue, is the story of two friends who come from different worlds. Dave and Miguel meet in the gutting room of a chicken processing plant. Both are working class, but Dave and his wife, Trish, are white U.S. citizens, while Miguel and his wife, Maria, are undocumented Mexican immigrants. Even though their jobs diverge—Dave uses a connection to get a job installing satellite dishes, while Miguel is promoted to the more dangerous live-hang room—their lives become increasingly intertwined. But then the threat of deportation arrives, and with it the potential of a family being ripped apart. Only a brave and dangerous act can keep these families together. Mason talks about how she came to write this story, and how topical it is—given the recent news about ICE arresting children in hospitals, detaining the single parents of disabled kids, separating families, and raiding workplaces like the chicken plant.

Go beyond the episode:

Bobbie Ann Mason’s short story, “Live-Hang”
Listen to “Our Town,” a two-part story from This American Life about the undocumented immigrants in an Alabama poultry town
Read T. C. Boyle’s story “The Fugitive,” told from the perspective of an immigrant with no health insurance and tuberculosis
Watch Mississippi Chicken, a documentary about the hardships of undocumented immigrants in another rural poultry town
Read “Fallout,” Bobbie Ann Mason’s essay about plutonium contamination in Paducah, Kentucky, or “The Chicken Tower,” her essay about growing up in the town of Mayfield (New Yorker subscription required)

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#46: The Floral Gospel

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 04:01:00 GMT

When we talk about climate change and conservation, animals tend to steal the show. Yet the organisms whose extinction would affect us the most are actually plants. Horticulturalist Carlos Magdalena has become known as the Plant Messiah for his work using groundbreaking, left-field techniques to save endangered species. First captivated by the bogs and flowers of his native Spain, Carlos has spent much of his professional life in greenhouses and laboratories—and traveling the world, from the Amazon to Australia—to resurrect plants of all shades. And with his new book, he’s on a mission to change the way we see the flora around us by spreading the good word about green things.

Go beyond the episode:

Carlos Magdalena’s The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species
Get a daily dose of flower power through Kew Gardens’s Instagram account
Check out images and background on the Café Marron plant at the Global Trees Campaign
Watch a clip from the BBC’s Kingdom of Plants, including a glimpse of Carlos tending to some water lilies
Read the wild story of how several samples of the world’s smallest water lily—the one Carlos saved—were stolen in a grand heist
Kew Gardens highlights other plants on the brink in this YouTube video

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#45: Voicing a Legend

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent Millay boomeranging from heartbreak to revelry. Or T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Waste Land,” itemized the neuroses of unrequited love in “Prufrock, and then turned around and set to verse the antics of cats like Growltiger and Rumpleteazer. You could say that the same range exists in the best of actors—like Jeremy Irons, who’s played everyone from starry-eyed Charles Ryder to Humbert Humbert himself. Irons’s iconic voice has lent itself to animated lions and audiobooks before, but now, he joins us to talk about perhaps his most ambitious project yet: narrating the poems of T. S. Eliot.

Go beyond the episode:

Jeremy Irons reads The Poems of T. S. Eliot from Faber & Faber and BBC Radio 4
Read more about T. S. Eliot’s life at the Poetry Foundation
May we suggest Juliet Stevenson’s portfolio of Jane Austen’s novels for your next road trip?
Listen for yourself: T. S. Eliot reads “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”and “The Waste Land”
On the other hand, we love W. H. Auden’s reading of “As I Walked Out One Evening” (and his collaboration on the Night Mail documentary)

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Excerpt of “The Rum Tum Tugger” used courtesy the BBC, which owns the production copyright.

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#44: Go Fish

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 04:01:00 GMT

Go beyond the episode:

Anna Badkhen’s Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea
“Magical Thinking in the Sahel,” an essay about gris-gris and good luck in the The New York Times
“The Secret Life of Boats,” a dispatch from Joal in Granta
A Voice of America video report on overfishing in Senegal
“Tackling illegal fishing in western Africa could create 300,000 jobs,” the Guardian reports
It’s not just West Africa: how territorial disputes have put the South China Sea’s fishery on the verge of collapse

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#43: Burmese Daze

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 15:48:14 GMT

Since August 2017, in the country’s latest wave of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence, over 647,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar due to systemic violence and ethnic cleansing that has killed more than 10,000 people. Why is a religion seen as so peaceful in the West lashing out with such vehemence, and why are the Rohingya their target? And how did a seemingly local conflict erupt across the entire country? Journalist Francis Wade, who has reported in Myanmar for a decade, gives us the deep history, which stretches farther back than contemporary reports might suggest, and reveals a tangled web of interests: ultranationalist Buddhist monks, a military fearful of losing its grip on power, implicit racial hierarchies, and a democratic political party, led by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, whose very principles are called into question.

Go beyond the episode:

Francis Wade’s Myanmar’s Enemy Within: The Making of a Muslim “Other”
Read the UNHCR’s report on the Rohingya emergency
During the reporting of “Massacre in Myanmar,” on the systemic destruction of Rohingya villages, two Reuters reporters were arrested by Myanmar security forces and are still in custody
Hanna Beech asks in The New Yorker, “What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?”
For daily coverage of Myanmar politics, read The Irrawaddy
Explore the Tea Circle, an Oxford forum for new perspective on Burma/Myanmar

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#42: To Infinity (and Beyond!)

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 14:50:00 GMT

We revisit an interview with Eugenia Cheng, the author of How to Bake Pi, who translates higher math using metaphors that even the most mathematically disinclined can comprehend: infinite layers of puff pastry, endless jars of marmalade, and deep-dish pi(e). She talks about the false dichotomy between mathematics and art, and how understanding math helps you see the world in a new light. Also, how five-year-olds sometimes pose the most difficult questions for mathematicians to answer, like: what’s a number?

Go beyond the episode:

Eugenia Cheng’s Beyond Infinity
And her attempt to teach Stephen Colbert how to make puff pastry
Natalie Angier’s review of How to Bake Pi (verdict: delicious!)
Watch an animated explanation of the Infinite Hotel Paradox from TED-Ed

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#41: The Killers’ Canon

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 04:01:00 GMT

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neopolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won't ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev's memoirs, Saddam Hussein's hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family's film theory. This show is about that kind of very long book, and the man who decided to read all of them: Daniel Kalder, who joins us on the show to talk about his journey through The Infernal Library and what these books tell us about the dictatorial soul, assuming there is one.

Go beyond the episode:

Dive into Turkmenbashi’s Ruhnama, if you dare.
Daniel Kalder reviews Saddam Hussein’s prose—he “tortured metaphors, too”—or you can read it yourself
Or check out Kalder’s dispatches from The Guardian’s “Dictator-lit” archives
While we couldn’t find a video of Fidel Castro’s four-hour-and-29-minute address to the United Nations in 1960, you can read it here

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#40: Top of the Tots

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 05:01:00 GMT

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book, Off the Charts, Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose lives have informed our approach to child-rearing and education. Nature versus nurture is just the start of the debate—and it turns out there’s no model for raising any kind of child, genius or not, and no guarantee of success, whatever that means.

Go beyond the episode:

Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (and read an excerpt here)
Ann Hulbert lists her top five books on precocious children
Our top book for a glimpse into the life of a precocious child? Helen DeWitt’s cult novel, The Last Samurai
“Promethea Unbound,” by Mike Mariana, about a child genius raised in poverty whose life was nearly destroyed by violence
At the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik puts Off the Charts in conversation with a slate of other books on childrearing in “How to Raise a Prodigy”

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#39: Zombies and Plagues and Bombs, Oh My!

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 05:01:00 GMT

For decades, artists have been using horror to speak to our deepest societal fears, from the wilderness (werewolves) to the unknown (aliens). With zombies, that fear is infection: the outbreak of some terrible epidemic that sweeps the world, rendering us all into the drooling, flesh-eating monster next door. But as Dahlia Schweitzer shows in her new book, Going Viral, zombies are part of a much older lineage—dating back to Haitian slavery. Recently, these stories have arisen as commentary on the Ebola and AIDS epidemics, as well as terrorism, and in many cases, fact and fiction seem unfortunately to blur. Why have these outbreak narratives infected the public conversation? And how have they affected the way we see the world?

Episode page: https://theamericanscholar.org/zombies-oh-my/

Go beyond the episode:

Dahlia Schweitzer’s Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World
Check out this chart of the three film cycles of outbreak narratives
Want to be comforted after all that terror? Here’s an outline of all the female scientists who save the day in these films
Watch how the film Pandemic (2016) blurs fact and fiction with actual news footage
In case you had any doubts about Dawn of the Dead (1978) was about consumerism: here’s the mall scene
And check out the whole “syllabus” for Going Viral

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Download the audio here (right click to “save link as ...”)

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#38: Renaissance Rumor Mill

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 05:01:00 GMT

Visit the episode page for a slideshow of Vasari’s work.

Go beyond the episode:

Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney’s The Collector of Lives: Girogio Vasari and the Invention of Art
Explore the National Gallery of Art’s collection of Vasari’s works on paper and panel
Take a hilarious video tour of the Palazzo Vecchio—which Vasari altered and lined with his own paintings—with “Giorgio Vasari” (played by an actor far more attractive than Vasari was in real life)
Can’t book a ticket to Florence? The Uffizi offers a virtual tour of its halls, also designed by Vasari

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#37: Reclaiming Craftiness

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 05:01:00 GMT

If you're a creature of the 21st century, odds are you've stumbled upon the nascent DIY movement. From baking our bread to stitching our own clothes to raising back yard chickens and growing our own vegetables—even restoring our own furniture—the past few decades have seen a resurgence in our appreciation for crafts, right down to craft beer. But have you ever thatched your own roof with grasses that you grew in your own back yard? Or spent hours researching the secret behind making the best kind of haystack? Alexander Langlands has, and in his new book, Craeft, he takes DIY to a whole new level. Part how-to, part memoir, the book gets at what it means to make things with your own hands, and how this experience connects us both to the past and to our present sense of place.

Episode page: https://theamericanscholar.org/reclaiming-craftiness/

Go beyond the episode:

Alexander Langlands’s Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Old meets new in this Pinterest board of traditional tools to complement the book
Watch Alexander Langlands re-create early 20th-century life on the BBC’s Edwardian Farm, preceded by Victorian Farm
Or there’s Wartime Farm, which returns an English estate to its condition during the Second World War
Can’t get enough of the BBC? There’s also Tudor Monastery Farm, featuring one of our past guests, Ronald Hutton
Jump into the circular economy through old-fashioned mending: visit a Repair Café to learn how to make things last

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#36: A Revolutionary Change of Heart

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 05:01:00 GMT

Phil Klay joins us on the podcast to talk about his essay, “Tales of War and Redemption,” in our Winter issue. It’s an essay that starts on a humorous note, describing the horrible, ridiculously gory deaths of the Christian saints in The Big Book of Martyrs—a comic book for kids. And then he reminds you that he’s been in war, and he’s seen horrible deaths, and horrible suffering. What follows is a beautiful, moving look at suffering, not as sacrifice or cynical constant, but as a reminder of its inverse: joy, of a life lived, or one snuffed out.

Visit the episode page for Phil Klay’s recommendations of writers to read after listening.

Go beyond the episode:

Phil Klay’s “Tales of War and Redemption”
Photos from his own deployment, released while he was a public affairs officer serving in Iraq
Want more joy? Read Christian Wiman’s essay, “Still Wilderness,” a meditation on a feeling (and poetry, and faith, and …)

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#35: School’s Out for Segregation

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:17:49 GMT

School choice. A portfolio of options. Charters. Vouchers. Virtual classrooms. This is the vocabulary of the 21st-century American education system—and having more of these private options is exactly what policymakers, like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, would like to see. But where did the idea of "public charter schools" come from? And what kind of impact does siphoning money away from the public education system have on the students who remain in that system—or the ones who are taking virtual geometry classes in their kitchens? Noliwe Rooks tackles these questions in her new book, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education—and unearths a dark history that stretches all the way back to Reconstruction and the very first charter schools: the “segregation academies” set up by white supremacists in the American South.

Go beyond the episode:

Noliwe Rooks’s Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education
Read the “A Nation at Risk” report that set the stage for business-first educational reform
Listen to This American Life’s two-part series, “The Problem We All Live With” on two schools that integrated in the 21st century—one by accident, and one on purpose
Two 2017 studies about Washington, D.C., a city with nearly 43 percent of its students enrolled in public charter schools, found not only that public schools remains highly segregated, but that private school enrollment contributes to the problem

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#34: Seeing Red

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 05:01:00 GMT

So much of the story we hear about China today is an economic one—how over the past few decades, it has risen from poverty and ruin to become a global economic powerhouse. But there’s a story beneath the surface, of the artistic avant-garde that resisted rule from above and inspired generations of ordinary Chinese citizens to seek freedom of expression. From their countryside re-education posts to the abandoned warehouses of Beijing and the short-lived Democracy Wall, Chinese artists flourished at the edge of acceptability—until the entire edifice came crashing down with the Tiananmen Square massacre. Madeleine O’Dea’s new book, The Phoenix Years, follows the lives of nine contemporary Chinese artists to tell the story of how art shaped a nation.

Visit the episode page for portraits and archival images of the artists and their work.

Go beyond the episode:

Madeleine O’Dea’s The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China
Peruse the exhibition catalogue for the seminal 1993 Hong Kong show, “China’s New Art, Post-1989” (now out of print)
Guo Jian’s artist website
Xhang Ziaogang’s work on artnet
Aniwar’s work on Artsy, if you’re looking to buy
Listen to our first China-focused episode, “Unlikely Encounters,” for an interview with Julian Gewirtz the least likely visitor to the People’s Republic: Milton Friedman

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#33: CSI: Roman Empire

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 05:01:00 GMT

The Roman Empire's reputation precedes it: a wingspan that stretched from Syria to Spain, and from the Nile to Scotland's doorstep. Centuries of unbroken rule, a unified commonwealth, and at one point nearly a quarter of the world's population. And then, it all came tumbling down. Why Rome fell has been a favored subject of armchair theorizing pretty much since the empire started teetering—and now, one historian has a bold new idea. Kyle Harper joins us on the podcast to explore how climate change and disease might have played a key role in the fall of an entire civilization.

Go beyond the episode:

Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
Read an excerpt from the book on how the Huns laid waste to the Eternal City
How we can learn from Rome’s experience with epidemics to contend with emerging diseases today
Pandemics should scare you: here’s how tropical diseases are on the rise in our own back yard

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast@theamericanscholar.org ... And rate us on iTunes!

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#32: Brainwaves

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 05:01:00 GMT

This week, Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman talk about the science (and practice) of creating new things. We share a lot with the other sentient beings on this planet—love, hunger, death, joy, family, jealousy, rage. There's one thing, though, we do that other species, for whatever reason, do not: we innovate. We create. And we do so in a symbiotic way with other humans, building and improving on one another's ideas until suddenly we've all got a supercomputer in our back pockets. So what's at the heart of human creativity? Where does it come from, how does it work, and how can we get better at harnessing our own ingenuity?

Visit the episode page for a slideshow of images from the book demonstrating bending, breaking, and blending.

Go beyond the episode:

The Runaway Species by Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman
Want to learn more about your gray matter? Watch David Eagleman’s PBS series The Brain
Listen to Maternity, an oratorio for soprano and orchestra, the authors’ first collaboration

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast •

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! •

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#31: Funny Business

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:15:02 GMT

This week, we talk to Cullen Murphy, the son of cartoonist John Cullen Murphy, about growing up during the funnies’ midcentury heyday. Cartoon County is part memoir, part history of the giants of the comics world, who drew Superman, Beetle Bailey, Hägar the Horrible, The Wizard of Id … and a bevy of strips and gags read by millions of Americans.

Visit the episode page for a slideshow of images from the book, including sketches, comic strips, and Polaroids from Cullen Murphy’s collection.

Go beyond the episode:

Cartoon County by Cullen Murphy
Read the strips online: Prince Valiant, Hägar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey …
Learn more about Fairfield County in Cullen’s essay in Vanity Fair

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast •

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! •

Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#30: Jane Austen and the Making of Desire

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 05:01:00 GMT

This week on the podcast, we’re talking about sublimated desires—and the repressed kind, too. William Deresiewicz expands on an essay he wrote for us about being a man in Jane Austen’s world—and how her novels are about so much more than Colin Firth-as-Mr. Darcy. And Hallie Lieberman explains how the history of sex toys—and the laws banning them—can illuminate America’s complicated relationship with sexuality. • Go beyond the episode: William Deresiewicz’s essay, “A Jane Austen Kind of Guy” • Read an essay on the dark underbelly of Mansfield Park’s grand estates and country balls from Mikita Brottman • Further proof of how everyone wants to be Mrs. Darcy from our Daily Scholar alum, Paula Marantz Cohen • Hallie Lieberman’s Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy • Anthony Comstock and his obscenity laws play a big role on another podcast episode, “Out of the Closet and Into the Courts” • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. •

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast • Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#29: The Three Percent

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 05:05:00 GMT

A measly three percent of books published in the United States are works in translation—so this week, we’re shining a spotlight on two books from dramatically different places. Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields is the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English; he and his translator, Allison Charette, talk with us about love stories and origin stories. And Tenzin Dickie, editor of Old Demons, New Deities—the first English anthology of Tibetan fiction—joins us on the show to talk about life in exile, the rain in Dharamsala, and the best momos in Queens (Little Tibet, in Jackson Heights, in case you're wondering). • Episode Page: https://theamericanscholar.org/the-three-percent/ • Go beyond the episode: Read an excerpt from Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo, translated by Allison Charette • Watch the book trailer for Old Demons, New Deities, narrated by editor Tenzin Dickie • Check out the University of Rochester’s Three Percent project, which frequently reviews new books in translation • Read new stories in translation (including bilingual versions!) on Words Without Borders the online magazine for international literature • Cross a prizewinner off your reading list with the Man Booker International Prize • Listen to our interview with the founders of Restless Books, Joshua Ellison and Ilan Stavans • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. • Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast • Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#28: Witches Never Die

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Our Halloween special covers two subjects perfect for your next macabre dinner party: how the witch gained her powers, and the myriad alternatives to a casket. Caitlin Doughty, the Internet’s favorite mortician, tells us about her world travels in search of the holy grail of corpse interaction—along with a few other stories that illuminate our changing relationship with the afterlife. And Ronald Hutton, medieval historian and witch expert, goes into the history of fear surrounding one of the oldest scapegoats in the world. • Episode page: https://theamericanscholar.org/witches-never-die/ • Go beyond the episode: Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity • Ronald Hutton’s The Witch • Ask a Mortician all about coffin birth, ghost marriage, and the iconic corpses of the world on Caitlin’s YouTube channel • Read more about the Order of the Good Death, an organization of funeral professionals working to change attitudes about death • Virtually visit the high-tech Ruriden Columbarium in Tokyo, Japan with head monk Yajima Taijun • For the flip side of witchcraft, watch Ronald Hutton’s dramatic documentary about the good ones—A Very British Witchcraft, about the founder of modern Wicca • And for some spooky Halloween viewing, watch The Witch, our host’s favorite movie about witches—featured on Vulture’s list of top 15 witch movies, if you’re dying for more • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. • Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast • Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! • Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”), Dead End Canada (“Witch Hunt”), and 8bit Betty (“Spooky Loop”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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#27: Back in the USSR

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:03:38 GMT

Family drama, circa 1930: Yuri Slezkine tells the saga of the House of Government, a communal residence where top Soviet officials and their families lived, loved, died, and disappeared in the years after the Russian Revolution; Caroline Moorehead introduces American audiences to the story of the Rossellis, the family at the forefront of the fight against Mussolini’s fascism. • Episode Page: https://theamericanscholar.org/back-in-the-ussr/ • Go beyond the episode: • Yuri Slezkine’s House of Government • Watch Neighbors of the Kremlin, a documentary about the House on the Embankment • Caroline Moorehead’s A Bold and Dangerous Family • Read poetry by Carlo Rosselli’s daughter, Amelia (named after his mother), whose work has only recently been translated • Explore the Fondazione Rosselli archives online • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. • Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast • Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#26: Once and Future Food

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 14:31:00 GMT

This week, we look at how we have irrevocably shaped the planet through consumption: of fossil fuels, exotic foods, cups of tea. Erika Rappaport talks about how the drive for empire was spurred on by lust for a certain caffeinated plant, which fueled countless wars and colonial expansion. And Alexandra Kleeman and Jen Monroe throw a dinner party for the future, imagining what food will taste like in 30 years’ time. • Episode page: https://theamericanscholar.org/once-and-future-food/ • Go beyond the episode: • Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World • Bon Appétit explains how to brew the perfect cup of tea • Check out Bad Taste, Jen Monroe’s experimental food project • Read “Choking Victim,” a short story by Alexandra Kleeman • Explore the unusual artistic encounters of The Bellwether, which put on The Next Menu, and Jordan Kisner’s essay on the massive aspen grove threatened by climate change • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. • Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#25: Rhapsodies in Blue

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 03:54:49 GMT

What power do words have, and how do their meanings change across centuries—and continents? We talk to Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, about how moving from Britain to Baltimore changed his work; Jennifer Choi unearths the cruel etymology behind an innocuous blue birthmark; and Max Décharné draws a map of the vulgar tongue. • Episode page: https://theamericanscholar.org/rhapsodies-in-blue/ • Go beyond the episode: • “My Mongolian Spot,” Jennifer Choi’s essay on having a blue behind • Four poems by Andrew Motion, including “Surveillance,” which he read on the podcast • Listen to more poets read their work on the Poetry Archive, founded by Andrew Motion during his time as Poet Laureate • Max Décharné’s Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of the English Language • Our back to school required reading list • Don’t forget to send us an email at podcast@theamericanscholar.org if you want us to mail you swag! • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. • Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast • Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#24: Scientists and Saints

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 15:21:47 GMT

This week is for the ladies: we'll be talking about women's roles in two pretty different fields—science and religion—and how women have worked their way in from the fringes of both. Angela Saini unravels the pervasive idea that science is free from bias, and talks about how prejudice against women comes out in studies as well as in the academy; Adrian Shirk spotlights the American women who have shaped modern religion, both inside and outside the lines. • Episode Page: https://theamericanscholar.org/scientists-and-saints/ • Go beyond the episode: • Angela Saini’s Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story • “Women Are Dying Because Doctors Treat Us Like Men” by Kayla Webley Adler in Marie Claire • Read an excerpt from Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction about the biases built into Big Data • Adrian Shirk’s And Your Daughters Shall Prophecy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion • Watch the trailer for American Mystic, Alex Mar’s documentary featuring a modern-day Spiritualist medium • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. • Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast • Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

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#23: Lady Pirates and Oceans of Plastic

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 16:33:34 GMT

We hit the seven seas and the five gyres in our wettest podcast episode yet: Laura Sook Duncombe talks about the female swashbucklers forgotten by history—including a pirate who gave birth in the middle of a sea battle—and Marcus Eriksen talks about sailing the ocean blue in a raft made of plastic bottles. • Go beyond the episode: • Laura Sook Duncombe’s Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas • Read more about Cheng I Sao, the world’s most successful pirate, or catch Anne Bonny and Mary Read on the television show Black Sails • Listen to our podcast segment on the history of eclipse in preparation for the upcoming total solar eclipse—including why the ancient Babylonians always marked the occasion with a king-swapping ritual and human sacrifice • Learn more about Marcus Eriksen’s journey on the Junk Raft • Read more about how much plastic we produce and where it goes, how 100 companies are responsible for 71% of greenhouse gas emissions • And dry off with our list of the most arid reads around: 10 Books to Read—And Not a Drop to Drink • Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. •Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

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#22: What the Nose Knows

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 16:44:40 GMT

Melanie Kiechle introduces us to the 19th-century world of smell detectives, where the nose reigned supreme and cities mapped their stench patterns; Sam Kean tells how gases can have a profound effect on us—from knocking us out to making us laugh, and even causing the French Revolution. Plus, top off our exploration into the sensory world of invisible forces with an excerpt from a new book on all the light we cannot see.

Go beyond the episode:

Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us
Check out a modern-day smell map of the City of Light (and Odor), from graphic designer Kate McClean
Live in Pittsburgh? Download Smell PGH, the app that tracks pollution odors (read more here)
Read more about the volcanic eruption that led to the French Revolution
Flip through the scanned pages of Humprhy Davy’s book on his laughing gas experiments, which could use a funnier title: Researches, chemical and philosophical chiefly concerning nitrous oxide, or diphlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration

Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

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#21: Love Games and First Impressions

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 16:00:00 GMT

Psychologist Alexander Todorov tells us how we’ve got it all wrong on the science of first impressions—and warns of physiognomy’s dangerous return—while Elizabeth Wilson gives us a glimpse into the secret, sexy history of tennis, just in time for the Wimbledon finals.

Go beyond the episode:

Alexander Todorov’s Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions
Explore the Social Perception Lab at Princeton, where you can watch videos of how our visual stereotypes map onto faces
Watch how bias shapes photographic portraits in this experiment from Canon Australia
Elizabeth Wilson’s Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
And, of course: live updates from Wimbledon

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#20: From Beer to Eternity

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 16:02:58 GMT

Meet the experimental archaeologist and the master brewer who are resurrecting beverages of the past. Dr. Patrick McGovern, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head Brewery, discuss what it takes to turn millennia-old booze samples at the bottom of a jug into mead fit for a king; our editors give us a sneak peek at their favorite fictional food scenes; and we honor Brian Doyle, who died last month.

Go beyond the episode:

Read “Joyas Voladoras,” Brian Doyle’s ode to the capacity of the heart
Explore Dr. Pat’s work on the intoxicating science of alcohol
Watch Patrick McGovern and Sam Calagione work on a recipe for a new ancient ale
Add your favorite food scene to our list of top fictional feasts

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#19: From the Horse’s Mouth

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 18:15:47 GMT

True tales of horse historians, mad bombers, and infinite jam jars

Susanna Forrest takes us down the bridle path of our long relationship with horses; Michael Cannell tells the story of New York’s mad bomber and the invention of criminal profiling; and Eugenia Cheng shares her infinite enthusiasm for the link between mathematics and art.

Go beyond the episode:• Susanna Forrest’s The Age of the Horse, and her blog about horse history and news• Michael Cannell’s Incendiary• Track the mad bomber through New York City on this map• Eugenia Cheng’s Beyond Infinity, and her attempt to teach Stephen Colbert how to make puff pastry• Natalie Angier’s review of How to Bake Pi (delicious!)

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#18: Twin Peaks

Tue, 16 May 2017 17:36:29 GMT

Sarah Williams Goldhagen takes us on a tour of New York’s High Line—and the insides of our brains—and Judith Matloff talks about traveling 72,000 miles, across nearly a dozen mountain ranges, as she investigated why the world’s highlands harbor so much violence.

Go beyond the episode:• Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives• Judith Matloff’s No Friends But the Mountains: Dispatches from the World’s Violent Highlands• Plan your own trip to New York’s High Line park

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#17: The Fox in the Big House

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 03:56:08 GMT

Lee Alan Dugatkin on the world’s cutest science experiment, which transformed wild foxes into cuddlebugs; Ellen Lagemann makes the case for college in prisons; and an underground poetry reading promoting this weekend’s March for Science.

Go beyond the episode:• The Science Stanzas curated by Jane Hirshfield for the March for Science• Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut’s How to Tame a Fox• Ellen Lagemann’s Liberating Minds and the Bard Prison Initiative• Read more about Stalin’s geneticist henchman, Trofim Lysenko, in our review of Stalin and the Scientists• Our first subterranean segment, from our third (!) episode

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#16: Out of the Closet and Into the Courts

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 20:56:53 GMT

Geoffrey R. Stone tells the epic story of how sex came to be legislated in America; Linda Heywood introduces us to an African queen cooler than Cleopatra; and John Dvorak gives us a lesson in the total eclipse of the heart. Er, sun.

Mentioned in this episode:• Geoffrey R. Stone’s Sex and the Constitution• Linda M. Heywood’s Njinga of Angola• The upcoming solar eclipse on August 21st, with an interactive map from NASA

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#15: All the Rage

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:11:05 GMT

Pankaj Mishra goes back to the Enlightenment to explain our age of anger; Ronald Rael imagines how architecture might dismantle a wall rather than construct it; and our editors offer up their favorite tales from the Emerald Isle. Sláinte!

Episode extras:• Our St. Patrick’s Day Reading list• Martha McPhee on Edna O’Brien

Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

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#14: Unlikely Encounters

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 20:56:15 GMT

André Aciman gives us a primer on W. G. Sebald, who blurred the line between memory and fiction; Rowan Ricardo Phillips talks about the biomechanics of poetry; and Julian Gewirtz unveils the travel itinerary of the least likely visitor to communist China you’d expect: Milton Friedman.

Mentioned in this episode:• André Aciman on W. G. Sebald and “The Life Unlived”• “Halo,” a poem by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Langdon Hammer’s introduction• Julian Gewirtz’s essay, “Milton Friedman’s Misadventures in China”

Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

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#13: From Côte d’Ivoire to the California Coast

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 22:03:43 GMT

Julia Lichtblau takes us to an elite secondary school in Abidjan that’s changing the lives of African girls; Steve Early shows how Richmond, California, became a progressive beacon; and Phillip Lopate tells us what he thinks about confiding your darkest secrets.

Mentioned in this episode:• Julia Lichtblau on the smart girls of Côte d’Ivoire• Phillip Lopate’s collection of essays for us on his blog, Full Disclosure• Emily Fox Gordon’s essay on the central conflict of the memoir, whether to confess or confide

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#12: Portraits of a Movement

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 21:42:54 GMT

Amanda Kolson Hurley gives us a tour of the Trump Hotel; our editorial assistant Noelani Kirschner introduces the Scholar’s newest blog; and a chorus of voices tells us why they went to Washington for the Women’s March.

Mentioned in this episode:• Amanda Kolson Hurley on Trump’s influence over public space in Washington, D.C.• Barry Goldstein’s portrait series of March attendees and of protesters• The first post in our new blog, Portrait of the Artist

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#11: Sounds Like a Revolution

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 19:15:00 GMT

Madeleine Thien talks about art and music under totalitarianism, along with her novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Scholar managing editor Sudip Bose explains how Neville Marriner, conductor of the now-ubiquitous Academy-of-St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, used to be a rebel; and beloved former Scholar blogger Jessica Love catches us up on the radical changes she’s made to her book on psycholinguistics.

Mentioned in this episode:• Listen to the Spotify playlist we curated to accompany Do Not Say We Have Nothing, featuring every recording mentioned in the novel (that’s 23 hours and 40 minutes of music!)• Read Sudip Bose’s ode to the great Neville Marriner in our Winter 2017 issue• Check out the archives of Psycho Babble, Jessica Love's long-running blog about language and the brain.

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#10: The Aftermath

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 05:00:00 GMT

Keramet Reiter talks about what happens to prisoners who spend decades in solitary confinement; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilia-Whitaker offer some historical perspective on the crisis at Standing Rock; and Sandra Gilbert reflects on the importance of Adrienne Rich and reads her favorite poem.

Mentioned in this episode:• Read an excerpt from Keramet Reiter’s new book, 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s new book, “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans• Sandra Gilbert reviews Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems, plus: four scintillating poems of her own

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#9: Fighting the Zika Virus with John Wayne (and John Aubrey)

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:53:08 GMT

Harriet Washington discusses how our current Zika crisis fits into the (tragic) pattern of ignoring tropical diseases until they hit our shores; Brian Doyle tries to justify watching 50 John Wayne movies in a row; and Ruth Scurr tells funny stories about John Aubrey, the most curious biographer of the Elizabethan age.

Mentioned in this episode:• Harriet Washington’s cover story on neglected tropical diseases and mental health, “The Well Curve”• Brian Doyle on John Wayne• … and on his dog’s crush on Peter O’Toole• “You Remember John Aubrey. Chased by Debt Collectors, Chaser of Whores,” a New York Times review of John Aubrey, My Own Life by Ruth Scurr

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#8: High Art and Low Chairs

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 18:41:00 GMT

Take a crash course in Indie Publishing 101 with the founders of Restless Books; hear Scholar senior editor Bruce Falconer explain how John le Carré burned the bridge between genre and literary fiction; and learn from Witold Rybczynski how an iconic modern chair was inspired by an ant.

Mentioned in this episode:• Bruce Falconer’s review of The Pigeon Tunnel• Our list of 13 “Spooktacular” Books and Michael Dirda’s attempt to out-scare us with a list of his own• An excerpt from How to Travel Without Seeing by Andrés Neuman, published by Restless Books, which offers a glimpse inside the surreal operations of Venezuela’s book industry• An NPR segment on Witold Rybczynski’s new book about chairs, Now I Sit Me Down, including illustrations of the medieval backstool

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#7: Ku Klux Kounty

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Patrick Phillips recounts the ugly history of a southern county that brutally expelled its African-American residents and remained entirely white for most of the 20th century; Ross King reveals some of Claude Monet’s more unusual painting habits, including his obsession with a certain flower; and Paula Becker introduces the memoir of a beloved American children’s book author.

Mentioned in this episode:• Read more about Forsyth in Patrick Phillips’s new book, Blood at the Root• Watch Oprah Winfrey’s televised 1987 visit to Forsyth County, Georgia• Take a virtual tour of the Musée de l’Orangerie’s rooms of the Water Lilies• Read The Seattle Times’s review of Betty MacDonald’s memoirs on the 50th anniversary of her final memoir’s publication

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#6: Women v. ISIS

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 20:25:59 GMT

Meredith Tax explains how the Rojava Kurds—and their democratic, feminist, and environmentally conscious society—are fighting back against ISIS; Ed Yong takes us on a tour of the ecosystems lurking inside our bodies; and Amy Whitaker, alias “Agony Amy,” our resident agony aunt, gives advice about balancing a creative life.

Mentioned in this episode:• View a slideshow of Joey Lawrence’s photographs from Rojava, and read an excerpt from A Road Unforeseen• “The Revolution in Rojava”, Meredith Tax’s article in Dissent magazine that sparked the book• Read an excerpt from Ed Yong’s new book I Contain Multitudes on our regular books feature, Shelf Life

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#5: A New Story for Black Americans

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 16:00:00 GMT

Charles Johnson questions the stories we tell ourselves about black America, eight years after President Obama’s election; Barry Goldstein gives us the inside story on covering the 2016 Republican and Democratic national conventions; and David Lehman explains what crowdsourcing and poetry have in common.

Mentioned in this episode:• Charles Johnson’s original 2008 essay, “The End of the Black American Narrative”• David Lehman’s “Next Line, Please” blog• Barry Goldstein’s portraits from the conventions

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#4: Go West, Young Scholar

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:46:42 GMT

Terry Tempest Williams talks America’s national parks and her new book, “The Hour of Land;” James Conaway explains how to survive a California wildfire while downing petit syrah; and Ted Levin sticks up for the beleaguered timber rattlesnake.

Mentioned in this episode:• Our Summer 2016 cover story about America’s national parks, “The Taming of the Wild”• James Conaways’s essay about the Valley Fire, “Waiting for Fire”• Ted Levin’s Shelf Life excerpt

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#3: Reading Lolita in Maximum Security Prison

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 04:00:00 GMT

How do you run a literature course for convicts, and what do a headless chicken and Pinochet have in common? Mikita Brottman discusses her new book, The Maximum Security Book Club; Idra Novey reads a short story; and we venture underground to check out what's happening to the abandoned streetcar tunnels under Washington, D.C.

Mentioned in this episode:• Idra Novey’s short story, “Under the Lid”• Our original coverage of the Dupont Underground• Mikita Brottman’s essay, “Jane Austen’s Ivory Cage”

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#2: Superheroes Are So Gay!

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:30:00 GMT

What do the X-Men have to do with feminism, and how did the Fantastic Four get caught up in the radical politics of the New Left? Learn about the queer history of superhero comics with Ramzi Fawaz, and check in on reporter Karen Coates's documentary project on world hunger, "Bellyache." Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

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#1: Mary Roach and a Double Dose of Shakespeare

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 04:01:00 GMT

Hear about weird military science from Mary Roach, learn bizarre Elizabethan recipes, and catch an excerpt from a new book about Shakespeare's strange appeal. Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Smarty Pants #0: Trailer

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 13:00:00 GMT

A podcast from The American Scholar magazine. Tune in every two weeks to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Smarty Pants

Hue and Cry

Shotgun Ornithology

Eulogy for a Yenta

The Carnifex of Čachtice

What We Talk About When We Talk About Prehistory

The Midwife of Black Nationalism

Ground Truths

The Dangerous Dead

For the Love of Foraging

From Sofia to Chicago

Why the Bronx Burned

What Lies Beneath the Levee Camp Holler

The Art of *Doing* Politics

The Linguistics of Brain Rot

Michael Douglas Explains It All

Once in a Lifetime

Family Values

Lingua Obscura

The Shipping News

Coming Home

Muscle Memory

The Most Famous Unknown Artist

The Root Cause

Something New in the West

Family/History

The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Keepers of the Old Ways

Kinship and Contradictions

Overconsumed

Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

American Horror Story

The Writing on the Wall

This Woman’s Work

Queen of the Night

A Toothsome Tale

A Rebel to Remember

Going for Gold

Paradise Reclaimed

Bathing Badasses

Turning the World to Powder

#292: Indiana Absurd

Changing the Lens

In Memoriam: American Modernism’s Lost Boy-King

Let Us Compare Mythologies

Interlude: The Idea of “The West”

The Spirit of ’68

Reedies Against Racism

Sing, Muse

Trailer: Exploding the Canon

#291: Dancing the Imperial Twist

#290: Dying for Fashion

#289: On the Line

#288: Of Panic and Paranoia

#287: Man vs. Mosquito

#286: The Falcon’s Odd Little Cousin

#285: Imagined Cuisines

#284: What Could Be Wurst?

#283: Why the West Won’t Die

#282: No-No Novel

#281: Music to Have Revelations To

#280: Lines from the Front

#279: Losing the Lot

#278: The Pacifist and the Battlefield

#277: A Home in Chinatown

#276: Listening to the Dead

#275: That Time of the Month

#274: Twenty Years of War

#273: The Art of Doing Nothing Much, Together

#272: Cherry Blossom Bonanza

#271: Filling in the Fragments

#270: Reading the Trail Trees

#269: Chaucer’s Leading Lady

#268: The Comic Queen of Metafiction

#267: Justice, Arrested

#266: Past is Present

#265: The Promised Land of the Pampas

#264: Medieval Madams

#263: The Sensual Sargent

#262: Lost in Smog

The Art of Doing Politics