Smarty Pants

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 VesselRead an excerpt from the book's introductionTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his award-winning 2003 graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson depicted his teenage love and 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 MemoirRead 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 journalismMore about the United States's “Secret War” in LaosTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 LivesRead an excerpt, “Mr. Olympia,” from our Spring 2025 IssueExplore the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at AustinTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 BiographyThe artist's official websiteWatch 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 BauRead the original Playboy interviews that Sheff conducted with Yoko Ono and John Lennon in September 1980Tune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 FamineFor 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 WorldCATU Ireland organizes around housing and community issues across the islandIt's true: Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series is all about the Irish housing marketTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 RemarqueWatch the original 1930 American adaptation of the novelWar poets who wrote in the trenches: August Stramm, Wilfred Owen, Rupert BrookeTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, 1790-1958Read his 2021 essay on why Black biography matters ( “A Prophet and a President”) and “The Autobiography of Biography” 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 every bit 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 AgeVisit our episode page for primary source links and historical fiction we loveTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 AliveWatch 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 filindeuInterested in learning a traditional craft? Check out our interview with Alexander Langlands about his book CraeftTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 AmericaFor more on citizenship in the Creek nation, listen to our interview with Caleb Gayle on the complicated history of Black enrollmentTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 SaleVisit our episode page for further reading about fast fashion, the dark side of Goodwill, and the moral hazards of recyclingAbandon your idols: Mari Kondo has begun selling you junk to replace the junk you just KonMari'dRead more about why local textile industries are dying in Ghana and African countries more broadlyLearn more about the Right to Repair movementTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the summer after graduation, and Munir Hachemi 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 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? Munir Hachemi joins us in the studio to talk about storytelling, machismo, and going vegan.Go beyond the episode: Living Things by Munir HachemiSome of Hachemi's inspirations include Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia, Tomás Downey, María Sonia Cristoff, Pablo Katchadjian, Emiliano Monge, and, of course, Borges 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 filmRead Alice Sheldon's story “The Screwfly Solution,” first published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon in 1977You know we love horror—visit our website for a list of our spookiest episodesSubscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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”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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 MovementWe have too many links to the Bluestockings' own books, so visit our episode page for the full list!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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 DarkExplore Foxfire Books, a series of anthologies about Appalachian culture (and cookery!)DarkSky International works to protect the night around the worldKeep an eye out for these annual nighttime events: Mothapalooza, Grandfather Glows, Glowworms in the DismalitesTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 HumansVisit our episode page to see some of Patricia J. Wynne's original illustrations for the bookTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. DownsNat's bible is on view at the National Museum of African American History and CultureFor 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 firstTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 winnersTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ParadiseListen to John Clare's “I Love to See the Summer Beaming Forth” on our sister podcast, Read Me a PoemIn 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 gardenWe 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 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 WaterRead all about the aquatic theater that Wilbert E. Longfellow devised in the name of safetyLearn 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 KellermanVisit our episode page to view more imagesTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ParticlesSand is a kind of dust—and we're running out of itJorge Otero-Pailos's series The Ethics of Dust uses the latex sheets that conservationists use to clean grimy stoneworkJohn 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 assembledOwens Lake returnsTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 TsaoRead Tsao's post in memory of Budi Darma, who died in August 2021Check out these other Indonesian writers mentioned in the episode: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Umar Kayam, Chairil Anwar, Ajip RosidiWant 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 DickieTune 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 linksReed College Office of Institutional Research data on historical enrollment by ethnicity (2002–2024)The 2023–24 Hum 110 syllabus, with timelines and mapsFeatured 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 BoyRead 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”Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHosted 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 LivesIn “Claiming the Classical,” Mac Sweeney and her co-authors examine how classical antiquity is used by 21st-century political actorsSubscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHosted by Stephanie Bastek. Theme music by Nathan Prillaman. Exploding the Canon returns next week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 QuarterlyIn Memoriam: Linda Gordon Howard, Calvin FreemanVisit our episode page to see more of Stephen Robinson's photographs from 1968Transcript available on our websiteFeatured 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 demandsReed'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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedTranscript available on our episode page. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, 2023-24Visit 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.Follow The American Scholar on Twitter and Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Smarty Pants is taking the rest of the summer off! Host Stephanie Bastek is working on something new for the show—a miniseries. We'll see you when the leaves turn. Til then, dig into some of the books we've featured, listen to our sister podcast Read Me a Poem, and take advantage of summer while it's here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 releaseRead “Last Dance,” Saporiti's story of the George Igawa OrchestraUnfamiliar 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-resisterTune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ClothesThomas's tips for weaning yourself off fast fashionWhy donating secondhand clothes to developing countries can actually prevent development—and kill local textile industriesWhat is “slow fashion”? The New York Times explainsMartha Stewart teaches Clothing Repair 101Tune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 SeasLet 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 catastropheJohn Dos Passos loved fishing for tuna just as much as Papa Hemingway didAnna Badhken spoke to us in 2018 about how overfishing and warming waters have devastated a Senegalese fishing communityTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 DemocracyListen to our previous conversation about cryptids, aliens, and other weird encountersJust 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 yearThe “groomers” conspiracy draws on a long history of trans- and homophobiaFor more about the Satanic Panic, listen to this episode of the You're Wrong About podcastTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 PredatorTo 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 riskWe 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 tipsVisit our episode page for a gallery of anti-mosquito efforts, courtesy of Dutton 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 CreatureRead an excerpt about Charles Darwin's encounters with the birdMeet Tina, the striated caracara who can “find Nemo,” and a crested caracara named KevinHere's some footage of a flock on Saunders Island in the FalklandsTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 HomeIn case you missed it, last week's episode dealt with what might perhaps be called America's quixotic national dish: the hot dogDig in to our culinary history, and you'll find a collection of immigrant women who changed the way American eatsJames Beard did, tooPicture 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?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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 DogsProPublica's exposé of the meatpacking industry during Covid revealed awful conditions, and government collusionDelight your senses with PBS's classic A Hot Dog ProgramVisit 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 JerseyHot Dog Ruiz Los Chipilones in Tucson, ArizonaKing Jong Grillin in Portland, OregonThe hot dog carts across the street from the Crypto.com Arena, or near Union Station in Los Angeles, CaliforniaTexas Tavern in Roanoke, VirginiaTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 LivesWe have covered Greece and Rome in previous episodes, as well as Njinga of AngolaIn our Summer 2023 issue, Sarah Ruden considers how modern biographers distort VergilTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 BoyNo-No Boy by John OkadaWatch Frank Abe's film about the Japanese-American draft resisters, Conscience and the ConstitutionRead Julian Saporiti's essay in our Summer 2023 issue, “Last Dance”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.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 MusicWe dare you not to hum the hook in “Horseradish” Check out the Small Fools TikTokRead 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 composersTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 KaminskyListen to Serhiy Zhadan's “Take Only What Is Most Important” on our Read Me a Poem podcastRead Megan Buskey's essay on the long, unfortunate history of Ukrainian displacementTune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 WorldRead 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 conspiracyThe 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 '80sHot 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 percentTune 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. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @TheAmSchoSubscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 WarRead 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.”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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 HomecomingRead her reflections on her railworker great-great-grandfather and contemporary immigration controlHer columns as the Urban Forager for The New York Times grew into Eating Wildly, her 2015 bookVisit our website for a selection of family photographs 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 RemainsHer 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 ESMAGuatemala'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 analogueIn the experimental film Los Rubios, Albertina Carri investigates what happened to her parents during the Argentine dictatorshipTune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 MenstruationRead 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 usageA new generation of artists is making art with menstrual blood, The Guardian reportsTune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 WarRead 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 invasionSome of Abdul-Ahad's illustrations from the bookTune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 TimeLiming learned a lot about the art of the hang through her time playing in the Catamount Pipe Band and the jam band The ArmadillosRay Oldenburg celebrated all the “third places” where people hang out in The Great Good PlaceYou know what would make hanging out a lot easier? The 15-minute cityPractice doing nothing much with one of these great hangout filmsTune 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. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • 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! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.