Podcasts about phi beta kappa society

No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acquire quality pieces and a little bit of history, with the bonus of saving grandma's treasures from the landfill. For several years, vintage enthusiast Kate Davis has been writing a popular weekly newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing, that not only spotlights upcoming sales of note but offers a guide for the uninitiated. Her new book, Bring Cash, distills those lessons (the first one is in the title) along with essays about favorite finds and what to look for: dovetail joints in furniture, finished seams in clothing, the sign-in sheet at the front of the line so you're not the last one admitted into the designer's midcentury bungalow. Davis joins the podcast this week to talk about what she's learned from estate sailing, her term for the ritual of trekking out to someone's house and wandering its halls for treasure—which is almost always sure to include at least one inexplicable maritime tchotchke.Go beyond the episode:Kate Davis's Bring Cash: A Guide to Estate Sales in the Midwest and BeyondHer newsletter, Midwestern Estate SailingFor more on the afterlives of secondhand stuff, listen to our interviews with Adam Minter (on global thrifting) and Dana Thomas (on fast fashion)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 • PandoraHave 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.

“Medieval psychology” might sound nearly a millennium out of date, irrelevant to modern science, with its reassurances of cognitive data and peer-reviewed studies. But we often say that Shakespeare's 400-year old plays communicate the human condition, and that wouldn't be possible if the Bard didn't have a deep understanding of what makes our minds tick. Rewind the clock just 200 years further and you'll find, with the help of a Middle English glossary, that the autobiographical writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—not to mention Chaucer—seem achingly familiar in their yearning, their humor, and their determination. We're not so different, mentally, from our forebears, and beyond literature, medieval writings on morality and psychology have a lot to offer us. But since cracking open a vellum manuscript to read cramped Latin text is beyond most of us, historian Peter Jones can be our guide in his new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages. And the starting point for much medieval guidance on living a better life is quite familiar: the Seven Deadly Sins, which were less a catalog of forbidden behaviors than a path to self-knowledge. Just ask Dante. Go beyond the episode:Peter Jones's Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About LivingFor more about medieval women's religious experience of food, you can't do better than Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy FastGuillaume de Deguileville's The Pilgrimage of Human Life, in scanned manuscript or translationBernard of Clairvaux's The Steps of Humility and Pride Thomas Aquinas's works are available online in a free side-by-side translationDon't sleep on the early Christian mystics: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Catherine of Siena 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 • PandoraHave 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.

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

Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered habitats. Birders, not to mention scientists, are sounding the alarm. But true as these words are today, they also describe the 19th century, and the valiant—and occasionally violent—efforts to protect birds from the utter devastation of human activity. This is the subject of James H. McCommons's new book, The Feather Wars. Birds were threatened by aggressive logging, farming, hunting, sport, and the desire to put a feather in a woman's cap. But they were also imperiled by the very people who claimed to love them—ornithologists, and their kindred oologists, whose hobby consisted of killing thousands upon thousands of birds and collecting their eggs to fluff out their collections. McCommons takes us behind the battle lines of the first American effort to save the birds, in the hopes that some lessons might apply to our current circumstances.Go beyond the episode:James H. McCommons's The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America's BirdsGet to know the birds in your back yard with eBird from the Cornell Lab of OrnithologyLearn how to garden for wildlifeRead this viral essay about keeping your cat indoors: “The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It” (1916)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 • PandoraHave 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 a cramped rent-controlled apartment on the lousy end of the Upper East Side, a dying woman in a diaper writes the story of her life. She is Barbara Rosenberg, high on OxyContin and determined to explain herself, if not exactly apologize, to the two people she loved most: her estranged trans son and her best friend, Sugar Becker, whose betrayals she has yet to forgive. This delirious monologue is the heart of Jordy Rosenberg's new novel, Night Night Fawn, which gives voice to Barbara's deepest disappointments about her friends, her family, her in-laws, and maybe, if she's being honest, her own silver-screen aspirations. But Barbara's most unhinged thoughts—about serving cold cuts at a funeral or the lesbian perils of a corduroy jacket; the schmucks of 1960s Flatbush or bad 1980s nose jobs; Karl Marx or yenta science—reach a crescendo with the unexpected reappearance of her long-lost loves.Mentioned in this episode:Jordy Rosenberg's Night Night FawnGillian Rose's Mourning Becomes the LawMichelle de Kretser's Theory & PracticeSophie Lewis's Enemy FeminismsRoberto Bolano's By Night in Chile, translated by Chris AndrewsAdania Shibli's Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth JaquetteJordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox (listen to our 2018 interview here)Amy Kaplan's Our American IsraelGretchen Felker-Martin's ManhuntGrace Byron's HerculineZefyr Lisowksi's Uncanny Valley GirlsTorrey Peters's Stag Dance and Detransition, BabyAnd, of course, Karl Marx's Capital (best read with an introduction)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 • PandoraHave 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.

Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have been the most prolific serial killer of all time, responsible for butchering as many as 650 virgins and bathing in their blood. Her Hungarian water castles are the sites of gruesome ghost tours, a metal band named itself for her, and for years she was in the Guinness Book of World Records. The number of women she's said to have killed is four times the population of an average 17th-century village, but when it comes to Bathory's story, even the Guinness Book concedes that “it is impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Shelley Puhak disagrees: In her new book,The Blood Countess, she contends that Bathory was instead the victim of possibly the greatest misinformation campaign in history, brought against a powerful, wealthy woman at a tumultuous time. Lutherans and Calvinists were at one another's throats at the height of the Protestant Reformation, the Ottoman Empire lurked just across the border, and medicine in upheaval, with both new and old practices bringing accusations of heresy and witchcraft. It was a dark time to be a woman—especially one with 17 castles to her name, and no husband to defend her.Go beyond the episode:Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a MonsterTune 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 • PandoraHave 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 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which tells users whether their prehistoric genes predispose them to certain behaviors, like hoarding or not getting hangry. In the 1880s, Neanderthals were not being celebrated at all—they were depicted as little more than troglodytes with tools—and the 1980s weren't much better: rough hair, swarthy skin, dull eyes, jutting foreheads … an evolutionary dead end. Today, armed with recently decoded Neanderthal DNA, researchers are reconstructing these archaic people as lighter-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. For historian Stefanos Geroulanos, however, this new account raises difficult questions. “Are Neanderthals now smart because they are no longer depicted as dark-skinned? Or, conversely, have they become blond and white because they are now believed to have been smart, able, quintessentially human?” Questions like these form the heart of his book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, which has just won Phi Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. Geroulanos contends that our claims about the deep past—whether made in 1726 or 2026—tell us more about the moment we propose them than anything else.Go beyond the episode:Stefanous Geroulanos's The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human OriginsListen to Geroulanos in conversation at the Phi Beta Kappa 2025 Book AwardsReconstructed ancient languages like Proto-Indo-European have been similarly weaponized for political ends, as Laura Spinney describes on an earlier episodeAnd our understanding of the more recent past—like Viking history, similarly prone—has been challenged by recent archaeological discoveries too, as Eleanor Barraclough explains in Embers of the HandsTune 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 • PandoraHave 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.

Audley Moore mentored Malcolm X, popularized reparations for African Americans in a 1963 essay, and advanced the cause of Black women in both the Black nationalist and civil rights movements. She rubbed elbows with the Mandelas, Jessie Jackson, and Rosa Parks. Once a household name in the mid-20th century, she has fallen out of the history books, despite a career of organizing and activism that spanned a century, her artifacts lost and her archives scattered. But more than 100 years after Moore's birth and 28 years after her death, Ashley D. Farmer has written the first biography of Moore, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore. Farmer brings together a decade of research spanning oral history, archival work from Louisiana to New York City, and, of course, reams of FBI documents to paint the fullest picture of this icon's life to date.Go beyond the episode:Ashley D. Farmer's Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley MooreSpeaking of neglected Black figures: read Harriet A. Washington's Winter 2026 cover story on Rudolph Fisher, Harlem Renaissance manTune 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 • PandoraHave 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 ancient Greece, the view from on high was known as catascopos, or “the looker-down.” It's a privileged perspective, and in the modern world, one increasingly taken by machines: drones, satellites, spy cameras, airplanes, sentient doorbells. In his new book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View, Edward McPherson surveys the cultural history of top-down and far-ranging perspectives from aviation and warfare to quarantine and protest. “We continue to make decisions based on the big picture,” he writes. “Politicians and planners confront the challenges of today with lofty intelligence, always pointing to the forest, not the trees.” Often that view can be obscuring, even as its accuracy is hailed. Consider the dead civilians mistaken for combatants in drone warfare the world over, or the wrong face recognized on CCTV. And in some cases, the forest isn't even there, as in John B. Bachelder's birds-eye map of Gettysburg and its imaginary copse of trees. Is distance the straightest path to truth? What dangers lie in prioritizing the big picture? McPherson joins Smarty Pants to muddle through the trees.Go beyond the episode:Edward McPherson's Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long ViewRead “Lost and Found,” his essay about the house in Gettysburg built by his great-great-grandfather, also named Edward McPhersonTune 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 • PandoraHave 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.

Stories of the undead tormenting the living supposedly entered the English-speaking world in 1732, with a report from the Hapsburg military of events in Serbia—events that would go on to inspire the most famous vampire of all, Dracula. But the count from Transylvania was neither the first undead man in England (British corpses went walking in 680, and again in 1090) nor the most emblematic of the folk tales that preceded him (that would be Carmilla, who embodies a type seen from China to the Eastern Roman Empire). In Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair uses examples from the far-flung ancient world—a “vampire belt” stretching from Scandinavia and the North Sea through central and eastern Europe, western Russia, the Near East, India, and China to Indonesia—to make the case that “corpse-killing is mainstream and not marginal, therapeutic and not pathological.” The undead have seemingly always been with us, as has our need to kill them to exorcise our own anxieties. “Killing the dead is better than killing the living,” Blair writes. “Like other extreme rituals, it is depressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.”Go beyond the episode:John Blair's Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New WorldListen to our interview about the modern vampire with Nick Groom, the Prof of Goth, and our conversation with Ronald Hutton about witch persecutions through the agesYou know we love horror—visit our episode page for a list of spookiest episodesTune 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!Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) and 8bit Betty (“Spooky Loop”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Foraging has been part of the human story forever, and its post-pandemic resurgence is a return to ways of living with the natural world that have only recently been forgotten. Gabrielle Cerberville, or the Chaotic Forager, as she's known online, is one of the voices championing the practice on social media. Her videos distill the beauty of living with the seasons into bite-size videos, many of them including recipes, from pine-syrup mugolio to simple dry-sauteed mushrooms. Her new book, Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, combines personal essays with a kind of narrative field guide, along with—of course—dozens of wildly creative recipes, making for the book version of walking through the woods with a friend.Go beyond the episode:Gabrielle Cerberville's Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal LifeFind foraging workshops and videos on her website, TikTok, and InstagramRead Michael Autrey's account of foraging for mushrooms, or Matthew Desmond's reporting on the wild ginseng trade in AppalachiaVisit our episode page for a list of recommended field guides and cookbooksTune 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 • PandoraHave 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.

Boxy Moskvitch and Lada cars, pastel-green concrete tiles, derelict playgrounds, intermittent hot water: these were the markers of Izidora Angel's childhood in 1980s Sofia. “Banana Yellow Trabants,” her essay for our Autumn 2025 issue, takes its name from the Duroplast car that her grandfather, and then her father, Solomon, drove in the 1980s. But bananas show up elsewhere, too: in the myths that young girls would tell each other about the diets of Bulgaria's famed rhythmic gymnastics team and once, miraculously, on her family's holiday table. The Angel family's antics suffuse the essay with warmth and humor, but churning beneath the surface is Solomon's ambition. “He would be the boss, the creative vision and force behind all his future endeavors,” Angel writes, “opening the hottest nightclub in the capital, running five restaurants, renovating city landmarks, building the first manufacturing plant in the country after communism, developing plans to build a whole city.” That city was never built, and Angel lives in Chicago today, sent here alone on a plane more than 20 years ago. She joins us to talk about how her life has been an act of translation.Go beyond the episode:Read Izidora Angel's “Banana Yellow Trabants” in our Autumn 2025 issue, and an essay on translation and her father, “The Alphabet of Supposition”For more on Angel's translation, read this interview from Reading in Translation about her forthcoming translation of She Who Remains by Rene KarabashIn 2023, the Bulgarian novel Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize—here are more Bulgarian books in translationTune 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 • PandoraHave 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.

From 1968 through the early 1980s, thousands of fires raged through the Bronx. The precise number is unknown and it's uncertain who was responsible for setting them. But at the time, most fingers pointed to the working-class Black and Puerto Rican tenants who lived in the borough. The newspapers said as much, as did the Blaxploitation movies of the late 1970s. Politicians, too: in the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “People don't want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn't burn it down.” The Bronxites who lived that history, however, have long identified a different culprit, and over the past decade, historians have arrived at a new explanation for the arsons. Bench Ansfield's new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, is unequivocal: “The hand that torched the Bronx and scores of other cities was that of a landlord impelled by the market and guided by the state.” The story that unfolds is one of fire and a new FIRE economy, insurance and disinvestment, profit and privatization.Go beyond the episode:Bench Ansfield's Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American CityWatch Decade of Fire, Vivian Vázquez Irizarry's 2018 documentary, and Born in Flames (1993) from which Ansfield's book takes its titleFor a film on the pathologization of public housing, there's no better place to start than Candyman (1992)Across the Hudson, Hoboken was burning, tooTune 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.

“Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man,” Eric McHenry writes in our Summer issue. Mattison had found the tale in the writings of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose source identified a powerful Mississippi levee boss as the murderer of an SPCA officer. Not finding any existing ballads about the crime, Mattison wrote the eerily beautiful track “Charlie Idaho,” which caught the attention of McHenry, who specializes in poring over old newspapers for musical breadcrumbs about the blues. He quickly discovered that Mattison wasn't the first person to put the story to song—and “Charlie Idaho” masked the name of the Mercy Man's true killer.Go beyond the episode:Read Eric McHenry's investigation, “Who Killed the Mercy Man?”Listen to Mike Mattison's ballad “Charlie Idaho” Sampled in the episode:Sampson Pittman's “I've Been Down in the Circle Before”Ed Lewis's “Levee Camp Holler” and his commentary, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959Alger “Texas” Alexander's “Levee Camp Moan Blues”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.

For the past few decades, American democracy has crystallized around the central importance of voting: making an informed decision about a candidate or a referendum, and expressing it at the ballot box. The marketplace of ideas—enshrined in our constitutional right to free speech—will ensure that the best arguments, and thus the best candidates, win the election. If that idea sounds a little tired, you've probably been paying attention. In her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano draws on everything from Aristotle to cutting-edge neuroscience to illuminate the surprising truth underlying our political behavior. Spoiler: we are far less rational than the marketplaces of ideas would suggest, whether we're voting or doing something else. But, as Stein Lubrano contends, that's not entirely a bad thing—and understanding the psychology behind our beliefs might just lead to better actions.Go beyond the episode:Sarah Stein Lubrano's Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century MindsFollow her on Instagram or Substack, where she writes articles like “In the Apocalypse, the Person Who Saves You is Your Neighbor” Read “The Perils of Social Atrophy” 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.

Language is always changing, but these days it seems to be moving at warp speed. Whether it's the shift from

American men are having a hard time right now. They're behind in school, staying single, earning less, drinking more, and dying younger. They're also taking out their anger on women online, in the home, and in mass shootings, and taking dubious advice from social media influencers pushing ice baths and raw meat diets. They'd be better off looking to the films of Michael Douglas, argues Jessa Crispin in her new book, What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything. Throughout the '80s and '90s, Douglas's characters were a mirror for our times, reflecting seismic economic and cultural shifts: “He was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine.” Not that these characters offer a how-to guide today (just as they didn't a few decades ago). Rather, as Crispin writes, Douglas “embodied the torments and confusions of the modern man, letting the invisible trouble become discernible.” While feminists have spent the past half-century manifesting alternatives, however imperfect or in progress, to previous norms of femininity, men like Douglas have been stuck trying to play the same role as the stage they'd stood on changed. Crispin dares to ask: in a post-Michael Douglas world, of what will the men dream? Go beyond the episode:Jessa Crispin's What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain EverythingListen to our interview with Elizabeth D. SametReadPaul Crenshaw's cover story on masculinity, gun violence, and Pearl JamTune 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 June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren't sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of the Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music's relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.Go beyond the episode:Jonathan Gould's Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed RockRead about the origin of Stop Making Sense—and then watch it, of courseCheck out the new “Psycho Killer” music video starring Saoirse Ronan, made in honor of the 40th anniversary of the first Talking Heads performanceTune 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 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father's Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson's administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked. “As we know it,” Scholar contributor Augustine Sedgewick writes in his new book, “Father's Day is an unintended consequence of the fractious American politics of race, gender, and class.” Sedgewick's book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, is the story of how such politics ensnarled parental care, and of the men who expanded the domain of fathers across generations of crisis and change, from Aristotle and Henry VIII to Freud and Bob Dylan. Go beyond the episode:Augustine Sedgewick's Fatherhood: A History of Love and PowerThe far right's signature style is less about dad pants and more about fatherhood: read Sedgewick's essay “Ku Klux Khaki”“Thoreau's Pencils,” Sedgwick explores the abolitionist's relationship with his family—and his family business's ties to slaveryFor more on the Moynihan Report and political interventions on parenting, read Melinda Cooper's Family ValuesTune 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.

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin. But by 1786, the British judge and philologist Sir William “Oriental” Jones was applauded when he famously asserted that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek had “sprung from some common source.” Some 450 years later, linguists and archaeologists have filled in many of the gaps in our knowledge of this common source, called Proto-Indo-European, and sketched out its family tree, the branches of which extend from Scotland to China. But over the past two decades, the study of paleogenetics has radically advanced our understanding of this language—and the people who spoke it some 5,000 years ago. In her new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, science journalist Laura Spinney tells their story, and that of their linguistic—and in some cases, genetic—offspring, which constitute the world's largest language family.Go beyond the episode:Laura Spinney's Proto: How One Ancient Language Went GlobalOne enduring Indo-European mystery? How Celtic got to IrelandRead the two landmark 2015 studies in Nature identifying the Yamnaya's genetic contributions to EuropePreviously on Smarty Pants: how a language dies, how to live like a NeolithicTune 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 this episode of 1050 Bascom, we were delighted to talk with Corey Robin, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Robin is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. Prof. Robin was on campus in April as part of the University's Phi Beta Kappa Society's Visiting Scholar Program. He presented a talk entitled, “Clarence Thomas's Radical Race Politics and the Future of the Supreme Court.” We asked Prof. Robin about his research into the intellectual life of Clarence Thomas, the longest serving justice on the Supreme Court. It was a fascinating conversation and we learned so much. Listen here.

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.

 C S Lark has had many accomplishments, her biggest yet is that of an author. In 2019, she published her first book, Schideler's Goal. She has many accomplishments including receiving the Presidential Volunteer Service Award in high school for the most community service hours, she graduated college with high honors in the Phi Beta Kappa Society as well as the National Honors Society, worked in retail and has just finished working on two political campaigns. She is now currently working on her second book, a children's book which is the first in a series.https://www.amazon.com/Schidelers-Goal-C-S-Lark/dp/1098011554https://x.com/realCSLark 

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.

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.

This Day in Legal History: South Carolina Ratified the US Constitution  On May 23, 1788, South Carolina ratified the United States Constitution, marking its official entry as the eighth state in the newly formed union. This significant event took place amidst debates and conventions where federalists and anti-federalists argued over the merits and drawbacks of the proposed Constitution. South Carolina's decision to ratify was crucial, as it reinforced the momentum towards establishing a strong federal government under the Constitution. The state played a pivotal role in shaping the early political landscape of the United States, contributing to the foundational structure of American governance. This decision also reflected the complex dynamics of the time, balancing state and federal interests. As a predominantly agrarian society with a significant enslaved population, South Carolina's ratification highlighted regional economic and social considerations influencing constitutional acceptance. The ratification helped ensure a more unified stance among the original thirteen colonies, setting the stage for the eventual adoption of the Bill of Rights. South Carolina's entry into the union marked a step forward in the collective journey towards a cohesive and functioning republic, laying the groundwork for the nation's future growth and development.The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed a new rule requiring political campaigns to disclose the use of AI-generated audio, video, and images in their radio and TV ads. This initiative, introduced by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, aims to ensure transparency by mandating that advertisements supporting specific candidates or issues flag any algorithm-created content. While the proposal does not ban AI-generated content, it seeks to make its presence known to the public. This move comes in response to growing concerns about deepfakes and their potential to spread disinformation, especially with the upcoming 2024 US election. The proposal must be approved by the FCC's five-member board before further discussion and finalization. Despite potential GOP opposition, highlighted by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's recent criticism of bipartisan efforts to regulate AI in federal elections, various state legislatures are also considering regulations on AI use in political communications. This step by the FCC represents a significant move towards managing the influence of AI in the political sphere.AI Use in Campaign Ads Would Have to Be Disclosed Under FCC PlanThe U.S. Justice Department, along with several states, plans to sue Live Nation Entertainment Inc. for antitrust violations concerning Ticketmaster's dominance in concert ticket sales. The lawsuit, to be filed in the Southern District of New York, seeks to break up Live Nation. This move follows reports of Live Nation's stock dropping by 7% in premarket trading. The Biden administration has prioritized competition, bringing similar antitrust cases against major companies like Google and Amazon. Live Nation, the largest U.S. concert promoter, merged with Ticketmaster in 2010 under a settlement with the Obama administration that barred it from retaliating against venues not using Ticketmaster. However, the Trump administration found that Live Nation violated this agreement, leading to a modified settlement in 2019.The current administration reopened the investigation in 2022, following public outcry over Ticketmaster's mishandling of Taylor Swift ticket sales. This lawsuit adds to the Biden administration's ongoing efforts to address monopolistic practices in various industries, exemplified by recent legal actions against tech giants like Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon.Justice Department Seeks Breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster (1)Johnson & Johnson (J&J) faces allegations of abusing the bankruptcy system to avoid lawsuits related to its baby powder, which consumers claim causes cancer. According to a new lawsuit, J&J's two failed Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases aimed to settle current and future claims by improperly shifting assets among its units and delaying jury trials for cancer victims. The company is accused of using "fraudulent transfers" and bad faith bankruptcy filings to hinder and defraud former users.J&J is seeking consumer support for an $11 billion settlement to resolve these claims, to be managed by a trust in a potential third bankruptcy filing. Despite these legal battles, J&J maintains that its talc-based baby powder, which it replaced with a cornstarch formula last year, does not cause cancer.The ongoing litigation, which includes over 61,000 suits alleging ovarian and asbestos-related cancers, is impacting J&J's stock value. The lawsuit, filed in New Jersey, targets J&J's executives, accusing them of participating in fraudulent transfers and violating state fraudulent-transfer laws. Previous bankruptcy attempts by J&J's subsidiary LTL Management LLC were rejected by courts for failing to demonstrate financial distress.Plaintiffs argue they are entitled to damages due to these fraudulent actions, and the lawsuit seeks class action status. The case highlights the complex legal strategies and significant financial stakes involved in J&J's efforts to manage extensive litigation over its talc products.Johnson & Johnson Talc Bankruptcies Abused System, Suit Says (1)The heads of three universities and an academic honor society are scheduled to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce about their responses to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses. This testimony is part of the committee's ongoing investigation into campus tensions following the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which resulted in 1,200 deaths and over 250 hostages. The subsequent Israeli military offensive in Gaza has led to nearly 36,000 Palestinian deaths and 80,000 injuries, according to Gaza's health ministry.Students at numerous universities have organized protests, demanding President Joe Biden take action to end the conflict and urging their institutions to divest from companies supporting Israel. The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned after facing backlash over their testimony on campus antisemitism in December.The upcoming hearing will feature leaders from Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), along with the head of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, who will testify in a personal capacity. At UCLA, protests escalated into clashes with counter-demonstrators, leading to a significant police intervention and the arrest of 210 protesters. Chancellor Gene Block acknowledged the need for better preparation to ensure community safety.In contrast, Rutgers and Northwestern universities reached agreements with student protesters to end the demonstrations, with Northwestern allowing protests to continue until June 1. Recently, a Northwestern student filed a class-action lawsuit, claiming the university has permitted widespread antisemitism, affecting Jewish students' educational experience.University heads to testify before US House committee on campus tensions | ReutersMicrosoft's introduction of Copilot+ PCs, featuring high-performance Neural Processing Units (NPUs), has raised significant privacy concerns for professionals handling sensitive information. These new PCs, designed for AI capabilities, include a feature called Recall, which continuously captures screenshots of all activities on the device. This feature aims to help users retrieve information efficiently but poses potential privacy risks.Recall is designed to create a searchable database of screenshots, allowing users to locate content across various applications and websites. Although Microsoft claims that the data is processed and stored locally to ensure privacy, the automatic activation of Recall and its extensive data capture capabilities may still pose a threat to professionals who handle confidential third-party information.The ability to filter out specific applications and websites from being indexed by Recall is provided, but the effectiveness of this feature in safeguarding sensitive data remains questionable. Professions with strict confidentiality standards, such as law, accounting, and healthcare, may find the current privacy controls inadequate.Another major concern is the capability of Recall to meet data deletion standards. While users can delete individual snapshots and time periods, ensuring that deleted data is permanently erased and unrecoverable is crucial for maintaining compliance with professional and legal standards.Legal compliance is also a critical issue. Professionals must be able to handle legal obligations, such as subpoenas, without compromising other sensitive information. Whether Recall can balance these requirements effectively remains to be seen.Overall, while Copilot+ PCs represent a significant advancement in AI-driven productivity tools, the privacy, security, and compliance challenges they pose must be rigorously tested to ensure they meet the needs of professionals handling sensitive information.Copilot+ PCs Could Be A Privacy Nightmare For Professionals Get full access to Minimum Competence - Daily Legal News Podcast at www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

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.

In the latest episode of the Empowerography Podcast, my guest is Helen Sanchez. My background includes over thirty years working as a recruiter and recruiting manager, I am a member of The Phi Beta Kappa Society with degrees in Women and Gender Studies, as well as African American Studies. In addition, I am a Certified Coach Graduate of the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC). I decided to work with women over 40 after my own personal experience in the workplace. Even today, women face diminishing value in the workplace after 40. They face many challenges, and I want to give them the tools to overcome those challenges. I am also facilitating a course called Building Your Legacy Season, which gives women the tools to identify what they want to do in their next chapter. In this episode we discuss ageism, sexism, Tanagui LLC, confidence and relationships.   Website - https://tanagui.com/ FB - https://www.facebook.com/TanaguiCareerConsultants LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/helen-sanchez-58501278   In this episode you will learn: 1. Why it's important to start thinking about what you love to do/your passions in your 40's. 2. The importance of cross-generational teams in the workplace. 3. How to build confidence within your career and maintain that confidence.   "I started Tanagui in 2020 and the company, basically what I do is I do one on one coaching with primarily women over I also do events  discussing managing ageism in your job search and helping people to overcome the standard hurdles." - 00:01:48 "One of the things that frustrates me greatly when I work with women is their ability to you know undervalue themselves to not have the confidence they need to not understand that everything they've done in their life has given them skills."- 00:15:05 "One of the most important things always is follow through whether you've been on an interview, I know younger people will not know what you're talking about, but following up with a thank you." - 00:30:49   THE WORLD needs to hear your message and your story. Don't deny the world of that gift within you that the universe has gave to you. Someone out there needs to hear your story because it will support them in feeling hope, inspired and even transformed. Want to discover how I help my clients get out of their own way, show up and confidently share their message? I would like to invite you to check out my FREE MASTERCLASS REPLAY Start Your Own Podcast: Idea to Implementation Watch Here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7iItDG4qaI

In the latest episode of the Empowerography Podcast, my guest is Helen Sanchez. My background includes over thirty years working as a recruiter and recruiting manager, I am a member of The Phi Beta Kappa Society with degrees in Women and Gender Studies, as well as African American Studies. In addition, I am a Certified Coach Graduate of the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC). I decided to work with women over 40 after my own personal experience in the workplace. Even today, women face diminishing value in the workplace after 40. They face many challenges, and I want to give them the tools to overcome those challenges. I am also facilitating a course called Building Your Legacy Season, which gives women the tools to identify what they want to do in their next chapter. In this episode we discuss ageism, sexism, Tanagui LLC, confidence and relationships.   Website - https://tanagui.com/ FB - https://www.facebook.com/TanaguiCareerConsultants LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/helen-sanchez-58501278   In this episode you will learn: 1. Why it's important to start thinking about what you love to do/your passions in your 40's. 2. The importance of cross-generational teams in the workplace. 3. How to build confidence within your career and maintain that confidence.   "I started Tanagui in 2020 and the company, basically what I do is I do one on one coaching with primarily women over I also do events  discussing managing ageism in your job search and helping people to overcome the standard hurdles." - 00:01:48 "One of the things that frustrates me greatly when I work with women is their ability to you know undervalue themselves to not have the confidence they need to not understand that everything they've done in their life has given them skills."- 00:15:05 "One of the most important things always is follow through whether you've been on an interview, I know younger people will not know what you're talking about, but following up with a thank you." - 00:30:49   THE WORLD needs to hear your message and your story. Don't deny the world of that gift within you that the universe has gave to you. Someone out there needs to hear your story because it will support them in feeling hope, inspired and even transformed. Want to discover how I help my clients get out of their own way, show up and confidently share their message? I would like to invite you to check out my FREE MASTERCLASS REPLAY Start Your Own Podcast: Idea to Implementation Watch Here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7iItDG4qaI

Here are some historical events that occurred on December 5:1776: The Phi Beta Kappa Society, one of the oldest academic honor societies in the United States, was founded at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.1831: Former U.S. President John Quincy Adams took his seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the only former president to serve in the U.S. House.1933: The 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, repealing the Prohibition of alcohol.1952: The Great Smog of London began, a severe air pollution event that lasted until December 9 and caused significant health problems and deaths.1978: The American space probe Pioneer 12 (also known as Pioneer Venus) sent back its first images of Venus.2001: The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admitted that it had underestimated the amount of asbestos in the air following the September 11 attacks in New York City.2013: Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa and anti-apartheid revolutionary, passed away at the age of 95.These are just a few historical events that happened on December 5. As with any date, there are numerous other events that occurred on this day throughout history.Podcast Website:https://atozenglishpodcast.com/a-to-z-this-day-in-world-history-december-5th/Social Media:WeChat account ID: atozenglishpodcastFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/671098974684413/Tik Tok:@atozenglish1Instagram:@atozenglish22Twitter:@atozenglish22A to Z Facebook Page:https://www.facebook.com/theatozenglishpodcastCheck out our You Tube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCds7JR-5dbarBfas4Ve4h8ADonate to the show: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/9472af5c-8580-45e1-b0dd-ff211db08a90/donationsRobin and Jack started a new You Tube channel called English Word Master. You can check it out here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2aXaXaMY4P2VhVaEre5w7ABecome a member of Podchaser and leave a positive review!https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-a-to-z-english-podcast-4779670Join our Whatsapp group: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7Intro/Outro Music: Daybird by Broke for Freehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_For_Free/Directionless_EP/Broke_For_Free_-_Directionless_EP_-_03_Day_Bird/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcodehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Joplin/Piano_Rolls_from_archiveorg/ScottJoplin-RagtimeDance1906/https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

My guest today is Jeff Henriksen. He is the CEO and founder of Thorpe Abbotts Capital, LLC. He is also an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford and a contributor to Forbes.   Over the last ten years, Jeff has gained knowledge and experience as a private investor with a focus on behavioral finance. Although his investment style is rooted in the teachings of traditional value-oriented thinkers, Jeff's philosophy centers on understanding the behavioral factors behind mispricing to unlock the core building blocks of the value premium. Using knowledge of these core building blocks, Jeff seeks to adapt traditional value investing philosophy to 21st century financial markets.   Jeff earned his MBA from the University of Oxford where he received the Dean's Commendation Award. He also holds a master's in finance from the University of Colorado Denver and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he graduated magna cum laude in History. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.   Today, we start with some childhood stories, and Jeff's first entrepreneurial experience.   We dive deep into the concepts behind behavioral finance and economics in search of the new frontier or maybe the last edge in the investment world. Jeff has a gift for explaining difficult concepts in a very relatable way.   All investors read, many write, some publish, and others also teach on top of it all, Jeff tells us what he learned teaching investing at Oxford.   Jeff shares his recent memories of crisis investing while navigating through the global pandemic and tells a story of a stock trader who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis… a story I didn't know, but a story that gave me a new way of looking at extremely uncertain moments in time.   We have a longer discussion about obliquity, a concept that's been on my mind lately, it's the idea of indirectly arriving at the goal we chose.   Stay tuned to the end, one more time, my guest surprises me with a new take on the definition of success. It involves a Hollywood movie and more.   Find Jeff here: www.thorpeabbottscapital.com ---- To get regular updates and bonus content, please sign-up for my substack: ⁠https://bogumilbaranowski.substack.com/⁠ Follow me on Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/bogumil_nyc⁠ Learn more about ⁠⁠⁠⁠Talking Billions⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about ⁠⁠⁠⁠Bogumil Baranowski⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about ⁠⁠⁠⁠Sicart Associates, LLC⁠⁠⁠⁠. Read ⁠⁠⁠⁠Money, Life, Family⁠⁠⁠⁠: My Handbook: My complete collection of principles on investing, finding work & life balance, and preserving family wealth. NEVER INVESTMENT ADVICE. IMPORTANT: As a reminder, the remarks in this interview represent the views, opinions, and experiences of the participants and are based upon information they believe to be reliable; however, Sicart Associates nor I have independently verified all such remarks. The content of this podcast is for general, informational purposes, and so are the opinions of members of Sicart Associates, a registered investment adviser, and guests of the show. This podcast does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any specific security or financial instruments or provide investment advice or service. Past performance is not indicative of future results. More information on Sicart Associates is available via its Form ADV disclosure documents available ⁠⁠⁠⁠adviserinfo.sec.gov⁠⁠⁠⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/talking-billions/message

On August 24th, the White House announced a plan to forgive $20,000 in student loan debt for borrowers who received Pell Grants, and $10,000 for other borrowers—all of whom must meet certain income qualifications. The Biden administration says the plan falls under The HEROES Act of 2003. Those in opposition of the plan say it's presidential overreach, and unfair to those who didn't go to college or already paid back their loans. Fred Lawrence of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and Charles C. W. Cooke of the National Review join host Jeffrey Rosen to discuss the legal issues on all sides of the loan forgiveness plan.   Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org.  Continue today's conversation on Facebook and Twitter using @ConstitutionCtr. Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate, at bit.ly/constitutionweekly.