Smarty Pants

Journalist Anna Badkhen has immersed herself in the lives of Afghan carpet weavers, Fulani cow herders in Mali, and other people often ignored or forgotten—especially in the Global North. Yet our lives are entwined with others’ across the continents, and in ways that we may not even realize. Consider, for example, the dire situation in Joal, Senegal—the subject of Badkhen’s latest book—where artisanal fishermen are facing the consequences of an ocean depleted by climate change and overfishing. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:Anna Badkhen’s Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea“Magical Thinking in the Sahel,” an essay about gris-gris and good luck in the The New York Times“The Secret Life of Boats,” a dispatch from Joal in GrantaA Voice of America video report on overfishing in Senegal“Tackling illegal fishing in western Africa could create 300,000 jobs,” The Guardian reportsIt’s not just West Africa: how territorial disputes have put the South China Sea’s fishery on the verge of collapseTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Living in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic feels like watching the sun go down on a crumbling empire. The world’s wealthiest country has experienced more deaths and suffered a greater economic shock than any of its peers. Staggering levels of unemployment and eviction are looming, not to mention a potentially chaotic November election. We can’t help but think back to our 2017 interview with classicist Kyle Harper, who in his book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, advanced a new theory about why and how the empire fell … under circumstances alarmingly similar to our own. Though the decline of Rome has been a favored subject of armchair theorists for as long as there have been armchairs, Harper's hypothesis points to many of the same problems we're wrestling with today.Go beyond the episode:Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an EmpireRead an excerpt from the book on how the Huns laid waste to the Eternal CityHow we can learn from Rome’s experience with epidemics to contend with emerging diseases todayPandemics should scare you: here’s how tropical diseases are on the rise in our own back yardOur interview with epidemiologist Rob Wallace, who points to how climate change and factory farming led to the Covid-19 pandemicTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whether it’s Lemurians making their home on Mount Shasta, aliens alighting in the middle of Illinois, meat falling from the Kentucky sky, or cows being drained of blood in Oregon, accounts of unexplained phenomena are on the rise. Why have so many Americans opened themselves up to fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, even as our empirical understanding of the world has increased? Cultural historian Colin Dickey joins us on the show this week to talk about his new book, Unidentified, in which he traverses the country in search of the cryptids and conspiracies that have stuck with us for the past few centuries, evolving alongside the dramatic changes in our frontiers, scientific knowledge, and cultural mores.Go beyond the episode:Colin Dickey’s Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the UnexplainedRead an excerpt from his previous book, Ghostland, about America’s haunted placesLearn about the Altamaha-ha, the sea monster of the Georgia coastNPR gets in on the cow mute game in October 2019: ‘Not One Drop Of Blood’: Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon; Kansas reported a spate of the same phenomenon in 2016; the FBI investigated in the 1970s and concluded it was scavengers, but not everyone was convincedTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine there’s a place where music exists as it was first created, thousands and thousands of years ago, a place where song and dance still glued communities together across generations. That place exists: Epirus, a little pocket of northwestern Greece on the border with Albania. There, in scattered mountain villages, people still practice a musical tradition that predates Homer. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Christopher King, an obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—who goes on an odyssey to uncover Europe’s oldest surviving folk music, and spins us some rare 78s.Go beyond the episode:Episode page, with R. Crumb’s original illustrationsChristopher King’s Lament from EpirusBuy LPs, CDs, or MP3s of Chris’s Epirotic collections, from Five Days Married and Other Laments to Why the Mountains Are BlackRead Christopher King’s Paris Review essay, “Talk About Beauties,” about the lost recordings of Alexis ZoumbasListen to A Lament for Epirus (1926–1928) by Alexis Zoumbas on SpotifyTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Other music in this episode graciously provided by Christopher King. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As we enter month five of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, while many countries around the world slowly ease back into some semblance of normality, it can be difficult not to despair. Infection and death rates are rising, especially in states that rushed to reopen, and now some states that did open too fast are putting restrictions back in place. One of the few lights in the darkness has been Philip Alcabes, whose birds-eye view of the pandemic in essays on our website has paid particular attention to how its effects play out in the unequal society in which we live. His most recent essay, “Bodies and Breath,” connects Covid-19’s disproportionate effect on Black communities to the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests. The essay draws on the work of longtime Scholar contributor Harriet Washington, who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her writing on racism and medicine. We invited them to join us for a discussion about how public health cannot be divorced from the fractures in society.Go beyond the episode:Read Philip Alcabes’s essay “Bodies and Breath,” and his previous coverage of the Covid-19 pandemicHarriet Washington’s latest book is A Terrible Thing to Waste, which considers the devastating effects of environmental racismRead her cover story on how infectious diseases disproportionately affect the poor and minorities, “The Well Curve,” which was expanded into her book Infectious MadnessTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When we talk about climate change and conservation, animals tend to steal the show. Yet the organisms whose extinction would affect us the most are actually plants. Horticulturalist Carlos Magdalena has become known as the Plant Messiah for his work using groundbreaking, left-field techniques to save endangered species. First captivated by the bogs and flowers of his native Spain, Magdalena has spent much of his professional life in greenhouses and laboratories—and traveling the world, from the Amazon to Australia—to resurrect plants of all shades. He joins us this episode (originally aired in 2018) to share his mission to change the way we see the flora around us, by spreading the good word about green things.Go beyond the episode:Carlos Magdalena’s The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest SpeciesGet a daily dose of flower power through Kew Gardens’s Instagram accountCheck out images and background on the Café Marron plant at the Global Trees CampaignWatch a clip from the BBC’s Kingdom of Plants, including a glimpse of Carlos tending to some water liliesRead the wild story of how several samples of the world’s smallest water lily—the one Carlos saved—were stolen in a grand heistKew Gardens highlights other plants on the brink in this YouTube videoTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the past year and a half, Amanda Holmes has been delighting readers around the world with The American Scholar ’s podcast Read Me A Poem. She has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives. So this week, we peer behind the curtain of our sister show, speaking with that voice that has been brightening all our lives with weekly poems.Go beyond the episode:View the Read Me A Poem archives on our websiteSubscribe to Read Me A Poem: iTunes • Feedburner • Google Play • AcastRead Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the Washington Independent Review of BooksPoems mentioned:Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”Rabindranath Tagore, “Dungeon” and an excerpt from GitanjaliWalt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”Emily Dickinson,“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”Kamala Das, “Summer in Calcutta”Toru Dutt, “Our Casuarina Tree”Leonardo Sinisgalli, “Elderly Tears”Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest and oldest creatures of the planet is also the most mysterious. But whales have been around for 50 million years, and in all that time, we still haven’t figured out how many species of whales have existed—let alone how many exist today. How did these creatures of the deep get to be so big, and how did they make it back into the sea after walking on land? Most importantly, what will happen to them as humanity and its detritus increasingly encroach on their existence? The Smithsonian’s star paleontologist, Nick Pyenson, joins us this episode (originally aired in 2018) to answer some of our questions about the largest mysteries on Earth, and how they fit into the story of the world’s largest ecosystem: the ocean.Go beyond the episode:Nick Pyenson’s Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome CreaturesTake a 3D tour of the Cerro Ballena site, where dozens of intact whale fossils were found by the side of the road in ChileCheck out Phoenix’s website at the Smithsonian, where you can learn all about this right whale (to search for sightings of her, follow this link to the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog and enter “Whale Name: Phoenix” on the “Search for Individual Whales” page)Explore the hidden lives of minke whales, who live in rapidly warming Antarctic watersTag along on marine biologist Ari Friedlaender’s trips to tag whales in the ocean(“extreme field science in action!”)Listen to an incredible story about one woman and a baby whale on the “This Is Love” podcastThere are some amazing, tear-jerking whale videos on YouTube that we stumbled upon in our research for this episode. To get you started, here’s the story of how a whale saved biologist Nan Hauser’s lifeThe inimitable David Attenborough mingles his voice with the dulcet tones of humpback whale song in this clip from the BBC’s Animal AttractionAnd listen to our interview with Marcus Eriksen, who sailed the Pacific on a “junk raft” to raise awareness about aquatic plastic pollution—one of the leading causes of death in marine creaturesWe used whale songs in this episode that were recorded by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Check out their archive the “Sea of Sound” here.Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Farah Peterson is a law professor and legal historian at the University of Virginia School of Law. In her first essay for the Scholar, published in our Winter 2019 issue, she examined John Adams’s defense of eight British soldiers, charged with killing Crispus Attucks, an unarmed black man, on March 5, 1770. Despite how they have long been characterized, Adams’s arguments, she wrote, were hardly the ultimate expression of principle and rule of law. In our new issue, Peterson turns to yet another dangerous myth of the Revolutionary era: namely, that black Americans in bondage did not want to be free. Given the ongoing protests against police brutality, here and around the world, Peterson’s work feels all the more vital as we enter into a newly invigorated national conversation about race and how to rectify historical injustices.Go beyond the episode:Farah Peterson’s “The Patriot Slave”And “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre”Listen to our interview with Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in which she corrects the record on white women slave ownershipTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on our website, we unlocked an essay that appears in our new Summer issue: “The Patriot Slave,” written by University of Virginia law professor Farah Peterson. In it, she explores the ways in which we’re still haunted by the dangerous myth that African Americans chose not to be free in revolutionary America. Peterson will be joining us for an interview next week to talk about her essay and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. In preparation, let’s revisit this episode from last year, in which the historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers revises another dangerous myth—namely that wealthy white women in the South were separated from the ugly reality of slavery both by their own disenfranchisement and their intrinsic sweet nature. Since women often inherited more slaves than land, they were deeply invested, in a social, moral, and economic sense, in the trade of enslaved people. A white woman could cordon off her property from her husband’s in a prenuptial agreement, preserve her right to manage her own property, and fend off her husband’s debtors in court. She also ensured the continued reproduction of the institution by engaging in the market for wet nurses who were often coerced into serendipitous pregnancies through sexual violence, and whose breast milk was then used to nurse white children. How does the power of women slave owners change our understanding of the relationship among gender, slavery, and capitalism in the 19th century? Why were these relationships obscured for so long?Go beyond the episode:Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American SouthRead Farah Peterson’s essay, “The Patriot Slave” about the dangerous myth that blacks in bondage chose not to be free in revolutionary AmericaRead the interviews with formerly enslaved people collected by the WPA, in the Library of Congress’s thorough online archiveAnd explore the complicated relationship that historians have had with these testimoniesTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.