Smarty Pants

Travel to any of the hundred-odd countries where malaria is endemic, and the mosquito is not merely a pest: it is a killer. Factor in the laundry list of other diseases that this insect can transmit—dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, filiaraisis, and a litany of encephalitises—and the mosquito was responsible for some 830,000 human deaths in 2018 alone. This is the lowest figure on record: for context, one estimate puts the mosquito’s death toll for all of human history at 52 billion, which accounts for almost half our human ancestors. How did such a wee little insect manage all that, and escape every attempt to thwart its deadly power? To answer that question, Timothy C. Winegard wrote The Mosquito, a book spanning human history from its origins in Africa through the present and toward the future of gene-editing. In its 496 pages and 1.6 pounds—the equivalent of 291,000 Anopheles mosquitoes—he outlines how the insect contributed to the rise and fall of Rome, the spread of Christianity, and countless wars—not to mention the conquest of South America, in which the mosquito both sparked the West African slave trade and, ironically, led to its end in the United States. This episode originally aired in 2019.Go beyond the episode:Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest PredatorTo help you sleep even less at night, here is the WHO’s list of mosquito-borne diseases and a 2019 report on how climate change puts billions more at riskWe recommend listening to this episode with a citronella candle at hand—and you can consult the CDC’s guidelines for preventing mosquito bites for more tipsVisit our episode page for a gallery of anti-mosquito efforts, courtesy of Dutton Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th century; and modern falconers have used their understanding of language to train them to do dog-like tricks. The other nine species of caracara that span the rest of South America are just as odd in their own ways. In his book, A Most Remarkable Creature, Jonathan Meiburg follows their unusual evolutionary path across the continent and describes his encounters with these birds over the past 25 years. He joins us from his home in Texas to introduce us to some new feathered friends. This episode originally aired in 2021.Go beyond the episode:Jonathan Meiburg’s A Most Remarkable CreatureRead an excerpt about Charles Darwin’s encounters with the birdMeet Tina, the striated caracara who can “find Nemo,” and a crested caracara named KevinHere’s some footage of a flock on Saunders Island in the FalklandsTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Take any international trip, and the tourist-trap restaurants near the must-see landmarks will all be hawking the “national dish” you simply can’t miss: Greek souvlaki, Japanese ramen, Italian pasta, Mexican mole. Leaving aside the question of whether a restaurant with a laminated English menu could possibly serve good food, we must ask what makes a dish “national”—must it be an old recipe? A common one? Unique to that place? Anya von Bremzen poses these questions and more in her new book, National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home. Beginning in Paris with the 18th-century inauguration of modern French cuisine—and searching for the invention, or perhaps congelation, of pot-au-feu—von Bremzen travels across oceans and continents in search of what defines a country’s cuisine, unraveling notions of identity, nationhood, and politics in the process.Go beyond the episode:Anya von Bremzen’s National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of HomeIn case you missed it, last week’s episode dealt with what might perhaps be called America’s quixotic national dish: the hot dogDig in to our culinary history, and you’ll find a collection of immigrant women who changed the way American eatsJames Beard did, tooPicture the food of the future—specifically that of the climate crisis—in this immersive dinner party episode  And who could forget the inner organs of beasts and fowls that spill across the pages of Ulysses?Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special; drive-through and deli; chili and chile: Loftus devoured them all. Her ensuing book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, brings the glory and the gory. It may be the first to detail not only the different genders of pickle jars one can buy at a gas station, but also the horrific treatment of animals and workers at slaughterhouses, conditions that got distinctly worse during the pandemic. Loftus—stand-up comedian, TV writer, and creator of such illustrious one-season podcasts as “My Year in Mensa” and “Ghost Church”—joins us to talk about the wild world of that iconic American food. Go beyond the episode:Jamie Loftus’s Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot DogsProPublica’s exposé of the meatpacking industry during Covid revealed awful conditions, and government collusionDelight your senses with PBS’s classic A Hot Dog ProgramVisit our episode page for a list of the varieties mentioned in this episode Loftus’s top five dogs are:Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, New JerseyHot Dog Ruiz Los Chipilones in Tucson, ArizonaKing Jong Grillin in Portland, OregonThe hot dog carts across the street from the Crypto.com Arena, or near Union Station in Los Angeles, CaliforniaTexas Tavern in Roanoke, VirginiaTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The idea of “Western civilization” looms large in the popular imagination, but it’s no longer taken seriously in academia. In her new book, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won’t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the “clash of civilizations” and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day—“from Plato to NATO.” Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten—Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d’Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi—Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies. Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary “western” identity.Go beyond the episode:Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History in Fourteen LivesWe have covered Greece and Rome in previous episodes, as well as Njinga of AngolaIn our Summer 2023 issue, Sarah Ruden considers how modern biographers distort VergilTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1956, John Okada wrote the first Japanese-American novel, No-No Boy, a story about a Nisei draft-resister who returns home to Seattle after years in prison. It should have been a sensation: American literature had seen nothing like it before. But the book went out of print, Okada never published again, and the writer died in obscurity in 1971. That would have been the end of the story, were it not for a band of Asian-American writers in 1970s California who stumbled upon the landmark novel in a used bookshop. Frank Abe, one of the co-editors of a new book about Okada—and a friend to the “CARP boys” who discovered him—joins us to talk about the era in which No-No Boy was written and what the novel can teach us about our own moment in history. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No BoyNo-No Boy by John OkadaWatch Frank Abe’s film about the Japanese-American draft resisters, Conscience and the ConstitutionRead Julian Saporiti’s essay in our Summer 2023 issue, “Last Dance”Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Siblings Ruthie and Nathan Prillaman are classically trained musicians who have put their knowledge of counterpoint and unusual time signatures to use in their medieval-inspired folk band, Small Fools. Renaissance madrigal meets contemporary queer meme in songs like “Crying in My Subaru” (also the title of their debut EP) and “Horseradish,” inspired by the words on a pickle jar. Such strange musical pairings—the marriage of Gregorian chant with lighthearted lyrics about gnomes, for example—might sound gimmicky, but in the siblings’ hands, they somehow achieve transcendence. The Prillamans join the podcast this week to talk about Small Fools, big ideas, and which 16th-century mystics they find most inspiring.Go beyond the episode:Listen to Small Fools on Spotify or Apple MusicWe dare you not to hum the hook in “Horseradish” Check out the Small Fools TikTokRead more about the lives of anchoresses in this article by Mary Wellesley, cohost of The London Review of Books’s Medieval Beginnings podcast (and a one-time guest on this podcast)Polymath Hildegard of Bingen, one of the first named composers, is still one of the most famous female composersTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but Vladimir Putin’s forces have been nibbling at the edges of the country since 2014. Or one could say that the war began “long before 2014 by way of colonial imperial politics, suppression of language cultures, mass hunger, and terror,” as the poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky write in the introduction to In the Hour of War, their new anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry. “This is a poetry marked by a radical confrontation with the evil of genocide,” they write. “Does poetry have the tensile strength to embody such a confrontation?” The anthology seeks to answer that question with the help of its diverse contributors: “soldier poets, rock-star poets, poets who write in more than one language, poets whose hometowns have been bombed and who have escaped to the West, poets who stayed in their hometowns despite bombardments, poets who have spoken to parliaments and on TV, poets who refused to give interviews, poets who said that metaphors don’t work in wartime and poets whose metaphors startle.” Forché joins us this week on the podcast to talk about the surprising “life-giving force of these poems.”Go beyond the episode:In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, edited by Carolyn Forché and Ilya KaminskyListen to Serhiy Zhadan’s “Take Only What Is Most Important” on our Read Me a Poem podcastRead Megan Buskey’s essay on the long, unfortunate history of Ukrainian displacementTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In certain cities, parking may seem like a scarce commodity, especially when you’re circling the block in search of it. But in the United States, there are three to eight spots for every car, depending on whom you ask. Municipal codes that dictate how much parking buildings are required to offer have changed urban density, the cost of housing, and the amount of time drivers spend on the road. In his new book, Paved Paradise, Slate staff writer Henry Grabar makes the compelling case that the simple, rectangular parking spot has shaped the city as we know it. In the past two decades, many people have begun to question the parking paradigm and sought to banish outdated parking minimums, repurpose disused garages, and reimagine the way we use the space we’ve heretofore allotted to cars. Grabar joins the podcast this week to talk about what they’re up against, and what new world potentially awaits us.Go beyond the episode:Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the WorldRead his report on “How Paris Kicked Out the Cars” and explanation of how the concept of the 15-minute city snowballed into a right-wing conspiracyThe Netherlands, now the cycling capital of the world, won traffic reform and bike lanes the old-fashioned way: through the civil disobedience of the Stop de Kindermoord movement in the 1970s and ’80sHot on its heels: Ghent and its ambitious 2017 “mobility plan,” which introduced free “park and ride” buses into town, moved long-term and commuter parking outside of downtown, and thereby increased public transportation use by 12 percentTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @TheAmSchoSubscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

W. E. B Du Bois is best known for his seminal collection of essays on the African-American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, and his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, which reframed the story of freed slaves in the Civil War and the brief window of political promise that followed. Du Bois is less remembered for his support for America’s entry into the First World War, an endorsement that surprised many of his Black and radical allies. Moreover, he pushed for African Americans to join the ranks, in the hopes of accelerating the fight for freedom at home. He would soon regret his decision, and he spent the next two decades of his life grappling with the complex legacy of the war, and African Americans’ experience of it. As the historian Chad Williams puts it, this manuscript—called The Black Man and the Wounded World—was “Du Bois’s most significant work to never reach the public,” and the struggle to write it would irrevocably shape his politics. Williams, a professor of history and African-American studies at Brandeis University, joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War.Go beyond the episode:Chad Williams’s The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World WarRead Williams’s reflection on the centenary of Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil“War is organized murder, and nothing else,” Harry Patch maintained; the last surviving British soldier in World War I died in 2009 at the age of 111. He once told Tony Blair: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.”Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.