Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

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

Alain Mabanckou is an award-winning Congolese essayist, novelist, and poet with a string of darkly funny books to his name. His work pokes at taboos and the borders between literary traditions with glee and irreverence—while subverting what it means to be an African writer, educated in Congo-Brazzaville and in France, now living and writing in America. His second novel, Broken Glass, is narrated by a former schoolteacher turned drunk, also named Broken Glass, who records the irregular lives of the regulars at his local bar, Credit Gone West. It’s a potent apéritif for the dark humor of his work—just mind you don’t drink too deep.Go beyond the episode:Alain Mabanckou’s Broken GlassRead Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, the first African novel published in English outside of Africa (and the wild ups and downs of its critical reception)Read The Paris Review interview with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, like Tutuola, an inspiration for MabanckouOf the Latin American writers Mabanckou named, Gabriel García Márquez a

Opiates have gone by many names in their millennia-long entanglement with humans, in an ever-refined chain of pleasure: poppy tears, opium, heroin, morphine. With the advent of synthetic opiates like fentanyl, we’re seeing addiction and devastation on a scale unmatched in the 5,000-year history of the drug—but also a return to some of the same patterns and failed attempts at regulation that have haunted our efforts to control it. Cultural historian Lucy Inglis tells the painful, pain-fighting story of opium, and how its history is really our history—from trade and war to medicine and money.Go beyond the episode:Lucy Inglis’s Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium “Opioids and Paternalism” by David Brown, considers how doctors and patients need to find a new way to think about pain“The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe, profiles the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma—the makers of OxyContin“Dying To Be Free” by Jason Cherkis, which explores Suboxone treatment“What the media gets w

In the past 30 years, electronic dance music (or EDM) has gone from underground culture to a global phenomenon. Journalist Matthew Collin drew on the British rave scene for his earlier work—a book called Altered State. But in the 20 years since that book came out, and even in the time it took to write it, EDM and its culture have completely transformed. The tunes on the radio and the DJs who put on giant shows in places like Ibiza look—and sound—very different from the originators of the genre, like the musicians who invented acid house in 1980s Chicago. Collin traveled around the world to figure out whether the EDM of today still holds onto its liberating roots—or whether commercialization killed the music.Go beyond the episode:Matthew Collin’s Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance MusicRead about the clash between techno fans and extremists in TbilisiRead some of the many effusive obituaries commemorating Frankie Knuckles, “Godfather of House Music”Watch a trailer for the 1990 movie Paris Is Burnin

The Snow Maiden—not to be confused with the Snow Queen, Snow White, or Frosty the Snow Man—is a popular Slavic folktale about an elderly couple and a miraculous child born from snow. In addition to being a charming story about the passing of seasons, it references a number of folk rituals, from jumping over fires on the summer solstice to mock funerals marking the Yuletide. Philippa Rappoport, a lecturer in Russian culture at George Washington University, explains how folktales and rituals overlap, and reads aloud her own version of this wintry tale.This is our last episode of the year, and we want to hear from you about 2019! If there are any subjects or guests you would especially like to hear on the show, send us an email at podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And, of course, help us find more listeners by rating us on iTunes and telling all your friends.Go beyond the episode:Read six versions of “The Snow Maiden,” classified by folklorist D. L. Ashliman as tales of “type 703,” or, relatedly, nine different sp

The modern American home is a wilderness: there are thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants that lurk in our floorboards, on our counters, and inside our kitchen cabinets—not to mention the microbes that flavor our food itself. The trouble with wilderness, however, is that humans always want to tame it. Cleaning, bleaching, sterilizing, and killing the organisms in our homes has had unintended—and dangerous—consequences for our health and the environment. Biologist Rob Dunn, a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, joins us to impart some manners about how to welcome these formerly unknown guests into our homes.Go beyond the episode:Rob Dunn’s Never Home AloneDig deeper into the experiments mentioned in the show, like the sourdough project or the world’s largest survey of showerheadsCat people: track your cat to reveal its secret life—and what it brings into your home—in this citizen science projectMore opportunities to participate in scien

Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird … and at the end of the day, who really understands sung Italian anyway? The barriers aren’t just financial: there are hundreds of years of musical history at work, along with dozens of arcane terms that defy pronunciation. But opera has been loved by ardent fans for centuries, and the experience of seeing it—once you know what to listen for—can be sublime. So we asked Vivien Schweitzer, a former classical music and opera critic for The New York Times, to teach us how to listen to opera.Go beyond the episode:Read Vivien Schweitzer’s A Mad Love: An Introduction to OperaListen to the accompanying Spotify playlistReady? Find an opera performance near you by searching the National Opera Center of America’s database of upcoming offeringsListen to the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts or catch it live in a movie theater near youAt The Guardian, Imogen Tilde explains “How to find cheap opera tickets”Songs sampled during the epis

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

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

You may have heard of them before: those pale creatures with suspiciously sharp canines that sleep in coffins during the day, hunt people at night, and occasionally transform into bats. Stories of bloodsucking monsters have haunted humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years—but the modern vampire was arguably born when Enlightenment rationality met Eastern European folklore. That’s Nick Groom’s argument: he’s known as the Prof of Goth, and he makes the case that vampires rose from the grave at the same time that philosophy, theology, forensic medicine, and literature were beginning to question what it meant to be human. Why have vampires lingered in the imagination for hundreds of years? Nick Groom joins us on the podcast to open some coffins for answers.Go beyond the episode:Nick Groom’s The Vampire: A New HistoryThe London Library reported this week that it located some of the dog-eared books Bram Stoker used during the seven years he researched Dracula Watch the trailer for The Hunger (1983), in w

A. N. Devers is a writer and rare book dealer whose business, The Second Shelf, centers on all the women writers that time forgot. When she first entered the trade, she noticed that these writers were getting second shrift: sold for less money, not sold at all, and left out of the archives. Why were so many award-winning, well-reviewed books by women sliding out of print? Since rare book dealers are often the ones who shape the collections of archives and libraries—and thus the materials scholars and researchers have to work with—the Second Shelf aims to flood that pipeline with women’s work. Shift the bookshelves, and you just may shift the canon. We spoke with a number of booksellers to get a picture of the trade today, and with Devers about how she’s hoping to change it.Go beyond the episode:Peruse The Second Shelf website and preorder a copy of its first quarterlyCheck out Honey & Wax Booksellers, a woman-owned enterprise founded in 2011Get to know Bette Howland, in A. N. Devers’s

What’s spookier than the Tower of London, home to the ghosts of queens and the rest of Henry the VIII’s enemies? How about the half-dozen black ravens that inhabit it—without which, as legend has it, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall? Since there haven’t been dead bodies littering the Tower Green for centuries, someone has to keep the ravens alive—and that person is the Ravenmaster, Christopher Skaife. As a Yeoman Warder, Skaife is one of the custodians of the Tower’s rich history and traditions, and he joins us to offer a bird’s-eye view of his life among the ravens.Go beyond the episode:Christopher Skaife’s The RavenmasterRead an excerpt about the birds’ daily routineFollow Merlina the raven (with help from the Ravenmaster) on TwitterFor more scary tales, read ex-Yeoman Warder Geoffrey Abott’s book, Ghosts of the Tower of London For photographs that Skaife says “come very close to capturing the true majesty and mystery of the birds,” see Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens seriesBehold, the funerals of

Not everyone believes in witches: in Siberia, after all, locals blame misdeeds on ghosts, and the Irish have fairies. But for those who do, witchcraft can be incredibly threatening—and an accusation of witchcraft can be a powerful tool to control people and entire societies. To get you into the Halloween spirit, we’re revisiting our interview with one of the world’s foremost experts on witchcraft, the historian Ronald Hutton.Go beyond the episode:Ronald Hutton’s The WitchFor the flip side of witchcraft, watch Ronald Hutton’s dramatic documentary about the good ones—A Very British Witchcraft, about the founder of modern WiccaFrances F. Denny’s exhibition “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” on view at the ClampArt gallery in New York, explores the contemporary idea of witches through portraits of those who identify as such. One of Denny’s foremothers was accused of witchcraft in 1674, and 20 years later another of her ancestors presided as a judge in the Salem Witch Trials.And for some spooky Halloween vie

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

Someday soon, you might be finally able to count all the grains of sand on the beach, because there might be no beaches—and no sand—left. With the global population and its attendant consumption booming, we’re running out of sand in our quest to build larger cities and better smartphones. This essential resource, so easy to overlook, ranks just below air and water on a global scale of how much we use. But as journalist Vince Beiser explains in his new book, The World in a Grain, its over-extraction is harming us, whether in the form of murder in the black markets of India, pollution from fracking sand mines in Wisconsin, or islands that have simply disappeared.Go beyond the episode:Vince Beiser’s The World in a GrainRead his article on India’s black market in Wired, “The Deadly Global War for Sand”For more on how sand mining works, watch this aerial video (from a sand mine worker) of a quarry in Central TexasVisit our episode page to see photographs from Adam Ferguson, who accompanied Beiser on his visit to I

How much do you know about Oklahoma City? Probably you know about the bombing, the Dust Bowl, and the Trail of Tears. Maybe, if you’re a basketball fan, you know about the drama of their basketball team, the Thunder. A feeble history, then, of a flyover city in the public imagination. Sam Anderson wants to change all that. As a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, he was sent off to O.K.C. a few years ago to write about a stolen basketball team, and fell so hard for what he calls “one of the great weirdo cities of the world” that he wrote a whole book about it.Go beyond the episode:Sam Anderson’s Boom TownRead his original reporting on the Oklahoma City Thunder, “A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America”And his Summer 2004 essay for us, “Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Joyce,” as strange a travelogue of Dublin as you’ll ever readPeruse the Oklahoma Historical Society’s materials on the Land Run of 1889Read the original coverage of the Land Run in the May 18, 1889 edition of Harper’s Weekly (click here for a mor

Why does New York City smell? Is its smell distinguishable from that of other large cities? Does that smell tell us something about the world that our other senses cannot? Last year we spoke to historian Melanie Kiechle, who has devoted a considerable amount of brain- and nose-power to our long relationship with the scents around us. Her book, Smell Detectives, is an olfactory history of 19th-century urban America, from delightful scents to foul stenches, including those that everyday citizens used to bolster the budding environmental movement.Go beyond the episode:Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban AmericaOn our episode page, we've got sanitary surveys of New Orleans and New York, along with sketches of the early respirators people used to protect themselves from foul odorsCheck out a modern-day smell map of the City of Light (and odor), from graphic designer Kate McLeanLive in Pittsburgh? Download Smell PGH, the app that tracks pollution

In case you missed it, last month Forbes published an op-ed that stoked so much public outrage that the editors felt compelled to delete it. Libraries, it argued, should be replaced by Amazon to save taxpayers money. Yet Panos Moudoukoutas’s piece was based on a common misconception: that libraries are only repositories of books, whereas in truth, they provide myriad other services—and generate an enormous return on investment. To bust the myth that libraries could ever be replaced by a for-profit enterprise, we hit the stacks ourselves and spoke to librarian Amanda Oliver about the services that libraries don’t get enough credit for.Go beyond the episode:Read Amanda Oliver’s stirring defense of the libraryHere are some of the Twitter highlights in response to Moudoukoutas’s op-ed (be sure to grab some popcorn)Read Ray Bradbury’s 1971 essay, “How, Instead of Being Educated in College, I was Graduated From Libraries,” fittingly published in the Wilson Library BulletinExplore the DC Public Library’s Punk Archiv

Forsyth County, Georgia, is infamous for being—for a remarkably long stretch of the 20th century—one of the only all-white counties in America. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Patrick Phillips, whose book Blood at the Root is both a history of the county where he grew up and a personal reckoning with the “ghost story” that he heard for most of his childhood: the racial cleansing of 1912, when white night riders violently drove all 1,098 black citizens out of their homes, and out of the county. But the people who pushed out Forsyth’s black residents weren’t Klan members: their identities might well surprise you.Go beyond the episode:Read more about Forsyth in Patrick Phillips’s new book, Blood at the RootView a slideshow of images from the book on our episode pageWatch Oprah Winfrey’s televised 1987 visit to Forsyth County, GeorgiaLearn more about Forsyth, and other black citizens driven out of their communities, in the documentary Banished: American Ethnic CleansingsTune in every week

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