Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

In her summer cover story for the Scholar, “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo,” Sandra M. Gilbert looks at how far the newest feminist movement has come—and how far we have to go yet to achieve feminism’s goals. Her essay places the latest wave in the mythic feminist tradition, expresses her qualms about certain directions the movement has taken, and asks how we should regard the work of artists whose offensive behavior has been revealed. On our podcast, she these questions and much more.Go beyond the episode:“An Open Letter from Dylan Farrow,” and her first television interview detailing her sexual assault allegations against Woody AllenThe full letter that the survivor in the Stanford rape case read at Brock Turner's trialRoxane Gay, “Can I Enjoy the Art but Denounce the Artist?”Hadley Freeman, “What does Hollywood’s reverence for child rapist Roman Polanski tell us?”A. O. Scott, “My Woody Allen Problem”Claire Dederer, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”Jason Farago, “Gaugin: It’s Not Just Genius vs. Mo

The most unusual brains are not the largest, nor the ones that can remember the most digits of the number pi. What fascinates Helen Thomson—a neuroscientist by training, a journalist by trade—are the brains that see auras, feel another’s pain, or play music around the clock. In her new book, Unthinkable, she travels the globe to find out what life is like for these people who perceive a completely different world than she does. How does a man who believes he’s a tiger live in a human community? How can a father who believes that he’s dead go to dinner with his kids? What’s it like to be lost in your own living room? The answers can teach you something about your own noggin.Go beyond the episode:Helen Thomson’s UnthinkableRead her interview with a dead man—or at least, a man who thinks he’s deadScientific American lists 10 of the biggest ideas in neuroscience of the 21st centuryMeet the scientists who discovered the brain’s internal GPSThink you might be a synesthete? Take neuroscienti

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 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.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 Constitution An incomplete list of the best literature abo

In case you missed it, the grassy courts of Wimbledon are open once again for the annual championship—the oldest tennis tournament in the world. Seven-time Wimbledon champion Serena Williams is back in action, moving through the singles bracket and joining sister Venus in the doubles, and Roger Federer is looking for his ninth win. To commemorate the most famous fortnight in sports, we’re revisiting our interview with Elizabeth Wilson, an English tennis fan and cultural historian. Among her surprising insights, given the pay gap between genders in modern tournaments: the game’s Victorian reboot found men and women on the same playing field.Go beyond the episode:Elizabeth Wilson’s Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global PhenomenonYour place for live scores and other updates from the BBC“At Wimbledon, Married Women Are Still ‘Mrs.’” “Roger Federer, $731,000; Serena Williams, $495,000: The Pay Gap in Tennis”And Claudia Rankine’s superb profile, “The Meaning o

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 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 Smith

For more than 100 years now, we’ve been blessed with National Parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872; Pinnacles, created in 2013, is the 59th and most recent National Park to join the list. Other kinds of natural national treasures exist, though—protected monuments and seashores and recreation areas, plus an abundance of state parks and lands. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Terry Tempest Williams, who marked the centennial of the National Park Service with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. From the Grand Tetons to the Gulf Islands, Alcatraz to the Arctic, each place is imbued, in Williams’s telling, with the depth of history, a sense of longing, and her indelible, close observation of the peaks and twigs around her.Go beyond the episode:Episode pageTerry Tempest Williams’s The Hour of LandGo find a park at the National Park Service website’s interactive map.Check out Ansel

So many tropical storms and hurricanes hit Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles that native residents talk about them as if they’re family members: “Who broke that window—Rita? Gustav? It wasn’t Katrina or Ike.” Rising sea levels and increasingly volatile storms bring other, no less harmful consequences, too: groundwater salinization, disappearing wetlands, decimated wildlife and fishing. The choice for people and animals in these places is stark: retreat or die. In her new book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, environmental reporter Elizabeth Rush tells the stories of the life-altering changes happening right now in our own back yards.Go beyond the episode:Elizabeth Rush’s new book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American ShoreEpisode page, with a slideshow of Elizabeth Rush's photographs from the book“The Marsh at the End of the World,” an excerpt from the book, published in GuernicaRead an excerpt from Rush’s previous work, Still Lives from a Vanishing City, on disappe

There’s a dark chapter in American history that gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of women from the 1910s through the 1950s. Conceived in WWI to protect soldiers from “promiscuous” women and the diseases they possibly carried, women were surveilled, picked off the street, detained without due process, imprisoned sometimes for years, and forcefully injected with unproven mercury treatments for sexually transmitted infections they were merely suspected of having. The American Plan laid the groundwork—and sometimes, the literal foundations—for the women’s prisons and mass incarcerations of today. Progressive luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Earl Warren endorsed the plan, so its victims, more often than not women of color, were often forced to fight back on their own. Historian Scott W. Stern joins us to tell the story of Nina McCall, one of the women who defied a system that locked her up even though she was

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. In his new book, Lament from Epirus, the obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—Christopher King 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 t

Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole scenes from Star Trek? If so, then good news: it might have taken a few broken eyeglasses and shoves in high school, but geek culture has finally triumphed. Dragons are cool, Star Wars has never had more fans, and everyone is geeking out over the latest sci-fi release on Netflix. How did this happen? And how have the changing demographics of geekdom affected it, for better or worse? Lifelong nerd and critic A. D. Jameson, whose geek cred is stronger than the Force itself, joins us to figure it out.Go beyond the episode:A. D. Jameson’s I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek CultureRead A. D. Jameson and Justin Roman’s article on sexism in gaming, “If Magic: The Gathering Cares About Women, Why Can’t They Hire Any?”For more on how franchises have changed Hollywood’s structure, check out Stephen Metcalf’s article, “Ho

Rachel May's new book, An American Quilt, has an innocuous enough title, invoking an innocent American pastime. But sometimes ugly secrets can be hidden in the stitchwork—or even, as in the case of the quilt at the heart of May’s book, behind it. The paper-pieced quilt was stitched together from fabric basted onto hexagon-shaped paper templates. These scraps, which turned out to be letters and documents dating all the way back to 1798, tie together one family from the abolitionist North and one from the slave-owning South. This paper trail led May to stitch together the stories of the women behind the quilt, enslaved and free. In the process, she shows how dependent the “free” North was on the enslaved labor of its southern neighbor.Go beyond the episode:Rachel May’s An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and SlaveryFor a peek at the global history of the stuff quilts are made of, read an excerpt from Sven Beckert’s Empire of CottonPeruse the National Museum of Ameri

When there's a gold rush on, the thing to do is not to dig. Instead, sell shovels to all the suckers who think they'll get rich digging for gold. This is one of the lessons that investigative reporter Corey Pein learned when he moved to San Francisco at the height of the Silicon Valley start-up boom. In his analogy, the gold rush is the tech boom, and the suckers are all the start-up wannabes who flock to the Bay Area for a slice of the venture capital pie. And all of us, the consumers, who fell for the excitement of the gig economy and the lure of a free social network that promised to never sell our data? We’re suckers, too.Go beyond the episode:Corey Pein’s Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley of DeathAnd an excerpt from the book on web fraudRead his exposé of the alt-right/tech connection, “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich” and the followup, “The Moldbug Variations”Wikipedia’s page on “Uber protests and legal actions”Tune i

Bobbie Ann Mason's short story “Live-Hang,” from our Spring Issue, is the story of two friends who come from different worlds. Dave and Miguel meet in the gutting room of a chicken processing plant. Both are working class, but Dave and his wife, Trish, are white U.S. citizens, while Miguel and his wife, Maria, are undocumented Mexican immigrants. Even though their jobs diverge—Dave uses a connection to get a job installing satellite dishes, while Miguel is promoted to the more dangerous live-hang room—their lives become increasingly intertwined. But then the threat of deportation arrives, and with it the potential of a family being ripped apart. Only a brave and dangerous act can keep these families together. Mason talks about how she came to write this story, and how topical it is—given the recent news about ICE arresting children in hospitals, detaining the single parents of disabled kids, separating families, and raiding workplaces like the chicken plant.Go beyond the episode:Bobbie Ann Mason’s short

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, Carlos 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. And with his new book, he’s on a 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

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent Millay boomeranging from heartbreak to revelry. Or, quintessentially, T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Wasteland,” itemized the neuroses of unrequited love in Prufrock, and then turned around and set to verse the antics of cats like Growltiger and Rumpleteazer. You could say that the same range exists in the best of actors—like Jeremy Irons, say, who’s played everyone from starry-eyed Charles Ryder to Humbert Humbert himself. Irons’s iconic voice has lent itself to animated lions and audiobooks before, but now, he joins us to talk about perhaps his most ambitious project yet: narrating the poems of T. S. Eliot.Go beyond the episode:Jeremy Irons reads The Poems of T. S. Eliot from Faber & Faber and BBC Radio 4Read more about T. S. Eliot’s life at the Poetry FoundationMay we suggest Juliet Stevenson’s portfolio of Jane Austen’s novels&n

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.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&nbs

Since August 2017, in the country’s latest wave of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence, over 647,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar due to systemic violence and ethnic cleansing that has killed more than 10,000 people. Why is a religion seen as so peaceful in the West lashing out with such vehemence, and why are the Rohingya their target? And how did a seemingly local conflict erupt across the entire country? Journalist Francis Wade, who has reported in Myanmar for a decade, gives us the deep history, which stretches farther back than contemporary reports might suggest, and reveals a tangled web of interests: ultranationalist Buddhist monks, a military fearful of losing its grip on power, implicit racial hierarchies, and a democratic political party, led by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, whose very principles are called into question.Go beyond the episode:Francis Wade’s Myanmar’s Enemy Within: The Making of a Muslim “Other”Read the UNHCR’s report on the Rohingya emergencyDuring the reporting of “Mas

We revisit an interview with Eugenia Cheng, the author of How to Bake Pi, who translates higher math using metaphors that even the most mathematically disinclined can comprehend: infinite layers of puff pastry, endless jars of marmalade, and deep-dish pi(e). She talks about the false dichotomy between mathematics and art, and how understanding math helps you see the world in a new light. Also, how five-year-olds sometimes pose the most difficult questions for mathematicians to answer, like: what’s a number?Go beyond the episode:Eugenia Cheng’s Beyond InfinityAnd her attempt to teach Stephen Colbert how to make puff pastryNatalie Angier’s review of How to Bake Pi (verdict: delicious!)Watch an animated explanation of the Infinite Hotel Paradox from TED-EdTune 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 progres

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neopolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won't ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev's memoirs, Saddam Hussein's hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family's film theory. This show is about that kind of very long book, and the man who decided to read all of them: Daniel Kalder, who joins us on the show to talk about his journey through The Infernal Library and what these books tell us about the dictatorial soul, assuming there is one. Go beyond the episode:Dive into Turkmenbashi’s Ruhnama, if you dare.Daniel Kalder reviews Saddam Hussein’s prose—he “tortured metaphors, too”—or you can read it yourselfOr check out Kalder’s dispatches from The Guardian’s “Dictator-lit” archivesWhile we couldn’t find a video of Fidel Castro’s four-hour-and-29-minute address to the United Nations in 1960, you can 

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book, Off the Charts, Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose lives have informed our approach to child-rearing and education. Nature versus nurture is just the start of the debate—and it turns out there’s no model for raising any kind of child, genius or not, and no guarantee of success, whatever that means.Go beyond the episode:Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (and read an excerpt here)Ann Hulbert lists her top five books on precocious childrenOur top book for a glimpse into the life of a precocious child? Helen DeWitt’s cult novel, The Last Samurai“Promethea Unbound,” by Mike Mariana, about a