Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

On December 16, 1876, a 35-year-old woman named Nancy Ann Harris died in rural Wisconsin of complications from an abortion. Only one other abortion is mentioned in the leather-bound death records of the county where Harris died and Tamara Dean lives, which she writes about in her essay “Safer than Childbirth,” in the Spring 2022 issue of The American Scholar. The more common cause of death, Dean found, was giving birth. With new challenges to safe and legal abortion coming hard and fast in recent years, it can be instructive to remember that, in the 19th century, abortion was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Even the Catholic Church didn’t oppose ending pregnancy before “quickening,” usually around the fourth month, because no one believed that human life existed before a woman could feel the fetus move. Tamara Dean joins the podcast to talk about what struck her about this one woman’s story, and what gets forgotten in the contemporary battle against abortion. 

The birth of religion is commonly held to lie far back in human history, with the occasional exception of an angel Moroni or the borderline godhood of a cult leader. But in Accidental Gods, Anna Della Subin documents how a surprising number of 20th-century men (it’s almost always men) found themselves labeled divine, sometimes without their knowledge and nearly always without their consent. Some, like General Douglas MacArthur, were even crowned four different ways, on three separate continents. Subin joins the podcast to explore the urges that lead us to declare a mortal man a god, and what this desire tells us about modernity.Go beyond the episode:Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned DivineRead “Philip’s People” in The London Review of BooksA corollary to the book: a brief history of objects turned into godsMeet the balsa wood carving of General Douglas MacArthur from the Guna people of PanamaTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts,

The North has been a blank, snowy canvas for our best and worst fantasies for thousands of years, home to biting winds, sea unicorns, fearsome Vikings, and even a wintry Atlantis. And it is also home, of course, to Indigenous communities, whose existence and culture could be inconvenient to myths of Aryan purity. Historian Bernd Brunner explores this curiosity cabinet of a region in his new book, Extreme North, translated by Jefferson Chase. Brunner argues that the North was as much invented as it was discovered by the European explorers, colonists, and armchair enthusiasts who ventured there. Encounters with the cultures of the North would inspire epic storytellers (Tolkien, Wagner), grifters (James Macpherson and his Poems of Ossian), racists (Hitler), and countless other complicated figures (Franz Boas, Nanook of the North). Brunner joins us on the podcast to explore the outer, icy limits of the known world and why it still has a hold on us today.Go beyond the episode:Bernd Brunner’s Extreme North, transla

Antwerp, the other port city on the North Sea, is frequently overshadowed by its Dutch big brother, Amsterdam. But long before the latter was dubbed the “Venice of the North,” Venetians—and Germans, Britons, Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, and others—flocked to Antwerp, the wealthiest European city of the 16th century and a huge beneficiary of the Age of Exploration. Pepper, silver, wool, sugar, salt, books, wine, and diamonds all passed through Antwerp in the complex web of trade spanning the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires, India, the Americas, and Africa. The city’s star burned brightly for a century, and then was snuffed out first by Spanish soldiers in 1576 and then the Calvinists in 1577. In his new book, Europe’s Babylon, Amsterdam-based writer Michael Pye brings Antwerp’s golden age to life in all its scandalous, sparkling glory.Go beyond the episode:Michael Pye’s Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden AgeVisit the episode page for images of the paintings described in the epis

It’s hard to imagine an American city without a Chinese restaurant, a pizza parlor or three, and at least one taco joint. But the cooks who originally made American tastebuds salivate at the thought of a good stir-fry or a curry are hardly household names, even though their impact on our cuisine lingers. Mayukh Sen’s new book, Taste Makers, chronicles seven immigrant women, each from a different country, who transformed American cookery but have since faded from memory: Chao Yang Buwei (China), Elena Zelayeta (Mexico), Madeleine Kamman (France), Marcella Hazan (Italy), Julie Sahni (India), Najmieh Batmanglij (Iran), and Norma Shirley (Jamaica). He joins us on Smarty Pants to talk about why these women mattered, and why they have been unjustly forgotten.Go beyond the episode:Mayukh Sen’s Taste MakersRead excerpts from the book in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother JonesGet the full set of links on our websiteTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, scien

The third novel from John Darnielle, the creative force behind the band The Mountain Goats, draws on the surprisingly fertile combination of freeway towns, goth teenagers, Le Morte d’Arthur, and Chaucer. Devil House followstrue-crime writer Gage Chandler, who, at the urging of his editor, moves into the newly renovated “Devil House” of Milpitas, California, once an abandoned porn shop and the site of a grisly, unsolved double murder on Halloween in 1986. News clippings about the crime point to disaffected teenagers who transformed the old shop into a kind of clubhouse, replete with pentagrams, video art, and schlocky monsters, but no arrests were ever made. Gage struggles with the nature of his work and how to tell the story of Devil House fairly: “What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?” Darnielle joins the podcast to talk about Devil House, a novel less about the crime than the search for truth.Go

Learning Chinese is intimidating: four tones, 3,000-odd characters or ideograms to carry on a basic conversation, a completely different orientation of words on the page … oh, and about a dozen languages classified as “Chinese” whose speakers wouldn’t understand one another. Becoming literate in any Chinese language was even more difficult at the turn of the 20th century than it is now. Then, no standard pronunciation system existed to get you started on the road to learning one of them. The story of how Mandarin won out—and how its tens of thousands of ideograms survived threats of colonization, simplification, and Romanization—is the subject of Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale. She joins us on the podcast to discuss the rebels, novelists, engineers, librarians, and fringe reformers who made modern Mandarin what it is today.Go beyond the episode:Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of CharactersSomething else that radically changed Chinese culture: modern artNot all

Between Hello Kitty, anthropomorphized Disney candlesticks, and the prevalence of doe-eyed sticker-comments on Facebook, it’s safe to say that cuteness has permeated everything. But what makes something “cute,” and how might there be something disquieting going on beneath all the sugar and spice and everything nice? The philosopher Simon May has spent a lot of time thinking about what cuteness has to tell us about the shifting boundaries between ourselves and the outside world, and how it plays with the dichotomies of gender, age, morality, species, and even power itself. After all, cute is adorable, and kind of harmless—but for all that, it’s also a little bit unnerving. This episode originally aired in 2019.Go beyond the episode:Simon May’s The Power of CuteThe sweet and sinister art of Yashimoto NaraArt historian Elizabeth Legge wrote about Jeff Koons’s Baloon Dog and the Cute Sublime in her paper “When Awe Turns to Awww …”And here is an entire book on Hello Kitty: Christine R. Yano’s&n

According to the prevailing logic, America has an anger management problem: it’s counterproductive, destructive, and, unchecked, might lead you to storm the Capitol. But not all anger is made equal, and perhaps the best way to master its uses and abuses is to understand its differences. In her new book, The Case for Rage, University of California philosophy professor Myisha Cherry contends that this misunderstood emotion—wielded successfully in the past by figures like Audre Lorde, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ida B. Wells—can fuel today’s fight against racism. Cherry joins us on the podcast to discuss how to cultivate the kind of rage we need to make a better world.Go beyond the episode:Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage (read an excerpt here)Read Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, “The Uses of Anger,” which inspired Cherry’s coining of the term Lordean rageListen to our interview with Pankaj Mishra about the ressentiment that fuels our Age of AngerDown with the Stoics, up with Epicureanism!Tune in every week to cat

A few years ago, we ran a special winter episode on the Snow Maiden, an adored figure from Slavic folklore. Today, we travel to Austria for an encounter with the Krampus. Each December, this devil clad in sheepskin and goat horns wanders the Alpine valleys of Bavaria and Tyrol. The Krampus lurks in other parts of Austria, as well—and some of his cousins pop up even farther afield in Eastern Europe—but the specter of this dark Christmas legend is strongest in the mountains. You might have met some version of him in—the 2015 Hollywood horror movie Krampus or the 2010 Finnish film Rare Exports. But the real story of the Krampus is better than the movies.  Here to tell us about it is Al Ridenour, host of the dark folklore podcast Bone & Sickle and the author of the book The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas.Go beyond the episode:Al Ridenour’s The Krampus and the Old Dark ChristmasListen to the Bone & Sickle podcast, co-hosted by Ridenour and Sarah ChavezLooking for more winter folktales? The Snow Ma

Elizabeth D. Samet teaches English at West Point, where future Army officers learn how not to lose. There, as in any U.S. military setting, everything can be won—and should be won—unequivocally, whether it’s a sports match, an exam, or a war. But what happens when, as Samet writes in our Winter 2022 cover story, “The ambiguities of life are confused with the clarity of sport?” What are the stakes when the ambiguities of war are disguised by the very institutions sending young people to fight, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, on time scales that can be measured in decades? Samet, the author of the recently published book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, joins us to discuss the hazards of never owning loss. The opinions expressed here are Samet’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. Go beyond the episode:Elizabeth D. Samet’s Winter 2022 cover story, “The Art

Some time ago, the legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and Homo sapiens Charles Foster spent a few weeks in the woods trying to live like a badger, a deer, a swift, an otter, and a fox, hoping to understand animal consciousness. That book, Being a Beast, now finds its unlikely sequel in Being a Human, in which Foster attempts the perhaps more difficult task of reconstructing the human consciousness of millennia ago. He settles on three pivotal turns in our history: the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, and, far more recently, the Enlightenment. How does one escape the constraints of modern thought—of written language, digital technology, creature comfort—in pursuit of the origins of modern consciousness? Foster joins the podcast to report on his quest in the woods of northern England, and beyond.Go beyond the episode:Charles Foster’s Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, and Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species DivideFor another complicating view on humanity’s adventures in

If you’re a person who has despaired over ever finding a nice 100 percent wool sweater and decided to knit your own, odds are you’ve heard of Clara Parkes. Parkes, who started out in 2000 with a newsletter reviewing yarn, now has six books under her belt, including the New York Times best-selling Knitlandia. Her seventh book, Vanishing Fleece, is a yarn of a different kind—the unlikely story of how she became the proud proprietor of a 676-pound bale of wool and, in the process of transforming it into commercial yarn, got an inside look at a disappearing American industry. Parkes journeys across the country from New York to Wisconsin and Maine to Texas. Along the way, she meets shepherds, shearers, dyers, and the countless mill workers who tend the machinery that’s kept us in woolens for more than a century, but which for the past 50 years has been on the verge of collapse.Go beyond the episode:Clara Parkes’s Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American WoolPeruse her reviews of yarn and o

Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University, searches for plants that may be used to treat life-threatening illnesses. Her lab has discovered compounds—found in chestnuts, blackberries, and a host of other plants—that can help treat antimicrobial resistance by stopping bacteria from communicating with each other, adhering to our tissues, or producing toxins. In her new memoir, The Plant Hunter, Quave discusses how a childhood staph infection and its lifelong complications motivated her deeply personal fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In her quest for new treatments, she has explored the rainforests of the Amazon, the mountains of Italy, Albania, and Kosovo, and the swamps of Florida. Quave joins us on the podcast to talk about how she discovered why and how plant-based folk medicines work. Go beyond the episode:Cassandra Quave’s The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next MedicinesTune into her Foodie Pharmacology podcastExplore (or voluntee

Manuscript scholars have long marveled over the marginalia left in books, particularly handwritten books, and what the different layers of a text tell us about the people who made it. Look beyond the pages—to the bindings, the illustrations, the pages themselves—and a surprising material history reveals itself. Mary Wellesley, a tutor at the British Library, has written an ode to the ordinary people who wrote such manuscripts by hand, illustrated them, bound them, preserved them, and did all of the necessary labor to ensure that they survived the centuries intact, or perhaps only slightly nibbled by mice. She joins us on the podcast to talk about her new book, The Gilded Page. Go beyond the episode:Mary Wellesley’s The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval ManuscriptsYou can flip through the only known copy of Margery Kempe’s autobiography on the British Library websiteOr peruse Anne Boleyn’s elaborately illuminated Book of Hours, in which Henry VIII scribbled love notes, and her miniature girdl

In his decades-long career, the writer Paul Auster has turned his hand to poems, essays, plays, novels, translations, screenplays, memoirs—and now biography. Burning Boy explores the life and work of Stephen Crane, whose short time on earth sputtered out at age 28 from tuberculosis. Like his biographer, Crane, too, spanned genres—poetry, novels, short stories, war reporting, and semi-fictional newspaper “sketches”—striking it big in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage, which was widely celebrated at the time and is still regarded as his best work. But in Auster’s estimation, the rest of Crane’s output (and there is a surprising amount of it) is sorely neglected, and the pleasure of Burning Boy lies in reading one of the 19th century’s finest writers alongside one of today’s. Paul Auster joins the podcast to talk about the task of restoring Stephen Crane to the American canon.Go beyond the episode:Paul Auster’s Burning BoyRead Steven G. Kellman’s review, “Poet of the Extreme”Eager for a taste of Stephen Crane b

Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel, Practical Magic, is the story of two sisters, Sally and Gillian Owens, who are born into a family of witches. The catch is that their ancestor, Maria Owens, cursed the family, so that any man one of them falls in love with dies an untimely death. It’s a classic fairy tale, and like most fairy tales it didn’t have a sequel—until this year. After going back to the 1960s generation of the family with The Rules of Magic, and all the way back to the 1600s with Magic Lessons, Hoffman returns this year to the present with the fourth and final story of the Owens family, The Book of Magic, which sees the youngest Owens, Kylie, maybe—finally—break the curse for good.Go beyond the episode:Alice Hoffman’s The Book of Magic, and her 40-odd other magical talesThe original trailer for Practical Magic, starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and the most beautiful house in MassachusettsFrom New England to Catalonia, people are campaigning to memorialize—and legally pardon—the tens of thousands of

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. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:Nick Groom’s The Vampire: A New HistoryThe London Library reported that it located some of the dog-eared books Bram Stoker used during the seven years he researched Dracula Watch the traile

Between 1947 and 1956, at least 77 recorded witchcraft trials took place in West Germany. Wonder doctors and faith healers walked the land, offering salvation to the tens of thousands of sick and spiritually ill wartime survivors who flocked to them. People hired exorcists and made pilgrimages to holy sites in search of redemption. The Virgin Mary appeared to these believers thousands of times. Monica Black, a historian at the University of Tennessee, found these stories and many others in newspaper clippings, court records, and other archives of the period that testify to West Germany’s supernatural obsession with ridding itself of evil—and complicate the conventional story of its swift rise from genocidal dictatorship to liberal, consumerist paradise. Black joins us on the podcast to describe the spiritual malaise lurking in the shadows: the unspoken guilt and shame of a country where Nazis still walked free. This episode originally aired in 2020.Go beyond the episode:Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted LandTher

In 2002, literacy was at an all-time low in Egypt, revolution was a few short years away, and Nadia Wassef opened an independent bookstore named Diwan in Cairo. With her sister Hind and her friend Nihal, Wassef built an oasis for lovers of the written word, whether Arabic, English, French, or German. Diwan now has seven locations—and two mobile book trucks—having survived recessions, censorship, misogyny, and political turmoil. Wassef joins the podcast to talk about the story of the store in her new book, Shelf Life.Go beyond the episode:Nadia Wassef’s Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo BooksellerIf you’re ever in Egypt, visit DiwanRead your way through Egypt with these recommendations in The GuardianDive into the golden age of Egyptian cinema, or watch Souad, the first film by a female Egyptian director to be screened at CannesTune 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 n