Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

The late Budi Darma, one of Indonesia’s most beloved writers, spent a formative chapter of his life far from home, studying at Indiana University in the 1970s. He wrote a series of strikingly lonely short stories that would go on to form the collection People from Bloomington, first published in Indonesian in 1980. A man befriends his estranged father only to control him and ends up controlled himself. Someone steals his dead roommate’s poetry and enters it into a competition. Another character desperately tries to make contact with the old man across the street who may or may not be trying to shoot people from his attic room. With this absurd but oddly real little collection—and with his next novel, Olenka, also Indiana-inspired—Darma ascended into the pantheon of Indonesian literature, winning numerous awards, including the presidential medal of honor. Budi Darma may be barely known in the United States, but Tiffany Tsao—who has recently translated People from Bloomington for Penguin Classics—hopes that an

If you’ve ever been sucked into the world of Tudor England, whether by Wolf Hall, The Tudors, or one of the novels about Anne Boleyn, you’ve likely met Hans Holbein. Born in 1497, he learned to paint from his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, and went on to become arguably the finest portraitist of the 16th century. Now Holbein: Capturing Character, the first major show dedicated to the artist in the United States, is being held at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City through May 15. Smarty Pants jetted to the Big Apple to bring you on an audio tour of the exhibition with Austėja Mackelaitė, the Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator at the Morgan and a co-curator of the exhibition.Virtually follow along our stops on the tour:Erasmus of Rotterdam Images of DeathSir Thomas MoreRichard Southwell (and preparatory drawing)Simon George (and preparatory drawing)Portrait of a WomanGo beyond the episode:Take a virtual walk through Holbein: Capturing CharacterRead the first few sample pages of Hi

When we look back to what we imagine to have been the golden age of reading—say, before the invention of the smart phone—could it be that we’re really misreading book history? That’s what literary critic and Rutgers professor Leah Price argues in What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, using material history and social history to explore both how people read in the past and how most of us read today. Gutenberg printed more papal indulgences than Bibles, and until the past century or so, most reading was done aloud—in fact, too much reading was discouraged because of the deleterious effect it supposedly had on one’s character! Price joins us this week to discuss how, just maybe, social media and books aren’t enemies after all, but merely different forms of the same literary tradition.Go beyond the episode:Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About BooksHow does your Zoom background stack up against those on Bookshelf Credibility?For those of us who always check out a new f

When Thomas More wrote Utopia in the 16th century, he ensured that all those who would seek out a perfect society, inspired by his book, would have to answer for the literal Greek meaning of its title: “no place.” So, has there ever been a utopia? It depends on whom you ask. Adrian Shirk, who joined Smarty Pants several years ago to talk about her previous book, takes utopia to mean communities that “have intentionally understood themselves as world-building a way out of a death-dealing system, in the service of making, if only briefly, some idea of heaven on earth—not just for themselves, but however foolhardy, for all of humankind.” From that definition—and from the bop by Belinda Carlisle, of course—comes the title of her new book, Heaven Is a Place on Earth, an exploration of moments and movements in American utopianism then, today, and tomorrow, from the Shakers to the rebuilding of the Bronx to a Waffle House by the side of the road.Go beyond the episode:Adrian Shirk’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Search

In 1889, a group of Jewish families fleeing Russian pogroms arrived in Argentina, hoping for a new life—or at least a safe place to reside for a while before making their way to Israel. Moisés Ville, the town they founded, some 400 miles from Buenos Aires, was one of the first Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina and over the next 50 years would come to be called the “Jerusalem of South America,” replete with theaters, libraries, and two synagogues. But this sunny story of life in the new world has a dark underside, as Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay learned one day, upon reading a 1947 Yiddish newspaper article written by his own great-grandfather. The article detailed 22 murders of Jewish colonists in swift succession, all in the last decade of the 19th century. Why these people were killed—and what it says about the complex history of this once grand town—is the subject of Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll. Sinay joins us to talk about ho

Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endured repeated failures—to spread the sakura around the world. But there’s one naturalist in particular we can thank: Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram. Journalist Naoko Abe joins us on the podcast to share how this English eccentric saved some of Japan’s most iconic cherry blossoms—from the spectacular Great White Cherry to the pink Hokusai—from extinction. This episode originally aired in 2019.Go beyond the episode:Naoko Abe’s The Sakura ObsessionIf you’re in Washington, D.C., you need not visit the (closed) tidal basin to view the cherries—here is a map trees blossoming all over the cityThe National Park Service

Bacteria made the first sounds on Earth, dinosaurs likely belched and bugled instead of roared, and for millennia, the Earth was largely silent. Why it took so long for communicative sound to emerge—and how it flourished into the coos, croaks, cries, and cacophony of today—is the subject of David George Haskell’s new book, Sounds Wild and Broken. While documenting the sonic marvels of the world, Haskell arrived at the alarming conclusion that we’re in an acoustic crisis. Manmade sounds and behavior are causing insects and songbirds to die out, disrupting whale song and silencing shrimp, creating stress in our own minority communities, and generating countless other aural ills. David George Haskell, a professor of biology and environmental studies at Sewanee: The University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow, joins us on the podcast to talk about why sound matters.Go beyond the episode:David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory ExtinctionLi

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