Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

If you were a small child who grew up near a coastline—or maybe especially if you didn’t—nothing was more enchanting about summer than collecting seashells on the beach. People have been using conches and scallops and whelks as musical instruments, jewelry, canvas, and even money, pretty much since we evolved enough to pick them up. But the future of seashells and the creatures who make them is uncertain. The smallest shells are dissolving in an acidifying ocean, and today mollusks that have survived 500 million years of ice ages and heat waves are facing an enemy undeterred by their hardened exteriors: humans, and the climate change we've created. Science writer Cynthia Barnett's new book, The Sound of the Sea, is a plea to listen to what shells are telling us, both about the ocean and ourselves. Go beyond the episode:Cynthia Barnett’s The Sound of the Sea (watch the book trailer here)Listen to the haunting sound of the conch horn found in the temple of Chavín, and read about Miriam Kolar’s archaeoacous

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan 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. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:Daniel Kalder’s The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of LiteracyDive 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 “D

Suzanne Simard, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forests and Conservation Sciences, has dedicated her life to mapping the relationships between trees: how they send nutrients to one another, remember the past, warn their neighbors of disease or drought, and support their offspring. Her new memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, tells how her work has unfolded from her first discoveries of mycorrhizal fungi in the “wood wide web” to the inheritance left behind by dying trees and the life-giving force of the largest elders. Simard used isotopes and mass spectrometers to quantify the Indigenous knowledge that inspired her to study the interconnectedness of forest communities—and our human ones. She joins us on the podcast to discuss what we might all learn from trees.Go beyond the episode:Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother TreeRead Miranda Weiss’s review from our Summer 2021 issue hereExplore the Mother Tree Project, an experiment on forest resilience in the face of climate chan

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. This episode originally aired in 2019.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 tra

Despite the rampant success of books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, intellectual circles tend to look down on anything that sells itself as self-help. And yet, in a certain light, the most original form of self-help might actually be philosophy—an older and more respected genre, even, than the novel. So this week, we’re going back to the past and asking that old chestnut: what is a meaningful life? The Stoics are awfully popular these days, but the philosopher Catherine Wilson joins us this episode to pitch a different kind of Greek: Epicurus, whose teachings live on most fully in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. For a few centuries, Epicurus was wrongly remembered as the patron saint of whoremongers and drunkards, but he really wasn’t: his philosophy is rich with theories of justice, empiricism, pleasure, prudence, and equality (Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, welcomed women and slaves into his school). Epicureanism advocated for a simple life, something that appeal

If when you read a work of fiction you are never alone, since you can hear the voice of the author, then when you read in translation, you're in sort of a threesome. The translator, as Cervantes is said to have said, is there at the edge of the frame, revealing the other side of the tapestry. Susan Bernofsky has been translating from German into English for decades, focusing on the writers Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her latest book is a biography of Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, and she is now translating Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a (very) brief excerpt of which we published earlier this year. Bernofsky directs the literary translation program at Columbia’s School of the Arts. She joins us on the podcast to talk about the joys and struggles of bringing another writer’s words into English. Go beyond the episode:Susan Bernofsky’s latest book is Clairvoyant of the Small, a biography of Robert WalserYou can find her translations on her website and on her long-running blog, T

The first Gilded Age was a time of rampant corruption, the big business crooks of Tammany Hall, and lavish displays of wealth rivaled by abject poverty. It was also the period when America’s elite mastered the art of crafting the perfect cocktail. Though there were a few missteps along the way—including the Black Velvet, which included equal parts champagne and, disturbingly, porter—the era birthed the classic cocktails that we drink to this day. But what parties, what people, were around for the debut of the Manhattan? Or the martini, the daiquiri, the pisco sour? Cecelia Tichi, professor of American literature and culture at Vanderbilt University, tells all in her new book, The Gilded Age of Cocktails.Go beyond the episode:Cecelia Tichi’s The Gilded Age of CocktailsTichi mentioned a few other keepers of bartending history: David Wondrich, who wrote Imbibe!; and our own Wayne Curtis, who wrote And a Bottle of Rum and Neutral Ground, a long-running column on our website about all things New Orleans (including

Each week on our sister podcast, Read Me a Poem, Amanda Holmes reads suggestions from listeners around the world. Recently, a listener requested a longer work by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry is not as widely known 40 years after her death as it should be. Holmes joins us this week to discuss why Rukeyser’s work speaks to her and then to read the long poem cycle “Letter to the Front,” written in 1944.Go beyond the episode:Listen to Amanda Holmes each week on the Read Me a Poem podcastRead “Letter to the Front” by Muriel RukeyserTry not to chuckle as Rukeyser reads her poem “Waiting for Icarus,” written from the perspective of the ill-fated man’s wifeThe Book of the Dead (1938), reissued in 2018 by West Virginia University Press, was written in response to the 1931 Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, in which hundreds of miners, mostly Black, died of silicosis. Rukeyser combined her own observations with trial testimony from the surviving miners’ lawsuit against their employer.“In moments of desperation, a fa

Geoffrey Chaucer was born a wine-merchant’s son in 1340s London. He survived the plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Rising, and an adolescence spent wearing tight pants in a rich woman’s house to become one of the most celebrated poets in English. In the first biography of Chaucer in a generation, historian Marion Turner makes the case that the man we think of as a great English poet was, in fact, a great European one. He was inspired by the literature of Italy, Spain, France, and elsewhere—but more importantly, he drew on his interactions with the people he encountered during his travels, and from the places he visited. For example, how did the frescoes of Florence give rise to the perspectives in The House of Fame? Did Chaucer’s visits to his daughter’s none-too-chaste nunnery influence the bawdy Nun’s Priest’s Tale? Marion Turner takes us back to the Middle Ages to find out. This episode originally aired in 2019.Go beyond the episode:Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European LifeBrush

On the eve of World War II, a young housewife named Alma Fielding found herself in the grip of a poltergeist hell-bent on flinging china through the air, toppling over dressers, and leaving no egg uncracked in her London home. Her case caught the attention of the Hungarian ghost hunter Nandor Fodor, whose tests at the International Institute for Psychical Research led to ever-odder phenomena from Alma: a bird flew from her skirts, beetles crawled beneath her gloves, stolen jewelry materialized on her fingers. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Kate Summerscale tells the story of an investigation that combines the supernatural and subconscious, revealing the very real anxieties of a changing society.Go beyond the episode:Kate Summerscale’s The Haunting of Alma FieldingIf you haven’t seen it yet, you must: PoltergeistAlso Carrie: because Alma’s story is in many ways a mashup of bothIn a reversal of Alma’s story, the unexpectedly excellent Ouija: Origin of Evil follows a family whose fraudulent tricks end in real

Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you responded to work emails solely using ?? Is ~ this ~ your favorite punctuation mark for conveying exactly just how much you just don’t care about something? Welcome, Internet Person—you’re using a different kind of English from the previous generation. But these conversational norms weren’t set on high, and how they evolved over the past decades of Internet usage tells us a lot about how language has always been created: collaboratively. Or, as Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch puts it, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” She joins us to analyze the language we use online and off—how it got this way, where it’s going, and why it’s a good thing that our words are changing so quickly. This episode originally aired in 2019.Go beyond the episode:Gretchen McCulloch’s Because InternetRead her Resident Linguist column at Wired, formerly at The Toast

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 new 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.Go beyond the episode:Jonathan Meiburg’s A Most Remarkable CreatureRead an excerpt about Charles Darwin’s encounters with the birdMeet Tina,

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 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. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:Elizabeth Rush’s 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 fr

Stagger Lee is “The Baddest Man in Town,” as poet and critic Eric McHenry writes in our Spring 2021 issue. The man behind the myth—“Stack” Lee Shelton—was a real person, who did many if not most of the things ascribed to him in song (except, perhaps, go down to hell and take over for the devil). The bar, the hat, the gun, all have become mainstays of African-American folklore in the 120 years since Lee made his debut in song. McHenry joins us on the podcast for a look into the life and legend of Stagger Lee, which he exhumed through newly digitized newspaper records and troves of archival recordings—including the conversation between an elderly St. Louis musician and a 1970s graduate student that plucked Lee from a rich oral history tradition and back into the written record.Go beyond the episode:Read Eric McHenry’s essay “The Baddest Man in Town”Compare the oldest known lyrics (from 1897) to Mississippi John Hurt’s definitive 1928 version—or Nick Cave’s depraved oneListen to our Spotify playlist of selected

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 crea

In the past year of the pandemic, Amazon has added more than 500,000 jobs, mostly in its various warehouses. During the same period, more than 20,000 of its frontline workers tested positive for Covid-19. Their boss, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, saw his net worth rise by $67 billion. Amazon’s shadow extends beyond the warehouses, though, to the cardboard factories that supply its packaging, the local stores it’s crowded out, and the affordable housing that’s flipped to luxury condos near its headquarters. In his new book, Fulfillment, ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis uses Amazon as a frame to chronicle the widening gap between winner-take-all-cities and the regions left behind.Go beyond the episode:Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click AmericaRead his piece in The New York Times, “Amazon and the Breaking of Baltimore”German novelist Heike Geissler worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet—and wrote about the brutal experience in her novel Seasonal AssociateLearn more abo

Women in wars on land and sea, whether queens or foot soldiers, rarely get their due—yet their lives are at least as interesting as their male counterparts’, not least because they had to leap through so many hoops to fight. Historian Pamela Toler wants us to know their names, and her book Women Warriors is a global history covering everyone from the Trung sisters, who led an untrained, 80,000-strong Vietnamese army against the Chinese Empire, to Cheyenne warriors like Buffalo Calf Road Woman, who knocked General Custer off his horse. There are at least a hundred killer screenplay ideas lurking in the history books—if only we bothered to look. This episode originally aired in 2019.Go beyond the episode:Pamela D. Toler’s Women Warriors: An Unexpected HistoryRead an excerpt about the Russian First Women’s Battalion of DeathRead Toler’s piece for us on Peggy Hull, the first woman accredited as a war correspondent by the U.S. militaryLearn about the lady pirates time forgot, includin

Once upon a time, you turned 30 and you already had it all: a spouse, a house, a job, and a passel of kids. But even before the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our lives, thirtysomethings’ expectations for their own lives were changing, both by choice and by necessity. Today, they’re getting married later if at all, having fewer kids, taking on more debt, and moving back in with their parents. Is economic upheaval and inequality the primary force behind these shifts? And why do traditional landmarks like getting married still exert such a pull on our psyches? Journalist Kayleen Schaefer conducted hundreds of interviews with researchers and millennials across the country to understand how this generation is redefining adulthood.Go beyond the episode:Kayleen Schaefer’s But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining AdulthoodOne landmark millennials do seem to be hitting? Burnout. Read Anne Helen Petersen’s essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”Read Paula Marantz Cohen’s essay “

The Aeneid has a reputation: it’s the founding myth of Rome, used down the centuries to justify conquest, colonization, and the expansion of empire the world over. Although Virgil includes many voices in his epic, Aeneas’s is the one that tends to be remembered—and celebrated, especially by his putative descendant, the Emperor Augustus. But with her new translation of The Aeneid, classicist Shadi Bartsch reveals the many ways that Virgil undermines both the glory of Aeneas and the authority of collective memory, down to the very verb used to begin and end the poem. Bartsch joins us on the podcast to untangle how the story of Aeneas is actually many stories, all in conversation with one another. Go beyond the episode:Shadi Bartsch’s translation of The AeneidRead her essay in The Washington Post, “Why I won’t surrender the classics to the far right”Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay “Lost Classics” reminds us that the study of ancient texts is the study of things that are no longer: lives, songs, stories, poems, me

So much of the story we hear about China today concerns Covid-19, or the economy—how over the past few decades, it has risen from poverty and ruin to become a global powerhouse. But there’s a story beneath the surface, of the artistic avant-garde that resisted rule from above and inspired generations of ordinary Chinese citizens to seek freedom of expression. From their countryside re-education posts to the abandoned warehouses of Beijing and the short-lived Democracy Wall, Chinese artists flourished at the edge of acceptability—until the entire edifice came crashing down with the Tiananmen Square massacre. Madeleine O’Dea joins us to talk about her book, The Phoenix Years, which follows the lives of nine contemporary Chinese artists to tell the story of how art shaped a nation.Visit the episode page for portraits and archival images of the artists and their work.Go beyond the episode:Madeleine O’Dea’s The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern ChinaPeruse