Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

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. This episode originally aired in 2018.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

For decades, we’ve been filling our plates with fruit and vegetables from California’s Central Valley and with meat fattened by the golden fields of the Corn Belt. But the future of almonds and soybeans looks grim. Industrial agriculture yields massive crops, but in the process destroys its own foundations: groundwater and topsoil. In his new book, Perilous Bounty, journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott explores the contradictions in our food supply by narrowing his focus to these agricultural essentials—water and earth. He reveals a “quiet emergency” happening on our fruited plains, profiles the farmers adapting old ways to a new era, and suggests ways we might reimagine not only the future of food, but that of the people who grow, pick, and package it.Go beyond the episode:Tom Philpott’s Perilous BountyRead his Guardian essay, “Unless we change course, the US agricultural system could collapse”Philpott’s recent reporting has focused on the meatpacking industry, especially poultry productionAnd his recent

Everywhere but where we live—and maybe where you live?—it seems like things are slowly creeping back toward how they were before the pandemic, or at least slowly getting less awful. In New York City, the High Line is reopening a little bit more of its 1.5 mile length to a socially distanced public, bringing a few more blocks of that beloved, reclaimed railroad to visitors. So this week, we’re looking back to an interview from the spring of 2017, when we walked along the High Line with architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Her book, Welcome to Your World, is about how people experience the built environment, not just as individuals but as groups of people living together in cities or towns. She weaves together research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to explain how the buildings we encounter every day shape our feelings, our memories, and our well-being.Go beyond the episode:Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our LivesIf you’re a New Yorker,

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 T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Waste Land,” 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, 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. This episode originally aired in 2018.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

Twenty-five years ago, anthropologist Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within weeks of each other. “Soon after,” he writes in his new book, “I started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories—geological, archaeological, histories before history.” The Book of Unconformities is his meditation on the unlikely human stories unearthed in some of the oldest things in the earth—Manhattan marble, the Cape York meteorite, Icelandic lava, petrified whale blubber—and the questions they raise about the very nature of anthropology and memory itself.Go beyond the episode:Hugh Raffles’s The Book of UnconformitiesStarting in the 9th century CE, Chinese philosophers began to study and collect gongshi, or scholars’ rocks Behold the standing stones of CallanishThe Cape York meteorite is still part of the collection of t

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. This episode originally aired in 2018.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 Af

Living in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic feels like watching the sun go down on a crumbling empire. The world’s wealthiest country has experienced more deaths and suffered a greater economic shock than any of its peers. Staggering levels of unemployment and eviction are looming, not to mention a potentially chaotic November election. We can’t help but think back to our 2017 interview with classicist Kyle Harper, who in his book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, advanced a new theory about why and how the empire fell … under circumstances alarmingly similar to our own. Though the decline of Rome has been a favored subject of armchair theorists for as long as there have been armchairs, Harper's hypothesis points to many of the same problems we're wrestling with today.Go beyond the episode:Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an EmpireRead an excerpt from the book on how the Huns laid waste to the Eternal CityHow we can learn

Whether it’s Lemurians making their home on Mount Shasta, aliens alighting in the middle of Illinois, meat falling from the Kentucky sky, or cows being drained of blood in Oregon, accounts of unexplained phenomena are on the rise. Why have so many Americans opened themselves up to fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, even as our empirical understanding of the world has increased? Cultural historian Colin Dickey joins us on the show this week to talk about his new book, Unidentified, in which he traverses the country in search of the cryptids and conspiracies that have stuck with us for the past few centuries, evolving alongside the dramatic changes in our frontiers, scientific knowledge, and cultural mores.Go beyond the episode:Colin Dickey’s Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the UnexplainedRead an excerpt from his previous book, Ghostland, about America’s haunted placesLearn about the Altamaha-ha, the sea monster of the Georgia coastNPR gets in on the cow mute game

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. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Christopher King, an obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—who 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 recordi

As we enter month five of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, while many countries around the world slowly ease back into some semblance of normality, it can be difficult not to despair. Infection and death rates are rising, especially in states that rushed to reopen, and now some states that did open too fast are putting restrictions back in place. One of the few lights in the darkness has been Philip Alcabes, whose birds-eye view of the pandemic in essays on our website has paid particular attention to how its effects play out in the unequal society in which we live. His most recent essay, “Bodies and Breath,” connects Covid-19’s disproportionate effect on Black communities to the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests. The essay draws on the work of longtime Scholar contributor Harriet Washington, who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her writing on racism and medicine. We invited them to join us for a discussion about how the connections between public health and the fractures in o

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, Magdalena 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. He joins us this episode (originally aired in 2018) to share his 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 th

For the past year and a half, Amanda Holmes has been delighting readers around the world with The American Scholar ’s podcast Read Me A Poem. She has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives. So this week, we peer behind the curtain of our sister show, speaking with that voice that has been brightening all our lives with weekly poems.Go beyond the episode:View the Read Me A Poem archives on our websiteSubscribe to Read Me A Poem: iTunes • Feedburner • Google Play • AcastRead Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the&nb

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 this episode (originally aired in 2018) 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

Farah Peterson is a law professor and legal historian at the University of Virginia School of Law. In her first essay for the Scholar, published in our Winter 2019 issue, she examined John Adams’s defense of eight British soldiers, charged with killing Crispus Attucks, an unarmed black man, on March 5, 1770. Despite how they have long been characterized, Adams’s arguments, she wrote, were hardly the ultimate expression of principle and rule of law. In our new issue, Peterson turns to yet another dangerous myth of the Revolutionary era: namely, that black Americans in bondage did not want to be free. Given the ongoing protests against police brutality, here and around the world, Peterson’s work feels all the more vital as we enter into a newly invigorated national conversation about race and how to rectify historical injustices.Go beyond the episode:Farah Peterson’s “The Patriot Slave”And “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre”Listen to our interview with Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in which she corrects the record

This week on our website, we unlocked an essay that appears in our new Summer issue: “The Patriot Slave,” written by University of Virginia law professor Farah Peterson. In it, she explores the ways in which we’re still haunted by the dangerous myth that African Americans chose not to be free in revolutionary America. Peterson will be joining us for an interview next week to talk about her essay and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. In preparation, let’s revisit this episode from last year, in which the historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers revises another dangerous myth—namely that wealthy white women in the South were separated from the ugly reality of slavery both by their own disenfranchisement and their intrinsic sweet nature. Since women often inherited more slaves than land, they were deeply invested, in a social, moral, and economic sense, in the trade of enslaved people. A white woman could cordon off her property from her husband’s in a prenuptial agreement, preserve her right to manage her own pro

With protests now in every state over the murder of George Floyd and ongoing police brutality, we're revisiting an episode from last year with the science journalist Angela Saini, whose work explains how scientific inquiry has been complicit in, or explicitly aligned with, racism and white supremacy. Despite the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we disc

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 friend’s bookshelf first,

Sure, you’ve gotten really into sourdough during quarantine—but have you ever thatched your own roof with grasses that you grew in your own back yard? Or spent hours researching the secret behind making the perfect haystack? Alexander Langlands has. The archaeologist and medieval historian has been on BBC shows like Edwardian Farm and Tudor Farm, recreating the life of yore, and his book, Cræft, takes DIY to a whole new level. Part how-to, part memoir, the book gets at not only what it means to make things with your own hands, but how this experience connects us to people and places across time. Also, how everyone should set fire to their leaf blowers.Go beyond the episode:Alexander Langlands’s Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional CraftsOld meets new in this Pinterest board of traditional tools to complement the bookWatch Alexander Langlands re-create early 20th-century life on the BBC’s Edwardian Farm, preceded by Victorian FarmOr there’s&

Our guest this week is New York Times best-selling novelist Matthew Quirk, who went from being a reporter at The Atlantic to writing thrillers about government fixers and special agents. His latest book is Hour of the Assassin, about an ex-Secret Service agent who tests the security protecting public officials for weaknesses that might allow killers to break through. That is, until his latest assignment ends in … a setup! Quirk’s previous books have dealt with every manner of agent, from the FBI and special ops to con men and consultants. He joins us to talk about his approach to writing thrillers, how he avoids getting scooped by the news, and what fiction of all kinds has to offer us in dark times.Go beyond the episode:Matthew Quirk’s Hour of the AssassinRead Quirk’s essay for Vox on how the Trump era keeps spoiling his booksWe love John le Carré too: read senior editor Bruce Falconer’s review of the master’s memoir, The Pigeon TunnelFor an escape of a different kind, check out our editors’ favorite Br

Today, almost 90 percent of the world’s population is hooked on coffee or its most addictive component, caffeine. But 500 years ago, hardly anyone drank it, and the story of how coffee came to grace so many breakfast tables, office kitchens, and factory breakrooms speaks volumes about the very unequal world we live in. Our guest this week is Augustine Sedgewick, whose new book, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, uses the global history of the Hill family, a coffee dynasty in El Salvador, to unravel how societies, rural and urban alike, were recast in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately, that restructuring led to many of the inequalities we still see today between the global North that drinks coffee and the global South that farms it.Go beyond the episode:Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite DrugRead his recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, “How Coffee Became a Modern Necessity”Check out the recent documenta