Smarty Pants

Sometimes, historical truth is so strange that it demands to be turned into fiction. Such is the story of William Sydney Porter, better known as the American short-story writer O. Henry. Before he made it big with tales about Magi gifts and the Cisco Kid, he embezzled some money in Texas and fled for Honduras, which at the turn of the 20th century had no extradition treaty with the United States....

You may not know her name, but Odetta was one of the most influential singers of the 20th century: called “the voice of the civil rights movement” by The New York Times and anointed “queen of American folk music” by Martin Luther King Jr., himself. Our guest this week is music journalist Ian Zack, author of the first in-depth biography of Odetta, whose incredible voice rang out at some of the most...

In 1536, a now obscure poet named Vincent Obsopoeus published a long verse called The Art of Drinking , or De Arte Bibendi , filled with shockingly modern advice. Moderation, not abstinence, is the key to lasting sobriety, he writes—and then turns around and teaches us how to win at drinking games and give a proper toast. Joining us this week is the man who brought this sound advice to modern Engl...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes just how connected the world is, while, at the same time, circumscribing our individual worlds much more. How do we dress for these new circumstances, where our trips outside the house are limited to neighborhood walks and forays into the yard? Our guest today, Shahidha Bari, has been thinking deeply about how we interact with our clothes since long before t...

Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird … and at the end of the day, who really understands sung Italian anyway? The barriers aren’t just financial: there are hundreds of years of musical history at work, along with dozens of arcane terms that defy pronunciation. But opera has been loved by ardent fans for centuries, and the experience of seeing it—once you know what t...

One thing we’re thinking about at the Scholar as we’re all shut away, working from home, is how much we depend—emotionally and logistically—on contact with other people. As coming together in public parks, offices, arts hubs, and community spaces has become verboten in the age of social distancing, what will happen to the urban commons in cities? Amanda Huron, an associate professor of interdiscip...

In her book Going Viral , pop culture critic and film professor Dahlia Schweizer asks why, and when, outbreak narratives became such a part of our culture. She divides these narratives into three distinct waves of film starting in the early 1990s: first globalization, then terrorism and conspiracy, and then post-apocalypse and zombie films. What's surprising about these outbreak narratives, though...

We are all inundated with news about the COVID-19 pandemic, but one thing is glaringly missing from the coverage: the underlying structural reasons for why this is happening. Yes, in our globalized economy, travel has increased exponentially in the past 20 years, not just for pleasure, but also for profit. Still, that alone does not explain why we’ve had a litany of infectious disease outbreaks ov...

Social science research confirms what seems obvious: our decisions don’t occur in a void, but rather are hugely influenced by our peers and social context. Society influences our behavior but, in turn, our behavior influences society. To put it another way, our social behaviors are contagious. Because of our respective environments, we may feel compelled to cheat on our taxes, drive heavy cars, or...

As of 2019, 49.7% of American renters spend more than a third of their household income on rent. One quarter of all renters are spending at least half their income on rent. Whole generations are being shut out of the housing market by the skyrocketing price of buying a home. How did we get here? To find out, you have to go much further back than the 2008 financial crisis, which was infamously buil...

Marie Arana is the award-winning Peruvian-American author of Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, a book about a whole continent that manages not to be a thousand pages long—even though it covers about a thousand years of history. She makes the compelling case that there are really three driving forces behind the entire region: exploitation and extraction; violenc...

Everywhere, all the time, it seems like we’re being sold on the idea that getting rid of things will solve our problems—from the life-changing magic of Marie Kondo to the streamlining of all those DVDs into digital subscriptions—and it’s all being sold under the label of minimalism. In his new book, The Longing for Less , Kyle Chayka criticizes this trend as a kind of upscale austerity designed to...

In his previous book, Junkyard Planet , journalist Adam Minter went around the world to see what happened to American recyclables such as cardboard, shredded cars, and Christmas lights around the world as they became new things. In his new book, Secondhand , Minter looks at what happens to all the things that get resold and reused, objects that end up in Arizona thrift stores, Malaysian flea marke...

Two years ago, Carmen Maria Machado pushed the weird and gothic into the mainstream with her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties , which was a finalist for the National Book Award and made her a Guggenheim Fellow. Now she’s back with In the Dream House , a memoir of a harrowing relationship told in a splintered, fractured style. The list of chapters reads like an introduction...

When thinking of the past, one of the hardest things is to imagine what it would have been like to inhabit a physical body in a world so different in look, smell, and feel from our own. What was it like to go to the doctor 800 years ago? If you cut your finger and bled, what would that blood mean to you? What about the blood of saints—would that be different? What about exercising, eating, giving...

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...

To get into the Halloween spirit, we’ve invited Assistant Editor Katie Daniels and Editorial Assistant Taylor Curry, the hosts of [Spoiler Alert], our online book club, to interview the literary critic Ruth Franklin. Their October book is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the suspenseful tale of the two Blackwood sisters and the mysterious murder that took place at their house....

This week, WeWork got a huge bailout from an investor after its plan to go public went belly-up amid disclosures of rampant mismanagement. Now the company can’t even afford to lay off the thousands of employees it would like to because it can’t afford to pay their severance packages. The parallels to Uber, which did go public this fall, are striking: just like WeWork, Uber was a unicorn startup—la...

Two decades ago, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell turned their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex, England, into a massive outdoor laboratory. They decided to cede control of their land to nature and watched it slowly grow wild again. Now, at what they call Knepp Wildland, herds of fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, and longhorn cows do battle with scrubland and tree branches, while Tamworth pigs rustle in...

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...

Love it, hate it, or refuse to listen to anything released after 1980—however you feel about country music, you can’t drive across the United States without hearing it. Even people who don’t appreciate the genre have been thinking about it lately, as the controversy over Lil Nas X’s exclusion from the Billboard country music charts has inspired discussion of country music, racism, and who gets to...

The United States has an uneven record when it comes to refugees. It infamously refused to accept a boatload of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust; at other times, it took in huge numbers of refugees from all over the world. As recently as 1980, we admitted more than 200,000 people. But that number has plummeted to its lowest level in 40 years: in 2018, only 22,491 people were permitted to rese...

More than a century ago, Antonín Dvořák prophesied that American music would be rooted in the black vernacular. It’s come true, to a certain extent: when we think of American music—jazz, blues, rock, hip hop, rap—we are thinking of music invented by black musicians. The field of classical music, however, has remained stubbornly white. At one point in the last century, classical music was on the cu...

To mark New York Fashion Week, longtime style reporter Dana Thomas is ripping the veil off the industry. Her new book, Fashionopolis, is an indictment of the true costs of fashion—like poisoned water, crushed workers, and overflowing landfills—that never make it onto the price tag of a dress or pair of jeans. Between 2000 and 2014, the annual number of garments produced doubled to 100 billion: 14...

This week, with the world's forests burning from the Amazon to Indonesia, we’re revisiting a 2017 episode about the future of food—the production of which, whether beef or palm oil, has caused an unprecedented number of deliberate fires. Centuries of colonialism and resource extraction have transformed continents and the waters between them. Oceans are rising and acidifying, resulting in the extin...