Smarty Pants

About 50 books are known to exist in the world that are allegedly bound in human skin—and it’s possible that there are many more. Believe it or not, these dark books were not made by Nazis, serial killers, or occultists, nor were they churned out in a nightmare factory during the French Revolution. No, they were made mostly by doctors in the 19th century. How and why such books came to be is the s...

Caitlin Doughty is the death professional behind the Internet’s favorite show about death, Ask a Mortician, and founder of the Order of the Good Death, which works to overcome our culture’s anxiety about dying, grief, and the afterlife. She runs her own funeral home, Undertaking LA, which offers alternatives to traditional, formaldehyde-soaked approaches to burial. In her book From Here to Eternit...

Magic has gotten a bad rap for the past few hundred years: in our haste to become rational, logical creatures of the Enlightenment, we’ve disavowed magic of all kinds (and burned a few hundred thousand women as witches along the way). Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden wants to change the way we think about magic, starting with its definition: a connection with the universe that allows u...

What’s spookier than the Tower of London, home to the ghosts of queens and the rest of Henry the VIII’s enemies? How about the half-dozen black ravens that inhabit it—without which, as legend has it, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall? Since there haven’t been dead bodies littering the Tower Green for centuries,  someone  has to keep the ravens alive—and that person is the...

If you’ve ever made a salad from tender greens picked up from the farmers’ market, slurped an oyster cultivated at a regenerative farm, or sliced into a hearty loaf of rye bread—then raise a glass of California wine to James Beard, the dean of American cooking. For more than 35 years and in nearly two dozen cookbooks, Beard swept aside stuffy imported notions of epicurean haute cuisine on the one...

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 l...

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...

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 look...

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 t...

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—g...

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 o...

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 intervi...

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 histo...

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. T...

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...

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...

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 . Holm...

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...

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...

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 a...

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, pseudoscientif...

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 re...

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,&nb...

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 assi...

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...