Smarty Pants

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 th...

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...

Since August 2017, in the country’s latest wave of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence, over 647,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar due to systemic violence and ethnic cleansing that has killed more than 10,000 people. Why is a religion seen as so peaceful in the West lashing out with such vehemence, and why are the Rohingya their target? And how did a seemingly local conflict erupt across the e...

We revisit an interview with Eugenia Cheng, the author of  How to Bake Pi,  who translates higher math using metaphors that even the most mathematically disinclined can comprehend: infinite layers of puff pastry, endless jars of marmalade, and deep-dish pi(e). She talks about the false dichotomy between mathematics and art, and how understanding ma...

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there:  Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote,  the Neopolitan 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 decide...

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book,  Off the Charts,  Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose liv...

For decades, artists have been using horror to speak to our deepest societal fears, from the wilderness (werewolves) to the unknown (aliens). With zombies, that fear is infection: the outbreak of some terrible epidemic that sweeps the world, rendering us all into the drooling, flesh-eating monster next door. But as Dahlia Schweitzer shows in her new book,  Going Viral , zombies are part of a...

Giorgio Vasari has been variously called the father of art history, the inventor of artistic biography, and the author of “the Bible of the Italian Renaissance”—a little book called The Lives of the Artists . It’s a touchstone for scholars looking to get a peek at life in Michelangelo’s day, and quite fun, too, depending on whose wildly embellished life you’re reading. Ingrid Rowland joins us on t...

If you're a creature of the 21st century, odds are you've stumbled upon the nascent DIY movement. From baking our bread to stitching our own clothes to raising back yard chickens and growing our own vegetables—even restoring our own furniture—the past few decades have seen a resurgence in our appreciation for crafts, right down to craft beer. But have you ever thatched your own roof with grasses t...

Phil Klay joins us on the podcast to talk about his essay, “Tales of War and Redemption,” in our Winter issue. It’s an essay that starts on a humorous note, describing the horrible, ridiculously gory deaths of the Christian saints in  The Big Book of Martyrs— a comic book for kids. And then he reminds you that he’s been in war, and he’s seen horrible deaths, and...

School choice. A portfolio of options. Charters. Vouchers. Virtual classrooms. This is the vocabulary of the 21st-century American education system—and having more of these private options is exactly what policymakers, like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, would like to see. But where did the idea of "public charter schools" come from? And what kind of impact does siphoning money away from the...

So much of the story we hear about China today is an economic one—how over the past few decades, it has risen from poverty and ruin to become a global economic 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 Roman Empire's reputation precedes it: a wingspan that stretched from Syria to Spain, and from the Nile to Scotland's doorstep. Centuries of unbroken rule, a unified commonwealth, and at one point nearly a quarter of the world's population. And then, it all came tumbling down. Why Rome fell has been a favored subject of armchair theorizing pretty much since the empire started teetering—an...

This week, Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman talk about the science (and practice) of creating new things. We share a lot with the other sentient beings on this planet—love, hunger, death, joy, family, jealousy, rage. There's one thing, though, we do that other species, for whatever reason, do not: we innovate. We create. And we do so in a symbiotic way with other humans, building and improving on...

This week, we talk to Cullen Murphy, the son of cartoonist John Cullen Murphy, about growing up during the funnies’ midcentury heyday. Cartoon County is part memoir, part history of the giants of the comics world, who drew  Superman, Beetle Bailey, Hägar the Horrible, The Wizard of Id  … and a bevy of strips and gags read by millions of Americans. Visit the episode page  for a slide...

This week on the podcast, we’re talking about sublimated desires—and the repressed kind, too. William Deresiewicz expands on an essay he wrote for us about being a man in Jane Austen’s world—and how her novels are about so much more than Colin Firth-as-Mr. Darcy. And Hallie Lieberman explains how the history of sex toys—and the laws banning them—can illuminate America’s complicated relationship wi...

A measly three percent of books published in the United States are works in translation—so this week, we’re shining a spotlight on two books from dramatically different places. Naivo’s  Beyond the Rice Fields  is the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English; he and his translator, Allison Charette, talk with us about love stories and origin stories. And Tenzi...

Our Halloween special covers two subjects perfect for your next macabre dinner party: how the witch gained her powers, and the myriad alternatives to a casket. Caitlin Doughty, the Internet’s favorite mortician, tells us about her world travels in search of the holy grail of corpse interaction—along with a few other stories that illuminate our changing relationship with the afterlife. And Ronald H...

Family drama, circa 1930: Yuri Slezkine tells the saga of the House of Government, a communal residence where top Soviet officials and their families lived, loved, died, and disappeared in the years after the Russian Revolution; Caroline Moorehead introduces American audiences to the story of the Rossellis, the family at the forefront of the fight against Mussolini’s fascism. • Episode Page :...

This week, we look at how we have irrevocably shaped the planet through consumption: of fossil fuels, exotic foods, cups of tea. Erika Rappaport talks about how the drive for empire was spurred on by lust for a certain caffeinated plant, which fueled countless wars and colonial expansion. And Alexandra Kleeman and Jen Monroe throw a dinner party for the future, imagining what food will taste like...

What power do words have, and how do their meanings change across centuries—and continents? We talk to Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, about how moving from Britain to Baltimore changed his work; Jennifer Choi unearths the cruel etymology behind an innocuous blue birthmark; and Max Décharné draws a map of the vulgar tongue. • Episode page : https://theamericanscholar.org...

This week is for the ladies: we'll be talking about women's roles in two pretty different fields—science and religion—and how women have worked their way in from the fringes of both. Angela Saini unravels the pervasive idea that science is free from bias, and talks about how prejudice against women comes out in studies as well as in the academy; Adrian Shirk spotlights the American women who have...

We hit the seven seas and the five gyres in our wettest podcast episode yet: Laura Sook Duncombe talks about the female swashbucklers forgotten by history—including a pirate who gave birth in the middle of a sea battle—and Marcus Eriksen talks about sailing the ocean blue in a raft made of plastic bottles. • Go beyond the episode: • Laura Sook Duncombe’s  Pirate Women : The Princesses, Prostitutes...

Melanie Kiechle introduces us to the 19th-century world of smell detectives, where the nose reigned supreme and cities mapped their stench patterns;  Sam Kean tells how gases can have a profound effect on us—from knocking us out to making us laugh, and even causing the French Revolution. Plus, top off our exploration into the sensory world of invisible forces with an excerpt from a new book on all...

Psychologist Alexander Todorov tells us how we’ve got it all wrong on the science of first impressions—and warns of physiognomy’s dangerous return—while Elizabeth Wilson gives us a glimpse into the secret, sexy history of tennis, just in time for the Wimbledon finals. Go beyond the episode: Alexander Todorov’s  Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions  Explore the  Social Percep...