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Episode 515: Clint Smith

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Clint Smith is a poet and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His most recent book is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America and his latest feature is “Monuments to the Unthinkable.”

“I've been to a lot of places that carry a history of death and slaughter and murder. I've been on plantations. I've been in execution chambers. I've sat on electric chairs. I've been on death row. But I have never experienced anything like what I experienced walking through the gas chamber in Dachau. I mean, there's reading books about the Holocaust, and then there's that. And that is something that I hope to continue doing for the rest of my life: putting my body where these things happen. Because it completely transforms your understanding of what it was like.”

Show notes:

  • @ClintSmithIII
  • clintsmithiii.com
  • Smith on Longform
  • Smith's Atlantic archive
  • 00:00 How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little Brown • 2021)
  • 01:00 "Monuments to the Unthinkable" (Atlantic • Nov 2022)
  • 17:00 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Matthew Desmond • Crown • 2017)
  • 33:00 The Hemingses of Monticello (Annette Gordon-Reed • W.W. Norton • 2009)
  • 34:00 Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing • 2016)
  • 57:00 The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank • 1947)
  • 57:00 Number the Stars (Lois Lowry • Houghton Mifflin • 1989)
  • 1:07:00 "The Stories Tamir Rice Makes Us Remember" (New Yorker • Dec 2015)
  • 1:08:00 Smith's New Yorker archive
  • 1:08:00 "Freddy Adu and the Children of the Beautiful Game" (New Yorker • Mar 2017)
  • 1:09:00 Above Ground (Little Brown • 2023)
  • 1:09:00 Crash Course Black American History

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