When Thomas More wrote Utopia in the 16th century, he ensured that all those who would seek out a perfect society, inspired by his book, would have to answer for the literal Greek meaning of its title: “no place.” So, has there ever been a utopia? It depends on whom you ask. Adrian Shirk, who joined Smarty Pants several years ago to talk about her previous book, takes utopia to mean communities that “have intentionally understood themselves as world-building a way out of a death-dealing system, in the service of making, if only briefly, some idea of heaven on earth—not just for themselves, but however foolhardy, for all of humankind.” From that definition—and from the bop by Belinda Carlisle, of course—comes the title of her new book, Heaven Is a Place on Earth, an exploration of moments and movements in American utopianism then, today, and tomorrow, from the Shakers to the rebuilding of the Bronx to a Waffle House by the side of the road.

Go beyond the episode:

• Adrian Shirk’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
• Read essays that became part of the book: “A Brief History of American Utopian Communities,” “Odd Fellows at the Rockland Palace,” and “A Visit to Charlotte Street.”
• Also mentioned: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
• Even The New York Times is profiling the “new generation” of intentional communities
• You can, of course, still visit the classics

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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In 1889, a group of Jewish families fleeing Russian pogroms arrived in Argentina, hoping for a new life—or at least a safe place to reside for a while before making their way to Israel. Moisés Ville, the town they founded, some 400 miles from Buenos Aires, was one of the first Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina and over the next 50 years would come to be called the “Jerusalem of South America,” replete with theaters, libraries, and two synagogues. But this sunny story of life in the new world has a dark underside, as Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay learned one day, upon reading a 1947 Yiddish newspaper article written by his own great-grandfather. The article detailed 22 murders of Jewish colonists in swift succession, all in the last decade of the 19th century. Why these people were killed—and what it says about the complex history of this once grand town—is the subject of Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll. Sinay joins us to talk about how a story from 100 years ago changed the way he saw his country, and his own relationship to Judaism.

Go beyond the episode:

• Javier Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville
• Visit our episode page for images from Moisés Ville
• It’s never too late to connect with the language of your ancestors, as Phyllis Rose writes in “My Mother’s Yiddish”
• Journey further afield into the driving forces of Latin America in our interview with Marie Arana
• Scholar senior editor Bruce Falconer reported from a very different kind of religious community in southern Chile

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

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Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endured repeated failures—to spread the sakura around the world. But there’s one naturalist in particular we can thank: Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram. Journalist Naoko Abe joins us on the podcast to share how this English eccentric saved some of Japan’s most iconic cherry blossoms—from the spectacular Great White Cherry to the pink Hokusai—from extinction. This episode originally aired in 2019.

Go beyond the episode:

• Naoko Abe’s The Sakura Obsession
• If you’re in Washington, D.C., you need not visit the (closed) tidal basin to view the cherries—here is a map trees blossoming all over the city
• The National Park Service created a guide to the cherry blossom varieties in the city
• Smithsonian’s list of the best places to see cherry blossoms around the world

Cherry varieties discussed:

• Taihaku / Prunus serrulata taihaku / Great white cherry
• Somei-yoshino / Prunus x yedoensis / Tokyo cherry

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bacteria made the first sounds on Earth, dinosaurs likely belched and bugled instead of roared, and for millennia, the Earth was largely silent. Why it took so long for communicative sound to emerge—and how it flourished into the coos, croaks, cries, and cacophony of today—is the subject of David George Haskell’s new book, Sounds Wild and Broken. While documenting the sonic marvels of the world, Haskell arrived at the alarming conclusion that we’re in an acoustic crisis. Manmade sounds and behavior are causing insects and songbirds to die out, disrupting whale song and silencing shrimp, creating stress in our own minority communities, and generating countless other aural ills. David George Haskell, a professor of biology and environmental studies at Sewanee: The University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow, joins us on the podcast to talk about why sound matters.

Go beyond the episode:

• David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
• Listen to more sounds from the book in this playlist
• “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” Brook Jarvis writes in The New York Times Magazine
• Despite a 2008 U.S. Navy report in which it admitted that its sonar killed whales, whale beachings and deaths from military sonar continue even today
• In The Conversation: “Urban noise pollution is worst in poor and minority neighborhoods and segregated cities”
• See also: Scholar contributor Harriet A. Washington on environmental racism in A Terrible Thing to Waste
• Explore the sounds of different decades and countries on Radiooooo, “the musical time machine”

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On December 16, 1876, a 35-year-old woman named Nancy Ann Harris died in rural Wisconsin of complications from an abortion. Only one other abortion is mentioned in the leather-bound death records of the county where Harris died and Tamara Dean lives, which she writes about in her essay “Safer than Childbirth,” in the Spring 2022 issue of The American Scholar. The more common cause of death, Dean found, was giving birth. With new challenges to safe and legal abortion coming hard and fast in recent years, it can be instructive to remember that, in the 19th century, abortion was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Even the Catholic Church didn’t oppose ending pregnancy before “quickening,” usually around the fourth month, because no one believed that human life existed before a woman could feel the fetus move. Tamara Dean joins the podcast to talk about what struck her about this one woman’s story, and what gets forgotten in the contemporary battle against abortion.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Tamara Dean’s “Safer than Childbirth”
• Watch Cecily Strong’s Saturday Night Live skit that captures the struggle to talk about abortion openly
• In December, the FDA permanently allowed abortion pills to be delivered by mail, which it had previously restricted
• Listen to our interview with Scott Stern about the decades-long U.S. government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The birth of religion is commonly held to lie far back in human history, with the occasional exception of an angel Moroni or the borderline godhood of a cult leader. But in Accidental Gods, Anna Della Subin documents how a surprising number of 20th-century men (it’s almost always men) found themselves labeled divine, sometimes without their knowledge and nearly always without their consent. Some, like General Douglas MacArthur, were even crowned four different ways, on three separate continents. Subin joins the podcast to explore the urges that lead us to declare a mortal man a god, and what this desire tells us about modernity.

Go beyond the episode:

• Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
• Read “Philip’s People” in The London Review of Books
• A corollary to the book: a brief history of objects turned into gods
• Meet the balsa wood carving of General Douglas MacArthur from the Guna people of Panama

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The North has been a blank, snowy canvas for our best and worst fantasies for thousands of years, home to biting winds, sea unicorns, fearsome Vikings, and even a wintry Atlantis. And it is also home, of course, to Indigenous communities, whose existence and culture could be inconvenient to myths of Aryan purity. Historian Bernd Brunner explores this curiosity cabinet of a region in his new book, Extreme North, translated by Jefferson Chase. Brunner argues that the North was as much invented as it was discovered by the European explorers, colonists, and armchair enthusiasts who ventured there. Encounters with the cultures of the North would inspire epic storytellers (Tolkien, Wagner), grifters (James Macpherson and his Poems of Ossian), racists (Hitler), and countless other complicated figures (Franz Boas, Nanook of the North). Brunner joins us on the podcast to explore the outer, icy limits of the known world and why it still has a hold on us today.

Go beyond the episode:

• Bernd Brunner’s Extreme North, translated by Jefferson Chase
• Full show notes on our episode page
• Rosamond Purcell re-created the Museum Wormianum of Arctic curiosities
• You can read all the extant Icelandic family sagas for free online
• The Poems of Ossian has been called the “Harry Potter of the 18th century”—except the boy wizard wasn’t a literary hoax
• How the handshake came to Nunavut
• Why the top of the map faces north

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Antwerp, the other port city on the North Sea, is frequently overshadowed by its Dutch big brother, Amsterdam. But long before the latter was dubbed the “Venice of the North,” Venetians—and Germans, Britons, Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, and others—flocked to Antwerp, the wealthiest European city of the 16th century and a huge beneficiary of the Age of Exploration. Pepper, silver, wool, sugar, salt, books, wine, and diamonds all passed through Antwerp in the complex web of trade spanning the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires, India, the Americas, and Africa. The city’s star burned brightly for a century, and then was snuffed out first by Spanish soldiers in 1576 and then the Calvinists in 1577. In his new book, Europe’s Babylon, Amsterdam-based writer Michael Pye brings Antwerp’s golden age to life in all its scandalous, sparkling glory.

Go beyond the episode:

• Michael Pye’s Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age
• Visit the episode page for images of the paintings described in the episode
• See the shadows of the age with a visit to today’s Antwerp
• A beginner’s guide to Belgian beer styles
• Get to know genever, the Low Countries’ answer to gin and whiskey
• Antwerp’s golden age of fashion came in 1986, with the Antwerp Six

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s hard to imagine an American city without a Chinese restaurant, a pizza parlor or three, and at least one taco joint. But the cooks who originally made American tastebuds salivate at the thought of a good stir-fry or a curry are hardly household names, even though their impact on our cuisine lingers. Mayukh Sen’s new book, Taste Makers, chronicles seven immigrant women, each from a different country, who transformed American cookery but have since faded from memory: Chao Yang Buwei (China), Elena Zelayeta (Mexico), Madeleine Kamman (France), Marcella Hazan (Italy), Julie Sahni (India), Najmieh Batmanglij (Iran), and Norma Shirley (Jamaica). He joins us on Smarty Pants to talk about why these women mattered, and why they have been unjustly forgotten.

Go beyond the episode:

• Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers
• Read excerpts from the book in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones
• Get the full set of links on our website

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The third novel from John Darnielle, the creative force behind the band The Mountain Goats, draws on the surprisingly fertile combination of freeway towns, goth teenagers, Le Morte d’Arthur, and Chaucer. Devil House followstrue-crime writer Gage Chandler, who, at the urging of his editor, moves into the newly renovated “Devil House” of Milpitas, California, once an abandoned porn shop and the site of a grisly, unsolved double murder on Halloween in 1986. News clippings about the crime point to disaffected teenagers who transformed the old shop into a kind of clubhouse, replete with pentagrams, video art, and schlocky monsters, but no arrests were ever made. Gage struggles with the nature of his work and how to tell the story of Devil House fairly: “What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?” Darnielle joins the podcast to talk about Devil House, a novel less about the crime than the search for truth.

Go beyond the episode:

• John Darnielle’s Devil House
• Dip into The Mountain Goats’ discography (our host’s go-tos are usually Tallahassee, All Hail West Texas, and The Sunset Tree)
• Mentioned in the interview: “Unicorn Tolerance” from the album Goths, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (read it all online or try your hand at deciphering the British Library’s 15th-century manuscript)

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.

Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.