Smarty Pants

The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, codenamed “Jane,” performed an estimated 11,000 low-cost abortions in Chicago in the years immediately preceding the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Jane began in 1969 as a counseling service that connected people with doctors willing to terminate their pregnancies. But soon enough, its members started assisting with the procedures, and by the end of 1971, were themselves providing as many as 90 abortions a week in addition to basic gynecological care. None of the Jane volunteers—all of them women—were doctors. They simply believed that women should take reproductive care into their own hands, as they had done for centuries prior to the advent of bans on abortion. In The Story of Jane, activist Laura Kaplan tells the story of the legendary service, of which she herself was a member.

Go beyond the episode:

• Laura Kaplan’s The Story of Jane
• Watch Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’s 2022 documentary about the group, The Janes
• You still might be able to catch the new feature film Call Jane, directed by Phyllis Nagy, in theaters
• In December, the FDA permanently allowed abortion pills to be delivered by mail, which it had previously restricted
• New underground networks are smuggling abortion pills north across the Mexican border into Texas and California, from which they can be mailed anywhere in the United States
• Listen to “Free, Legal, On Demand,” our interview with Tamara Dean on the ubiquity—and safety—of 19th-century abortion
• 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.

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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 1921, white citizens of Tulsa burned down the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, killing hundreds of residents, ruining dozens of businesses, and destroying a community of 10,000. For generations, the history was buried, surfacing only through the determined research of a professor here or a novelist there; it wasn’t until 2001 that the state of Oklahoma commissioned a report revealing the extent of the damage. One hundred years on, the Tulsa massacre is the most infamous of a number of 20th-century efforts by white mobs to destroy Black communities. RJ Young, author of the memoir Let It Bang and a Fox Sports analyst, offers his perspective in Requiem for the Massacre, both as a native Tulsan deeply embedded in its present and as a Black writer conflicted by the tone of the centennial events a year ago.

Go beyond the episode:

• RJ Young’s Requiem for the Massacre: A Black History on the Conflict, Hope, and Fallout of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
• For more history on the violence in Tulsa, read Scott Ellsworth’s The Ground Breaking; Cameron McWhirter’s Red Summer details the unprecedented anti-Black riots and lynchings of 1919
• “How HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ Brought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to Life;” a descendent of the massacre reflects on watching the show 
• Just this week, even more unmarked graves were discovered in Tulsa’s Greenwood Cemetery

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.

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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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Teenagers with knives, invading insects, vampire children, crazed surgeons, wronged actors out for revenge—the horror genre has a haunted house for everyone, no matter your taste. Despite treating women like disposable straws, or lumping the queer and disabled together as monsters, scary movies have long been celebrated by the people most likely to be before the opening credits are done. For this year’s season of scares, editor Joe Vallese asked 24 queer and trans writers to consider the horror movies that matter to them, from Halloween to Hereditary and all points in between. The resulting collection, It Came from the Closet, demonstrates the complicated relationship between the macabre and the marginalized.

Go beyond the episode:

• It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese
• Read these essays from the collection: Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jen Corrigan on Jaws, Zefyr Lisowski on The Ring and Pet Sematary
• If your taste runs to spooky books, too, we have several lists for that

Our host’s top horror picks, for every taste:

• Not that scary if you’re trying to dip your toes into the genre: Les Diaboliques, The Devil Rides Out, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, The Cremator, Cure
• Mild scares that come with a side of laughter: Sugar Hill, An American Werewolf in London, Throne of Blood, Rare Exports, Prevenge
• Spooky silents, most memorably watched with a live score: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Häxan, Nosferatu
• Beloved classics: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Alien + Aliens, The Thing, The People Under the Stairs, Candyman, The Wicker Man
• Modern favorites: The Babadook, Get Out, Raw, His House, The Witch, The House of the Devil, The Descent
• Underrated gems: Possession, The Appointment, Onibaba, The Lure, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Mother Joan of the Angels, It Follows

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.

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 2018, the writer Ling Ma published Severance, which promptly won several literary prizes but only hit the big time in 2020. The novel follows Candace Chen, who continues to go to her unfulfilling job in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that slowly fills the world with slack-jawed zombies. You can guess why it was popular. This fall, Ma is back with a new collection of stories, Bliss Montage, which imagines a number of other surreal scenarios, such as a drug that makes you invisible, a dream job that just might open a literal door into a dream world, and a manual on Yeti lovemaking. One of Ma’s characters lives in an L.A. mansion with her 100 ex-boyfriends; another visits her husband’s homeland, where people bury themselves alive in an annual festival in hopes of curing their physical or psychic ills. Bliss Montage’s eight stories are, above all, about the fictions we tell ourselves to survive the delusions of modern life.

Go beyond the episode:

• Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage
• Read “Peking Duck” in The New Yorker and more about Ma’s time at Playboy
• If you missed the pandemic boat: read Severance (if you’re an audiobook fan, Nancy Wu’s droll audiobook narration is perfect) and check out the Post45 discussion circle about the novel
• Jeanine Basinger’s original formulation of the “bliss montage” in films, from her book A Woman’s View

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 • 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.

Harold McGee’s 1984 book On Food and Cooking—revised extensively in 2004—changed modern cuisine, inspiring the molecular gastronomy of Ferran Adrià as well as the weeknight creations of humble home cooks everywhere. McGee’s latest book, Nose Dive, is a companion encyclopedia to On Food and Cooking, and it focuses on the most overlooked of our senses: smell. When we bring a fresh oyster or a glass of wine to our lips, what makes us detect minerality or grassiness? When did the molecules that we smell first appear? What happens to these volatile molecules when we transform our food, whether through cooking, fermentation, or some other process? Listen to McGee explain this universe of smells—which he dubs “the osmocosm”—and you’ll never breathe in the aroma of fresh-baked cookies the same way again.

Go beyond the episode:

• Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells
• If your copy of On Food and Cooking is also illegible from use—fear not! Copies abound, but be sure to grab the 2004 revision
• McGee blogs at the Curious Cook
• Get a whiff of 19th-century olfactory history in our interview with historian Melanie Kiechle
• Imagine the future of food in our changing climate with novelist Alexandra Kleeman and chef Jen Monroe

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 • 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.

In 2019, Joy Harjo was named the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, becoming the first Indigenous American to receive the honor. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Her unusually varied career has included painting, screenwriting, and playing the alto saxophone, as well as teaching and editing. Harjo is marking the occasion of her semi-centenary as a poet with two books: Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, which collects 50 poems for 50 years, and Catching the Light, a meditation on “the why of writing poetry.” Her work stands at the crossroads, evoking both the deeply personal and the shared experience of generations, and in it we find Creek spirits and missing women, creation myths and truck stops. Through it all, her voice is unmistakable.

Go beyond the episode:

• Joy Harjo’s Catching the Light and Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years
• Peruse her back catalog of books and music
• Listen to our Read Me a Poem podcast

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 • 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.

There are so many things to fear in this world—water, choking, dark forests—and an equal number of things to obsess over—books, grief, things themselves. In The Book of Phobias and Manias, Kate Summerscale collects 99 such fixations, from the fanciful (hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a fear of long words) to the debilitatingly real (acrophobia, a fear of heights). No matter if dressed in Greek clothing (koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons) or bluntly named (social phobia), these obsessions account for many of today’s most common anxiety disorders. But Summerscale’s case studies, spanning 14th-century France to the contemporary psychology lab, reveal that our obsessions’ historical origins—and our fervor for categorizing our differences—tell us an awful lot more about modernity than our evolutionary past.

Go beyond the episode:

• Kate Summerscale’s The Book of Phobias & Manias: A History of Obsession
• Listen to our previous interview with Summerscale about The Haunting of Alma Fielding
• Fear of the future is strikingly dramatized in Dorothy Macardle’s neglected Gothic tale The Unforeseen

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 • 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.

Why does your dad love bluegrass while your sister moshes to hardcore? Why do you still have a soft spot for that cheesy rock ballad you danced to in middle school? The question of why we like the music we like is as eternal as it is maddening. In This Is What It Sounds Like, Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas offer an answer. Today, Rogers is a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor at Berklee College of Music—but before that, she was Prince’s chief engineer for his 1984 album, Purple Rain, and remains one of the most successful female record producers of all time. She has spent decades learning to listen, and This Is What It Sounds Like is a primer for understanding the concept of our innate “listener profile”—the dimensions of a song that our brains respond to. The book is an invitation to tune into musical self-awareness, and a celebration of the music that makes us feel most like ourselves, whoever we are.

Go beyond the episode:

• This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
• Listen along to all the songs in the book, including the ones sampled in this episode
• Join the global record pull
• “Meet the Shaggs” in Susan Orleans’s introduction to one of music’s strangest legends
• Previously in Listening 101 on Smarty Pants: learn how to love opera

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 • 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.

Somewhere among the dark forests of Eastern Europe, Baba Yaga, the crinkled crone of Slavic folklore, lurks inside a timber hut atop a pair of chicken legs. She hops through the woods, doing good or evil or just her own thing, depending on whom you ask. GennaRose Nethercott’s debut novel, Thistlefoot, reimagines the folklore of Baba Yaga in a contemporary American setting. Estranged siblings Bellatine and Isaac Yaga are brought together, somewhat unwillingly, by a surprising and mysterious inheritance: a sentient house on chicken legs, named Thistlefoot, who once belonged to their twice-great-grandmother, and with whom they embark on a cross-country puppet tour. But a shadowy figure from a century ago is stalking them, bringing the horrors of the Yagas’ ancestral shtetl with him. Nethercott is a writer and folklorist whose first book, The Lumberjack’s Dove, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She joins us to talk about the folktales and history that inspired her latest work.

Go beyond the episode:

• GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot
• Catch her on tour, with a live puppet show, this fall
• Read the short story “A Diviner’s Abecedarian”
• “Vassilissa the Beautiful” is one of the tales featuring Ivan Bilibin’s magnificent illustration in this collection of Russian fairy tales
• Hear more Slavic folklore on our episode about the Snow Maiden

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 • 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. The music in this episode is “The Hut on Fowl's Legs,” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, performed by the Oslo Philharmonic with conductor Semyon Bychkov.

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

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. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Christopher King, an obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—who goes on an odyssey to uncover Europe’s oldest surviving folk music, and spins us some rare 78s.

Go beyond the episode:

• Episode page, with R. Crumb’s original illustrations
• Christopher King’s Lament from Epirus
• Buy LPs, CDs, or MP3s of Chris’s Epirotic collections, from Five Days Married and Other Laments to Why the Mountains Are Black
• Read Christopher King’s Paris Review essay, “Talk About Beauties,” about the lost recordings of Alexis Zoumbas
• Listen to A Lament for Epirus (1926–1928) by Alexis Zoumbas on Spotify

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 • 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. Other music in this episode graciously provided by Christopher King.

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