Smarty Pants

Despite the rampant success of books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, intellectual circles tend to look down on anything that sells itself as self-help. And yet, in a certain light, the most original form of self-help might actually be philosophy—an older and more respected genre, even, than the novel. So this week, we’re going back to the past and asking that old chestnut: what is a meaningful life? The Stoics are awfully popular these days, but the philosopher Catherine Wilson joins us this episode to pitch a different kind of Greek: Epicurus, whose teachings live on most fully in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. For a few centuries, Epicurus was wrongly remembered as the patron saint of whoremongers and drunkards, but he really wasn’t: his philosophy is rich with theories of justice, empiricism, pleasure, prudence, and equality (Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, welcomed women and slaves into his school). Epicureanism advocated for a simple life, something that appeals to more and more people today with the return to artisan crafts, self-sufficiency, and, yes, the KonMari method.

Go beyond the episode:

• Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean
• Read A. E. Stallings’s recent translation of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things
• Or read Karl Marx’s university thesis on Epicurus, “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”

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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Long before the advent of true crime podcasts, 17th-century murder pamphlets sold like hotcakes in England, and dubious criminal “autobiographies” were sold at executions. On the eve of the 19th century, William Godwin published Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, identified by this week’s guest, Martin Edwards, as the “first thriller about a manhunt”—and a blueprint for how detective novelists would go on to construct the whodunnit. Edwards should know. He’s the eighth president of the Detection Club and the author of dozens of crime novels (and about a thousand articles about other people’s mysteries). Now he has written A Life of Crime, the first major history of the genre in more than 50 years, distilling two centuries of crime fiction from around the world, from the Golden Age of Agatha Christie and company to the realm of contemporary Japan.

Go beyond the episode:

• Martin Edwards’s The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators
• Read an excerpt here
• We dare you not to snap up the entire collection of the British Library’s editions of Crime Classics, edited by Edwards, based on the covers alone
• Three women stars of early crime fiction: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915; her 1862 book Lady Audley’s Secret was a “sensation novel” in every sense), Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935; her reputation as the “mother of the detective novel” began with The Leavenworth Case in 1878), and Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947; Alfred Hitchcock famously adopted her 1913 novel The Lodger to the screen)
• Find a full suite of reading recommendations on our episode page
• Further evidence that our host has a crime show problem

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.

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

Anglo-American attitudes toward burial have changed significantly over the past half century: today, most people choose to be cremated, and alternatives like natural burials and human composting are on the rise. Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, about the importance of getting your affairs in order, was a surprise bestseller, and American mortician Caitlin Doughty is but one of several popular YouTube personalities who speak about death. But largely absent from the conversations at so-called Death Cafes (coffee, crumpets, and the inevitable!) is any discussion of the people who devote their lives to caring for the dead. These death workers are the focus of Hayley Campbell’s new book, All the Living and the Dead. Campbell speaks to people doing jobs we tend not to consider: embalmers and executioners, of course, but also crime scene cleaners, mass fatality investigators, bereavement midwives, and others. What makes these people choose to surround themselves with death tells us a lot about what the rest of us lose when we relegate death to the shadows.

Go beyond the episode:

• Hayley Campbell’s All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work
• Read more about the Order of the Good Death, an organization of funeral professionals working to change attitudes about death
• You can join the conversation at your nearest Death Cafe
• Watch Caitlin Doughty’s series on your death rights (and listen to our interview with her about funerary practices around the world)

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 • 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 pursuit of the natural laws of the universe, human beings have accomplished remarkable things. We’ve outlined the principles of gravity and thermodynamics. We’ve built enormous machines to dig into the deepest parts of the Earth, to understand what happens at the shortest quantum distances, and equally large machines to take pictures of the most distant parts of the cosmos. Still, there remain a number of foundational gaps in our knowledge—gaps that have allowed some wild ideas to take root. Some scientists hypothesize that, with every decision we make, our universe forks into multiverses, that consciousness arises from the quantum movements of microtubules, that the universe itself is conscious, or that there is this cat in a box and not in a box at the same time. These ideas, and related big questions about the nature of the universe, are the subject of particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Existential Physics. In it, she argues that many of these far-out theories, put forward without evidence, are on par with religious belief. Physics, she contends, does not yet provide the answers to all of our questions—and it’s doubtful that it ever will.

Go beyond the episode:

• Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions
• And her previous book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
• More questions (and answers) on Hossenfelder’s blog, Backreaction, and YouTube Channel, Science Without the Gobbledygook (or, you can try your hand at parsing her scholarly papers)
• The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are indeed impressive
• For another physicist’s perspective, listen to our interview with Stephon Alexander about his experience as a self-identified outsider in the field

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 • 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.

Long before Wynton Marsalis arrived in the plush halls of Lincoln Center, jazz was often performed in far more dangerous venues. Greats like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday found their footing on the stages of America’s most notorious vice districts, where big players in the mob, such as Al Capone and Mickey Cohen, called the shots. In his new book, Dangerous Rhythms, journalist T. J. English explores the complexities of this corner of the underworld, where venues like the Cotton Club explicitly upheld the racial dynamics of Jim Crow America while simultaneously providing Black musicians with otherwise unavailable opportunities. But the emerging civil rights movement disrupted this “glorified plantation system,” as English calls it, just as it eventually upended both the music and the mob.

Go beyond the episode:

• T. J. English’s Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld
• Peruse his back catalog of books on organized crime
• Listen to a playlist of songs to accompany the episode, and the book
• You can still have a drink and listen to some tunes at Chicago’s Green Mill, which has a shrine to Al Capone
• Other surviving clubs include the Village Vanguard in New York City and Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit (though beer is no longer 26 cents!)
• Listen to Louis Armstrong playing with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band on “Canal Street Blues,” recorded in Richmond, Indiana, on April 5, 1923—and listen to more early jazz recordings now in the public domain
• The song featured in this episode is “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” recorded by Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars in Chicago on December 9, 1927

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 • 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.

Picture the first “It Girl,” and you’re likely to imagine young, fun Clara Bow, sex symbol of the Roaring ’20s. But behind the frame is the woman who wrote It: Elinor Glyn, an English-gentlewoman-turned-Hollywood-screenwriter whose romantic novels inspired so much of the era’s glamorous aesthetic. Hilary Hallett, a professor of history at Columbia University, brings Glyn back into the spotlight in her new biography, Inventing the It Girl. Glyn’s story, like that of so many of her heroines—and unlike her contemporaries—begins after her marriage in 1892 to a spendthrift noble with a gambling problem. The blockbuster success of her scandalous 1907 sex novel, Three Weeks, catapulted her to literary stardom and, as it so often does, to Hollywood, where she worked on dozens of films and styled silent-era superstars like Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson. Hallett joins the podcast to discuss how Glyn paved the way for a century of sexual, romantic, and psychological independence.

Go beyond the episode:

• Hilary Hallett’s Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood
• Watch It, the “Elinor Glyn–Clarence Badger Production” that made Clara Bow a star in 1927
• Meet more neglected Hollywood women: Dorothy Arzner remains the most prolific woman studio director in the history of cinema; start with Merrily We Go to Hell from 1932
• Jean Smart will play a mostly accurate version of Elinor Glyn in Damien Chazelle’s upcoming film Babylon, about the decadence of the Roaring ’20s
• Visit our episode page for more photographs of Glyn, including her scintillating turn as the Tiger Queen

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 • 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!

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

The Pain Killer, the Penicillin, the Doctor—some cocktail menus lean heavily on the idea of “self-medication.” But for millennia, alcohol was medicine. Weak beer was safer to drink than water, and eau de vie was distilled from any number of fruits to treat colic or a cold. Though the ancient Greeks wrote at length about the medical applications of wine, even earlier uses for fermented beers and beverages appear on Sumerian tablets, Egyptian papyri, and Vedic texts. Cocktail connoisseur Camper English, who has been covering the drinks industry for more than 15 years, turns his attention to this long and storied history in Doctors and Distillers, which traces modern mixology back to its therapeutic roots.

Go beyond the episode:

• Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails
• Read English’s series on four bitter botanicals: cinchona bark, rhubarb root, wormwood, and gentian
• English’s blog Alcademics has a wealth of cocktail-related articles, including how to make your simple syrup last for more than six months and how to dehydrate liqueurs (aka his Solid Liquids Project)
• Ever had a drink with crystal-clear ice in it? Raise a glass to English, who discovered directional freezing in 2009

Camper English’s Preferred Gin & Tonic:

Keep your gin and tonic in the refrigerator for the crispest medicinal cocktail:

1. Start with a lime wheel at the bottom of a double Old-Fashioned glass and press down to express the citrus oil and a little juice
2. Fill the glass with ice, then add 3 ounces of gin
3. Top with 2 ounces of tonic water and gently stir
4. Resist the urge to add more garnishes!

And for the less gin-inclined, the Chrysanthemum:

1. Fill a mixing glass with ice
2. Add 2 ounces dry vermouth, 1 ounce Bénédictine, and 3 dashes of absinthe; stir until well-chilled
3. Strain into a coupe glass and garnish with an orange twist

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!

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

In Great Britain, some 3,000 villages and towns disappeared in the Middle Ages due to the effects of the Black Death alone. Zoom out on the time scale, then factor in storms and floods, economic or social shifts, climate change, and war, and the number of abandoned settlements balloons. The historian and broadcaster Matthew Green selected eight to visit in his new book, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages. From the mysterious Neolithic ruins of Skara Brae and the medieval city that fell off a cliff, Green takes us to the militarized STANTA villages of Norfolk and drowned Capel Celyn in the 20th century. As man-made climate change causes ever more extreme weather events and threatens to engulf our coastal cities, these places become more than a memorial to the past—but a harbinger of the future that awaits us.

• Matthew Green’s Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages
• And if you’re closer to London than we are, take a walking tour with Green featuring medieval wine, ghosts, gin, or coffee
• There may be no more people on St. Kilda, but there sure are sheep: meet the Soay and Boreray breeds of this little land and buy some of their wool
• Perhaps if you’re lucky, you too can spot the ruined spires of Dunwich on a tour of the Suffolk coast
• Capel Ceylin and the STANTA villages are a precursor to our future in more ways than one: though it’s commonly said that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions, the military’s role as an obstacle to meaningful environmental policy is rarely mentioned. The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of oil in the world, and militaries around the world contribute some six percent of global emissions—though countries aren’t required to count armed forces data in their annual totals.
• Visit our episode page for links to medieval primary sources—like the travelogues of the inimitable Gerald of Wales—and a map of all the places mentioned in the episode

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!

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

The Creek chief Cow Tom was born around 1810 along the west coast of Florida. He survived the Trail of Tears, served as an interpreter between the Creeks and the U.S. government, and earned the title of Mikko, or chief, for his leadership of Creek refugees during the Civil War. In 1866, he served as an adviser during the nation’s treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. This treaty, in addition to banning slavery in the five First Nations who were party to it, granted full citizenship in the Creek Nation to Black Creeks who had been accepted into the community after marriage or had been previously enslaved by their Indian owners. Mikko Cow Tom was one of those Black Creeks. When he died in 1874, he bequeathed his considerable assets, including grist mills, cattle, and land, to his family—along with Creek citizenship and a degree of social prominence that was exceedingly rare for a Black family of the time. But in 1979, the Creek Nation expelled its Black members, and to this day refuses to recognize their citizenship. In his new book, We Refuse to Forget, journalist and Northeastern University professor Caleb Gayle tells the complex story of the Creek Nation’s ongoing reckoning with identity.

Go beyond the episode:

• Caleb Gayle’s We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power
• Read Gayle’s 2018 article on Damario Solomon-Simmons’s suit against the Creek Nation to restore Black Creeks’ citizenship
• Solomon-Simmons lost the case, but in 2017 a U.S. judge ruled that Cherokee Freedmen had the right to tribal membership (a decision the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2021)
• You can search the Dawes Rolls, which lists people accepted between 1898 and 1914 as members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw,and Seminole tribes. The Dawes Commission, pictured on our episode page, notably used blood quantum and race to define membership—which would sometimes vary within the same family.

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!

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

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling immediately prohibited abortion in seven states, with 23 more either moving to make it illegal or likely to. At the heart of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in overturning Roe v. Wade is the notion that abortion is not “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” Since Roe was based on the 14th Amendment, Alito contends that we must consider the context in which the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. This week, to provide the context that Alito misrepresented, we are rerunning our interview with Tamara Dean about abortion in the 19th century, when it was common, and largely unprohibited. In the leather-bound death records of the county where Dean lives, only two abortions are mentioned, which she writes about in her essay “Safer than Childbirth.” The more common cause of death, Dean found, was giving birth. At the time, 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 gets forgotten in the contemporary battle over 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
• Listen to our interview with Scott Stern about the decades-long U.S. government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women

Resources for those seeking an abortion, now or in future:

• Before accessing any of these links, read the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide to digital privacy and security
• Find out how to safely terminate a pregnancy at an abortion clinic at abortionfinder.org
• Find an abortion fund that can provide financial support at abortionfunds.org
• Medication to safely end a pregnancy can be mailed to you through plancpills.org
• Get a prescription, in advance, for abortion medication in the mail through aidaccess.org
• For guidance and support in taking this medication at home, call or text the Reprocare Healthline at 833-226-7821, and for confidential legal advice regarding abortion, contact the Repro Legal Helpline

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!

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