Smarty Pants

By The American Scholar

Tune in every other 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... more

· Society & Culture

4.4

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How many episodes does Smarty Pants have?

The podcast currently has 361 episodes available.

Best of Smarty Pants

The most played episodes among Podcast App listeners.

Number 1: Blades of Grass
Summon an image of an American home: Odds are there’s a green grass lawn in front of it. Was this what Walt Whitman sang of in Leaves of Grass? Or was it the native grassland of the prairies, now disappearing under the onslaught of Poa pratensis, Kentucky bluegrass? In Christopher Kondrich’s new collection of poems, Tread Upon, a blade of grass is the beginning of a book-length sequence about the devaluation of the living world, from BP’s invention of the concept of the carbon footprint to the tiny bodies of bats exploding near wind turbines, from the coal ash belched into the Cape Fear River to voiceless Western pond turtles searching for water in a drought. “We belittle the grass when we think it grows / everywhere. It doesn’t. It grows here and here and here,” Kondrich writes. “Even one blade is a place.” Christopher Kondrich is the author of the previous collections Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland. Go beyond the episode:Christopher Kondrich’s Tread UponWatch Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) Read selections from the collection: “There are empty spaces we make …”“Floodwaters carry coal ash into the Cape Fear River …”“I side with myself. I touch my face …”“We belittle the grass when we think it grows …”“The fantasy of chaining myself to a redwood …” Tune in every other 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/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora 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.
August 21, 202623min
Number 2: The Translator Stuck
Amanda L. Andrei’s parents—he Romanian, she Filipina—met in Bucharest as two free spirits in the 1970s and then moved to the United States. Growing up in Virginia, Andrei didn’t speak Romanian, but came to the language—and translation—in adulthood. “When I am translating a Romanian text with my dad, I feel as if I am in rehearsal,” she writes. “My father becomes my scene partner, volleying the words back and forth until we find the ones that satisfy us.” When she views a French performance of a Romanian play that they translated, she reconsiders the relationships that led to that moment: her father’s with her mother, his homeland, and his languages; hers with translation, theater, and familial diaspora. “Speaking a language, falling in love, leaving a home, applying for citizenship, all could go down thousands of paths,” she writes in our Summer issue, “but somehow, only one version of a life exists.” Andrei joins us this week on Smarty Pants to discuss her essay, “Found in Translation,” and her ever-evolving relationship with language—and her father. Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic based in Los Angeles. Go beyond the episode:Amanda L. Andrei’s “Found in Translation”Explore her plays, both original and in translationPhotographs from a stage reading of Oana Hodade’s play Scene din viața familei StuckThe American Literary Translators Association offers resources and events for literary translators of all genres Tune in every other 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/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora 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.
August 07, 202627min
Number 3: Riot Girls
In her 25 years as a music journalist, Jessica Hopper has profiled the doyennes of modern rock and pop music: Björk, Kacey Musgraves, St. Vincent, Liz Phair, Robyn, and many more. Her reviews run the gamut from the latest Nicki Minaj album and the “mobile shopping mall that is the Vans Warped Tour” to the only album by D.C.’s first all-women punk band, released three decades after they broke up. The new second edition of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic expands on the 2015 one. That the provocative (and mostly accurate) title still works six years later points out that rock criticism has even fewer women in it than rock music does. Hopper joins us on the podcast to discuss her writing, from her beginnings as a local Chicago critic to her expansive oral histories of Hole and the women who transformed Rolling Stone in the 1970s. This episode originally aired in 2021. Go beyond the episode:Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock CriticRead “Building a Mystery,” her oral history of Lilith Fair, and her reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, 50 years onListen to her eclectic playlist of music that came out of ChicagoHopper hosted Season 2 of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast, looking at artistic legacies of the likes of The Freeze and Cat Power Tune in every other 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/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora 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.
July 24, 202624min
Number 4: Call It Macaroni
Susan Stryker’s new book, Changing Gender, is as chameleonic as the scholar herself, combining as it does trans history, cultural theory, memoir, linguistics, gossip, anthropology, art criticism, and even an unforgettable analysis of the children’s song “Yankee Doodle.” The word gender originated in the domain of grammar, before becoming interlinked with sex in the 20th century, as the story goes. But Stryker’s romp through the historical record shows that as far back as the 17th century, English-speakers were playing with the concept. Far from being a simple linguistic category, gender sneaks in all sorts of assumptions that we make in the background of our everyday lives—and that, Stryker contends, is what makes it so threatening to the pundits and politicians who want to uphold the status quo and criminalize trans people. “Trans issues impinge directly upon the topics of how we collectively decide in the first place what’s materially possible, and therefore potentially real and empirically true,” she writes. “Untangling the mess of where gender came from has the potential to shift the ground of the culture wars if it allows us to understand the issues at stake differently.” Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies, beginning with her 1994 academic article / performance art piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” She’s written histories of trans people in America, edited volumes on transgender studies, and directed a film about a Compton cafeteria riot that predated the Stonewall rebellion by three years. Stryker retired from the University of Arizona as Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies in 2020, and currently holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University. Go beyond the episode:Susan Stryker’s Changing GenderWatch her documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria and her short film Christine in the Cutting RoomRead her 1994 article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix”Read James Anderson of Hermiston’s 1792 argument in favor of a gender-neutral pronounOr the 1857 short story “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” Tune in every other 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/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora 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.
September 04, 202632min
Number 5: To the Manor Born
The English country house has been on the brink of ruination since at least the start of World War I—or perhaps the first chug of the Industrial Revolution—or was it the end of serfdom …? Propping up this dying, decadent institution has been a favored pastime of preservationists, architecture buffs, and earls for about as long as the institution has been around. In his new book, Noble Ambitions, historian Adrian Tinniswood peels back the wallpaper to show how these ancestral piles survived both World War II and the sunset of the British Empire—and in some ways, are more relevant than they ever were. This episode originally aired in 2021. Go beyond the episode: Adrian Tinniswood’s Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War IIFor the completionist, his previous book: The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939Revisit the famed 1974 Victoria & Albert exhibition “The Destruction of the Country House,” or go visit Agecroft Hall and Gardens in Richmond, Virginia, one of several country homes dismantled and reassembled on this side of the Atlantic. In England? Check out Sudbury Hall, which gets a shout out in the episodeThe first bestselling nonfiction book about the country house? Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country HouseRead Sam Knight’s essay about the National Trust’s recent report on colonialism and slavery: “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History”If you haven’t yet, you simply must watch Downtown Abbey Tune in every other 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/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora 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.
July 10, 202625min