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Sure, you’ve gotten really into sourdough during quarantine—but have you ever thatched your own roof with grasses that you grew in your own back yard? Or spent hours researching the secret behind making the perfect haystack? Alexander Langlands has. The archaeologist and medieval historian has been on BBC shows like Edwardian Farm and Tudor Farm, recreating the life of yore, and his book, Cræft, takes DIY to a whole new level. Part how-to, part memoir, the book gets at not only what it means to make things with your own hands, but how this experience connects us to people and places across time. Also, how everyone should set fire to their leaf blowers.

Go beyond the episode:

• Alexander Langlands’s Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
• Old meets new in this Pinterest board of traditional tools to complement the book
• Watch Alexander Langlands re-create early 20th-century life on the BBC’s Edwardian Farm, preceded by Victorian Farm
• Or there’s Wartime Farm, which returns an English estate to its condition during the Second World War
• Can’t get enough of the BBC? There’s also  Tudor Monastery Farm, featuring one of our past guests, Ronald Hutton

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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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!

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Our guest this week is New York Times best-selling novelist Matthew Quirk, who went from being a reporter at The Atlantic to writing thrillers about government fixers and special agents. His latest book is Hour of the Assassin, about an ex-Secret Service agent who tests the security protecting public officials for weaknesses that might allow killers to break through. That is, until his latest assignment ends in … a setup! Quirk’s previous books have dealt with every manner of agent, from the FBI and special ops to con men and consultants. He joins us to talk about his approach to writing thrillers, how he avoids getting scooped by the news, and what fiction of all kinds has to offer us in dark times.

Go beyond the episode:

• Matthew Quirk’s Hour of the Assassin
• Read Quirk’s essay for Vox on how the Trump era keeps spoiling his books
• We love John le Carré too: read senior editor Bruce Falconer’s review of the master’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel
• For an escape of a different kind, check out our editors’ favorite British detective shows

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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!

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

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today, almost 90 percent of the world’s population is hooked on coffee or its most addictive component, caffeine. But 500 years ago, hardly anyone drank it, and the story of how coffee came to grace so many breakfast tables, office kitchens, and factory breakrooms speaks volumes about the very unequal world we live in. Our guest this week is Augustine Sedgewick, whose new book, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, uses the global history of the Hill family, a coffee dynasty in El Salvador, to unravel how societies, rural and urban alike, were recast in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately, that restructuring led to many of the inequalities we still see today between the global North that drinks coffee and the global South that farms it.

Go beyond the episode:

• Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
• Read his recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, “How Coffee Became a Modern Necessity”
• Check out the recent documentary Black Gold, about the trading practices of multinational coffee companies

Commonplace Book, Celebrity Coffee Fan Edition:

• “Without my morning coffee, I’m just like a dried-up piece of goat”—J. S. Bach
• “I never laugh until I’ve had my coffee”—Clark Gable
• “I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless.”—Napoleon Bonaparte
• “Coffee: the favorite drink of the civilized world”—Thomas Jefferson
• “As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move ... similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”—Honoré de Balzac
• “Among the numerous luxuries of the table ... coffee may be considered as one of the most valuable. It excites cheerfulness without intoxication; and the pleasing flow of spirits which it occasions ... is never followed by sadness, languor or debility.”—Benjamin Franklin
• “Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.”—Isak Dinesen
• “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”—Albert Camus

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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!

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

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Sometimes, historical truth is so strange that it demands to be turned into fiction. Such is the story of William Sydney Porter, better known as the American short-story writer O. Henry. Before he made it big with tales about Magi gifts and the Cisco Kid, he embezzled some money in Texas and fled for Honduras, which at the turn of the 20th century had no extradition treaty with the United States. There, Porter observed the machinations of American robber barons that inspired him to coin the term "banana republic"—which also happens to be the title of a new novel by Eric Sean Rawson, a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California and our guest this week. Inspired by the true life and crimes of O. Henry, Rawson's novel vividly depicts the banana republics of the 20th century, and the troubled U.S. interventions therein, through the ironical, often drunken eyes of a fictionalized William Sydney Porter.

Go beyond the episode:

• Eric Sean Rawson's Banana Republic
• For more on real-life banana republics and the men who made them, Rawson recommends The Incredible Yanqui by Hermann Deutsch and The Fish that Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen
• Explore the classic stories of O. Henry here

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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!

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

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You may not know her name, but Odetta was one of the most influential singers of the 20th century: called “the voice of the civil rights movement” by The New York Times and anointed “queen of American folk music” by Martin Luther King Jr., himself. Our guest this week is music journalist Ian Zack, author of the first in-depth biography of Odetta, whose incredible voice rang out at some of the most pivotal moments in the struggle for African-American equality, including 1960s marches in Washington and Selma.

Go beyond the episode:

• Ian Zack’s Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
• Zack recommends that new listeners begin with of Odetta’s first two albums: Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues and Odetta at the Gate of Horn (or her lone rock album, Odetta Sings)
• Or to get a feel for the effect she had on audiences, listen to a live album like Odetta at Town Hall—or watch her 1964 concert on YouTube

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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!

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