Smarty Pants

By The American ScholarSociety & Culture

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Smarty Pants episodes

June 26, 2020#135: Whale Song
It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest and oldest creatures of the planet is also the most mysterious. But whales have been around for 50 million years, and in all that time, we still haven’t figured out how many species of whales have existed—let alone how many exist today. How did these creatures of the deep get to be so big, and how did they make it back into the sea after walking on land? Most importantly, what will happen to them as humanity and its detritus increasingly encroach on their existence? The Smithsonian’s star paleontologist, Nick Pyenson, joins us this episode (originally aired in 2018) to answer some of our questions about the largest mysteries on Earth, and how they fit into the story of the world’s largest ecosystem: the ocean.

Go beyond the episode:
Nick Pyenson’s Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures
Take a 3D tour of the Cerro Ballena site, where dozens of intact whale fossils were found by the side of the road in Chile
Check out Phoenix’s website at the Smithsonian, where you can learn all about this right whale (to search for sightings of her, follow this link to the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog and enter “Whale Name: Phoenix” on the “Search for Individual Whales” page)
Explore the hidden lives of minke whales, who live in rapidly warming Antarctic waters
Tag along on marine biologist Ari Friedlaender’s trips to tag whales in the ocean(“extreme field science in action!”)
Listen to an incredible story about one woman and a baby whale on the “This Is Love” podcast
There are some amazing, tear-jerking whale videos on YouTube that we stumbled upon in our research for this episode. To get you started, here’s the story of how a whale saved biologist Nan Hauser’s life
The inimitable David Attenborough mingles his voice with the dulcet tones of humpback whale song in this clip from the BBC’s Animal Attraction
And listen to our interview with Marcus Eriksen, who sailed the Pacific on a “junk raft” to raise awareness about aquatic plastic pollution—one of the leading causes of death in marine creatures
We used whale songs in this episode that were recorded by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Check out their archive the “Sea of Sound” 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.
25 min
June 19, 2020#134: Founding Falsehoods
Farah Peterson is a law professor and legal historian at the University of Virginia School of Law. In her first essay for the Scholar, published in our Winter 2019 issue, she examined John Adams’s defense of eight British soldiers, charged with killing Crispus Attucks, an unarmed black man, on March 5, 1770. Despite how they have long been characterized, Adams’s arguments, she wrote, were hardly the ultimate expression of principle and rule of law. In our new issue, Peterson turns to yet another dangerous myth of the Revolutionary era: namely, that black Americans in bondage did not want to be free. Given the ongoing protests against police brutality, here and around the world, Peterson’s work feels all the more vital as we enter into a newly invigorated national conversation about race and how to rectify historical injustices.

Go beyond the episode:
Farah Peterson’s “The Patriot Slave”
And “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre”
Listen to our interview with Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in which she corrects the record on white women slave ownership

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.
19 min
June 19, 2020 #134: Founding Falsehoods
Farah Peterson is a law professor and legal historian at the University of Virginia School of Law. In her first essay for the Scholar, published in our Winter 2019 issue, she examined John Adams’s defense of eight British soldiers, charged with killing Crispus Attucks, an unarmed black man, on March 5, 1770. Despite how they have long been characterized, Adams’s arguments, she wrote, were hardly the ultimate expression of principle and rule of law. In our new issue, Peterson turns to yet another dangerous myth of the Revolutionary era: namely, that black Americans in bondage did not want to be free. Given the ongoing protests against police brutality, here and around the world, Peterson’s work feels all the more vital as we enter into a newly invigorated national conversation about race and how to rectify historical injustices.
Go beyond the episode:
- Farah Peterson’s “The Patriot Slave”
- And “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre”
- Listen to our interview with Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in which she corrects the record on white women slave ownership
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.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
19 min
June 12, 2020#133: The Antebellum Feminine Mystique
This week on our website, we unlocked an essay that appears in our new Summer issue: “The Patriot Slave,” written by University of Virginia law professor Farah Peterson. In it, she explores the ways in which we’re still haunted by the dangerous myth that African Americans chose not to be free in revolutionary America. Peterson will be joining us for an interview next week to talk about her essay and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. In preparation, let’s revisit this episode from last year, in which the historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers revises another dangerous myth—namely that wealthy white women in the South were separated from the ugly reality of slavery both by their own disenfranchisement and their intrinsic sweet nature. Since women often inherited more slaves than land, they were deeply invested, in a social, moral, and economic sense, in the trade of enslaved people. A white woman could cordon off her property from her husband’s in a prenuptial agreement, preserve her right to manage her own property, and fend off her husband’s debtors in court. She also ensured the continued reproduction of the institution by engaging in the market for wet nurses who were often coerced into serendipitous pregnancies through sexual violence, and whose breast milk was then used to nurse white children. How does the power of women slave owners change our understanding of the relationship among gender, slavery, and capitalism in the 19th century? Why were these relationships obscured for so long?

Go beyond the episode:
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
Read Farah Peterson’s essay, “The Patriot Slave” about the dangerous myth that blacks in bondage chose not to be free in revolutionary America
Read the interviews with formerly enslaved people collected by the WPA, in the Library of Congress’s thorough online archive
And explore the complicated relationship that historians have had with these testimonies

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.
25 min
June 12, 2020 #133: The Antebellum Feminine Mystique
This week on our website, we unlocked an essay that appears in our new Summer issue: “The Patriot Slave,” written by University of Virginia law professor Farah Peterson. In it, she explores the ways in which we’re still haunted by the dangerous myth that African Americans chose not to be free in revolutionary America. Peterson will be joining us for an interview next week to talk about her essay and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. In preparation, let’s revisit this episode from last year, in which the historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers revises another dangerous myth—namely that wealthy white women in the South were separated from the ugly reality of slavery both by their own disenfranchisement and their intrinsic sweet nature. Since women often inherited more slaves than land, they were deeply invested, in a social, moral, and economic sense, in the trade of enslaved people. A white woman could cordon off her property from her husband’s in a prenuptial agreement, preserve her right to manage her own property, and fend off her husband’s debtors in court. She also ensured the continued reproduction of the institution by engaging in the market for wet nurses who were often coerced into serendipitous pregnancies through sexual violence, and whose breast milk was then used to nurse white children. How does the power of women slave owners change our understanding of the relationship among gender, slavery, and capitalism in the 19th century? Why were these relationships obscured for so long?
Go beyond the episode:
- Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
- Read Farah Peterson’s essay, “The Patriot Slave” about the dangerous myth that blacks in bondage chose not to be free in revolutionary America
- Read the interviews with formerly enslaved people collected by the WPA, in the Library of Congress’s thorough online archive
- And explore the complicated relationship that historians have had with these testimonies
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.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
25 min
June 05, 2020 #132: Still Junk Science
With protests now in every state over the murder of George Floyd and ongoing police brutality, we're revisiting an episode from last year with the science journalist Angela Saini, whose work explains how scientific inquiry has been complicit in, or explicitly aligned with, racism and white supremacy. Despite the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2020, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
25 min
June 05, 2020 #132: Still Junk Science
With protests now in every state over the murder of George Floyd and ongoing police brutality, we're revisiting an episode from last year with the science journalist Angela Saini, whose work explains how scientific inquiry has been complicit in, or explicitly aligned with, racism and white supremacy. Despite the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2020, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
25 min
May 29, 2020#131: Reading Together, Alone
When we look back to what we imagine to have been the golden age of reading—say, before the invention of the smart phone—could it be that we’re really misreading book history? That’s what literary critic and Rutgers professor Leah Price argues in What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, using material history and social history to explore both how people read in the past and how most of us read today. Gutenberg printed more papal indulgences than Bibles, and until the past century or so, most reading was done aloud—in fact, too much reading was discouraged because of the deleterious effect it supposedly had on one’s character! Price joins us this week to discuss how, just maybe, social media and books aren’t enemies after all, but merely different forms of the same literary tradition.

Go beyond the episode:
Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
How does your Zoom background stack up against those on Bookshelf Credibility?
For those of us who always check out a new friend’s bookshelf first, look no further: https://bookshelfporn.com/
The Book of Kells is sadly offline right now, but you can learn about the hundreds of hours that went into digitizing it
You could page through the British Library’s digital copies of Gutenberg’s Bible … or gasp at the papal indulgences he printed to pay for it
The Library of Congress has an entire digital reading room for rare books and special collections, including some wild medieval medical books
Need dinner ideas? Check out Martha Brotherton’s 1833 recommendations from Vegetable cookery, with an introduction, recommending abstinence from animal food and intoxicating liquors

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.
26 min
May 29, 2020 #131: Reading Together, Alone
When we look back to what we imagine to have been the golden age of reading—say, before the invention of the smart phone—could it be that we’re really misreading book history? That’s what literary critic and Rutgers professor Leah Price argues in What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, using material history and social history to explore both how people read in the past and how most of us read today. Gutenberg printed more papal indulgences than Bibles, and until the past century or so, most reading was done aloud—in fact, too much reading was discouraged because of the deleterious effect it supposedly had on one’s character! Price joins us this week to discuss how, just maybe, social media and books aren’t enemies after all, but merely different forms of the same literary tradition.
Go beyond the episode:
- Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
- How does your Zoom background stack up against those on Bookshelf Credibility?
- For those of us who always check out a new friend’s bookshelf first, look no further: https://bookshelfporn.com/
- The Book of Kells is sadly offline right now, but you can learn about the hundreds of hours that went into digitizing it
- You could page through the British Library’s digital copies of Gutenberg’s Bible … or gasp at the papal indulgences he printed to pay for it
- The Library of Congress has an entire digital reading room for rare books and special collections, including some wild medieval medical books
- Need dinner ideas? Check out Martha Brotherton’s 1833 recommendations from Vegetable cookery, with an introduction, recommending abstinence from animal food and intoxicating liquors
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!

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
26 min
May 22, 2020#130: Cræft in the Time of Corona
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.

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.
20 min

About Smarty Pants

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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…