Smarty Pants

When thinking of the past, one of the hardest things is to imagine what it would have been like to inhabit a physical body in a world so different in look, smell, and feel from our own. What was it like to go to the doctor 800 years ago? If you cut your finger and bled, what would that blood mean to you? What about the blood of saints—would that be different? What about exercising, eating, giving birth, having sex, burying the dead? The way we think about these experiences fundamentally changes how we experience them. So how has our thinking changed since the Middle Ages? Jack Hartnell’s new book, Medieval Bodies, explores the answers to these questions through a series of vivid objects, stories, texts, and paintings, starting with the head and meandering through skin and heart and stomach all the way to the feet. Along the way, he constructs a living, breathing body of evidence that helps us understand our physical past.

Quick note: In our sign off, we promised a Thanksgiving episode—but a holiday cold has made liars of us, and we cannot put one out! We'll be back with a brand new interview on Friday, December 6th. Til then, take care, and stay warm!

Go beyond the episode:

• Jack Hartnell’s Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages (read an excerpt here)
• View a slideshow of related bodily medieval images on the episode page
• For more on medieval women’s medicine, check out Monica Green’s Making Women’s Medicine Masculine or her paper, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare”
• For another unusual angle of medieval history, check out our interview with Marion Turner, who wrote an innovative biography of Geoffrey Chaucer

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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If you’re a person who has despaired over ever finding a nice 100 percent wool sweater and decided to knit your own, odds are you’ve heard of Clara Parkes. Parkes, who started out in 2000 with a newsletter reviewing yarn, now has six books under her belt, including the New York Times best-selling Knitlandia. Her seventh book, Vanishing Fleece, is a yarn of a different kind—the unlikely story of how she became the proud proprietor of a 676-pound bale of wool and, in the process of transforming it into commercial yarn, got an inside look at a disappearing American industry. Parkes journeys across the country from New York to Wisconsin and Maine to Texas. Along the way, she meets shepherds, shearers, dyers, and the countless mill workers who tend the machinery that’s kept us in woolens for more than a century, but which for the past 50 years has been on the verge of collapse.

Go beyond the episode:

• Clara Parkes’s Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool
• Peruse her reviews of yarn and other woolly wares on the Knitter’s Review website
• Watch yarn company Brooklyn Tweed’s gorgeous video series on how woolen-spun and worsted-spun yarn is made—and how greasy fleece is scoured into clean, fluffy combed wool
• Some of the woolly companies mentioned in this episode: Allbirds wool shoes, Farm to Feet wool socks, Catskill Merino yarn (the source of her 676-pound bale), Lani Estill’s carbon-neutral Bare Ranch, ElsaWool breed-specific yarns

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.

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

To get into the Halloween spirit, we’ve invited Assistant Editor Katie Daniels and Editorial Assistant Taylor Curry, the hosts of [Spoiler Alert], our online book club, to interview the literary critic Ruth Franklin. Their October book is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the suspenseful tale of the two Blackwood sisters and the mysterious murder that took place at their house. For a long time, Jackson’s hard-to-categorize novels and humorous parenting memoirs took the backseat to her (in)famous short story, “The Lottery.” That’s starting to change, thanks to film and television adaptations—and Ruth Franklin’s critically acclaimed biography, Shirley Jackson, which argued that her writing is an important contribution to the American gothic tradition.

Go beyond the episode:

• Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for biography (and read our glowing review)
• Join [Spoiler Alert], our monthly online book club and tune in today at 5 PM EST for a live discussion
• Watch the spooky trailer for the 2019 adaptation of Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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.

This week, WeWork got a huge bailout from an investor after its plan to go public went belly-up amid disclosures of rampant mismanagement. Now the company can’t even afford to lay off the thousands of employees it would like to because it can’t afford to pay their severance packages. The parallels to Uber, which did go public this fall, are striking: just like WeWork, Uber was a unicorn startup—lavishly funded and poised to take its place in the tech pantheon. And like WeWork’s Adam Neumann, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted by investors and made millions on the way out the door. When that happened in 2017, Uber went through a public reckoning, but the full details of the company’s misdeeds were only revealed this fall. Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac has reported on Uber from its beginnings, and his new book, Super Pumped, tells the whole story of how Uber came to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with Silicon Valley. Isaac joins us in the studio to take us inside Uber, while it was rising and as it was falling.

Go beyond the episode:

• Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
• Listen to “Get Rich or Die Trying,” our podcast interview with reporter Corey Pein on his experiences in Silicon Valley
• For more on Adam Neumann’s downfall, read Matt Stoller’s take on “WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism” in his newsletter

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.

Two decades ago, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell turned their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex, England, into a massive outdoor laboratory. They decided to cede control of their land to nature and watched it slowly grow wild again. Now, at what they call Knepp Wildland, herds of fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, and longhorn cows do battle with scrubland and tree branches, while Tamworth pigs rustle in the hedgerows and strengthen mycorrhizal networks in the soil. The result of this experiment is burgeoning biodiversity and resilience, as endangered species like turtledoves, nightingales, and rare butterflies inhabit a landscape unseen in England since the Middle Ages. Isabella Tree joins us to talk about what life is like in a wild world, and how Knepp has ignited a reckoning with traditional methods of land stewardship and conservation. We are re-running this episode to celebrate the U.S. release of Wilding, her book about the project.

Go beyond the episode:

• Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm
• View photos and video from Knepp Wildland on our episode page
• Read more about Knepp (and plan a visit!) on their website
• Watch a short video about Knepp’s beaver-like efforts to return the River Adur to a rewilded state
• Check out the whole range of “Kneppflix” wildlife videos
• Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Frans Vera’s work at the Oostvaardersplassen
• Learn more about rewilding efforts across Europe, from Portugal to Poland

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.

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.

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.

Love it, hate it, or refuse to listen to anything released after 1980—however you feel about country music, you can’t drive across the United States without hearing it. Even people who don’t appreciate the genre have been thinking about it lately, as the controversy over Lil Nas X’s exclusion from the Billboard country music charts has inspired discussion of country music, racism, and who gets to use trap beats on their tracks. It looked to a lot of people as if a genre that had traditionally celebrated outlaws and outsiders were locking its gates against a new kind of outsider. But as this week’s guest, the historian Peter La Chapelle, points out, none of this is new. Country music has been deployed to political ends since its birth in Appalachia. Nowhere is this more striking than on the campaign trail, where scores of politicians have used country music to appeal to voters. On the show, La Chapelle explains how fiddler-politicians and politician-fans have used this oddly flexible genre to advocate for the poor and dispossessed, fight for racial justice, fight against racial justice, lobby for gun rights, and articulate a whole range of sometimes contradictory positions.

Go beyond the episode:

• Peter La Chapelle’s I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music
• For an exhaustive introduction to the stars of old school country—from Ernest Tubb to Loretta Lynn—check out our host’s favorite music show, the Cocaine & Rhinestones podcast, or follow the crowds to Ken Burns’s Country Music
• Read “Canon Fodder,” Shuja Haider’s impassioned critique of country music’s constant exclusion from “Best Of” album lists—and “The Invention of Twang,” his take on Lil Nas X (you can read Billboard’s defense of their decision to exclude Lil Nas X from the country charts here)
• For more on country music’s relationship with race (and racism), check out Charles L. Hughes’s book Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South
• And read “The Roots of Country Music,” Dahleen Glanton’s essay on the country music establishment’s attempts in the 1990s to honor black country musicians
• Listen to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an old-time string band highlighting black country songs fronted by Rhiannon Giddens; Dom Flemons used to be a member

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. This episode features a song by the Downtown Mountain Boys recorded at KBOO and available at the Free Music Archives.

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The United States has an uneven record when it comes to refugees. It infamously refused to accept a boatload of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust; at other times, it took in huge numbers of refugees from all over the world. As recently as 1980, we admitted more than 200,000 people. But that number has plummeted to its lowest level in 40 years: in 2018, only 22,491 people were permitted to resettle here, less than half the number admitted the year before. Why do we treat refugees differently today? Why do we distinguish between refugees and immigrants? These are some of the questions at the heart of Dina Nayeri's new book, The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina and her family fled Iran as refugees in 1989, first landing in Italy, and later in Oklahoma, before continuing her nomadic journey across the world. On the podcast, Dina shares her own story and those of others to reveal “what immigrants never tell you”: that being a refugee is painfully disorienting and excruciatingly boring—and it mostly involves waiting around for the chance to tell a government official the right story in the right way.

Go beyond the episode:

• Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee
• Read a long excerpt in The Guardian
• UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has figures on current numbers of internally displaced people, refugees, and asylum-seekers (and explains the difference between these categories)

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.

More than a century ago, Antonín Dvořák prophesied that American music would be rooted in the black vernacular. It’s come true, to a certain extent: when we think of American music—jazz, blues, rock, hip hop, rap—we are thinking of music invented by black musicians. The field of classical music, however, has remained stubbornly white. At one point in the last century, classical music was on the cusp of a revolution: the Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was writing works like his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, Dvořák’s own assistant Harry Burleigh was reimagining black spirituals for the concert stage that would be performed by the likes of Marian Anderson. And the lineage continued with William Grant Still, Nathaniel Dett, Florence Price, and Margaret Bond. The arrival in 1934 of William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony seemed to usher in the imminent fulfillment of Dvořák’s prophecy—and yet Dawson never wrote another symphony. Why not? Joseph Horowitz, a cultural historian and the executive director of the PostClassical Ensemble, joins the podcast to explore why. Scholar managing editor Sudip Bose guest-hosts.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Joseph Horowitz’s essay, “New World Prophecy,” from our Autumn 2019 issue
• And read more about Antonín Dvořák’s time in Spillville, Iowa, in Tom Zoellner’s essay, “No Harmony in the Heartland,” about how the national struggle over immigration has hit an American town built by immigrant Czechs
• Listen to Leopold Stokowski conduct the American Symphony Orchestra’s 1963 performance of William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony
• Listen to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, played by David Shaffer-Gottschalk
• Listen to Marian Anderson perform Harry Burleigh’s composition of the spiritual “Deep River”
• Listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau perform Charles Ives’s extraordinary setting of “Feldeinsamkeit”
• Read about the rediscovery of the composer Florence Price

And keep an eye out for Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony at the following events:

• Georgetown University’s PostClassical Ensemble will perform the second movement on April 25, 2020
• The Brevard Music Festival may perform the complete symphony next summer

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.

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