Smarty Pants

Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird … and at the end of the day, who really understands sung Italian anyway? The barriers aren’t just financial: there are hundreds of years of musical history at work, along with dozens of arcane terms that defy pronunciation. But opera has been loved by ardent fans for centuries, and the experience of seeing it—once you know what to listen for—can be sublime. So we asked Vivien Schweitzer, a former classical music and opera critic for The New York Times, to teach us how to listen to opera.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Vivien Schweitzer’s A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera
• Listen to the accompanying Spotify playlist
• Ready? Find an opera performance near you by searching the National Opera Center of America’s database of upcoming offerings
• Listen to the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts or catch it live in a movie theater near you
• At The Guardian, Imogen Tilde explains “How to find cheap opera tickets”

Songs sampled during the episode:

• “Possente spirito,” the first famous aria in opera, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo
• “Pur te miro,” the first important duet in opera, from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
• “Svegliatevi nel core,” an example of da capo aria and a rage aria, from Handel’s Giulio Cesare
• The Queen of the Night’s first-act aria, an example of very high soprano notes, from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte
• “O Isis und Osiris,” an example of very low bass notes from the same opera
• “Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!” an example of very high tenor notes, from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment
• “Casta diva,” an example of bel canto style of singing, from Bellini’s Norma
• “Bella figlia dell’amore,” an example of ensemble singing from Verdi’s Rigoletto
• The infamous Tristan chord from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (and here is the resolution of the chord, hours later)

For a taste of contemporary opera's eclecticism, here are three examples:

• Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern by Helmut Lachenmann, an example of an opera with no actual singing
• Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an example of minimalism
• Saint Francois D’Assise by Olivier Messiaen, a composer who imitated birdcalls in his music

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.

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You've probably seen the photographs that Lynsey Addario has taken, even if you don't necessarily know her name. For more than 20 years, she’s covered life in conflict zones around the world, from Afghanistan under the Taliban and the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, to the genocide in Darfur and maternal death in the Philippines—too much suffering, in too many places, to name, or even imagine. But in her images, Addario captures the small joys, too, of the ordinary experiences lived between the cracks of war: children playing, young couples getting married, births, deaths, cooking, going to the movies, even sleeping. In the contrast between these ordinary moments and their extraordinary, often brutal circumstances, Addario manages the impossible, and holds together all the fragments of human life she's witnessed in her two decades of conflict photography.

Visit our episode page for a slideshow of Lynsey Addario’s work.

Go beyond the episode:

• Lynsey Addario’s Of Love and War
• The New York Times cover story about the U.S.-sponsored war in Yemen, with Addario’s photographs (and a note from the writer, Robert F. Worth, about the local networks that kept them safe)
• Read Addario’s memoir, It’s What I Do, and peruse online galleries of her work

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.

When disaffected teens in East Berlin first heard the Sex Pistols on British military radio in 1977, they couldn’t have known that those radio waves would spark a revolution. In the DDR, or East Germany, everyday life was obsessively planned and oppressively boring. To be punk was to be an individual, someone who wasn’t having any of the state’s rules. That didn’t exactly endear punks to the Stasi, the DDR’s dreaded secret police. Punks lost their jobs and families, were spied on for years by their own friends, had their homes searched and trashed by the police, and were even thrown in prison for dissidence. But every time the state cracked down, the punks only fanned the flames of resistance, ultimately firing up a nationwide, mainstream protest movement. American writer, translator, and former Berlin DJ Tim Mohr joins us on the podcast to tell the story of how punk rock brought down the Wall—on this day 29 years ago.

Go beyond the episode:

• Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus
• For photographs of East German punks, peruse the online gallery for the exhibition Ostpunk! Too Much Future
• We’ve compiled a playlist of DDR punk songs—many of them demos or live recordings from the ’80s—which include hits from Namenlos, Schleim Keim, Planlos, and Müllstation, of varying sound quality
• For something a little less scratchy, check out this 2007 remaster and rerelease of Feeling B’s songs from the Ostpunk era, Grün und Blau
• If you understand German, check out the documentary Too Much Future: Punk in der DDR. Another good one, sadly only available on DVD from Germany, is Flüstern und Schreien, which was released in 1989.

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!

Music featured from Namenlos (“Alptraum”) and Schleim Keim (“Kriege machen menschen”). Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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You may have heard of them before: those pale creatures with suspiciously sharp canines that sleep in coffins during the day, hunt people at night, and occasionally transform into bats. Stories of bloodsucking monsters have haunted humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years—but the modern vampire was arguably born when Enlightenment rationality met Eastern European folklore. That’s Nick Groom’s argument: he’s known as the Prof of Goth, and he makes the case that vampires rose from the grave at the same time that philosophy, theology, forensic medicine, and literature were beginning to question what it meant to be human. Why have vampires lingered in the imagination for hundreds of years? Nick Groom joins us on the podcast to open some coffins for answers.

Go beyond the episode:

• Nick Groom’s The Vampire: A New History
• The London Library reported this week that it located some of the dog-eared books Bram Stoker used during the seven years he researched Dracula
• Watch the trailer for The Hunger (1983), in which David Bowie and Susan Sarandon both suffer the love of an immortal vampire
• We are also fond of Only Lovers Left Alive (2014), in which a glamorous Tilda Swinton and a depressed Tom Hiddleston puzzle out their place in modern society
• Here’s a montage of all the bite scenes from Christopher Lee’s classic turn in Dracula (1958)
• And, of course, there’s always Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003), which inspired Slayage, a peer-reviewed journal from the Whedon Studies Association

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A. N. Devers is a writer and rare book dealer whose business, The Second Shelf, centers on all the women writers that time forgot. When she first entered the trade, she noticed that these writers were getting second shrift: sold for less money, not sold at all, and left out of the archives. Why were so many award-winning, well-reviewed books by women sliding out of print? Since rare book dealers are often the ones who shape the collections of archives and libraries—and thus the materials scholars and researchers have to work with—the Second Shelf aims to flood that pipeline with women’s work. Shift the bookshelves, and you just may shift the canon. We spoke with a number of booksellers to get a picture of the trade today, and with Devers about how she’s hoping to change it.

Go beyond the episode:

• Peruse The Second Shelf website and preorder a copy of its first quarterly
• Check out Honey & Wax Booksellers, a woman-owned enterprise founded in 2011
• Get to know Bette Howland, in A. N. Devers’s “Tale of a Forgotten Genius”
• Preorder A Public Space’s reissue of Bette Howland’s work and read its issue devoted to forgotten women writers
• The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America has an archive of video interviews with collectors from several generations
• Read Michael Schneier, of The New York Times, who once again discovers Barbara Pym (in 2017)
• The Scholar has been lamenting neglected books since the 1950s, when the editors polled 64 “distinguished men and women” to name “that book published in the past quarter of a century that they believed to have been the most undeservedly neglected.”

Special thanks to the minds behind the Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair, which put on such a welcoming show, and to the booksellers who humored us: Rachel Furnari of Graph Books; Bryn Hoffman of Pyewacket Books; Garrett Scott, Bookseller; Jason Rovito, Bookseller; and Heather Whitney.

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.

What’s spookier than the Tower of London, home to the ghosts of queens and the rest of Henry the VIII’s enemies? How about the half-dozen black ravens that inhabit it—without which, as legend has it, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall? Since there haven’t been dead bodies littering the Tower Green for centuries, someone has to keep the ravens alive—and that person is the Ravenmaster, Christopher Skaife. As a Yeoman Warder, Skaife is one of the custodians of the Tower’s rich history and traditions, and he joins us to offer a bird’s-eye view of his life among the ravens.

Go beyond the episode:

• Christopher Skaife’s The Ravenmaster
• Read an excerpt about the birds’ daily routine
• Follow Merlina the raven (with help from the Ravenmaster) on Twitter
• For more scary tales, read ex-Yeoman Warder Geoffrey Abott’s book, Ghosts of the Tower of London
• For photographs that Skaife says “come very close to capturing the true majesty and mystery of the birds,” see Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens series
• Behold, the funerals of crows
• For one of the “best books in the world on bird behavior,” according to Skaife, see Nathan Emery’s Bird Brain, and for dozens more recommended books on the Tower and its inhabitants, see the “Suggested Reading” section at the back of The Ravenmaster

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!

Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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

Not everyone believes in witches: in Siberia, after all, locals blame misdeeds on ghosts, and the Irish have fairies. But for those who do, witchcraft can be incredibly threatening—and an accusation of witchcraft can be a powerful tool to control people and entire societies. To get you into the Halloween spirit, we’re revisiting our interview with one of the world’s foremost experts on witchcraft, the historian Ronald Hutton.

Go beyond the episode:

• Ronald Hutton’s The Witch
• For the flip side of witchcraft, watch Ronald Hutton’s dramatic documentary about the good ones—A Very British Witchcraft, about the founder of modern Wicca
• Frances F. Denny’s exhibition “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” on view at the ClampArt gallery in New York, explores the contemporary idea of witches through portraits of those who identify as such. One of Denny’s foremothers was accused of witchcraft in 1674, and 20 years later another of her ancestors presided as a judge in the Salem Witch Trials.
• And for some spooky Halloween viewing, watch The Witch, our host’s favorite movie about witches—featured on Vulture’s list of top 15 witch movies, if you’re dying for more

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! Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) and 8bit Betty (“Spooky Loop”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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

Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer and scholar who focuses on 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory. His first novel, Confessions of the Fox, smashes those two disciplines together by retelling the story of two notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers: Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess, both real people who lived and breathed the fetid London air. But in Rosenberg's imagining, Jack is trans and Bess is the daughter of a South Asian sailor and an Englishwoman from the soon-to-be-drained fen. Confessions of the Fox is the title of both the novel and a long-lost manuscript that may or may not be their confessions, discovered by a scholar named Dr. Voth. He obsessively annotates the novel and presents it to us, the reader, with an introduction and footnotes that unspool into a conspiratorial tale of surveillance, resistance, and suspense. Rosenberg joins us on the podcast to talk about what it’s like to rewrite history.

Also, we have a copy of the novel to give away! So please, tell one person that you're a fan of the podcast, write us a pithy review on iTunes, and email [email protected] to tell us you’ve done so for your chance to win a copy of Confessions of the Fox. We will randomly select a winner on October 12.

Go beyond the episode:

• Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox
• Proof that Jack Sheppard is, in fact, real, and not a fantastical invention: his Encyclopedia Britannica entry
• Listen to the 1958 recording of The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay
• For more about how the spectacle of capital punishment was used in the 18th century, check out Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged

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: [email protected]. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. This episode features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

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

Someday soon, you might be finally able to count all the grains of sand on the beach, because there might be no beaches—and no sand—left. With the global population and its attendant consumption booming, we’re running out of sand in our quest to build larger cities and better smartphones. This essential resource, so easy to overlook, ranks just below air and water on a global scale of how much we use. But as journalist Vince Beiser explains in his new book, The World in a Grain, its over-extraction is harming us, whether in the form of murder in the black markets of India, pollution from fracking sand mines in Wisconsin, or islands that have simply disappeared.

Go beyond the episode:

• Vince Beiser’s The World in a Grain
• Read his article on India’s black market in Wired, “The Deadly Global War for Sand”
• For more on how sand mining works, watch this aerial video (from a sand mine worker) of a quarry in Central Texas
• Visit our episode page to see photographs from Adam Ferguson, who accompanied Beiser on his visit to India

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.

How much do you know about Oklahoma City? Probably you know about the bombing, the Dust Bowl, and the Trail of Tears. Maybe, if you’re a basketball fan, you know about the drama of their basketball team, the Thunder. A feeble history, then, of a flyover city in the public imagination. Sam Anderson wants to change all that. As a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, he was sent off to O.K.C. a few years ago to write about a stolen basketball team, and fell so hard for what he calls “one of the great weirdo cities of the world” that he wrote a whole book about it.

Go beyond the episode:

• Sam Anderson’s Boom Town
• Read his original reporting on the Oklahoma City Thunder, “A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America”
• And his Summer 2004 essay for us, “Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Joyce,” as strange a travelogue of Dublin as you’ll ever read
• Peruse the Oklahoma Historical Society’s materials on the Land Run of 1889
• Read the original coverage of the Land Run in the May 18, 1889 edition of Harper’s Weekly (click here for a more legible text-only version) or in The New York Times

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.