Smarty Pants

On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of The Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music’s relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.

Go beyond the episode:

• Jonathan Gould’s Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
• Read about the origin of Stop Making Sense—and then watch it, of course
• Check out the new “Psycho Killer” music video starring Saoirse Ronan, made in honor of the 40th anniversary of the first Talking Heads performance

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 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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In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father's Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson's administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked. “As we know it,” Scholar contributor Augustine Sedgewick writes in his new book, “Father's Day is an unintended consequence of the fractious American politics of race, gender, and class.” Sedgewick's book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, is the story of how such politics ensnarled parental care, and of the men who expanded the domain of fathers across generations of crisis and change, from Aristotle and Henry VIII to Freud and Bob Dylan. 

Go beyond the episode:

• Augustine Sedgewick’s Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
• The far right’s signature style is less about dad pants and more about fatherhood: read Sedgewick’s essay “Ku Klux Khaki”
• “Thoreau’s Pencils,” Sedgwick explores the abolitionist’s relationship with his family—and his family business’s ties to slavery
• For more on the Moynihan Report and political interventions on parenting, read Melinda Cooper’s Family Values

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin. But by 1786, the British judge and philologist Sir William “Oriental” Jones was applauded when he famously asserted that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek had “sprung from some common source.” Some 450 years later, linguists and archaeologists have filled in many of the gaps in our knowledge of this common source, called Proto-Indo-European, and sketched out its family tree, the branches of which extend from Scotland to China. But over the past two decades, the study of paleogenetics has radically advanced our understanding of this language—and the people who spoke it some 5,000 years ago. In her new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, science journalist Laura Spinney tells their story, and that of their linguistic—and in some cases, genetic—offspring, which constitute the world’s largest language family.

Go beyond the episode:

• Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
• One enduring Indo-European mystery? How Celtic got to Ireland
• Read the two landmark 2015 studies in Nature identifying the Yamnaya’s genetic contributions to Europe
• Previously on Smarty Pants: how a language dies, how to live like a Neolithic

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 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!

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

In 1978, a Swedish shipbuilder began construction on two new barges, never anticipating that the journey of these vessels would come to exemplify enormous changes in international law and the global economy. In his new book, Empty Vessel, Harvard historian Ian Kumekawa follows the ships’ journey from the docks of Stockholm to offshore oil rigs in Scotland, across the North Sea to West Germany, to deployment in the Falklands War. One of them becomes a floating prison not only in New York City, but also in Portland, England, before once again serving as housing for offshore oil workers, 40 years after its construction and eight names later. The history of the Vessel, as Kumekawa dubs it, mirrors the rise of offshore markets, labor exploitation, the caprices of international law, and the earth-shattering changes in the past 40 years of the global economy itself.

Go beyond the episode:

• Ian Kumekawa’s Empty Vessel
• Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction

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 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!

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

In his award-winning 2003 graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson depicted his teenage love and his fall from faith in rural Wisconsin. Now he returns to the story of his life with Ginseng Roots, which focuses on a minor detail that Blankets omitted: namely, 10 summers he spent as a boy weeding and harvesting American ginseng for a dollar an hour. Thompson maps the roots of the 300-year-old global ginseng trade from China and Korea to Marathon, Wisconsin, and profiles the other people tangled in the industry’s whiskers: Hmong harvesters who migrated from Laos, American workers and industrial farmers caught up in the vicissitudes of global agriculture, and wild ginseng hunters the world over.

Go beyond the episode:

• Craig Thompson’s Ginseng Roots: A Memoir
• Read Matthew Denton-Edmunson’s essay about wild ginseng hunters, “The Root Problem”
• Also mentioned: Scout McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisiible Art, Ted J. Kaptchuk’s The Orb That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, Joe Sacco’s breakthrough works of graphic journalism
• More about the United States’s “Secret War” in Laos

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.

We take our muscles for granted: every time we step or stand—or even fall asleep!—we are experiencing a complex system of muscles moving in concert. And yet our notion of strength is still bogged down in stereotypes and preconceptions, some of them holdovers from 2,000 years ago. In our Spring 2025 issue, Michael Joseph Gross wrote about how the ancient Greeks perceived strength—and muscles themselves—in an entirely different way than we do. This week, Gross joins us to talk about his new book, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives, which looks at weight training through historical, social, and medical lenses to show its transformative power over time. His guides are leading scholars in the intersecting fields of kinesiology, classics, gender studies, and medicine, whose work has been shifting the narrative about strength for more than half a century.

Go beyond the episode:

• Michael Joseph Gross’s Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives
• Read an excerpt, “Mr. Olympia,” from our Spring 2025 Issue
• Explore the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.

Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan, and easily the most maligned. She’s spoken of (falsely) as the woman who broke up the Beatles—not the woman who co-wrote “Imagine.” She’s known as a woman who can’t sing—not as a woman who used years of classical music training to subvert norms on more than a dozen experimental albums. Why don’t more people know about her mischievous One Woman Show at MOMA, a performance piece staged outside the museum, without its permission, that slyly railed against its exclusion of female and Asian artists? Or about the clever all-white chess set she once sent to Reagan and Gorbachev at the height of the Cold War in 1987, simply titled Play It By Trust? “Everybody knows her name,” her Beatle husband once said, “but no one knows what she does.” Now, thanks to David Sheff’s new biography, simply titled Yoko, no one has an excuse not to know anymore: about her art, her activism, her music, and her astonishing journey from war-torn Tokyo to the avant-garde art scenes of London and New York. 

Go beyond the episode:

• David Sheff’s Yoko: A Biography
• The artist's official website
• Watch Cut Piece in its 1965 or 1966 incarnations 
• Visitors to the Kunsthaus Zürich reactivated Bag Piece, originally performed in 1966, in 2022 
• Traveling to Berlin before August 31, 2025? See Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Gropius Bau
• Read the original Playboy interviews that Sheff conducted with Yoko Ono and John Lennon in September 1980

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.

The Irish Potato Famine, which began in 1845, looms large not only in the imagination of that country, but also here in the United States, where so many Irish migrants arrived in desperation. Phytophthora infestans caused blight across Europe—but only in Ireland did crop failures result in devastation so vast that the period is known in that country simply as the “Great Hunger.” Why did the blight strike Ireland, newly part of the United Kingdom, so much harder than it did elsewhere in Europe? In Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, historian Padraic X. Scanlan identifies the policies of the British Empire as the primary reason for the deaths of roughly a million people and the exodus of two million more. But Britain didn’t perpetuate a genocide, Scanlan argues—its choices reflected deep political beliefs in market forces that would reveal themselves to be anything but natural.

Go beyond the episode:

• Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
• For more on the famines that struck the rest of the British Empire, check out Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
• CATU Ireland organizes around housing and community issues across the island
• It’s true: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is all about the Irish housing market

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.

Lists of canonical works of fiction should inspire skepticism—we all bring our own notions of quality to the books we read. But every so often, we encounter an acknowledged classic that so captures our imagination as to make us wonder why we didn’t come to it earlier. Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek, for example, recently read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, originally published in 1929, for the first time. And she’s glad she waited: Kurt Beals’s new translation faithfully mirrors the original German. Beals brings an immediacy to what has been called the greatest war novel of all time, refreshing the text for a new generation of readers who might have only seen the Netflix version of Paul Bäumer and his comrades navigating the trenches of the First World War. Reworking a classic is challenging, but, as Beals writes in his introduction, the greater ordeal was “to spend months with these young soldiers, in the trenches and in their heads, to know them intimately enough to give them new voices in a new language, and then to watch them die.”

Go beyond the episode:

• Kurt Beals’s new translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• Watch the original 1930 American adaptation of the novel
• War poets who wrote in the trenches: August Stramm, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.

Since the publication of King: A Biography in 1970, the historian David Levering Lewis has been chronicling the lives of Black Americans in award-winning volumes that tell the American story from an African-American perspective. Now, for the first time, Lewis turns his attention to his own family history in a new book,The Stained Glass Window, inspired by a moment of reflection in the Atlanta church where his family has prayed for generations—and where, in the archives, he began a search that led to the discovery of a previously unknown forbear. Lewis's lineage reveals the tortuous and tortured racial history of our nation, as he follows the historical trail to two prominent white slaveholding families in Georgia, and a family of free persons of color who themselves owned slaves in South Carolina. Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, one for each volume of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, David Levering Lewis joins us from New York City to tell his own family's story.

Go beyond the episode:

• David Levering Lewis’s The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
• Read his 2021 essay on why Black biography matters ( “A Prophet and a President”) and “The Autobiography of Biography” 

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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed

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.