Smarty Pants

Humans have been accompanied by horses for thousands of years. They’ve carried us across the plains, farmed our fields, marched us into battle, fed us, clothed us, soothed us—in short, done so much to make life a little easier. But the horse is tucked away in our history, always present but never quite center stage. Susanna Forrest’s book, The Age of the Horse, puts Equus caballus squarely in the spotlight, from our first encounters to the dazzling array of skills we’ve developed alongside them. This episode originally aired in 2017.

Go beyond the episode:

• Susanna Forrest’s The Age of the Horse
• Peruse her blog about horse history and news
• Our host has definitely read every horse book on this list
• Move over, Secretariat: the best horse movie of all time is Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron (2002)
• For a dark, dreamy twist on equine friendship, watch Horse Girl (2020), starring Alison Brie

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.

Living in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic feels like watching the sun go down on a crumbling empire. The world’s wealthiest country has experienced more deaths and suffered a greater economic shock than any of its peers. Staggering levels of unemployment and eviction are looming, not to mention a potentially chaotic November election. We can’t help but think back to our 2017 interview with classicist Kyle Harper, who in his book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, advanced a new theory about why and how the empire fell ... under circumstances alarmingly similar to our own. Though the decline of Rome has been a favored subject of armchair theorists for as long as there have been armchairs, Harper's hypothesis points to many of the same problems we're wrestling with today.

Go beyond the episode:

• Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
• Read an excerpt from the book on how the Huns laid waste to the Eternal City
• How we can learn from Rome’s experience with epidemics to contend with emerging diseases today
• Pandemics should scare you: here’s how tropical diseases are on the rise in our own back yard
• Our interview with epidemiologist Rob Wallace, who points to how climate change and factory farming led to the Covid-19 pandemic

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!

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

For the past year and a half, Amanda Holmes has been delighting readers around the world with The American Scholar ’s podcast Read Me A Poem. She has recited poems ranging from English classics by W. B. Yeats and Maya Angelou to works in translation by Kamala Das and Wislawa Szymborska to mournful sonnets by Rupert Brooke and lighthearted romps by Kenneth Patchen and Laura Riding. Holmes’s gift lies in treating each poem with equal attention, whether it’s by a new poet she’s just encountered or a canonical master. These days, with listener requests flooding in during the pandemic, the show’s tagline seems truer than ever: we all need more poetry in our lives. So this week, we peer behind the curtain of our sister show, speaking with that voice that has been brightening all our lives with weekly poems.

Go beyond the episode:

• View the Read Me A Poem archives on our website
• Subscribe to Read Me A Poem: iTunes • Feedburner • Google Play • Acast
• Read Amanda Holmes’s book reviews and feature column at the Washington Independent Review of Books

Poems mentioned:

• Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
• Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”
• W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “Dungeon” and an excerpt from Gitanjali
• Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”
• Emily Dickinson,“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
• Kamala Das, “Summer in Calcutta”
• Toru Dutt, “Our Casuarina Tree”
• Leonardo Sinisgalli, “Elderly Tears”
• Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

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: iT...

If you’ve ever made a salad from tender greens picked up from the farmers’ market, slurped an oyster cultivated at a regenerative farm, or sliced into a hearty loaf of rye bread—then raise a glass of California wine to James Beard, the dean of American cooking. For more than 35 years and in nearly two dozen cookbooks, Beard swept aside stuffy imported notions of epicurean haute cuisine on the one hand and processed and freezer food on the other to reveal the real flavors that were available to American cooks: ham from Kentucky hogs, old-world loaves from immigrant bakeries, obscure Washington apples. As John Birdsall writes in the first biography of the chef in more than 25 years, Beard “remembered what food tasted like before supermarkets killed off local butchers and produce stands”—and he spent his whole life trying to share that memory with the public. But while he gave home cooks permission to put pleasure and flavor at the center of the American table, Beard kept his own struggles with self-doubt and his sexual identity in the closet (while winking at his own persona as a “gastronomic gigolo” in his books). Birdsall’s biography, The Man Who Ate Too Much, explores the paradox of Beard’s life as a beloved national figure who kept so much of himself hidden, “a man on a lonely coast who told us we could find meaning and comfort by embracing pleasure.”

Go beyond the episode:

• John Birdsall’s The Man Who Ate Too Much
• Read his first essay on James Beard in Lucky Peach (RIP), “America, Your Food Is So Gay”
• Watch the PBS American Masters documentary of Beard’s life, America’s First Foodie
• Chefs like Alice Waters took Beard’s lessons for the home cook to the restaurant kitchen, as she recalls in this clip
• Watch some moments from his short-lived show, I Love to Eat
• Check out one of our favorite James Beard cookbooks, Beard on Bread, which still holds up.

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.

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 ac...