Smarty Pants
The American Scholar
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Top 10 Smarty Pants Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Smarty Pants episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Smarty Pants for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Smarty Pants episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
#155: Four-Legged Friends
Smarty Pants
11/20/20 • 15 min
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.
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#141: This Is How an Empire Falls
Smarty Pants
08/07/20 • 19 min
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.
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#136: Read Me A Poem, Won’t You?
Smarty Pants
07/03/20 • 17 min
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.
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#148: Meet the Dean of American Cooking
Smarty Pants
10/02/20 • 27 min
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.
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#135: Whale Song
Smarty Pants
06/26/20 • 24 min
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...
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#140: I Want to Believe
Smarty Pants
07/31/20 • 21 min
Whether it’s Lemurians making their home on Mount Shasta, aliens alighting in the middle of Illinois, meat falling from the Kentucky sky, or cows being drained of blood in Oregon, accounts of unexplained phenomena are on the rise. Why have so many Americans opened themselves up to fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, even as our empirical understanding of the world has increased? Cultural historian Colin Dickey joins us on the show this week to talk about his new book, Unidentified, in which he traverses the country in search of the cryptids and conspiracies that have stuck with us for the past few centuries, evolving alongside the dramatic changes in our frontiers, scientific knowledge, and cultural mores.
Go beyond the episode:
- Colin Dickey’s Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained
- Read an excerpt from his previous book, Ghostland, about America’s haunted places
- Learn about the Altamaha-ha, the sea monster of the Georgia coast
- NPR gets in on the cow mute game in October 2019: ‘Not One Drop Of Blood’: Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon; Kansas reported a spate of the same phenomenon in 2016; the FBI investigated in the 1970s and concluded it was scavengers, but not everyone was convinced
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.
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#90: Totes Adorbs
Smarty Pants
05/10/19 • 20 min
Between Hello Kitty, anthropomorphized Disney candlesticks, and the prevalence of doe-eyed sticker-comments on Facebook, it’s safe to say that cuteness has permeated everything. But what makes something “cute,” and how might there be something disquieting going on beneath all the sugar and spice and everything nice? The philosopher Simon May has spent a lot of time thinking about what cuteness has to tell us about the shifting boundaries between ourselves and the outside world, and how it plays with the dichotomies of gender, age, morality, species, and even power itself. After all, cute is adorable, and kind of harmless—but for all that, it’s also a little bit unnerving.
Go beyond the episode:
- Simon May’s The Power of Cute
- The sweet and sinister art of Yashimoto Nara
- Art historian Elizabeth Legge wrote about Jeff Koons’s Baloon Dog and the Cute Sublime in her paper “When Awe Turns to Awww ...”
- And here is an entire book on Hello Kitty: Christine R. Yano’s Pink Globalization
- For a primer on cute research, see Natalie Angier’s article “The Cute Factor”
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.
#123: A Good Time for Opera
Smarty Pants
04/03/20 • 48 min
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. This episode originally aired in November 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
- Read Vivien Schweitzer’s A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera
- Catch a free nightly stream of a Metropolitan Opera production
- 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
#154: The Ghosts of Nazi Germany
Smarty Pants
11/13/20 • 20 min
Between 1947 and 1956, at least 77 recorded witchcraft trials took place in West Germany. Wonder doctors and faith healers walked the land, offering salvation to the tens of thousands of sick and spiritually ill wartime survivors who flocked to them. People hired exorcists and made pilgrimages to holy sites in search of redemption. The Virgin Mary appeared to these believers thousands of times. Monica Black, a historian at the University of Tennessee, found these stories and many others in newspaper clippings, court records, and other archives of the period that testify to West Germany’s supernatural obsession with ridding itself of evil—and complicate the conventional story of its swift rise from genocidal dictatorship to liberal, consumerist paradise. Black joins us on the podcast to describe the spiritual malaise lurking in the shadows: the unspoken guilt and shame of a country where Nazis still walked free.
Go beyond the episode:
- Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted Land
- There’s a three-part, five-hour documentary about the German mystic and faith healer Bruno Gröning on YouTube, presented by the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends, which is probably not the most unbiased source
- National Geographic has compiled an extensive map of sightings of the Virgin Mary (note the big upswing in 1950s Germany)
- East Germans also fell prey to the influence of West German faith healers: the preacher Paul Schaefer promised people salvation if they followed him to South America. Read Scholar senior editor Bruce Falconer’s 2008 essay, “The Torture Colony,” on the troubled (and Nazi-ridden) Colonia Dignidad
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.
#14: Unlikely Encounters
Smarty Pants
03/03/17 • 40 min
Mentioned in this episode:• André Aciman on W. G. Sebald and “The Life Unlived”• “Halo,” a poem by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Langdon Hammer’s introduction• Julian Gewirtz’s essay, “Milton Friedman’s Misadventures in China”
Tune in every two weeks 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.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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Smarty Pants have?
Smarty Pants currently has 313 episodes available.
What topics does Smarty Pants cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture and Podcasts.
What is the most popular episode on Smarty Pants?
The episode title '#155: Four-Legged Friends' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Smarty Pants?
The average episode length on Smarty Pants is 26 minutes.
How often are episodes of Smarty Pants released?
Episodes of Smarty Pants are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Smarty Pants?
The first episode of Smarty Pants was released on Jun 9, 2016.
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