Share

cover art for Smarty Pants

Smarty Pants

A podcast from The American Scholar magazine


Latest episode

  • 15. Family/History

    26:04||Season 3, Ep. 15
    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, 1790-1958Read 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 FeedHave 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!

More episodes

View all episodes

  • 14. The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

    30:51||Season 3, Ep. 14
    Vikings and Valkyries have captivated our imaginations for centuries, with greater and lesser degrees of historical accuracy. But as so often happens, the very people reading Snorri Sturluson or the Sagas of Icelanders today are the ones who were left out of history to begin with—the ordinary people doing the quietly heroic work of farming, midwifing, blacksmithing, and any number of difficult daily tasks. In her new book, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, the historian Eleanor Barraclough puts ordinary people at the center of the story. The sagas may tell of “warriors scrubbing beer kegs and Valkyries pouring glasses of wine in the afterlife,” but the exploits of the everyday Viking were just as interesting. Their stories bring to life a world of “wood, wool, flax, bone, stone, leather and antler, hand-wrought and fashioned”—a world that remains endlessly captivating, from the runes women carved to fetch their lovers home from the pub to the scribblings of a wee child.Go beyond the episode:Eleanor Barraclough’s Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking AgeVisit our episode page for primary source links and historical fiction we loveTune 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 FeedHave 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!
  • Keepers of the Old Ways

    28:41|
    Pasta thin as thread, a mirror believed to show your true self, a history passed down for 27 generations of the same family—these may sound like elements of fairy tale, but they exist in our very own modern world. In his new book, Custodians of Wonder, BBC reporter Eliot Stein tells the stories of the people keeping traditions like these alive, across 10 countries and five continents, in an effort to save the cultures that shaped them. Far from being a litany of all the rites we’ve lost over the years, Stein’s book is a paean to human ingenuity in the face of evolving technology and culture, and to the creative spirit that continues to fuel the places that we call home. Go beyond the episode:Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them AliveWatch videos from Stein’s travels on the BBC’s “Custom Made”: the keeper of the 750-year old secret of soy sauce, Taiwan’s last film poster painter, Germany’s matchmaking tree, and, of course, Sardinia’s su filindeuInterested in learning a traditional craft? Check out our interview with Alexander Langlands about his book CraeftTune 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 FeedHave 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!
  • Kinship and Contradictions

    28:37|
    Identity can be difficult enough to navigate without bureaucratic interference. For Native people, the question of identity is mired in more than a century of federal intrusion in the form of tribal rolls, blood quantum, and boarding schools—not to mention genocide. And yet, the number of people who identify as Native has increased by 85 percent in just 10 years—from 5.2 million in 2010 to 9.7 million in 2020 according to the U.S. Census. But tribal enrollment, hovering at about two million, has not grown at the same rate. This phenomenon is just one of the things that Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz addresses in her new book, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America. Her own story of enrollment in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina opens the door to many more stories that reveal how Native life still reverberates with the consequences of 19th-century federal policy.Go beyond the episode:Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in AmericaFor more on citizenship in the Creek nation, listen to our interview with Caleb Gayle on the complicated history of Black enrollmentTune 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 FeedHave 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!
  • Overconsumed

    24:45|
    In his previous book, Junkyard Planet, journalist Adam Minter went around the world to see what happened to American recyclables such as cardboard, shredded cars, and Christmas lights around the world as they became new things. In Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, Minter looks at what happens to all the things that get resold and reused, objects that end up in Arizona thrift stores, Malaysian flea markets, Tokyo vintage shops, and Ghanaian used-electronics shops. Who’s buying the tons of goods that get downsized, decluttered, or discarded every year? Does the fact that we can just pass something off to a thrift shop justify our buying more things? What about the sheer scale of it all? Minter joins us in the studio to talk about how we filled the world with all this stuff, and what really needs to change for us to get out from under it—no matter where we live.Go beyond the episode:Adam Minter’s Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage SaleVisit our episode page for further reading about fast fashion, the dark side of Goodwill, and the moral hazards of recyclingAbandon your idols: Mari Kondo has begun selling you junk to replace the junk you just KonMari’dRead more about why local textile industries are dying in Ghana and African countries more broadlyLearn more about the Right to Repair movementTune 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 FeedHave 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!
  • 11. Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

    25:03||Season 3, Ep. 11
    It's the summer after graduation, and Munir and his friends G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid for an idyllic summer picking grapes in the French countryside—because, as Munir writes in the sixth edict of his “decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital”: “What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something to say about it. So try living a little first. Not just in books or in bars, but out there, in real life. Wait until you've been scarred by the world, until it has left its mark.” But the scars end up a little deeper than Munir anticipated. There's no grape harvest—thanks to climate change—and the four friends end up working alongside the “etcetera of Europe” at a series of nightmarish factory farms where they do everything from injecting monstrous chickens with mysterious vaccines to artificially inseminating genetically modified corn. At least, that's the premise of Munir Hachemi's 2018 novel, Living Things, published earlier this year in an English translation by Julia Sanches. But how much of this tale is really fiction? And what’s the point of fiction in an inhumane world anyway? Hachemi joins us in the studio to talk about storytelling, machismo, and going vegan.Go beyond the episode: Living Things by Munir HachemiSome of Hachemi’s inspirations include Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia, Tomás Downey, María Sonia Cristoff, Pablo Katchadjian, Emiliano Monge, and, of course, Borges 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 FeedHave 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!
  • 10. American Horror Story

    29:16||Season 3, Ep. 10
    Americans can’t look away from horror stories, whether it’s slasher films on the big screen, true crime on the TV screen, or viral videos on the small screens of our phones. And in a lot of ways, as the historian Jeremy Dauber argues, American history is one horror story after another—from the terror the Puritans felt and wrought in the dark of New England, through the atrocities of Native American genocide and enslavement, down to modern fears of nuclear war. Dauber’s new book, American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, plumbs the depths of the nation’s past to draw unexpected parallels between contemporary terrors and older ones, whether Frankenstein’s connection to Black history or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s veiled xenophobia. Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, joins the podcast to talk about old standbys, forgotten gems, and new classics of the horror genre.Go beyond the episode:Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond Read Charles W. Chestnutt’s story about a white master’s worst fear, “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” from the collection The Conjure Woman (1899)Watch The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s only feature and arguably the most American horror filmRead Alice Sheldon’s story “The Screwfly Solution,” first published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon in 1977You know we love horror—visit our website for a list of our spookiest episodesSubscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS FeedHave 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!