Smarty Pants

Defining words is hard, no matter what they are, but the difficulty only doubles when the word in question is a purely visual referent like color. How do you define blue? Or red, or green, or—God forbid—pink? Well, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has this to say about teal duck, sense two, which transcends its origin as waterfowl: “a dark greenish blue that is bluer and duller than average teal, averaging teal blue, drake, or duckling.” Elegant. Fun, even, for a dictionary, whose defining characteristic is kind of to be dull as dust—which raises the question of how and why some of these colorful definitions came to be. That’s the subject of lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink, which takes her from the pink and buff archives of Merriam-Webster’s offices to the warring color standards of the early 20th century, from the glossy pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalog to the trenches of World War I. Go beyond the episode:Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc PinkRead Scholar executive editor Bruce Falconer’s essay, “What Is the Perfect Color Worth?” on the inscrutable world of color forecastingTune 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 • PandoraHave 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!

Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered habitats. Birders, not to mention scientists, are sounding the alarm. But true as these words are today, they also describe the 19th century, and the valiant—and occasionally violent—efforts to protect birds from the utter devastation of human activity. This is the subject of James H. McCommons's new book, The Feather Wars. Birds were threatened by aggressive logging, farming, hunting, sport, and the desire to put a feather in a woman's cap. But they were also imperiled by the very people who claimed to love them—ornithologists, and their kindred oologists, whose hobby consisted of killing thousands upon thousands of birds and collecting their eggs to fluff out their collections. McCommons takes us behind the battle lines of the first American effort to save the birds, in the hopes that some lessons might apply to our current circumstances.Go beyond the episode:James H. McCommons’s The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s BirdsGet to know the birds in your back yard with eBird from the Cornell Lab of OrnithologyLearn how to garden for wildlifeRead this viral essay about keeping your cat indoors: “The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It” (1916)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 • PandoraHave 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!

In a cramped rent-controlled apartment on the lousy end of the Upper East Side, a dying woman in a diaper writes the story of her life. She is Barbara Rosenberg, high on OxyContin and determined to explain herself, if not exactly apologize, to the two people she loved most: her estranged trans son and her best friend, Sugar Becker, whose betrayals she has yet to forgive. This delirious monologue is the heart of Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn, which gives voice to Barbara’s deepest disappointments about her friends, her family, her in-laws, and maybe, if she’s being honest, her own silver-screen aspirations. But Barbara’s most unhinged thoughts—about serving cold cuts at a funeral or the lesbian perils of a corduroy jacket; the schmucks of 1960s Flatbush or bad 1980s nose jobs; Karl Marx or yenta science—reach a crescendo with the unexpected reappearance of her long-lost loves.Mentioned in this episode:Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night FawnGillian Rose’s Mourning Becomes the LawMichelle de Kretser’s Theory & PracticeSophie Lewis’s Enemy FeminismsRoberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, translated by Chris AndrewsAdania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth JaquetteJordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (listen to our 2018 interview here)Amy Kaplan’s Our American IsraelGretchen Felker-Martin’s ManhuntGrace Byron’s HerculineZefyr Lisowksi’s Uncanny Valley GirlsTorrey Peters’s Stag Dance and Detransition, BabyAnd, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (best read with an 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.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • PandoraHave 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! 

Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have been the most prolific serial killer of all time, responsible for butchering as many as 650 virgins and bathing in their blood. Her Hungarian water castles are the sites of gruesome ghost tours, a metal band named itself for her, and for years she was in the Guinness Book of World Records. The number of women she’s said to have killed is four times the population of an average 17th-century village, but when it comes to Bathory’s story, even the Guinness Book concedes that “it is impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Shelley Puhak disagrees: In her new book,The Blood Countess, she contends that Bathory was instead the victim of possibly the greatest misinformation campaign in history, brought against a powerful, wealthy woman at a tumultuous time. Lutherans and Calvinists were at one another's throats at the height of the Protestant Reformation, the Ottoman Empire lurked just across the border, and medicine in upheaval, with both new and old practices bringing accusations of heresy and witchcraft. It was a dark time to be a woman—especially one with 17 castles to her name, and no husband to defend her.Go beyond the episode:Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a MonsterTune 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 • PandoraHave 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!

Since 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which tells users whether their prehistoric genes predispose them to certain behaviors, like hoarding or not getting hangry. In the 1880s, Neanderthals were not being celebrated at all—they were depicted as little more than troglodytes with tools—and the 1980s weren’t much better: rough hair, swarthy skin, dull eyes, jutting foreheads … an evolutionary dead end. Today, armed with recently decoded Neanderthal DNA, researchers are reconstructing these archaic people as lighter-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. For historian Stefanos Geroulanos, however, this new account raises difficult questions. “Are Neanderthals now smart because they are no longer depicted as dark-skinned? Or, conversely, have they become blond and white because they are now believed to have been smart, able, quintessentially human?” Questions like these form the heart of his book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, which has just won Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. Geroulanos contends that our claims about the deep past—whether made in 1726 or 2026—tell us more about the moment we propose them than anything else.Go beyond the episode:Stefanous Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human OriginsListen to Geroulanos in conversation at the Phi Beta Kappa 2025 Book AwardsReconstructed ancient languages like Proto-Indo-European have been similarly weaponized for political ends, as Laura Spinney describes on an earlier episodeAnd our understanding of the more recent past—like Viking history, similarly prone—has been challenged by recent archaeological discoveries too, as Eleanor Barraclough explains in Embers of the HandsTune 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 • PandoraHave 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!

Audley Moore mentored Malcolm X, popularized reparations for African Americans in a 1963 essay, and advanced the cause of Black women in both the Black nationalist and civil rights movements. She rubbed elbows with the Mandelas, Jessie Jackson, and Rosa Parks. Once a household name in the mid-20th century, she has fallen out of the history books, despite a career of organizing and activism that spanned a century, her artifacts lost and her archives scattered. But more than 100 years after Moore's birth and 28 years after her death, Ashley D. Farmer has written the first biography of Moore, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore. Farmer brings together a decade of research spanning oral history, archival work from Louisiana to New York City, and, of course, reams of FBI documents to paint the fullest picture of this icon's life to date.Go beyond the episode:Ashley D. Farmer’s Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley MooreSpeaking of neglected Black figures: read Harriet A. Washington’s Winter 2026 cover story on Rudolph Fisher, Harlem Renaissance manTune 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 • PandoraHave 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!

In ancient Greece, the view from on high was known as catascopos, or “the looker-down.” It's a privileged perspective, and in the modern world, one increasingly taken by machines: drones, satellites, spy cameras, airplanes, sentient doorbells. In his new book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View, Edward McPherson surveys the cultural history of top-down and far-ranging perspectives from aviation and warfare to quarantine and protest. “We continue to make decisions based on the big picture,” he writes. “Politicians and planners confront the challenges of today with lofty intelligence, always pointing to the forest, not the trees.” Often that view can be obscuring, even as its accuracy is hailed. Consider the dead civilians mistaken for combatants in drone warfare the world over, or the wrong face recognized on CCTV. And in some cases, the forest isn't even there, as in John B. Bachelder's birds-eye map of Gettysburg and its imaginary copse of trees. Is distance the straightest path to truth? What dangers lie in prioritizing the big picture? McPherson joins Smarty Pants to muddle through the trees.Go beyond the episode:Edward McPherson's Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long ViewRead “Lost and Found,” his essay about the house in Gettysburg built by his great-great-grandfather, also named Edward McPhersonTune 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 • PandoraHave 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!

Stories of the undead tormenting the living supposedly entered the English-speaking world in 1732, with a report from the Hapsburg military of events in Serbia—events that would go on to inspire the most famous vampire of all, Dracula. But the count from Transylvania was neither the first undead man in England (British corpses went walking in 680, and again in 1090) nor the most emblematic of the folk tales that preceded him (that would be Carmilla, who embodies a type seen from China to the Eastern Roman Empire). In Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair uses examples from the far-flung ancient world—a “vampire belt” stretching from Scandinavia and the North Sea through central and eastern Europe, western Russia, the Near East, India, and China to Indonesia—to make the case that “corpse-killing is mainstream and not marginal, therapeutic and not pathological.” The undead have seemingly always been with us, as has our need to kill them to exorcise our own anxieties. “Killing the dead is better than killing the living,” Blair writes. “Like other extreme rituals, it is depressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.”Go beyond the episode:John Blair’s Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New WorldListen to our interview about the modern vampire with Nick Groom, the Prof of Goth, and our conversation with Ronald Hutton about witch persecutions through the agesYou know we love horror—visit our episode page for a list of spookiest episodesTune 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!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. 

Foraging has been part of the human story forever, and its post-pandemic resurgence is a return to ways of living with the natural world that have only recently been forgotten. Gabrielle Cerberville, or the Chaotic Forager, as she’s known online, is one of the voices championing the practice on social media. Her videos distill the beauty of living with the seasons into bite-size videos, many of them including recipes, from pine-syrup mugolio to simple dry-sauteed mushrooms. Her new book, Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, combines personal essays with a kind of narrative field guide, along with—of course—dozens of wildly creative recipes, making for the book version of walking through the woods with a friend.Go beyond the episode:Gabrielle Cerberville’s Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal LifeFind foraging workshops and videos on her website, TikTok, and InstagramRead Michael Autrey’s account of foraging for mushrooms, or Matthew Desmond’s reporting on the wild ginseng trade in AppalachiaVisit our episode page for a list of recommended field guides and cookbooksTune 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 • PandoraHave 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!