Smarty Pants

When there's a gold rush on, the thing to do is not to dig. Instead, sell shovels to all the suckers who think they'll get rich digging for gold. This is one of the lessons that investigative reporter Corey Pein learned when he moved to San Francisco at the height of the Silicon Valley start-up boom. In his analogy, the gold rush is the tech boom, and the suckers are all the start-up wannabes who flock to the Bay Area for a slice of the venture capital pie. And all of us, the consumers, who fell for the excitement of the gig economy and the lure of a free social network that promised to never sell our data? We’re suckers, too.Go beyond the episode:Corey Pein’s Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley of DeathAnd an excerpt from the book on web fraudRead his exposé of the alt-right/tech connection, “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich” and the followup, “The Moldbug Variations”Wikipedia’s page on “Uber protests and legal actions”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 • AcastHave 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.

Bobbie Ann Mason's short story “Live-Hang,” from our Spring Issue, is the story of two friends who come from different worlds. Dave and Miguel meet in the gutting room of a chicken processing plant. Both are working class, but Dave and his wife, Trish, are white U.S. citizens, while Miguel and his wife, Maria, are undocumented Mexican immigrants. Even though their jobs diverge—Dave uses a connection to get a job installing satellite dishes, while Miguel is promoted to the more dangerous live-hang room—their lives become increasingly intertwined. But then the threat of deportation arrives, and with it the potential of a family being ripped apart. Only a brave and dangerous act can keep these families together. Mason talks about how she came to write this story, and how topical it is—given the recent news about ICE arresting children in hospitals, detaining the single parents of disabled kids, separating families, and raiding workplaces like the chicken plant.Go beyond the episode:Bobbie Ann Mason’s short story, “Live-Hang”Listen to “Our Town,” a two-part story from This American Life about the undocumented immigrants in an Alabama poultry townRead T. C. Boyle’s story “The Fugitive,” told from the perspective of an immigrant with no health insurance and tuberculosisWatch Mississippi Chicken, a documentary about the hardships of undocumented immigrants in another rural poultry townRead “Fallout,” Bobbie Ann Mason’s essay about plutonium contamination in Paducah, Kentucky, or “The Chicken Tower,” her essay about growing up in the town of Mayfield (New Yorker subscription required)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 • AcastHave 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.

When we talk about climate change and conservation, animals tend to steal the show. Yet the organisms whose extinction would affect us the most are actually plants. Horticulturalist Carlos Magdalena has become known as the Plant Messiah for his work using groundbreaking, left-field techniques to save endangered species. First captivated by the bogs and flowers of his native Spain, Carlos has spent much of his professional life in greenhouses and laboratories—and traveling the world, from the Amazon to Australia—to resurrect plants of all shades. And with his new book, he’s on a mission to change the way we see the flora around us by spreading the good word about green things.Go beyond the episode:Carlos Magdalena’s The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest SpeciesGet a daily dose of flower power through Kew Gardens’s Instagram accountCheck out images and background on the Café Marron plant at the Global Trees CampaignWatch a clip from the BBC’s Kingdom of Plants, including a glimpse of Carlos tending to some water liliesRead the wild story of how several samples of the world’s smallest water lily—the one Carlos saved—were stolen in a grand heistKew Gardens highlights other plants on the brink in this YouTube videoTune 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 • AcastHave 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.

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent Millay boomeranging from heartbreak to revelry. Or T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Waste Land,” itemized the neuroses of unrequited love in “Prufrock, and then turned around and set to verse the antics of cats like Growltiger and Rumpleteazer. You could say that the same range exists in the best of actors—like Jeremy Irons, who’s played everyone from starry-eyed Charles Ryder to Humbert Humbert himself. Irons’s iconic voice has lent itself to animated lions and audiobooks before, but now, he joins us to talk about perhaps his most ambitious project yet: narrating the poems of T. S. Eliot.Go beyond the episode:Jeremy Irons reads The Poems of T. S. Eliot from Faber & Faber and BBC Radio 4Read more about T. S. Eliot’s life at the Poetry FoundationMay we suggest Juliet Stevenson’s portfolio of Jane Austen’s novels for your next road trip?Listen for yourself: T. S. Eliot reads “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”and “The Waste Land”On the other hand, we love W. H. Auden’s reading of “As I Walked Out One Evening” (and his collaboration on the Night Mail documentary)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 • AcastHave 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. Excerpt of “The Rum Tum Tugger” used courtesy the BBC, which owns the production copyright. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Journalist Anna Badkhen has immersed herself in the lives of Afghan carpet weavers, Fulani cow herders in Mali, and other people often ignored or forgotten—especially in the Global North. Yet our lives are entwined with others’ across the continents, and in ways that we may not even realize. Consider, for example, the dire situation in Joal, Senegal—the subject of Badkhen’s latest book—where artisanal fishermen are facing the consequences of an ocean depleted by climate change and overfishing.Go beyond the episode:Anna Badkhen’s Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea“Magical Thinking in the Sahel,” an essay about gris-gris and good luck in the The New York Times“The Secret Life of Boats,” a dispatch from Joal in GrantaA Voice of America video report on overfishing in Senegal“Tackling illegal fishing in western Africa could create 300,000 jobs,” the Guardian reportsIt’s not just West Africa: how territorial disputes have put the South China Sea’s fishery on the verge of collapseTune 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 • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since August 2017, in the country’s latest wave of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence, over 647,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar due to systemic violence and ethnic cleansing that has killed more than 10,000 people. Why is a religion seen as so peaceful in the West lashing out with such vehemence, and why are the Rohingya their target? And how did a seemingly local conflict erupt across the entire country? Journalist Francis Wade, who has reported in Myanmar for a decade, gives us the deep history, which stretches farther back than contemporary reports might suggest, and reveals a tangled web of interests: ultranationalist Buddhist monks, a military fearful of losing its grip on power, implicit racial hierarchies, and a democratic political party, led by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, whose very principles are called into question.Go beyond the episode:Francis Wade’s Myanmar’s Enemy Within: The Making of a Muslim “Other”Read the UNHCR’s report on the Rohingya emergencyDuring the reporting of “Massacre in Myanmar,” on the systemic destruction of Rohingya villages, two Reuters reporters were arrested by Myanmar security forces and are still in custodyHanna Beech asks in The New Yorker, “What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?” For daily coverage of Myanmar politics, read The Irrawaddy Explore the Tea Circle, an Oxford forum for new perspective on Burma/MyanmarTune 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.

We revisit an interview with Eugenia Cheng, the author of How to Bake Pi, who translates higher math using metaphors that even the most mathematically disinclined can comprehend: infinite layers of puff pastry, endless jars of marmalade, and deep-dish pi(e). She talks about the false dichotomy between mathematics and art, and how understanding math helps you see the world in a new light. Also, how five-year-olds sometimes pose the most difficult questions for mathematicians to answer, like: what’s a number?Go beyond the episode:Eugenia Cheng’s Beyond InfinityAnd her attempt to teach Stephen Colbert how to make puff pastryNatalie Angier’s review of How to Bake Pi (verdict: delicious!)Watch an animated explanation of the Infinite Hotel Paradox from TED-EdTune 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 • AcastHave 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.

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neopolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won't ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev's memoirs, Saddam Hussein's hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family's film theory. This show is about that kind of very long book, and the man who decided to read all of them: Daniel Kalder, who joins us on the show to talk about his journey through The Infernal Library and what these books tell us about the dictatorial soul, assuming there is one. Go beyond the episode:Dive into Turkmenbashi’s Ruhnama, if you dare.Daniel Kalder reviews Saddam Hussein’s prose—he “tortured metaphors, too”—or you can read it yourselfOr check out Kalder’s dispatches from The Guardian’s “Dictator-lit” archivesWhile we couldn’t find a video of Fidel Castro’s four-hour-and-29-minute address to the United Nations in 1960, you can read it hereTune 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 • AcastHave 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.

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book, Off the Charts, Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose lives have informed our approach to child-rearing and education. Nature versus nurture is just the start of the debate—and it turns out there’s no model for raising any kind of child, genius or not, and no guarantee of success, whatever that means.Go beyond the episode:Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (and read an excerpt here)Ann Hulbert lists her top five books on precocious childrenOur top book for a glimpse into the life of a precocious child? Helen DeWitt’s cult novel, The Last Samurai“Promethea Unbound,” by Mike Mariana, about a child genius raised in poverty whose life was nearly destroyed by violenceAt the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik puts Off the Charts in conversation with a slate of other books on childrearing in “How to Raise a Prodigy”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 • AcastHave 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.

For decades, artists have been using horror to speak to our deepest societal fears, from the wilderness (werewolves) to the unknown (aliens). With zombies, that fear is infection: the outbreak of some terrible epidemic that sweeps the world, rendering us all into the drooling, flesh-eating monster next door. But as Dahlia Schweitzer shows in her new book, Going Viral, zombies are part of a much older lineage—dating back to Haitian slavery. Recently, these stories have arisen as commentary on the Ebola and AIDS epidemics, as well as terrorism, and in many cases, fact and fiction seem unfortunately to blur. Why have these outbreak narratives infected the public conversation? And how have they affected the way we see the world?Episode page: https://theamericanscholar.org/zombies-oh-my/Go beyond the episode:Dahlia Schweitzer’s Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the WorldCheck out this chart of the three film cycles of outbreak narrativesWant to be comforted after all that terror? Here’s an outline of all the female scientists who save the day in these filmsWatch how the film Pandemic (2016) blurs fact and fiction with actual news footageIn case you had any doubts about Dawn of the Dead (1978) was about consumerism: here’s the mall sceneAnd check out the whole “syllabus” for Going ViralTune 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.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastDownload the audio here (right click to “save link as ...”)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.