Stay ConnectedTune 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. A podcast from The American Scholar magazine. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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Giorgio Vasari has been variously called the father of art history, the inventor of artistic biography, and the author of “the Bible of the Italian Renaissance”—a little book called The Lives of the Artists. It’s a touchstone for scholars looking to get a peek at life in Michelangelo’s day, and quite fun, too, depending on whose wildly embellished life you’re reading. Ingrid Rowland joins us on the podcast to tell the story of the man behind the men of the Renaissance that we know so well—and, of course, to gossip a bit about Florentine egos, and even a few naughty monkeys. Visit the episode page for a slideshow of Vasari’s work.
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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.
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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!
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The Snow Maiden—not to be confused with the Snow Queen, Snow White, or Frosty the Snow Man—is a popular Slavic folktale about an elderly couple and a miraculous child born from snow. In addition to being a charming story about the passing of seasons, it references a number of folk rituals, from jumping over fires on the summer solstice to mock funerals marking the Yuletide. Philippa Rappoport, a lecturer in Russian culture at George Washington University, explains how folktales and rituals overlap, and reads aloud her own version of this wintry tale. This episode originally aired in 2018.
This is our last episode of the year, and we want to hear from you about what you’d like to hear in 2021! If there are any subjects or guests you would especially like to have on the show, send us an email at podcast@theamericanscholar.org. And, of course, help us find more listeners by rating us on iTunes and telling all your friends.
Go beyond the episode:
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.
The phrase “Russian spies” conjures up all sorts of Cold War thrills: hidden cameras, dastardly poisons, The Americans, John le Carré. But from the 17th to the 19th century, the best Russian spies were pencil-pushing bureaucrats along the long border with China, as Georgetown historian Gregory Afinogenov argues in his new book, Spies and Scholars. These career apparatchiks succeeded at gathering intelligence on the Qing dynasty from their quotidian positions at diplomatic offices, religious missions, and frontier outposts, though they never seemed to get much credit for their work. The irony is that while the intelligence they shared bought Russia greater prestige among European powers, these encounters with European ideals of intellectualism also radically changed what kind of “intelligence” was considered worthwhile.
Go beyond the episode:
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.
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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!
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The most unusual brains are not the largest, nor the ones that can remember the most digits of the number pi. What fascinates Helen Thomson—a neuroscientist by training, a journalist by trade—are the brains that see auras, feel another’s pain, or play music around the clock. In her new book, Unthinkable, she travels the globe to find out what life is like for these people who perceive a completely different world than she does. How does a man who believes he’s a tiger live in a human community? How can a father who believes that he’s dead go to dinner with his kids? What’s it like to be lost in your own living room? Thomson joins us on the podcast with answers that might teach you something about your own noggin. This episode originally aired in 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
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!
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John Baldessari is one of America's best-known conceptual artists, noted for pieces that pushed the boundaries of art, language, and the idea of the image. His 1971 work, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, is perhaps his most famous; it was executed long-distance, for the cost of a postage stamp. Sierra Bellows, who wrote about the artist for our Winter 2021 issue, joins us on the podcast to discuss this seminal work as “an emblem of the Covid era”—particularly poignant given that Baldessari died in January 2020, just before the pandemic began.
Go beyond the episode:
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.
A few years ago, Witold Rybczynski, one of The American Scholar's frequent contributors, happened to be coming to town for—of all things—a chair symposium. Not really having considered the chair as more than a functional object, we arranged to meet up at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to track down some classics of global chairmaking. And, of course, to sit in them.
Go beyond the episode:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
When disaffected teens in East Berlin first heard the Sex Pistols on British military radio in 1977, they couldn’t have known that those radio waves would spark a revolution. In the DDR, or East Germany, everyday life was obsessively planned and oppressively boring. To be punk was to be an individual, someone who wasn’t having any of the state’s rules. That didn’t exactly endear punks to the Stasi, the DDR’s dreaded secret police. Punks lost their jobs and families, were spied on for years by their own friends, had their homes searched and trashed by the police, and were even thrown in prison for dissidence. But every time the state cracked down, the punks only fanned the flames of resistance, ultimately firing up a nationwide, mainstream protest movement. American writer, translator, and former Berlin DJ Tim Mohr joins us on the podcast to tell the story of how punk rock brought down the Wall. This episode originally aired 29 years to the day after it came tumbling down, November 9, 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
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!
Music featured from Namenlos (“Alptraum”) and Schleim Keim (“Kriege machen menschen”). Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
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About 50 books are known to exist in the world that are allegedly bound in human skin—and it’s possible that there are many more. Believe it or not, these dark books were not made by Nazis, serial killers, or occultists, nor were they churned out in a nightmare factory during the French Revolution. No, they were made mostly by doctors in the 19th century. How and why such books came to be is the subject of Dark Archives, by rare-books specialist and UCLA medical librarian Megan Rosenbloom. She’s one of the founders of the Anthropodermic Book Project, whose team has used a simple protein test called peptide mass fingerprinting to confirm that, as of October 2020, 18 books were bound in human skin. What sort of person would do this? How did they get away with it, and what does this ghoulish practice tell us about the clinical gaze? Megan Rosenbloom joins us on the podcast this week to discuss the history of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the evolution of medical ethics and consent, and the controversial question of what we do now with the very human remains of this grim legacy.
Go beyond the episode:
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! Music featured from Master Toad (“Dreadful Mansion”) and Dead End Canada (“Witch Hunt”), courtesy of the Free Music Archive. Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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