Hosted by The American Scholar · 🇺🇸 US · EN · 343 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
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. A podcast from The American Scholar magazine. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The American Scholar hosts Smarty Pants, a society show with 343 episodes published.
It’s Pollinator Week, and the bugs need us more than ever. Not just bees: butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, midges, hummingbirds … Around 90 percent of the world's flowering plants and 75 percent of our major fo
Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole scenes from Star Trek? If so, then good news: it might have taken a few broken e
Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground, the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two cofounders of the Weather Underground, a militant, radical leftist group of the 1970s that used tactics like the after-hours bombings
Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting t
No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acqu
“Medieval psychology” might sound nearly a millennium out of date, irrelevant to modern science, with its reassurances of cognitive data and peer-reviewed studies. But we often say that Shakespeare’s 400-year old plays c
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, Webst
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 a
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 no
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 g
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 behavior
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 M
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, airplan
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 o
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 Forag
Boxy Moskvitch and Lada cars, pastel-green concrete tiles, derelict playgrounds, intermittent hot water: these were the markers of Izidora Angel’s childhood in 1980s Sofia. “Banana-Yellow Trabants,” her essay for our Aut
From 1968 through the early 1980s, thousands of fires raged through the Bronx. The precise number is unknown and it’s uncertain who was responsible for setting them. But at the time, most fingers pointed to the working-c
“Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man,” Eric McHenry writes in our Summer issue. Mattison had found the tale in the writings of folklorist Alan Loma
For the past few decades, American democracy has crystallized around the central importance of voting: making an informed decision about a candidate or a referendum, and expressing it at the ballot box. The marketplace o
Language is always changing, but these days it seems to be moving at warp speed. Whether it's the shift from 😂 to 💀 or the rise of “brain rot,” internet slang is taking over, and if you want to keep up with what's cool
Bill Ayers
Board Chairman · Catholic Charities of Long Island
1 appearance on this show
Jamie Loftus
Emmy-nominated comedy writer, NYT bestselling author, Webby-winning host of the podcast The Bechdel Cast
1 appearance on this show
Kate Davis
North America Field Marketing Manager · Azimuth
1 appearance on this show
Stefanos Geroulanos
on "The Invention of Prehistory"
1 appearance on this show
Gabrielle Cerberville
the Chaotic Forager
1 appearance on this show
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Oxford
1 appearance on this show
Adam Aleksic
the Etymology Nerd · unclear
1 appearance on this show
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Smarty Pants is hosted by The American Scholar. The show is categorised under society (culture) and has published 343 episodes.
Smarty Pants has published 343 episodes.
Smarty Pants regularly covers society, culture. It sits in the society category, with a culture focus.
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