For Peat’s Sake

Castles are strange buildings that bring together a lot of contradictory ideas. They are military, built to withstand siege and enable violence. They are romantic, sparkling across the marquees of children’s movies and chivalric tales of love and princesses. And perhaps above all, they are symbols of power and money, because moving that many rocks requires paying (or exploiting) a lot of people. We haven’t built castles out of stone for some time now, but their heyday wasn’t as far back as many people might think, depending on the meaning of the word castle. Novelist and historian Dan Jones offers a capacious definition in his new book, Castles: A Fortified History of the World, which takes in Viking ring forts and Islamic qasrs, Great Walls and chateaus, all in equal measure. But even when citadels crumble, their memory lingers in the stories we tell, or even in whatever we build atop their ruins—and sometimes these castles were only ever in the air.Dan Jones is the author of Powers and Thrones, among several other nonfiction ooks, as well as the fictional Essex Dogs trilogy. He is the host of the podcast This is History: A Dynasty to Die For and has produced, written, and presented dozens of TV shows, including the popular Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles.Go beyond the episode:Dan Jones’s Castles: A Fortified History of the WorldHis Essex Dogs trilogy features quite the castle siege Read Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies in translation or in the illuminated originalHorace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, often called the first Gothic novel, was inspired by a bad night’s sleep at his own castle, Strawberry Hill HouseHaven’t had your fill of castles? Visit one of these!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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For millennia, the darkest doorways on the spookiest of nights have been haunted by one figure: woman. Whether in the form of a fanged and cloaked vampire, a clawed fury, or a baby-slaying witch, wicked women have frightened and titillated us in equal measure. Eleanor Johnson’s provocative new book, Monstrous Bitch, follows these demonic archetypes through more than 4,000 years of human history to identify their source: the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia. Wearing different guises, she appears in the plays of Euripides and in the Bible, the manuals of witch-hunters and the poems of Keats, Freudian texts and Hollywood films—always loudmouthed, hypersexual, and infanticidal. Johnson's history finds in the figure of the Monstrous Bitch both a tool of the patriarchy and an agitator who contests its power, especially when she takes to the silver screen.Eleanor Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980) along with a number of scholarly monographs about the Middle Ages. Go beyond the episode:Eleanor Johnson’s Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women Read an excerpt hereCheck out the Letterboxd list of all the movies discussed in the bookTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bogs exist in the liminal space between water and land, haunted by will-o’-the-wisps and home to carnivorous plants, equally ready to suck in unsuspecting wanderers or disgorge eerily preserved ancient artifacts—or bodies. Long relegated to the purview of horror films or dismissed as wastelands, bogs have been sites of historical resistance and refuge in the past while quietly resisting the greatest threat to humanity in the present: climate change. Bogs sequester a third of the world's soil carbon while only covering a measly three percent of the Earth’s surface, but their reach is under even more threat due to peat harvesting and palm oil plantations. The ecologist Merritt Turetsky has spent decades studying the peaty places of the world, untangling sphagnum moss and dissecting cores from the boreal forests of Canada to the jungles of Borneo. Her new book, Bogland, is both a love song to the lands of peat and a plea for preservation. “Neither alive nor dead, suspended between present and past, peat is one of the strongest and most resilient resources on our planet,” she writes. “And yet, it is easily destroyed by human hands.”Merritt Turetsky is a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she runs the very boggy Ecosystem Analysis LabGo beyond the episode:Merritt Turetsky’s Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects LifeCheck out the boggy beauty of Tierra del FuegoPeruse the Faddan More Psalter text (discovered in a bog)Behold the Hjortspring Boat (also discovered in a bog)And read about nine noteworthy bog bodiesGet mired in fictional boglands:Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, obviously, including its finest adaptationGraham Swift’s WaterlandJordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the FoxPhillip Pullman’s La Belle SauvageKasi Lemon’s Eve’s BayouPaul Maslanski’s Sugar HillRob Reiner’s The Princess BrideWerner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of GodJack Arnold’s Creature from the Black LagoonTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Though the line between the living and the dead might seem at first obvious, the medical state of brain death invites complex moral questions, as bioethicist Carl Elliott writes in our Autumn issue. Organ transplantation regularly occurs in brain-dead individuals, but why stop there? Why not, as Willard Gaylin asked in 1974, keep brain-dead subjects—which Gaylin terms “neomorts”—on life support in specialized “bioemporiums” for use in medical training or drug trials? Though one’s first reaction might be a visceral “yuck,” this commodification of the body is simply an unvarnished version of what many “organ procurement organizations” regularly do in disguising their gruesome work with sanitized language. Revisiting Gaylin’s proposal, Elliott ventures deep into the world of tissue harvesting, cultural psychology experiments, and even etymology to question our assumptions about the degradation and altruism, donation and commodity, spectacle and science.Carl Elliott teaches philosophy and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.Go beyond the episode:Read Carl Elliott’s essay “Welcome to the Bioemporium” And its inspiration: Willard Gaylin’s “Harvesting the Dead” from 1974For a real tangent, check out work by the founder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue TaxidermistsTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For a country with one of the lowest crime rates in the world, Japan has an unusual cultural export: the yakuza, members of transnational crime syndicates that can trace their origins to the Tokugawa shogunate of the early 1600s. “At one time or another, the yakuza have penetrated almost every industry in Japan,” writes Andrew Rankin, “from fish markets to geisha agencies, pachinko parlors, garbage collecting, sumo wrestling, speedboat racing, property development, and pornography.” These gangland figures get their English-language due in his new book, Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld. Despite the violence (and finger-chopping) that made them such meaty fodder for folk myths and the film industry, the yakuza are equally known for tales of chivalry and codes of honor even as they are increasingly targeted by the government, which has just as often collaborated with them. As Rankin writes, “It is not inconceivable that the organizations that ruled the Japanese underworld for the last few centuries will recede and vanish from sight altogether. But it would probably be rash to write them off just yet.” Andrew Rankin studied and worked in Tokyo for 20 years before earning a doctorate in Japanese literature from Cambridge University. He is the author of Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide and Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait.Some of our host’s favorite yakuza films include:Pale Flower (1964)—a moody noir following a yakuza member recently released from prison who must navigate both a new balance of power in the underworld and a reckless new love with a gambling problem—all while wearing incredible suitsTokyo Drifter (1966)—a stylish, technicolor dream of a yakuza member set loose after his boss closes up shop and must outrun his own assassin through the countrysideBlind Woman’s Curse (1970)—Meiko Kaji (of Lady Snowblood fame) stars as the leader of a yakuza clan in this psychedelic film that memorably deploys dragon tattoos in everything from the fight choreography to the credit sequenceFireworks (1997)—a police officer stressed by a sick wife, a dead child, and a paralyzed partner starts to tumble into the underworld himself when borrowing from a yakuza loan shark leads him to rob a bankGiri/Haji (2019)—this British miniseries follows a Tokyo detective to London on the trail of his brother, whose alleged murder of a yakuza member’s nephew triggers the threat of a turf war; mesmerizing, impressionistic, and darkly funnyTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Susan Stryker’s new book, Changing Gender, is as chameleonic as the scholar herself, combining as it does trans history, cultural theory, memoir, linguistics, gossip, anthropology, art criticism, and even an unforgettable analysis of the children’s song “Yankee Doodle.” The word gender originated in the domain of grammar, before becoming interlinked with sex in the 20th century, as the story goes. But Stryker’s romp through the historical record shows that as far back as the 17th century, English-speakers were playing with the concept. Far from being a simple linguistic category, gender sneaks in all sorts of assumptions that we make in the background of our everyday lives—and that, Stryker contends, is what makes it so threatening to the pundits and politicians who want to uphold the status quo and criminalize trans people. “Trans issues impinge directly upon the topics of how we collectively decide in the first place what’s materially possible, and therefore potentially real and empirically true,” she writes. “Untangling the mess of where gender came from has the potential to shift the ground of the culture wars if it allows us to understand the issues at stake differently.”Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies, beginning with her 1994 academic article / performance art piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” She’s written histories of trans people in America, edited volumes on transgender studies, and directed a film about a Compton cafeteria riot that predated the Stonewall rebellion by three years. Stryker retired from the University of Arizona as Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies in 2020, and currently holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University.Go beyond the episode:Susan Stryker’s Changing GenderWatch her documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria and her short film Christine in the Cutting RoomRead her 1994 article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix”Read James Anderson of Hermiston’s 1792 argument in favor of a gender-neutral pronounOr the 1857 short story “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman”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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Summon an image of an American home: Odds are there’s a green grass lawn in front of it. Was this what Walt Whitman sang of in Leaves of Grass? Or was it the native grassland of the prairies, now disappearing under the onslaught of Poa pratensis, Kentucky bluegrass? In Christopher Kondrich’s new collection of poems, Tread Upon, a blade of grass is the beginning of a book-length sequence about the devaluation of the living world, from BP’s invention of the concept of the carbon footprint to the tiny bodies of bats exploding near wind turbines, from the coal ash belched into the Cape Fear River to voiceless Western pond turtles searching for water in a drought. “We belittle the grass when we think it grows / everywhere. It doesn’t. It grows here and here and here,” Kondrich writes. “Even one blade is a place.”Christopher Kondrich is the author of the previous collections Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland.Go beyond the episode:Christopher Kondrich’s Tread UponWatch Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964)Read selections from the collection: “There are empty spaces we make …”“Floodwaters carry coal ash into the Cape Fear River …”“I side with myself. I touch my face …”“We belittle the grass when we think it grows …”“The fantasy of chaining myself to a redwood …”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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amanda L. Andrei’s parents—he Romanian, she Filipina—met in Bucharest as two free spirits in the 1970s and then moved to the United States. Growing up in Virginia, Andrei didn’t speak Romanian, but came to the language—and translation—in adulthood. “When I am translating a Romanian text with my dad, I feel as if I am in rehearsal,” she writes. “My father becomes my scene partner, volleying the words back and forth until we find the ones that satisfy us.” When she views a French performance of a Romanian play that they translated, she reconsiders the relationships that led to that moment: her father’s with her mother, his homeland, and his languages; hers with translation, theater, and familial diaspora. “Speaking a language, falling in love, leaving a home, applying for citizenship, all could go down thousands of paths,” she writes in our Summer issue, “but somehow, only one version of a life exists.” Andrei joins us this week on Smarty Pants to discuss her essay, “Found in Translation,” and her ever-evolving relationship with language—and her father.Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic based in Los Angeles.Go beyond the episode:Amanda L. Andrei’s “Found in Translation”Explore her plays, both original and in translationPhotographs from a stage reading of Oana Hodade’s play Scene din viața familei StuckThe American Literary Translators Association offers resources and events for literary translators of all genresTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In her 25 years as a music journalist, Jessica Hopper has profiled the doyennes of modern rock and pop music: Björk, Kacey Musgraves, St. Vincent, Liz Phair, Robyn, and many more. Her reviews run the gamut from the latest Nicki Minaj album and the “mobile shopping mall that is the Vans Warped Tour” to the only album by D.C.’s first all-women punk band, released three decades after they broke up. The new second edition of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic expands on the 2015 one. That the provocative (and mostly accurate) title still works six years later points out that rock criticism has even fewer women in it than rock music does. Hopper joins us on the podcast to discuss her writing, from her beginnings as a local Chicago critic to her expansive oral histories of Hole and the women who transformed Rolling Stone in the 1970s. This episode originally aired in 2021.Go beyond the episode:Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock CriticRead “Building a Mystery,” her oral history of Lilith Fair, and her reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, 50 years onListen to her eclectic playlist of music that came out of ChicagoHopper hosted Season 2 of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast, looking at artistic legacies of the likes of The Freeze and Cat PowerTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The English country house has been on the brink of ruination since at least the start of World War I—or perhaps the first chug of the Industrial Revolution—or was it the end of serfdom …? Propping up this dying, decadent institution has been a favored pastime of preservationists, architecture buffs, and earls for about as long as the institution has been around. In his new book, Noble Ambitions, historian Adrian Tinniswood peels back the wallpaper to show how these ancestral piles survived both World War II and the sunset of the British Empire—and in some ways, are more relevant than they ever were. This episode originally aired in 2021.Go beyond the episode:Adrian Tinniswood’s Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War IIFor the completionist, his previous book: The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939Revisit the famed 1974 Victoria & Albert exhibition “The Destruction of the Country House,” or go visit Agecroft Hall and Gardens in Richmond, Virginia, one of several country homes dismantled and reassembled on this side of the Atlantic. In England? Check out Sudbury Hall, which gets a shout out in the episodeThe first bestselling nonfiction book about the country house? Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country HouseRead Sam Knight’s essay about the National Trust’s recent report on colonialism and slavery: “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History”If you haven’t yet, you simply must watch Downtown AbbeyTune 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.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! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.