Call It Macaroni

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.

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 food crops rely on pollinators, and they’re dying. Nowhere is insect decline more intimately entwined with our own than with honeybees, 2.7 million colonies of which are hauled around the country to pollinate American crops—most often, California almond trees. Since 2012, Jennie Durant has been studying the social and environmental drivers of bee decline, and her new book, Bitter Honey, combines her research with dozens of interviews with beekeepers, conservationists, scientists, and farmers.There’s no single answer to what’s killing the bees—pesticides, monoculture crops, overwork, parasites, viruses, competition for decreasing forage, the list goes on, and climate change exacerbates all of it—but that also means there are many ways we can still save them.Jennie Durant is a writer, researcher, and author whose work explores why bees and other pollinators are declining, and what it will take to build a more just and sustainable food system.Go beyond the episode:Jennie Durant’s Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save ThemIt’s not too late to celebrate Pollinator Week!Learn to identify some of the 4,000-odd bee species in North AmericaSave the Beltsville Bee Lab!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.

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 eyeglasses and shoves in high school, but geek culture has finally triumphed. Dragons are cool, Star Wars has never had more fans, and everyone is geeking out over the latest sci-fi release on Netflix. How did this happen? And how have the changing demographics of geekdom affected it, for better or worse? Lifelong nerd and critic A. D. Jameson, whose geek cred is stronger than the Force itself, joins us to figure it out. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:A. D. Jameson’s I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek CultureRead A. D. Jameson and Justin Roman’s article on sexism in gaming, “If Magic: The Gathering Cares About Women, Why Can’t They Hire Any?”For more on how franchises have changed Hollywood’s structure, check out Stephen Metcalf’s article, “How Superheroes Made Movies Expendable”If you’re looking for an escape this holiday weekend, please binge watch Marvel’s Jessica Jones  (reading a book would be fine, too)Listen to the queer history of comics in our second ever podcast episode, “Superheroes Are So Gay!”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.

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 of government buildings—including the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon—to protest the Vietnam War and racial injustice. “When I was just 3 years old, I learned to recognize plainclothes police officers and undercover agents in a crowd,” Dohrn writes, “It was a bit like playing a game—a grown-up version of dress-up or make believe—that only my family was good at or knew all the rules.” By the time Dohrn was born in 1977, his parents had been hiding from the FBI for close to a decade, working cash jobs from San Francisco to Harlem using assumed names and forged papers. Their decision to have a family while on the run is just one of the tangled contradictions that Dohrn writes about his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which is both a family memoir and a social history of a forgotten chapter of American activism. An acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a professor at Northwestern University and director of the MFA in Writing for Screen and Stage at Northwestern University. He is the creator of the narrative podcast Mother Country Radicals and the rock protest musical Revolution(s).Go beyond the episode:Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary UndergroundListen to Mother Country RadicalsIn 2022, we interviewed another member of the underground: Laura Kaplan, a member of the Jane collective that provided abortions before Roe v. WadeTune 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.