Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endured repeated failures—to spread the sakura around the world. But there’s one naturalist in particula...
Mar 18, 2022•21 min
Bacteria made the first sounds on Earth, dinosaurs likely belched and bugled instead of roared, and for millennia, the Earth was largely silent. Why it took so long for communicative sound to emerge—and how it flourished into the coos, croaks, cries, and cacophony of today—is the subject of David George Haskell’s new book, Sounds Wild and Broken . While documenting the sonic marvels of the world, Haskell arrived at the alarming conclusion that we’re in an acoustic crisis. Manmade sounds and beha...
Mar 11, 2022•43 min
On December 16, 1876, a 35-year-old woman named Nancy Ann Harris died in rural Wisconsin of complications from an abortion. Only one other abortion is mentioned in the leather-bound death records of the county where Harris died and Tamara Dean lives, which she writes about in her essay “Safer than Childbirth,” in the Spring 2022 issue of The American Scholar. The more common cause of death, Dean found, was giving birth. With new challenges to safe and legal abortion coming hard and fast in recen...
Mar 04, 2022•22 min
The birth of religion is commonly held to lie far back in human history, with the occasional exception of an angel Moroni or the borderline godhood of a cult leader. But in Accidental Gods, Anna Della Subin documents how a surprising number of 20th-century men (it’s almost always men) found themselves labeled divine, sometimes without their knowledge and nearly always without their consent. Some, like General Douglas MacArthur, were even crowned four different ways, on three separate continents....
Feb 25, 2022•31 min
The North has been a blank, snowy canvas for our best and worst fantasies for thousands of years, home to biting winds, sea unicorns, fearsome Vikings, and even a wintry Atlantis. And it is also home, of course, to Indigenous communities, whose existence and culture could be inconvenient to myths of Aryan purity. Historian Bernd Brunner explores this curiosity cabinet of a region in his new book, Extreme North, translated by Jefferson Chase. Brunner argues that the North was as much invented as ...
Feb 18, 2022•27 min
Antwerp, the other port city on the North Sea, is frequently overshadowed by its Dutch big brother, Amsterdam. But long before the latter was dubbed the “Venice of the North,” Venetians—and Germans, Britons, Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, and others—flocked to Antwerp, the wealthiest European city of the 16th century and a huge beneficiary of the Age of Exploration. Pepper, silver, wool, sugar, salt, books, wine, and diamonds all passed through Antwerp in the complex web of trade spann...
Feb 11, 2022•28 min
It’s hard to imagine an American city without a Chinese restaurant, a pizza parlor or three, and at least one taco joint. But the cooks who originally made American tastebuds salivate at the thought of a good stir-fry or a curry are hardly household names, even though their impact on our cuisine lingers. Mayukh Sen’s new book, Taste Makers , chronicles seven immigrant women, each from a different country, who transformed American cookery but have since faded from memory: Chao Yang Buwei (China),...
Feb 04, 2022•27 min
The third novel from John Darnielle, the creative force behind the band The Mountain Goats, draws on the surprisingly fertile combination of freeway towns, goth teenagers, Le Morte d’Arthur, and Chaucer. Devil House followstrue-crime writer Gage Chandler, who, at the urging of his editor, moves into the newly renovated “Devil House” of Milpitas, California, once an abandoned porn shop and the site of a grisly, unsolved double murder on Halloween in 1986. News clippings about the crime point to d...
Jan 28, 2022•29 min
Learning Chinese is intimidating: four tones, 3,000-odd characters or ideograms to carry on a basic conversation, a completely different orientation of words on the page … oh, and about a dozen languages classified as “Chinese” whose speakers wouldn’t understand one another. Becoming literate in any Chinese language was even more difficult at the turn of the 20th century than it is now. Then, no standard pronunciation system existed to get you started on the road to learning one of them. The sto...
Jan 21, 2022•25 min
Between Hello Kitty, anthropomorphized Disney candlesticks, and the prevalence of doe-eyed sticker-comments on Facebook, it’s safe to say that cuteness has permeated everything. But what makes something “cute,” and how might there be something disquieting going on beneath all the sugar and spice and everything nice? The philosopher Simon May has spent a lot of time thinking about what cuteness has to tell us about the shifting boundaries between ourselves and the outside world, and how it plays ...
Jan 14, 2022•21 min
According to the prevailing logic, America has an anger management problem: it’s counterproductive, destructive, and, unchecked, might lead you to storm the Capitol. But not all anger is made equal, and perhaps the best way to master its uses and abuses is to understand its differences. In her new book, The Case for Rage , University of California philosophy professor Myisha Cherry contends that this misunderstood emotion—wielded successfully in the past by figures like Audre Lorde, Martin Luthe...
Jan 07, 2022•28 min
A few years ago, we ran a special winter episode on the Snow Maiden, an adored figure from Slavic folklore. Today, we travel to Austria for an encounter with the Krampus. Each December, this devil clad in sheepskin and goat horns wanders the Alpine valleys of Bavaria and Tyrol. The Krampus lurks in other parts of Austria, as well—and some of his cousins pop up even farther afield in Eastern Europe—but the specter of this dark Christmas legend is strongest in the mountains. You might have met som...
Dec 17, 2021•19 min
Elizabeth D. Samet teaches English at West Point, where future Army officers learn how not to lose. There, as in any U.S. military setting, everything can be won—and should be won—unequivocally, whether it’s a sports match, an exam, or a war. But what happens when, as Samet writes in our Winter 2022 cover story, “The ambiguities of life are confused with the clarity of sport?” What are the stakes when the ambiguities of war are disguised by the very institutions sending young people to fight, in...
Dec 10, 2021•24 min
Some time ago, the legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and Homo sapiens Charles Foster spent a few weeks in the woods trying to live like a badger, a deer, a swift, an otter, and a fox, hoping to understand animal consciousness. That book, Being a Beast , now finds its unlikely sequel in Being a Human , in which Foster attempts the perhaps more difficult task of reconstructing the human consciousness of millennia ago. He settles on three pivotal turns in our history: the Paleolithic and Neolithic...
Dec 03, 2021•23 min
If you’re a person who has despaired over ever finding a nice 100 percent wool sweater and decided to knit your own, odds are you’ve heard of Clara Parkes. Parkes, who started out in 2000 with a newsletter reviewing yarn, now has six books under her belt, including the New York Times best-selling Knitlandia . Her seventh book, Vanishing Fleece , is a yarn of a different kind—the unlikely story of how she became the proud proprietor of a 676-pound bale of wool and, in the process of transforming ...
Nov 26, 2021•24 min
Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University, searches for plants that may be used to treat life-threatening illnesses. Her lab has discovered compounds—found in chestnuts, blackberries, and a host of other plants—that can help treat antimicrobial resistance by stopping bacteria from communicating with each other, adhering to our tissues, or producing toxins. In her new memoir, The Plant Hunter , Quave discusses how a childhood staph infection and its lifelong complications motivated he...
Nov 19, 2021•27 min
Manuscript scholars have long marveled over the marginalia left in books, particularly handwritten books, and what the different layers of a text tell us about the people who made it. Look beyond the pages—to the bindings, the illustrations, the pages themselves—and a surprising material history reveals itself. Mary Wellesley, a tutor at the British Library, has written an ode to the ordinary people who wrote such manuscripts by hand, illustrated them, bound them, preserved them, and did all of ...
Nov 12, 2021•21 min
In his decades-long career, the writer Paul Auster has turned his hand to poems, essays, plays, novels, translations, screenplays, memoirs—and now biography. Burning Boy explores the life and work of Stephen Crane, whose short time on earth sputtered out at age 28 from tuberculosis. Like his biographer, Crane, too, spanned genres—poetry, novels, short stories, war reporting, and semi-fictional newspaper “sketches”—striking it big in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage , which was widely celebrate...
Nov 05, 2021•29 min
Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel, Practical Magic , is the story of two sisters, Sally and Gillian Owens, who are born into a family of witches. The catch is that their ancestor, Maria Owens, cursed the family, so that any man one of them falls in love with dies an untimely death. It’s a classic fairy tale, and like most fairy tales it didn’t have a sequel—until this year. After going back to the 1960s generation of the family with The Rules of Magic , and all the way back to the 1600s with Magic Less...
Oct 29, 2021•19 min
You may have heard of them before: those pale creatures with suspiciously sharp canines that sleep in coffins during the day, hunt people at night, and occasionally transform into bats. Stories of bloodsucking monsters have haunted humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years—but the modern vampire was arguably born when Enlightenment rationality met Eastern European folklore. That’s Nick Groom’s argument: he’s known as the Prof of Goth, and he makes the case that vampires rose from the grave ...
Oct 22, 2021•20 min
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 newsp...
Oct 15, 2021•21 min
In 2002, literacy was at an all-time low in Egypt, revolution was a few short years away, and Nadia Wassef opened an independent bookstore named Diwan in Cairo. With her sister Hind and her friend Nihal, Wassef built an oasis for lovers of the written word, whether Arabic, English, French, or German. Diwan now has seven locations—and two mobile book trucks—having survived recessions, censorship, misogyny, and political turmoil. Wassef joins the podcast to talk about the story of the store in her...
Oct 08, 2021•25 min
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...
Oct 01, 2021•24 min
In March 2018, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan wrote a provocative essay for the London Review of Books asking, “Does anyone have the right to sex?” Three years later, the essay forms the backbone of a bold new collection that probes the complexity of sex as private and political act, moving beyond the simplicity of yes and no and the hashtags of #girlboss feminism. Srinivasan joins the podcast to discuss the ideas that animate The Right to Sex , whether it’s pornography and freedom, rape...
Sep 24, 2021•29 min
A bear burrowing through the trash bin. Rats on a home invasion spree. Elephants barreling through Indian villages. Caterpillars munching through crops. Once upon a time these offenders would be put on trial and dealt with in a court of law, however ineffectually. Today, conflict management between humans and the natural world is an entire industry that grows with every incursion we make into the wilderness. Mary Roach returns to the podcast to talk about what it was like to be mugged by a macaq...
Sep 17, 2021•23 min
For many of us, our very first book wasn’t one that we read ourselves—it was one read to us, the pages pawed by grubby hands eager to flip back to a favorite illustration. The very best children’s books combine a good story—however simple—with enchanting illustrations that can spark a love for reading, writing, art—or all three. Elizabeth Lilly, the author-illustrator of a new book for children called Let Me Fix You a Plate, joins us on the podcast to talk about the process of inviting the littl...
Sep 10, 2021•18 min
The most groundbreaking ideas in modern physics—the Earth is round, special relativity, the uncertainty principle—were once seen as shocking, impossible, even deviant (recall Galileo’s trial). Even today, wild ideas can be laughed out of a conference, especially if they come from someone perceived as an outsider. Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander, one such self-identified outsider, joins the podcast to talk about his new book, Fear of a Black Universe, and his own experiences ...
Sep 03, 2021•22 min
As of this summer’s Tokyo Games, skateboarding is an Olympic sport—and those of us who didn’t grow up popping ollies and skinning our knees might be wondering how that happened. Originally known as “sidewalk surfing,” skateboarding was invented in midcentury California and Hawaii by surfers looking for something to do when the waves weren’t great. Since the first commercial skateboard was sold in 1962, the sport has ballooned to a billion-dollar industry including magazines, movies, and merchand...
Aug 27, 2021•21 min
Black Beauty, Flicka, Secretariat, National Velvet, Misty of Chincoteague, and all the rest—horse books are a genre unto themselves, occupying an entire shelf (or more, should you add the 112 books in The Saddle Club series) of girls’ bedrooms everywhere. For all of the girls who lived and breathed horses (on the page or in the barn), the infatuation meant something that is difficult—or even embarrassing—to explain outside of the stable. Horse Girls , edited by Halimah Marcus, the executive dire...
Aug 20, 2021•19 min
If you were to distill the story of King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot down to its essence, you might alight on three nouns: Sword Stone Table . That’s the title of a new collection of Arthurian retellings, edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington, that imagines the legends of yore in a London coffee shop, a dystopian Mexico City, Anishinaabe country, and even on Mars. Krishna and Jenn Northington join the podcast to talk about the Arthurs, Merlins, Guineveres, Lancelots, Morgans, and m...
Aug 13, 2021•19 min
