Best Stephanie Bastek Podcasts (2025)

1
Lingua Obscura 34:31

9d ago34:31

34:31

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin. But by 1786, the British judge and philologist Sir Willia…

1
The Shipping News 25:01

24d ago25:01

25:01

In 1978, a Swedish shipbuilder began construction on two new barges, never anticipating that the journey of these vessels would come to exemplify enormous changes in international law and the global economy. In his new book, Empty Vessel, Harvard historian Ian Kumekawa follows the ships’ journey from the docks of Stockholm to offshore oil rigs in S…

1
Coming Home 24:53

1M ago24:53

24:53

In his award-winning 2003 graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson depicted his teenage love and his fall from faith in rural Wisconsin. Now he returns to the story of his life with Ginseng Roots, which focuses on a minor detail that Blankets omitted: namely, 10 summers he spent as a boy weeding and harvesting American ginseng for a dollar an hour. T…

1
Muscle Memory 27:30

2M ago27:30

27:30

We take our muscles for granted: every time we step or stand—or even fall asleep!—we are experiencing a complex system of muscles moving in concert. And yet our notion of strength is still bogged down in stereotypes and preconceptions, some of them holdovers from 2,000 years ago. In our Spring 2025 issue, Michael Joseph Gross wrote about how the an…

1
The Most Famous Unknown Artist 27:37

2M ago27:37

27:37

Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan, and easily the most maligned. She’s spoken of (falsely) as the woman who broke up the Beatles—not the woman who co-wrote “Imagine.” She’s known as a woman who can’t sing—not as a woman who used years of classical music training to subvert norms on more than a dozen experimental …

1
The Root Cause 30:19

3M ago30:19

30:19

The Irish Potato Famine, which began in 1845, looms large not only in the imagination of that country, but also here in the United States, where so many Irish migrants arrived in desperation. Phytophthora infestans caused blight across Europe—but only in Ireland did crop failures result in devastation so vast that the period is known in that countr…

1
Something New in the West 31:18

3M ago31:18

31:18

Lists of canonical works of fiction should inspire skepticism—we all bring our own notions of quality to the books we read. But every so often, we encounter an acknowledged classic that so captures our imagination as to make us wonder why we didn’t come to it earlier. Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek, for example, recently read Erich Maria Remarq…

1
Family/History 26:04

4M ago26:04

26:04

Since the publication of King: A Biography in 1970, the historian David Levering Lewis has been chronicling the lives of Black Americans in award-winning volumes that tell the American story from an African-American perspective. Now, for the first time, Lewis turns his attention to his own family history in a new book,The Stained Glass Window, insp…

1
The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday 30:51

4M ago30:51

30:51

Vikings and Valkyries have captivated our imaginations for centuries, with greater and lesser degrees of historical accuracy. But as so often happens, the very people reading Snorri Sturluson or the Sagas of Icelanders today are the ones who were left out of history to begin with—the ordinary people doing the quietly heroic work of farming, midwifi…

1
Keepers of the Old Ways 28:41

5M ago28:41

28:41

Pasta thin as thread, a mirror believed to show your true self, a history passed down for 27 generations of the same family—these may sound like elements of fairy tale, but they exist in our very own modern world. In his new book, Custodians of Wonder, BBC reporter Eliot Stein tells the stories of the people keeping traditions like these alive, acr…

1
Kinship and Contradictions 28:37

6M ago28:37

28:37

Identity can be difficult enough to navigate without bureaucratic interference. For Native people, the question of identity is mired in more than a century of federal intrusion in the form of tribal rolls, blood quantum, and boarding schools—not to mention genocide. And yet, the number of people who identify as Native has increased by 85 percent in…

1
Overconsumed 24:45

6M ago24:45

24:45

In his previous book, Junkyard Planet, journalist Adam Minter went around the world to see what happened to American recyclables such as cardboard, shredded cars, and Christmas lights around the world as they became new things. In Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, Minter looks at what happens to all the things that get resold and r…

1
Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming 25:03

7M ago25:03

25:03

It's the summer after graduation, and Munir and his friends G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid for an idyllic summer picking grapes in the French countryside—because, as Munir writes in the sixth edict of his “decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital”: “What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something …

1
American Horror Story 29:16

7M ago29:16

29:16

Americans can’t look away from horror stories, whether it’s slasher films on the big screen, true crime on the TV screen, or viral videos on the small screens of our phones. And in a lot of ways, as the historian Jeremy Dauber argues, American history is one horror story after another—from the terror the Puritans felt and wrought in the dark of New…

1
The Writing on the Wall 41:20

8M ago41:20

41:20

Henry David Thoreau is known for Walden Pond, his writings on solitude and nature, and his staunch, even strident, abolitionism. He is not known for his pencils. But it’s his pencils, writes the historian Augustine Sedgewick in our Autumn issue, that have been overlooked by scholars for so many years, along with one particularly damning detail that…

1
This Woman’s Work 25:47

8M ago25:47

25:47

In 1748, Lord Chesterfield told his son not to expect much from women: they “are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never knew in my life one who had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together.” In 1739, an anonymous pamp…

1
Queen of the Night 29:12

9M ago29:12

29:12

We’re often reminded of the splendors of the night sky—lunar eclipses, blood moons, meteors, stars—but what of the nighttime splendors of the earth? In her Autumn 2024 cover story for The American Scholar, nature writer Leigh Ann Henion keeps her eyes closer to the ground, on the night-blooming tobacco at a North Carolina farm. As these white flowe…

1
A Toothsome Tale 27:17

9M ago27:17

27:17

A tooth is not simply a tooth, as zoologist Bill Schutt writes in his new book, Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans. Teeth first showed up among vertebrates some 500 million years ago, and ever since, they’ve had much to do with the survival of many species. There are teeth that sharpen themselves with every snap (as with dog…

1
A Rebel to Remember 42:15

9M ago42:15

42:15

On August 22 1831, Nat Turner led a group of enslaved people in a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of more than a hundred people, Black and white, in Virginia’s Southampton County, near the border with North Carolina. Though the conflict only lasted a few days, Nat himself evaded capture for two months, until he surrendered on October 30. Befo…

1
Going for Gold 34:01

10M ago34:01

34:01

At this year’s Olympics, the men’s gymnastics team made it onto the podium for the first time since 2008, winning bronze thanks to stunning overall performances and a perfect routine from Stephen Nederoscik, the Pommel Horse Guy. Team USA’s stars have, for many years now, been on the women’s team, with Simone Biles the most decorated American gymna…

1
Paradise Reclaimed 26:41

10M ago26:41

26:41

Who defines paradise, and who gets to live in its verdant incarnation on Earth? This is the question animating Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, which ranges across the history of the English landscape, from John Milton’s writing of Paradise Lost to Laing’s own restoration of a walled garden. Alighting on the heartbreaking pastorals…

1
Bathing Badasses 27:14

11M ago27:14

27:14

Synchronized, scientific, ornamental, fancy, pretty: so many adjectives have been attached over the years to performative swimming, especially when done by women. Now known at the highest level as “artistic swimming,” it was for decades one of the few athletic activities women could pursue, albeit in uncomfortable, baggy, and not exactly aerodynami…

1
Turning the World to Powder 35:41

11M ago35:41

35:41

Our lives are filled with dust: on our desks, under our couches, and in the air we breathe. If we’re very unlucky—like the residents of Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico—it includes uranium blowing off heaps of mining waste. Or the carbon particles carried along by the wood smoke of forest fires. Or microplastics rubbing off car brakes and tires as we scre…

1
#292: Indiana Absurd 27:32

1y ago27:32

27:32

The late Budi Darma, one of Indonesia’s most beloved writers, spent a formative chapter of his life far from home, studying at Indiana University in the 1970s. He wrote a series of strikingly lonely short stories that would go on to form the collection People from Bloomington, first published in Indonesian in 1980. A man befriends his estranged fat…

1
Changing the Lens 57:41

1y ago57:41

57:41

Over the course of our miniseries Exploding the Canon, Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek has examined Reed College students’ efforts in 2016–2017 to fundamentally transform a mandatory freshman humanities course. Now, in the final episode, Bastek looks at how much has really changed since that time. The protestors were ostensibly successful—the Hu…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Stephanie Bastek Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

1
Smarty Pants

The American Scholar

1
Lingua Obscura 34:31

1
The Shipping News 25:01

1
Coming Home 24:53

1
Muscle Memory 27:30

1
The Most Famous Unknown Artist 27:37

1
The Root Cause 30:19

1
Something New in the West 31:18

1
Family/History 26:04

1
The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday 30:51

1
Keepers of the Old Ways 28:41

1
Kinship and Contradictions 28:37

1
Overconsumed 24:45

1
Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming 25:03

1
American Horror Story 29:16

1
The Writing on the Wall 41:20

1
This Woman’s Work 25:47

1
Queen of the Night 29:12

1
A Toothsome Tale 27:17

1
A Rebel to Remember 42:15

1
Going for Gold 34:01

1
Paradise Reclaimed 26:41

1
Bathing Badasses 27:14

1
Turning the World to Powder 35:41

1
#292: Indiana Absurd 27:32

1
Changing the Lens 57:41