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Smarty Pants

Smarty Pants

Auteur(s): The American Scholar
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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
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  • Michael Douglas Explains It All
    Jul 11 2025

    American men are having a hard time right now. They're behind in school, staying single, earning less, drinking more, and dying younger. They’re also taking out their anger on women online, in the home, and in mass shootings, and taking dubious advice from social media influencers pushing ice baths and raw meat diets. They'd be better off looking to the films of Michael Douglas, argues Jessa Crispin in her new book, What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Douglas’s characters were a mirror for our times, reflecting seismic economic and cultural shifts: “He was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine.” Not that these characters offer a how-to guide today (just as they didn’t a few decades ago). Rather, as Crispin writes, Douglas “embodied the torments and confusions of the modern man, letting the invisible trouble become discernible.” While feminists have spent the past half-century manifesting alternatives, however imperfect or in progress, to previous norms of femininity, men like Douglas have been stuck trying to play the same role as the stage they’d stood on changed. Crispin dares to ask: in a post-Michael Douglas world, of what will the men dream?

    Go beyond the episode:

    • Jessa Crispin’s What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything
    • Listen to our interview with Elizabeth D. Samet
    • ReadPaul Crenshaw’s cover story on masculinity, gun violence, and Pearl Jam


    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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.


    Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed


    Have 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.

    Voir plus Voir moins
    36 min
  • Once in a Lifetime
    Jun 27 2025

    On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of The Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music’s relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.


    Go beyond the episode:

    • Jonathan Gould’s Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
    • Read about the origin of Stop Making Sense—and then watch it, of course
    • Check out the new “Psycho Killer” music video starring Saoirse Ronan, made in honor of the 40th anniversary of the first Talking Heads performance



    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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.


    Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed


    Have 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.

    Voir plus Voir moins
    29 min
  • Family Values
    Jun 13 2025

    In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father's Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson's administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked. “As we know it,” Scholar contributor Augustine Sedgewick writes in his new book, “Father's Day is an unintended consequence of the fractious American politics of race, gender, and class.” Sedgewick's book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, is the story of how such politics ensnarled parental care, and of the men who expanded the domain of fathers across generations of crisis and change, from Aristotle and Henry VIII to Freud and Bob Dylan.


    Go beyond the episode:

    • Augustine Sedgewick’s Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
    • The far right’s signature style is less about dad pants and more about fatherhood: read Sedgewick’s essay “Ku Klux Khaki”
    • “Thoreau’s Pencils,” Sedgwick explores the abolitionist’s relationship with his family—and his family business’s ties to slavery
    • For more on the Moynihan Report and political interventions on parenting, read Melinda Cooper’s Family Values


    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 and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.


    Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed


    Have 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.

    Voir plus Voir moins
    24 min

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