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Smarty Pants

Tune in every 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 ... Read more

Ranked #1

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#63: Smell Ya Later

#63: Smell Ya Later

Why does New York City smell? Is its smell distinguishable from that of other large cities? Does that smell tell us some... Read more

7 Sep 2018

19mins

Ranked #2

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#113: Getting Physical

#113: Getting Physical

When thinking of the past, one of the hardest things is to imagine what it would have been like to inhabit a physical bo... Read more

22 Nov 2019

22mins

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Ranked #3

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#55: A Whale of a Show

#55: A Whale of a Show

It’s hard to believe that one of the biggest and oldest creatures of the planet is also the most mysterious. But whales ... Read more

29 Jun 2018

24mins

Ranked #4

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#76: Searching for the Spirit of Acid House

#76: Searching for the Spirit of Acid House

In the past 30 years, electronic dance music (or EDM) has gone from underground culture to a global phenomenon. Journali... Read more

1 Feb 2019

19mins

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Ranked #5

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#2: Superheroes Are So Gay!

#2: Superheroes Are So Gay!

What do the X-Men have to do with feminism, and how did the Fantastic Four get caught up in the radical politics of the ... Read more

27 Jun 2016

35mins

Ranked #6

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#87: The Ten Commandments of Bible Translation

#87: The Ten Commandments of Bible Translation

Few people have read the Hebrew Bible all the way through—maybe you memorized a portion for your bar or bat mitzvah, or ... Read more

19 Apr 2019

29mins

Ranked #7

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#3: Reading Lolita in Maximum Security Prison

#3: Reading Lolita in Maximum Security Prison

How do you run a literature course for convicts, and what do a headless chicken and Pinochet have in common? Mikita Brot... Read more

11 Jul 2016

42mins

Ranked #8

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#96: How a Language Dies

#96: How a Language Dies

The tiny village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea is home to an equally tiny language called Tayap. No more than a few hundr... Read more

28 Jun 2019

26mins

Ranked #9

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#52: Lock Her Up

#52: Lock Her Up

There’s a dark chapter in American history that gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained te... Read more

8 Jun 2018

19mins

Ranked #10

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#83: White Like Me

#83: White Like Me

This week, we’re exploring another overlooked angle of antebellum American history: how photography transformed the abol... Read more

22 Mar 2019

23mins

Ranked #11

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#73: Opera 101

#73: Opera 101

Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird … and at the end of the day, who really understands... Read more

30 Nov 2018

47mins

Ranked #12

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#104: Fashion Kills

#104: Fashion Kills

To mark New York Fashion Week, longtime style reporter Dana Thomas is ripping the veil off the industry. Her new book, F... Read more

6 Sep 2019

31mins

Ranked #13

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#91: The Space Between Your Ears

#91: The Space Between Your Ears

The prevailing view on how we think is that we use language: through writing our thoughts down, or debating them with fr... Read more

17 May 2019

24mins

Ranked #14

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#4: Go West, Young Scholar

#4: Go West, Young Scholar

Terry Tempest Williams talks America’s national parks and her new book, “The Hour of Land;” James Conaway explains how t... Read more

25 Jul 2016

38mins

Ranked #15

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#98: You Never Step Into the Same Internet Twice

#98: You Never Step Into the Same Internet Twice

Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you respo... Read more

26 Jul 2019

26mins

Ranked #16

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#108: Live, Laugh, Love Ancient Philosophy

#108: Live, Laugh, Love Ancient Philosophy

Despite the rampant success of books like Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, intellectual circles tend... Read more

11 Oct 2019

25mins

Ranked #17

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#30: Jane Austen and the Making of Desire

#30: Jane Austen and the Making of Desire

This week on the podcast, we’re talking about sublimated desires—and the repressed kind, too. William Deresiewicz expand... Read more

20 Nov 2017

37mins

Ranked #18

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#89: Little Boxes, Big Ideas

#89: Little Boxes, Big Ideas

The mythology of the 1950s American suburb—mom, dad, white picket fence, two-car garage, two-point-five kids—doesn’t ali... Read more

3 May 2019

28mins

Ranked #19

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#75: The Snow Maiden

#75: The Snow Maiden

The Snow Maiden—not to be confused with the Snow Queen, Snow White, or Frosty the Snow Man—is a popular Slavic folktale ... Read more

21 Dec 2018

16mins

Ranked #20

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#45: Voicing a Legend

#45: Voicing a Legend

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent ... Read more

13 Apr 2018

19mins

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