“Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man,” Eric McHenry writes in our Summer issue. Mattison had found the tale in the writings of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose source identified a powerful Mississippi levee boss as the murderer of an SPCA officer. Not finding any existing ballads about the crime, Mattison wrote the eerily beautiful track “Charlie Idaho,” which caught the attention of McHenry, who specializes in poring over old newspapers for musical breadcrumbs about the blues. He quickly discovered that Mattison wasn’t the first person to put the story to song—and “Charlie Idaho” masked the name of the Mercy Man’s true killer.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Eric McHenry’s investigation, “Who Killed the Mercy Man?”
• Listen to Mike Mattison’s ballad “Charlie Idaho”

Sampled in the episode:

• Sampson Pittman’s “I’ve Been Down in the Circle Before”
• Ed Lewis’s “Levee Camp Holler” and his commentary, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959
• Alger “Texas” Alexander’s “Levee Camp Moan Blues”

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.

For the past few decades, American democracy has crystallized around the central importance of voting: making an informed decision about a candidate or a referendum, and expressing it at the ballot box. The marketplace of ideas—enshrined in our constitutional right to free speech—will ensure that the best arguments, and thus the best candidates, win the election. If that idea sounds a little tired, you’ve probably been paying attention. In her new book, Don’t Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano draws on everything from Aristotle to cutting-edge neuroscience to illuminate the surprising truth underlying our political behavior. Spoiler: we are far less rational than the marketplaces of ideas would suggest, whether we’re voting or doing something else. But, as Stein Lubrano contends, that’s not entirely a bad thing—and understanding the psychology behind our beliefs might just lead to better actions.

Go beyond the episode:

• Sarah Stein Lubrano’s Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
• Follow her on Instagram or Substack, where she writes articles like “In the Apocalypse, the Person Who Saves You is Your Neighbor”
• Read “The Perils of Social Atrophy”

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.

Language is always changing, but these days it seems to be moving at warp speed. Whether it's the shift from 😂 to 💀 or the rise of “brain rot,” internet slang is taking over, and if you want to keep up with what's cool (another slang word, from another century), you need to be online. But if you aren’t keen on spending hours scrolling through TikTok, etymology nerd Adam Aleksic is more than happy to explain how social media is making new words go viral. In his new book, Algospeak, Aleksic expands on the ways the algorithm is shifting speech from the perspective of both a linguist and an insider: he scrutinizes influencer accents, memes, in-group slang, censorship evasion, subtweeting, and attention-grabbing morphology. And though these newfangled words and phrases may astonish you, what's most surprising is how fundamentally old the story of language change really is.

Go beyond the episode:

• Adam Aleksic's Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
• Follow @EtymologyNerd on Instagram or TikTok
• Listen to our interviews with Gretchen McCulloch on how the internet changed language and Don Kulick on how a language dies
• For two different takes on how the kids these days are handling social media, watch Adolescence (fiction) and/or Social Studies (documentary)

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.