Boxy Moskvitch and Lada cars, pastel-green concrete tiles, derelict playgrounds, intermittent hot water: these were the markers of Izidora Angel’s childhood in 1980s Sofia. “Banana Yellow Trabants,” her essay for our Autumn 2025 issue, takes its name from the Duroplast car that her grandfather, and then her father, Solomon, drove in the 1980s. But bananas show up elsewhere, too: in the myths that young girls would tell each other about the diets of Bulgaria’s famed rhythmic gymnastics team and once, miraculously, on her family’s holiday table. The Angel family's antics suffuse the essay with warmth and humor, but churning beneath the surface is Solomon’s ambition. “He would be the boss, the creative vision and force behind all his future endeavors,” Angel writes, “opening the hottest nightclub in the capital, running five restaurants, renovating city landmarks, building the first manufacturing plant in the country after communism, developing plans to build a whole city.” That city was never built, and Angel lives in Chicago today, sent here alone on a plane more than 20 years ago. She joins us to talk about how her life has been an act of translation.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Izidora Angel’s “Banana Yellow Trabants” in our Autumn 2025 issue, and an essay on translation and her father, “The Alphabet of Supposition”
• For more on Angel’s translation, read this interview from Reading in Translation about her forthcoming translation of She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
• In 2023, the Bulgarian novel Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize—here are more Bulgarian books in translation

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

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.

From 1968 through the early 1980s, thousands of fires raged through the Bronx. The precise number is unknown and it’s uncertain who was responsible for setting them. But at the time, most fingers pointed to the working-class Black and Puerto Rican tenants who lived in the borough. The newspapers said as much, as did the Blaxploitation movies of the late 1970s. Politicians, too: in the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down.” The Bronxites who lived that history, however, have long identified a different culprit, and over the past decade, historians have arrived at a new explanation for the arsons. Bench Ansfield’s new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, is unequivocal: “The hand that torched the Bronx and scores of other cities was that of a landlord impelled by the market and guided by the state.” The story that unfolds is one of fire and a new FIRE economy, insurance and disinvestment, profit and privatization.

Go beyond the episode:

• Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
• Watch Decade of Fire, Vivian Vázquez Irizarry’s 2018 documentary, and Born in Flames (1993) from which Ansfield’s book takes its title
• For a film on the pathologization of public housing, there’s no better place to start than Candyman (1992)
• Across the Hudson, Hoboken was burning, too

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.

“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 (Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity, from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)
• 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.