First off, thank you to the many hundreds who have already signed up to receive our podcasts and posts. We’ll be launching throughout the month of July with inaugural episodes of our three shows, so your early enthusiasm is heartening. All of our content will be free for several weeks, after which some of the episodes will beckon from behind a modest paywall. Please consider either our monthly or yearly plan, which you can find by clicking the button below.
To those who are already paid subscribers, your support means everything — and you won’t miss anything. If you happen to owe a friend or family member a belated birthday present, or are simply feeling generous, a Booksmart subscription makes a wonderful gift.
And in case you haven’t seen our About page, here’s more about Booksmart Studios and what you can expect in the coming months and beyond:
Why Are We Here?
When confronted recently with that vexed question, a starkly unphilosophical 7-year-old replied: “We’re not here for any reason. We’re here because we’re here. We evolved from monkeys and that’s why we’re here.” Guess you never heard of sugar-coating, huh kid? Now run along and stare into the void.
Unlike our reportedly pointless species, Booksmart Studios is here for a reason. We, too, have been shaken these past several years in our proverbial house, divided as it is against itself. We, too, are left wondering whether the long arc of a moral America is now breaking on its journey toward justice. And we, too, suspect that our vaunted democratic institutions are crumbling alongside the parchment on which they were built.
But hold that thought! We’re not nearly as nihilistic as, say, a certain 2nd-grader we know. As faithful devotees to the power of words and ideas, we believe that discourse — earnest, truth-seeking and reality-based — is the only path to understanding. What’s our alternative, another bloody civil war? Podcasting may be risky business but at least nobody dies from bayonet wounds. Or did that happen to Joe Rogan?
Mr. Rogan will be just fine, but America, fractured and brittle, may not. Booksmart Studios will lay down its musket and launch this summer with three podcasts — Bully Pulpit, Banished and Lexicon Valley — each with a brilliant, engaging host known for questioning conventional wisdom. Here, in their own words, are brief explanations of their respective shows.
Bob Garfield, former co-host of public radio’s On the Media:
Bully Pulpit will examine politics, society and culture through interviews and commentary, with all of the Bobospherics you’ve come to expect. Plus, it’ll have a catchy jingle and guaranteed there there. In pretty much every medium for 44 years, my work has always been about something beyond the particulars at hand, and has always had a beginning, middle and end. But I don’t much like the label opinion — because opinions are like assholes and good arguments are like ships-in-a-bottle. Not everybody can make one.
Amna Khalid, associate professor in the Department of History at Carleton College:
Persecuting those deemed witches or lepers may be a bygone practice, but banishment is alive and well today. Social death at the hands of Twitter mobs and pressure groups, after all, is far too familiar. In fact, the phenomenon of cancelling is arguably baked into communal living and even central to our origins — where would we be had Adam and Eve not been cast out of Eden? So what can we learn about our present obsession with cancel culture by examining history, and what might it mean for freedom of expression? Banished is about our reassessment of the many people, ideas, objects and even works of art that conflict with modern sensibilities.
John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University:
Under Booksmart Studios, Lexicon Valley will continue its tradition of dissecting this messy, maddening and thoroughly wonderful thing we call language. While retaining the show’s trademark nerdery and eccentricity, I’ll redirect it considerably to take on issues from the current headlines and discuss our weekly reality through the spoken and written word. Longtime listeners will know that I’ve always had a mantra of sorts as host: Everything is happy here in the Valley. No more. From now on, I’ll be stepping outside of that amiability at times to address how language rankles as well as assuages — in other words, all of what language actually is.
We hope you’ll consider supporting Booksmart Studios and our hard-working staff. Joining now will ensure that you don’t miss any of our considerable subscriber-only content, including extra podcast episodes, full transcripts of the shows and an opportunity to engage directly with our esteemed hosts.
So please click the button! In the meantime, we’ll let that 7-year-old know that we actually evolved from apes.
Thank You from Booksmart
It was a few years ago that I scored a triple-Garfield.
I was driving on Chicago’s West 55th Street, in a section where it is named Garfield Boulevard. On the NPR radio, I was listening to Bob Garfield. And he was interviewing Jim Davis, creator of Garfield comic strip.
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Looking forward, I am glad to see that prying myself loose from Slate will be possible without losing "Lexicon Valley" plus-style episodes. At the same time, see my previous comment -- Slate Plus did have a workable model for letting paying bonus customers get premium podcast versions without requiring them to listen on a web page. This was the idea of giving them specialized URLs with membership encoding, which could be plugged in to tools, like iTunes "subscribe to podcast by URL".
And it is interesting to see some odd echo of the history of "Lexicon Valley" -- which listeners from the heyday of McWhorter's cheerful deep expertise may not recall was started by Garfield!
Here's hoping you will make the audio podcasts available through usual channels (for me that still means iTunes, yikes, I know!) -- and including the subscriber-only episodes or versions. Slate Plus and to an extent Patreon were able to do that, by issuing custom URLs for the RSS or feed, with subscriber encoding embedded.