Stephanie Bastek

Washington, D.C., United States

Senior Editor at The American Scholar

Host at Smarty Pants

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Articles

Once in a Lifetime

2 days ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

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.
Family Values - The American Scholar

2 weeks ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

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.
Lingua Obscura - The American Scholar

1 month ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin.
The Shipping News

1 month ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

In 1978, a Swedish shipbuilder began construction on two new barges, never anticipating that the journey of these vessels would come to exemplify enormous changes in international law and the global economy. In his new book, Empty Vessel, Harvard historian Ian Kumekawa follows the ships’ journey from the docks of Stockholm to off-shore oil rigs in Scotland, across the North Sea to West Germany, to deployment in the Falklands War.
Coming Home - The American Scholar

2 months ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

In his award-winning 2003 graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson depicted his teenage love and fall from faith in rural Wisconsin. Now he returns to the story of his life with Ginseng Roots, which focuses on a minor detail that Blankets omitted: namely, 10 summers he spent as a boy weeding and harvesting American ginseng for a dollar an hour.
Muscle Memory - The American Scholar

2 months ago | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

We take our muscles for granted: every time we step or stand—or even fall asleep!—we are experiencing a complex system of muscles moving in concert. And yet our notion of strength is still bogged down in stereotypes and preconceptions, some of them holdovers from 2,000 years In our Spring 2025 issue, Michael Joseph Gross wrote about how the ancient Greeks perceived strength—and muscles themselves—entirely differently from us.
The Most Famous Unknown Artist

Mar 28, 2025 | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

Yoko Ono is arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan, and easily the most maligned. She’s spoken of (falsely) as the woman who broke up the Beatles—not the woman who co-wrote “Imagine.” She’s known as a woman who can’t sing—not as a woman who used years of classical music training to subvert norms on more than a dozen experimental albums.
Something New in the West

Feb 28, 2025 | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

I am deeply skeptical of lists of “must-read” classics or “greatest” whatever books, because inevitably we all have different criteria. But every so often I get to a famous book late—whether it’s Anna Karenina, Ulysses, or Beloved—and think, what took me so long?
Family/History - The American Scholar

Feb 14, 2025 | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

Since the publication of King: A Biography in 1970, the historian David Levering Lewis has been chronicling the lives of Black Americans in award-winning volumes that tell the American story from an African-American perspective.
The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Jan 31, 2025 | theamericanscholar.org | Stephanie Bastek

Vikings and valkyries have captivated our imaginations for centuries, with greater and lesser degrees of historical accuracy. But as so often happens, the very people reading Snorri Sturluson or the Sagas of Icelanders today are the ones who were left out of history to begin with—the ordinary people doing the quietly heroic work of farming, midwifing, blacksmithing, and any number of difficult daily tasks.