Episode 515: Clint Smith

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2022

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Clint Smith is a poet and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His most recent book is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America and his latest feature is “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” “I've been to a lot of places that carry a history of death and slaughter and murder. I've been on plantations. I've been in execution chambers. I've sat on electric chairs. I've been on death row. But I have never experienced anything like what I experienced walking through the gas chamber in Dachau. I mean, there's reading books about the Holocaust, and then there's that. And that is something that I hope to continue doing for the rest of my life: putting my body where these things happen. Because it completely transforms your understanding of what it was like.” Show notes: @ClintSmithIII clintsmithiii.com Smith on Longform Smith's Atlantic archive 00:00 How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little Brown • 2021) 01:00 "Monuments to the Unthinkable" (Atlantic • Nov 2022) 17:00 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Matthew Desmond • Crown • 2017) 33:00 The Hemingses of Monticello (Annette Gordon-Reed • W.W. Norton • 2009) 34:00 Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing • 2016) 57:00 The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank • 1947) 57:00 Number the Stars (Lois Lowry • Houghton Mifflin • 1989) 1:07:00 "The Stories Tamir Rice Makes Us Remember" (New Yorker • Dec 2015) 1:08:00 Smith's New Yorker archive 1:08:00 "Freddy Adu and the Children of the Beautiful Game" (New Yorker • Mar 2017) 1:09:00 Above Ground (Little Brown • 2023) 1:09:00 Crash Course Black American History Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Longform podcast. I'm Evan Ratliffe, one of the co-hosts of
0:14.0	the show. Co-hosting with me are Max Lensky and Aaron Lamar. Hey guys, good morning.
0:20.4	Great to co-host with you guys. Love to co-host with you guys. Evan, who is on the show this
0:24.0	week. I guess this week was Clint Smith. Clint is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He's an
0:31.5	essayist and journalist. He's also a poet. And last year he published this narrative nonfiction
0:38.8	book called How the Word is Past for which he traveled to different landmarks and locations
0:48.3	around the U.S. and abroad to look at how we as a society publicly remember and memorialize slavery
0:55.8	or fail to memorialize slavery in some cases. That book won a bunch of awards last year as New York
1:01.3	Times best seller. And then for the most recent cover of The Atlantic, he sort of did the same thing
1:06.9	in Germany where he traveled to Germany to examine how the Holocaust is memorialized. There,
1:12.8	it was kind of like an extension of his book almost. So we talked about all of that and we talked
1:19.2	a bit about his soccer writing, which I'm also a very big fan of. You could like put the World Cup
1:24.8	on mute. Listen to this podcast. Just a suggestion. Chances are that Aaron has the World Cup on mute
1:33.2	right now. We make this show with our friends at Vox. Thanks to them.
1:38.8	Now here's Evan with Clint Smith.
1:48.0	Clint, welcome to the show. It's good to be here. Monk I'm fan first time callers, they say.
1:52.8	Hey, I am a long time fan of your work. It's really great to have you on and you have this
1:58.9	this cover story in The Atlantic right now, which I'm very interested to talk about, but I want to
2:04.0	take a very long way around to it. So I want to go all the way back. You're from New Orleans.
2:10.8	New Orleans comes up in your work a good bit. And I want to find out a little bit about how you
2:15.6	ended up in this spot, almost like how you ended up traveling to Germany to write a cover story
2:19.7	for The Atlantic, how we get from here to there. And I wanted to sort of start a little bit just
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Longform, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Longform and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.