Episode 515: Clint Smith
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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)

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