Back in America

Hey everyone, Stan Berteloot here, your host of the Back in America podcast. After a long two-year break, we’re back with fresh, insightful episodes exploring American culture, values, and identity through the eyes of an expatriate.I’ve been busy working with amazing companies like NeuTigers, Pontosense, and Nytro Marketing, and staying active with Share My Meals, fighting food

This episode was originally published on December 17, 2020 In this episode, I interview three crew members of the EPIX / BBC docuseries Enslaved: The Lost History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. While 2020 has been a year of intense examination of racism in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Enslaved takes a deep dive at the historical realities of the Middle Passage. S

Back in America is a podcast exploring America’s culture, values, and identity. This conversation was recorded live on September 17. You can watch the unedited version on our Youtube channel. Listen to this episode to learn more about the release of the Pentagon report on UFOs to Congress. The importance of cosmos exploration. The chances of finding extraterrestrial life in our l

If the particular cannot be repeated, it remains forever lost; and this is why there can be no final closure to mourning. There can only be, alongside of mourning,​ learning to love new particulars ––Louise Fradenburg In this week’s installment of “Poetism,” we’d like to ask about how words, poems, songs, and other kinds of art objects help bring life to a world. And

The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. These lines, from the opening pages of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, emphasize

Across Northern Europe, so-called “bog people” have often been discovered shuffling around in the peat. While no one is quite certain where these quasi-mummified bodies come from––some date as recently as the 1940s––they have posed a strange mystery for countless poets and artists. This week, Back in America’s Poetism team takes a look at one of Seamus Heaney’s bog-

Elegy Who would I show it to In this short one-line poem, W.S. Merwin condenses the anguish of loss, of being alive, and of the limitations of languages into a neat little package. Why write in the absence of finality? And what happens when mortality catches up with us? In this installment of Poetism, Podcast Editor Josh Wagner takes to the studio to ask about the honesty of writin

She listen to a little of that D’Angelo music, some love’s melody, sophisticated-type rap, which she say sounds more like real music, like intelligent music, than some of that other music, then she cuts the radio off ––Gayl Jones, The Healing Like the narrator in Gayl Jones’ The Healing, this week’s installment of Poetism focuses on and around “black music,” that is

Why are we so blind, why do we see so little, when there is much around us to see? So asks philosopher Alva Noë in Strange Tools, an exploration of how art objects contain, persuade, envelop, and direct our attention. What happens when we love a song, poem, or a moment in a day? How do these works of art direct and misdirect our attention? What––physically, emotionally, actual

Happy July! While Stan and the usual Back in America podcast are on a hiatus this summer, Podcast Editor Josh Wagner will be hosting a new series entitled Poetism, tracing the foundations of and influences behind American poetry and music. Each week, Josh will invite a guest on the air to talk about an unusual pairing of a poem and song––seeing how they overlap and converse wit