The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons' Radio

Show for May 5, 2013. Jill Wolfson: Justice, Retribution, High School and Young Adult Fiction.

Jill Wolfson was last on the show discussing the Beat Within writing program for incarcerated teens. You can hear my interviews with Jill, her colleague Dennis Morton and some of kids they work with in Juvenile Hall in this program from 2010. Jill has also written extensively on juvenile justice, crime and retribution as a journalist and non-fiction author, and those themes figure prominently in her latest young adult novel, Furious. Inspired by Greek myth and the tragedies of Aeschylus, it’s about three high school girls who become modern incarnations of the avenging Furies. We talked about the challenges of writing for the “YA” audience, the wages of revenge, the indelible impress of high school and Jill’s own teen years.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for April 7, 2013. Leonard Susskind: Plumbing the Universe.

Last time I spoke to the theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, it was about his long-running debate with Stephen Hawking on the nature of information and black holes, as retold in the book The Black Hole War. You can listen to that conversation here. This time, we talked about Lenny himself: his humble beginnings as a plumber’s son in the Bronx, becoming a physicist, his thought process, his best ideas and some of his duds. Also, why he loves to explain physics to non-experts – a talent he put to good use in this interview, describing some of the initial insights that led to string theory and shedding light on the mind-stretching holographic principle. Overall, a very interesting glimpse into a highly original mind.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for March 24, 2013. Neurologist Robert Burton on The Limits of Neuroscience.

I don’t know whether Bob Burton’s car sports this bumper sticker…

… but it ought to. Bob has spent years exploring our shaky reliance on what he calls “involuntary mental sensations”: the internal perceptions by which we come to “know” our own minds. He says these inner representations, offered up by the brain itself, are partial at best, delusory at worst. And that’s a problem not only for ordinary seekers of self-knowledge but also for an ambitious group of neuroscientists attempting to explain consciousness and the human psyche, while beholden to many of the same, suspect intuitions that bamboozle the rest of us. Of course, there’s also that matter of the yawning gulf separating objective explanation and subjective experience, and whether it’s bridgeable at all. 

Bob raises these and other problems in his latest book, A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell us About Ourselves. We had a long and wide-ranging tête-à-tête on the difficulties that loom when science shifts from studying the brain to mapping the mind, and the deep and dubious assumptions built into categories such as conscious and unconscious, self and other, choice and non-choice.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for March 17, 2013. Neurologist Robert Burton on Self-Certainty.

As a preamble to next week’s interview with neurologist and neuroskeptic Robert Burton, I re-aired this earlier conversation with Bob from 2008. In it, we discussed his book On Being Certain: Believing You’re Right Even When You’re Wrong, about our brain’s often unreliable sense of self-certainty. Bob says our inner sensation of knowing or not knowing something, of familiarity or unfamiliarity – so critical to perception, judgment and decisionmaking – is based on neural mechanisms that can go badly awry and, even when things are working OK, is hardly a dependable arbiter of truth.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for March 10, 2013. Journalist and Ocean Activist David Helvarg

This radio program mostly ignores the large body of water that sits only a short block from our studio. Inexcusable, I know, but it’s not too late to make amends. For a start, I spoke to David Helvarg, marine conservationist and author of The Golden Shore: California’s Love Affair with the Sea. We talked about David’s own love affair with the sea as well as his earlier career as a war correspondent in Central America. Also, a history of beachgoing, the popularization of surfing, the future of the California coastline and a defense of the Poriferan lifestyle.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for March 3, 2013. Gretel Ehrlich: Facing the Wave

As the second anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami nears, the writer Gretel Ehrlich considers what nature wrought and how humans responded. She made three trips to Japan’s ravaged northeast coast in the months following the quake, trying to fathom the magnitude of what happened. Her new book Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami is part post-disaster travelogue, part meditation on death, life and impermanence.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Feb 24, 2013. The New Peer Gynt.

150 years after its creation, Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt remains sui generis and uncategorizable: folktale and fever dream, existential inquiry and social satire, straddling romanticism and modernism. Its locales include Norwegian mountain villages, a troll castle, the Moroccan coast and a Cairo lunatic asylum. A new adaptation mounted by Kimberly Jannarone at UC Santa Cruz turns Gynt into a kind of living gallery, with different scenes staged simultaneously in multiple venues and the audience wandering among them. Kimberly spoke to me about the history of the play, her own Gynt-mania (including a trip to Gynt’s Norwegian stomping grounds) and the play’s enduring popularity. Joining us was actor Nancy Carlin, who plays Peer Gynt’s mother Åse in the production.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Feb 17, 2013. Hear, Hear: Auditory Neuroscientist and Sound Savant Seth Horowitz.

Sound as vibration, sound as sensation, sound as means of manipulation. Sound as a state of mind and as a weapon. Seth Horowitz considers sonic phenomena from these and other angles in his new book The Universal Sense. And he’s a good one to do it: as a neuroscientist specializing in auditory phenomena, sound recordist, musician and aural explorer, not to mention the guy who proved that tadpoles can hear, Seth is a well-travelled guide to the sonic world. He and I listened to a sampling of audio curiosities while contemplating questions such as:

• What’s faster, our ears or our eyes?
• What’s it like to be a bat?
• What’s it like to be Evelyn Glennie?
• How do we build a picture of the world from auditory clues?
• Why are low sounds ominous?
• Can sounds kill?

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Feb 10, 2013. Civil rights leader and educator Bob Moses.

In the early 1960’s Bob Moses risked life and limb as a civil rights organizer in the deep south. In recent decades he’s taken up a new cause, promoting math instruction for educationally disadvantaged kids. He believes quality education is a fundamental right, and math skills are a key to economic opportunity. Bob is soft-spoken and not one to play up his accomplishments, but his story is extraordinary, as you’ll hear in this conversation.

 
Bob Moses in Mississippi in the 1960’s; and now.

 Learn more about the Algebra Project, the educational non-profit Bob Moses founded.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Feb 3, 2013. George Dyson: Turing’s Cathedral and the Dawn of the Digital Universe 

Originally broadcast in Feb, 2012, historian George Dyson (and son of physicist Freeman Dyson) tells the story of the project that laid the groundwork for much of modern computing. More here.

Show for Jan 27, 2013. Life and Death in Angola Penitentiary.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, is in many ways a world apart: a former slave plantation bigger in area than Manhattan, nestled in a crook of the Mississippi, where prisoners still work the fields overseen by guards on horseback. Many live out their days there and are buried on the grounds. It’s a world Marianne Fisher-Giorlando counts herself lucky to be a part of. She’s a criminologist who’s spent a good share of her life studying and volunteering in Angola. She’s become an authority on its workings, culture and history, and despite the fear and loathing the place may evoke, her experiences there have been surprisingly upbeat.

I met Marianne through filmmaker/musicologist Ben Harbert, when we did a show on his documentary film Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians. After hearing her story, I decided to share it with listeners.

Marianne Fisher-Giorlando in the Angola Museum.

Angola on Animal Planet (go figure). Some good glimpses here, despite the sensational treatment.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Jan 20, 2013. David Thomson—In and Out of Love with the Movies.

The critic David Thomson is so alert to the seductions and subterfuges of film it’s hard to imagine he was ever a sucker for cinema. Of course, we were all young and innocent once. Now he’s uneasily aware of what movie-watching entails: the voyeurism, the passivity, the ideologies concealed in images, characters and plots  (“advertisements for things that don’t exist”). He charts his – and our – increasingly distanced relationship with film in his latest book, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies. David and I talked about how moviegoing has changed over the decades, what the medium has done to us, and our new infatuation with other, smaller screens. Along the way we discussed immigrant filmmakers and American mythmaking, Citizen Kane, California light and Germanic shadow, film noir, masculinity and movies, Hitchcock and Tarantino.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Jan 13, 2013. Human Evolution Marches On?

People love to trip out on the subject of future human evolution, usually conjuring some form of twinkly transcendence (a seraphic super-race) or dystopian degeneracy (machine-dependent dullards enfeebled by our own technology). But those stories owe more to wishful thinking or baseless anxiety than to actual evolutionary theory. I decided to forgo the fantasizing and explore the science itself: the forces that shaped our species and that are still at work, however subtly, today. Evolutionary biologist Barry Sinervo joined me to explain the fundamentals and offer some educated guesses on what comes next. 

Barry has been on the 7th Avenue Project twice before, discussing lizard evolution and game theory here and a major new study of climate-related extinctions here.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)

Show for Jan 6, 2013. Filmmaker Ben Harbert on Louisiana prison music.

In 1933, folklorists John and Alan Lomax went inside Louisiana’s Angola prison and made a series of celebrated recordings and musical discoveries. Eighty years later, filmmaker and musicologist Ben Harbert followed in the Lomax’s footsteps, visiting Angola and other Louisiana penitentiaries to document the state of prison music today. Ben and I discussed his new film Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians, which screens in Santa Cruz this week (more details here). As we listened to performances from the film, Ben talked about the place of music in inmates’ lives and the ethics and challenges of shooting a doc in the joint. Also featured: Tony Seeger, musicologist (and nephew of Pete, Mike and Peggy Seeger), who advised Ben on the film.

You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)