The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons' Radio

Show for June 9, 2013: Gary Greenberg on our Changing View of Mental Illness

The latest edition of the DSM – the diagnostic manual of psychiatry – is hot off the presses, and it once again redraws the map of mental malfunction. Hoarding disorder and caffeine withdrawal are in, Asperger’s is out. Critics like psychotherapist Gary Greenberg say there’s a reason the DSM is a palimpsest: despite its quasi-scientific airs, it has little to do with any clear understanding of mental illness and a lot to do with changing societal attitudes, politics and money. Gary and I discussed his new book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry.

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 May 26, 2013. Jon Mooallem on Animals in the Wild and in Our Minds.

New Yorker and New York Times contributor Jon Mooallem says our efforts to save endangered species depend in large part on the tales we tell about them. Jon traces the history of wildlife in the American imagination and offers his own stories of three imperiled species (bear, butterfly and bird) and the people who fight for them in his new book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. Among the many topics we discussed: Tom Jefferson and the woolly mammoth, Teddy Bear vs. Billy Possum, conservationists and nature fakers, teaching whooping cranes to migrate, and the fate of polar bears. Also, music from Black Prairie’s new album Wild Ones, inspired by Jon’s book.

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 May 19, 2013. Songcatcher Ian Bell.

When not laboring at his his day job or raising a family – and sometimes even when so engaged – Ian Bell is likely to be bodying forth a new song or three. “When ideas come, they come,” he says, “and you don’t question how or why, you just scramble to get it down on something quick.” He may not question how or why, but I did. Joining Ian in his studio for conversation and music, I asked about his passion for rendering real-life stories in song and about his own story: growing up on the working-class fringes of London dreaming of America, then chasing his own version of the American dream in California.

Show for May 12, 2013. The Real Vocal String Quartet (Rebroadcast).

From 2011, our interview/house-concert with the women of the Real Vocal String Quartet. More info here.

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.

 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.

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…”)

Show for Dec 2, 2012: Yael Kohen on Women in Comedy

Of the many fields in which gender equality has been a long time coming, comedy might not seem as important as, say, high political office or corporate captaincy or astronaut-hood. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power and centrality of humor in modern-day America. The fact that comedy – especially stand-up – was until recently considered mostly a guy’s game and the speed with which funny women have closed the gap are matters worth pondering. Why the disparity in the first place? What changed, and why does it matter? I spoke to Yael Kohen, author of the recent oral history We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy.

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 Nov 25, 2012. Your Brain on Music (Rerun).

An old fave makes its return: our 2007 jam with music producer/neuroscientist Dan Levitin.

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 Nov 18, 2012. Geoffrey Nunberg and Ascent of the A-Word.

Oh sure I could trot out all sorts of cheap double entendres. I could describe the linguist Geoff Nunberg as one of our most penetrating critics. I could say his book Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years opens a rear window on the last century of changing social norms, and that it’s a bravura feat of bottom-up cultural history. But people would think I’m being flip, when the praise is sincere. “The essay is at its best,” Geoff told me, “when you’re noodling over some really trivial thing and in the course of your thinking are led to all sorts of interesting insights.” So: Montaigne on friendship, Thoreau on walking, Chesterton on a piece of chalk, Barthes on steak and french fries, and Nunberg on “asshole.” Geoff and I talked about the word as insult and syndrome (“assholism”), its surprisingly recent emergence, its role in public life and its linkage to American notions of populism, authenticity and therapeutic self-awareness. This is the uncensored version of the original on-air broadcast, which may have set a record for bleepage on public radio.

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 Nov. 11, 2012: How to Predict an Election—Polling Aggregators Sam Wang and Drew Linzer

Nate Silver isn’t the only forecaster to project the results of last Tuesday’s presidential election with preternatural accuracy. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium and Drew Linzer of Votamatic both hit the bullseye, too, and they explained to me why it’s not really so preternatural after all (hint: statistics works). We talked about their methods, why so many pundits and political partisans missed the boat, and whether it’s bedtime for bloviators.

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 Nov 4, 2011. Don Lattin on East-West Spirituality, Early Psychedelia and the Recovery Movement.

The last time I had journalist and author Don Lattin on the show, we discussed his book The Harvard Psychedelic Club, about Timothy Leary & Co. This time, we talked about a previous generation of consciousness raisers. Don’s new book, Distilled Spirits: Getting Drunk, Then Sober with a Famous Writer, A Forgotten Philosopher and a Hopeless Drunk, tells the intersecting stories of Aldous Huxley, spiritual voyager and Doors of Perception author; his compatriate Gerald Heard, a soi-disant mystic and early acid head; and Bill Wilson, friend of Heard and founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book is also a memoir of Don’s own psychedelic experiences, his drug and alcohol addiction and AA-assisted recovery.

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 Oct. 28, 2012. From Animals to Us: David Quammen on Zoonotic Disease.

There’s more between humans and our fellow animals than a common ancestry and a common planet. We also share some really gnarly pathogens. Our “infernal, aboriginal connectedness,” as David Quammen puts it, makes humanity a target-rich environment for zoonoses – diseases that spring up in other species and leap to us. In fact, most of our infectious maladies may have gotten their start in animals, and the latest wave of emergent contagions, including HIV, Ebola, SARS, Hantavirus, Lyme disease, avian flu and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) all have non-human beginnings.

David has spent the last few years absorbing the latest research, hanging with scientists and Indiana Jonesing his way through jungles and caves (with respirator and hazmat suit in place of fedora and bomber jacket), in pursuit of zoonotic wisdom. His new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, is simultaneously a serious introduction to the biology and epidemiology of animal-to-human disease, a series of medical adventure stories and a somber warning (he says human actions are responsible for the uptick in spillovers).

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 Oct 21, 2012. Ukulele Hero, Mariachi Magic.

Two new movies pay tribute to musical instruments and/or traditions that haven’t always gotten their due in mainstream USA. In part one, Tad Nakamura, director of Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings. It’s a moving portrait of the musician who’s taken the ukulele—sometimes wrongly dissed as a novelty instrument—to virtuosic heights. In part two, Tom Gustafson, director of Mariachi Gringo, the tale of a young man from the midwest who falls in love with Mexico and devotes himself to mariachi music. Lead actor Shawn Ashmore devoted himself to the music too, going to school on vihuela.

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 Oct. 14, 2012. Astrophysicist Martin Rees.

Martin Rees isn’t just one of the world’s most respected cosmologists (and Britain’s Astronomer Royal), who’s contributed to some of the field’s biggest advances over the last four decades. He’s also an ecumenical thinker with a broad view of the sciences and their limits, our historical moment and the long-range prospects for earth and its inhabitants. We talked about cosmology past and present, the politics of science in the US and Europe, science vs. religion, climate change and the human (or post-human) future.

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 Oct. 7, 2012. Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence (rebroadcast).

I was on hiatus last week, so I replayed this interview from last year: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker discussing his latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that, modern mayhem notwithstanding, human violence has been trending downward for centuries. We discussed whether, how and why people have been getting more peacable.

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 Sept. 30, 2012. Global comedian Shazia Mirza.

British comic Shazia Mirza has been taking her act to places where stand-up comedy is virtually unknown, and the spectacle of a woman cracking jokes on stage is almost revolutionary. Some audiences are ready for it, and some aren’t. We talked about the sometimes surprising reactions she’s gotten in Pakistan, India and back home in England.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Sept 23, 2012. Jazz & Soul Singer-Songwriter Gregory Porter.

Do I have to write a description of this interview? Can I simply say, “just listen”? Since his debut album came out in 2010, Gregory Porter has quickly won a passionate following around the world. It’s easy to see why: there’s so much depth and warmth and poetry in his vocals and compositions. And as our conversation made clear, those qualities come straight from the man himself. So just listen, and don’t miss the end.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Sept 16, 2012. Errol Morris and A Wilderness of Error

Errol Morris and I have talked about his investigative ardor in our previous conversations, and we’ve touched on his decades-long delvings into the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor serving a life sentence for murdering his wife and children. This time we get into the details, working our way through the evidence and Morris’s contention that MacDonald was railroaded. Morris says the investigation was bungled from the beginning (one forensic expert called it a “colossal clusterfuck”) and that MacDonald was the victim of a peremptory narrative that blinded the police, the courts and the public to many of the facts. Errol’s new book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald isn’t just a meticulous anatomy of a murder case, but a sobering reflection on our sometimes wayward truth-finding apparatus and all-too-corruptible justice system.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Sept. 9, 2012. Our Man in Hanoi: Historian Mike Vann.

Down the mean streets of old Hanoi goes Mike Vann, a historian specializing in Vietnam during its nearly 70 years under French rule. Mike has uncovered some wonderfully tawdry tales that reveal a lot about the whole strange business of colonialism, when much of the globe was claimed by a handful of European countries. We discuss sex in the colonial city, the great rat massacre, murder on the Rue Hue, Hanoi in the time of cholera, and some charming French postcards.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Sept 2, 2012. Jim Holt on the Mystery of Existence.

Jim Holt is a rarity: a writer who throws light on some of the most daunting problems in physics, philosophy and math in ways that are impressively knowledgeable, artful and entertaining. He’s outdone himself in his latest book, Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story, which confronts the enigma of existence itself, considered from the perspectives of physics, metaphysics and theology. As Kathryn Schulz wrote in the New York Times, “the book is deep, absorbing, associative, challenging, and makes you laugh, unexpectedly and a lot” – much like my experience talking to Jim in this interview.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Aug 26, 2012. The New Cosmology.

Originally broadcast in Feb 2011, my conversation with theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre on the new, more complex picture of the universe that cosmologists have been sketching out in recent years. Anthony gave some of the clearest explanations I’ve heard of eternal inflation, the multiverse and why the Big Bang might not have been the beginning of everything.

Click the “play” arrow above to listen to the interview, or download the MP3 here.

Show for Aug 19, 2012. Errol Morris Confidential, Pt 2 of 2.

I continue interrogating the interrogator in this second of two wide-ranging conversations with filmmaker/detective/truth-seeker Errol Morris. Among the many subjects discoursed on:

• Whether and how much the past can be recaptured through the art of investigation.
• Errol’s latest book A Wilderness of Error, about the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case.
• How he gets people to spill the beans on camera.
• Errol’s beef with his former PhD adviser, historian of science Thomas Kuhn.
• His next movie (The Fog of War with more fog?).

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Aug 12, 2012. Errol Morris Confidential, Pt 1 of 2.

Errol Morris’s relentless search for answers – philosophical, psychological, forensic – has led to a vast and ever-growing body of work that includes his celebrated documentaries, dozens of short films, weighty essays and cognitive experiments in the NY Times, books, actual criminal investigations and some pretty fetching commercials (example below). The backstories are often as interesting as the finished products, and Errol shared some of them with me in a very illuminating look at his career, his preoccupations and motivations. Topics discussed in this first of two installments include:

• His interest in serial killers and his recent re-investigation of a famous murder case.
• Why he started making movies.
• His early films and stylistic development.
• The many projects that haven’t come to fruition – mostly for financial reasons, but in one instance because of brute force.
• The influence of Werner Herzog and their legendary bet.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 Aug 5, 2012: Filmmaker Eva Soltes on Lou Harrison’s Musical World.

An hour-long interview wasn’t enough to cover but a fraction of Lou Harrison’s many accomplishments, but Eva Soltes and I did our best to hit some of the high points. Her new documentary, Lou Harrison: A World of Music, uses footage she shot during her decades-long friendship with the eminent American composer, musical innovator and political activist, who died in 1982. The film was recently screened as part of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, which Harrison helped found and which is honoring him this year with a performance of his Third Symphony. Details on the concert here. More information on Eva Soltes and Lou Harrison: A World of Music here.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 July 29, 2012. Composer and Musician John Wineglass.

As an Emmy-winning soundtrack composer for TV and film and as a session/backing musician (piano, violin, viola), John Wineglass can write or play just about anything. Gospel, classical, R&B, country, folk, Latin – he can swing it. But it’s his serious concert works he’s most proud of, like his new orchestral piece Someone Else’s Child, premiering at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music on August 4. We discussed the new composition, John’s dual-track musical education – playing classical in a well-known youth orchestra and gospel in church – and his jack-of-all-genres commercial work.

Someone Else’s Child was inspired by the poems of kids in juvenile hall, published in the Beat Within magazine, which presents writing and artwork by incarcerated youths. Check out this 7th Ave Project from 2010 on the Beat Within writing program, including interviews with kids in the hall and instructors Jill Wolfson and Dennis Morton.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 July 22, 2012. The Kitchen Sisters, from Radio Docs to the Concert Hall

Like so many other radiophiles, I was inspired to get into the medium by the work of great independent producers like the Kitchen Sisters—Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson. In fact, this show originates from the same station (KUSP) where Nikki and Davia cut their teeth. They’d left the station 20-some years before I got there, but Nikki was kind enough to give this newb some very helpful starting tips (she turned me on to my first digital editing program, Pro Tools Free). So it was really nice to finally sit down with her and learn about her own radio beginnings. We listened to some of the earliest and still-cool Kitchen Sisters recordings (Rattlesnakes, The Road Ranger and Ernie Morgan, World Champion One-Handed Pool Player) and discussed the latest evolution of their work: The Hidden World of Girls, Stories For Orchestra. Adapted from their Hidden World of Girls radio series, the new orchestral/multimedia production premieres at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music on July 28 and 29. Listening to Nikki talk, you can hear one of the essential ingredients in the Kitchen Sisters’ success: a lot of passion and a lot of heart.

Click the Play arrow at the top of this post to listen to the show, or 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 July 15, 2012. Science Writer Margaret Wertheim On Fringe Physicists.

When it comes to science, we at the 7th Avenue Project usually stick to the professional, institutionally sanctioned variety, even when discussing unorthodox notions and minority opinions. In this episode, though, we ventured further afield, into the alternate reality that Margaret Wertheim calls “outsider physics” and that some people less generously dub “crackpot science.” Margaret says the sheer number of folks who reject much or all of modern physics and persist in spinning out their own DIY theories raises some important questions about our relationship to science these days. We discussed her book, Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything, and also the organization she founded, The Institute For Figuring, “dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and engineering.”

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Show for July 8, 2012: Does Culture Drive Language?

It’s been about 50 years since Noam Chomsky conclusively established that the basic structures of human language are stamped in our brains, not gleaned from experience. Or… maybe he didn’t. Chomsky’s notion of an innate “universal grammar” fashioned by evolution has been hugely influential and has helped fuel the “cognitive revolution,” but there have always been doubters. While several generations of theoretical linguists have been diligently expanding the Chomskian program, another faction says there’s little or no evidence for UG and it’s time to scale back or even scrap the theory. Former innatist Daniel Everett is now part of the opposition. On last week’s show, I aired a 2007 interview with Dan talking about his adventures as a missionary-turned-Amazonian-linguist, and how he lost faith, first in Christianity and then in Chomskianism. This time, a new interview with Dan discussing his latest book, Language: The Cultural Tool. In it, he advances the idea that grammars and other aspects of particular languages are shaped by culture.

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Show for July 1, 2012. Iconoclast: linguist Daniel Everett.

Dan Everett is twice a heretic, having strayed from the path of Christian missionary to become a linguist, and then breaking with the dominant branch of theoretical linguistics led by Noam Chomsky. I did a report on Dan for NPR in 2007, but I never broadcast this longer interview, from which that piece was taken. I decided to air it now because Dan will be on the show next week, talking about his new book on the origins of language. The earlier interview provides the fascinating back story: how he went from rock n’ roller to missionary to Amazonian linguist, his years in the rain forest with the isolated Pirahã tribe, their anomalous language, and how he came to doubt Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar.

Click the Play arrow above to listen to the show, or 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 June 24, 2012. Paul Bendix: A Wheelchair Odyssey.

I’ve never much liked the phrase “confined to a wheelchair,” and it certainly doesn’t apply to Paul Bendix in anything more than a physical sense. In his new book of essays, Dance Without Steps, Paul writes about aging, travel, gardening, love, loss and disability with a breadth and clarity that feels liberating. Paul is an old friend, but we’d lost touch, so the release of his book gave us a chance to get reacquainted. We talked about his writing, his life, the random act of violence that left him partially paralyzed at the age of 21, and how he’s adjusted (and is still adjusting) in the four decades since.

In addition to his book, Paul writes regularly in his blog: Range of Motion, A Wheelchair Odyssey.

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Show for June 17, 2012. Jonathan Gottschall on the Storytelling Instinct.

I’ve been nipping at the edges of this subject for a while, and in a recent show I mentioned that I was seeking someone who could tackle it head-on. Well, I found him: Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Jonathan and I discussed the central place of narrative not only in art and entertainment, but in our deep understanding of the world and ourselves. With us humans, it’s story time all the time, or at least much of the time. Jonathan and I talked about storytelling’s pervasive influence, possible evolutionary explanations, its hazards and if/how we ever escape its constraints.

Bonus points to listeners who caught Jonathan’s passing reference (“ignorant armies clash by night”) to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. Substitute the notion of “story” for “love” in the last stanza, and the poem nicely captures some of the Jonathan’s thoughts on the psychological necessity of storytelling.

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Show for June 10, 2012. Crossing the Political Divide with Meghan McCain and Michael Ian Black.

When I spoke last April to comedian Michael Ian Black about his recent memoir, he mentioned his other new book, America, You Sexy Bitch, co-written with Meghan McCain. Michael’s a self-described East-Coast liberal. Meghan’s an avowed red-till-she’s-dead Republican (though an iconoclastic one) and the daughter of John McCain. Though hardly on the same ideological team, the two decry the hyper-partisan bloodsport that passes for political discourse these days in the USA. So they conducted a little experiment in fence-mending, crossing the country together in an RV in search of common ground. I talked to Meghan and Michael about their travels.

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Show for May 13, 2012: Documentary Filmmaker Joshua Dylan Mellars

Joshua Mellars has a thing for world travel and world music, and he combines both passions in his latest pair of films. Play Like a Lion: The Legacy of Maestro Ali Akbar Khan is a portrait of the late Indian classical virtuoso and his son Alam Khan, who’s carrying on the family musical tradition. Heaven’s Mirror: A Portuguese Voyage is about Portuguese Fado music, and features some of the top contemporary fadistas (fado singers), including Katia Guerreiro, Ana Moura, Camané, and Carlos do Carmo. Joshua joined me to discuss the films and the music that inspired them.

Play Like a Lion is screening at the Santa Cruz Film Festival.

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Show for May 6, 2012. George Dyson: The Dawn of the Digital Universe

Historian George Dyson tells the story of the Electronic Computer Project. Led by the brilliant polymath John Von Neumann in the 1940’s and 50’s, the project laid the groundwork for much of modern computing. In doing so, Dyson says, it birthed a new, digital ecosystem, a world of self-reproducing, ever-evolving numbers that may be said to have a life of their own.

We talked about that and about Dyson’s own very personal connection to the story. He’s the son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson and grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Von Neumann and crew did their pioneering work. He’s also an earth-loving outdoorsman, and has a foot in both the natural and technological worlds. 

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