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 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 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 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.
Fearless forecasters: Neuroscientist Sam Wang and Political Scientist Drew Linzer
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.
Courtesy of Don Lattin, a TV clip of an early acid experiment and rare footage of new age proto-prophet Gerald Heard.
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 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.
Jeffrey MacDonald as a young army doctor and after three decades in prison.
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.
L to R: “La Mission Civilisatrice”; French Hanoi; colonial humor; Mike Vann at Angkor Wat.
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 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?).
Errol Morris, conducting an interview using his interrotron.
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.
Davia Nelson (L) and Nikki Silva
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…”)
