Anne is a Man! -- Hot Tips

A writer's block for the blog, a blog block as it were, is still bothering me. In the mean time, I am listening to podcasts as usual, which means I owe you a whole lot of reviews. Will I ever get round to them? I wouldn't know, but I can at least give you some quick hot tips.

The Memory Palace - two great new issues since my last review (site, feed)

Introduction to Theory of Literature with Professor Paul H. Fry (Yale) - An English course at Open Yale. (site, feed)

New Books in History - Every interview in this series is worth a recommendation. There were four new chapters I listened to since my last review. Each one of them is worth a mention. Rebecca Manley about the fate of refugees inside the Soviet Union during WW2; Michaela Hoenicke with a study about American views on Nazi Germany before the war and implicitly about her own struggles with German identity; Benjamin Binstock about reconstructing art history by example of the Dutch painter Vermeer; Sarah Ross about female intellectuals in the Renaissance with among others Christin de Pisan, whose City of Women I read some twenty years ago.

the New York Review of Books podcast had a fascinating interview with Andrew O'Hagan about Samuel Johnson. (site)

UChannel Podcast - with a lecture about a new Israel Lobby; Jeremy Ben Ami explains how the main stream, moderate Jews in the US as well as Israel have been excluded from the regular Israel Lobby on Capitol Hill. The alternative is his own J-Street. (site)

Entitled Opinions - with both challenging and thought provoking chapters about Borges, Plato and Machiavelli. (site)

Death with Professor Shelly Kagan (Yale) - a very promising philosophy course in Open Yale. I am still at the first lectures which explore the arguments around the existence of the soul, which means that until this point there is more talk about the essence of human beings and their identity than about their death. (site, feed)