Listening ideas for 29 March 2011

Mahabharata Podcast
The Kauravas React
Episode 50 - Sanjay returns to Hastinapur with messages and intelligence from the Pandava camp. The king's charioteer delivers this information before the royal assembly, while Dhrarastra, Duryodhana, Bhisma and Karna argue over the significance of these threats.
(review, feed)

EconTalk
Vincent Reinhart on Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the Financial Crisis
Vincent Reinhart of the American Enterprise Institute talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the government interventions and non-interventions into financial markets in 2008. Conventional wisdom holds that the failure to intervene in the collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated the crisis. Reinhart argues that the key event occurred months earlier when the government engineered a shotgun marriage of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan Chase by guaranteeing billion of Bear's assets and sending a signal to creditors that risky lending might come without a cost. Reinhart argues that there is a wider menu of choices available to policy makers than simply rescue or no rescue, and that it is important to take action before the crisis comes to a head.
(review, feed)

Witness
Bangladesh independence
It is 40 years since a brutal crackdown by Pakistani troops marked the beginning of the war of independence in Bangladesh. Meghna Guhathakurta lost her father to 'Operation Searchlight'
(review, feed)

Inspired Minds
Gregor Zubicky – Artistic Manager of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Gregor Zubicky was an internationally renowned oboe soloist and principal cor-anglais with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra until medical problems with a hand forced a change in his career path. Today he is artistic director of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. This week Gregor Zubicky talks to Breandáin O’Shea about this career change, establishing a chamber music festival and the challenges he faces in his new position within an orchestra.
(review, feed)

Lyrics Undercover
Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
A wistful song written in Aspen, reflecting the humbling landscape, is the topic of this week’s Lyrics Undercover. “Landside” first appeared on Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1975 album.
(review, feed)

TED Talks
Don't insist on English! - Patricia Ryan
At TEDxDubai, longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question: Is the world's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? (For instance: what if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?) It's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.
(review, feed)

Hans Kundnani about Germany's left after the war

The flag ship of the New Books Network is of course the podcast New Books in History. Marshall Poe interviews authors of newly published, interesting, history books (feed). He has been doing it for three years and there is a wonderful wealth of subjects to choose from. One of them is the modern history of Germany.

A very particular and not often described (at least not in English) part of the history of Germany is the kind of intellectual struggle with the Nazi past that took place in West-Germany. Especially the more left-leaning generation after the war had an intense confrontation with its parents' and teachers' past. On NBiH Marshall Poe interviews journalist Hans Kundnani about his book Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia UP, 2010).

Kundnani (who grew up in Britain and is the son of a Dutch woman and an Indian man) investigated the new left in West-Germany - he calls it the Federal Republic. He describes how they began to view almost the entire previous generation as 'fascists' and therefore politically bankrupt and began to heavily theorize about right politics. Many of them seriously radicalized, but not all of them ended up as RAF (Rote Armee Faktion) terrorists. Notably Joschka Fischer made it to German foreign minister, for the Green Party. Kundnani is a very captive guest on the show and wonderfully effectively explains the intricacies of the leftist intellectual landscape of West-Germany in the sixties and seventies.

More New Books in History:
Ottoman Age of Exploration
The mysteries of whites and of mass,
A Soviet Memoir,
This I accomplish,
Not your idea of World War II.