Placebos
This week, we celebrate April Fools' Day with a little medical trickery. First, we learn about Franz Mesmer's questionable 18th-century cures. Next we hear how fooling the brain is sometimes the only way to get accurate scientific results.
(review, feed)
Dan Carlin's Hardcore HistoryDeath Throes of the Republic V
The last great generation of the Roman Republic emerges from the historical mists. The dynamic between Caesar, Cato, Cicero, Crassus and Pompey forms the axis around which the rest of this tale revolves.
(review, feed)
Wise Counsel
Stanislav Grof, MD on Transpersonal Psychology and the Meaning of Psychedelic Experience
Dr. Grof, a psychiatrist, transpersonal theorist and noted researcher of psychedelic experience, first encountered LSD as a young doctor working in Prague when the Sandoz company asked him to see if the compound had any psychiatric utility. Personal and research experience with LSD and its effects (including visual hallucinations, pre-natal and transpersonal memory and expansive, disembodied consciousness) profoundly changed his worldview away from the mainstream mechanistic view to a vision of the universe as essentially conscious.
(review, feed)
Naxos Classical Music Spotlight Podcast
Edward Seckerson about his new choral release
John Rutter talks to Edward Seckerson about how a confirmed agnostic became immersed in a world of churches and choral paeans of praise. He recalls his gentle childhood, his doodlings at an old upright piano which was only there because the previous occupants couldn’t get it out of the door. He reflects on why he has never written a musical when his love of the genre and his ear for a good tune dictated he should. And on that note, what it was like to be a tunesmith at a time when it was so deeply unfashionable to be one.
(review, feed)
Africa Past & Present
Political Change in Africa and the Diaspora
Horace Campbell (African American Studies and Political Science, Syracuse U.) on political change in Africa and the Diaspora. Focus is on the revolution in Libya, popular revolts, war, peace, and neo-liberalism in Africa and beyond. Campbell also shares insights from his new book: Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA.
(review, feed)
