Hardcore History: Stalingrad

The most innovative and creative podcast about history is Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. Carlin tries to tell history with a passion. He breathes life into the data, evokes the emotions, emphasizes the experience the contemporaries must have gone through and he also engages in questions of historiography. And sometimes he tries to do this all at once. When such enormous ambitions cannot always be met, one should not be overly surprised. One of my fascinations is to hear him try.

The current huge project is to capture the horrors of the Ostfront in World War II. So far Carlin has produced three massive podcast episodes on the subject, having spent four hours of audio and he still is not done. At the end of the last, the third chapter (Ghosts of the Ostfront III), he announced there will be a fourth. I wonder whether it should be as long and I wonder whether there could not be more and shorter chapters, if it has to be this long. There has to be some aspect at work of a researcher who takes precedent over the creative producer and pushes all the material in. Nevertheless, in style with the subject, as huge as the product is, as hard as it is to swallow, it is one impressive set of podcasts.

Carlin turns the Ostfront into Dante's Inferno with circle upon circle of ever increasing suffering. With all the evils, depravities and eternally prolonged suffering one can possibly imagine. In a harrowing retelling with poignant quotes from letters, diaries and other primary sources Carlin puts our faces with our mp3 players in the mud, the ice, the pain, the deprivation. Not only does he seem to want to make us experience and never forget the sheer scale of the history, but also drive the point home how this is so much larger than the other battles and wars we know of. The abyss of the Ostfront is larger than anything, apart, maybe, from hell itself.

More Hardcore History:
Ghosts of the Ostfront,
Dan Carlin about the East Front,
Slavery,
Gwynne Dyer Interview,
Interview with Victor Davis Hanson.

Bennie Jolink - KRO's voor een nacht (zomer versie)

Het programma KRO's voor 1 nacht gaat in de zomer door, zonder vaste interviewer Marc Stakenburg en zonder de openingsformule waarbij de gast moet antwoorden op tevoren geprogrammeerde tegenstellingen. Wat overblijft is een gewoon interviewprogramma met elke week niet alleen een nieuwe gast, maar ook een nieuwe interviewer.

Martijn Grimmius interviewde Bennie Jolink, de zanger van Normaal. Net zoals andere rockers, is ook Jolink inmiddels van middelbare leeftijd en gezegend met kleinkinderen. Als er al een tegenstelling aan de orde komt in dit programma dan is dat de rode draad van het gesprek: in hoeverre is Jolink de rauwe pop-artiest en in hoeverre is hij de lieve opa. Het antwoord hoeft niet te verbazen: hij is het natuurlijk allebei. En omdat het imago van de rocker op de voorgrond staat, probeert Jolink vooral de opa te benadrukken.

De opa in Jolink blijkt een opa als alle anderen, die op de kleinkinderen past op de vaste dag in de week en die het liever ziet dat de kids buiten spelen dan achter TV of computer zitten. Het komt er net zo authentiek uit als de popartiest. Deze is eveneens een gewone jongen met een degelijke mening. Daarin is de muziek uit zijn tijd veel beter dan de hedendaagse. Eigenlijk deugt er sinds de jaren tchtig weinig meer van. Man en paard worden genoemd. En als het over Oerend Hard gaat: eigenlijk speelt hij dat liever niet meer.

Meer KRO's voor 1 nacht:
Henk Spaan,
Maarten Ducrot,
Candy Dulfer,
Olga Zuiderhoek en Paul Rosenmoller,
Gijs Wanders en Adjiedj Bakas.

Human Impact on the Environment - lectures 9 and 10

I have directed you to UCSD's podcast BILD 18 before. Make sure you download all lectures, in order to secure them, before they are taken off line, which is to be expected by the end of the summer semester. While doing that, you can skip lecture 9 because it is empty.

Immediately after that, lecture 10 is highly recommended. This lecture is not as planned according to the BILD 18 course website about Ozone Depletion, but rather about Species Extinction (see lecture 11). The greatest merit of this lecture is that it relates less to the issue of species extinction and more to the problems of making this and similar problems of the environment known to the public and be perceived as to the problems as they are according to the scientific consensus. The lecturer tells of his own experiences of how he is publicly attacked and taken into doubt so effectively that the wide public thinks his and similar messages are not hard facts as they according to the real specialists are.

Justice - LSE podcast

On the LSE Public Lectures and Events was a very interesting lecture by Amartya Sen about The Idea of Justice. I have been more familiar with tackling Justice from the perspective of Law. Sen seems to come from political philosophies. Still, the approaches are similar enough.

Yes! A new Ersatz TV edition

My favorite video podcast. Unfortunately only in German, but rumor has it they might be working on an English version.

The last Flavius

For those who master the Dutch language: the Jewish history and culture program of the Joodse Omroep, Flavius has had its last edition, or at least the last that was brought to you by the professional of OVT. It has been a fascinating series and it got a fabulous closing with discussions about books and history. The book of Judges, The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man by Daniel Boyarin, Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész and De reisbeschrijving van Abraham Levie (1719-1723).