The Caucasus

As usual, Marshall Poe did a fascinating interview at New Books In History and it reminded me of two old university lecture series from Stanford you can still get on iTunes. Guest on the show was Charles King to speak about his book The Ghost of Freedom which attempts to tackle the history of the Caucasus.

Poe lets King explain how intricate and unusual it is to write a history book that focuses on a geographically defined place and a large one at that. Also, the Caucasus is an area with a complicated history torn between many different ethnicities and influenced from three very different imperial or cultural spheres: the Turkish, the Russian and the Persian. Besides, this is not a place we are particularly familiar with and so it is even more difficult to find our way in the labyrinth. Here is where the Stanford course lends a helping hand.

Martin Lewis offered two series of enhanced podcasts which also made a stop at the Caucasus. Geography of World Cultures (feed) and Global Geopolitics (feed) which were taught in 2007 and 2008 at Stanford. With the help of maps (added to the enhanced podcast) Lewis dove into the spread of cultures, languages and religions in this mountain range. On top of that, he offered a passage to the geopolitical tensions of the area, and there are not a few. I add the Caucasus map from the series about World Cultures (part of lecture 6).

Marshall Poe picks out three dualities from the Caucasus and lets Charles King elaborate upon them. These are relationships between locals and one of the big neighbors and King describes how they are close and strained of late. Those are the relationships of the Georgians with the Russians, of the Armenians with the Turks and of Azerbaijan with Iran.

More NBIH:
The genocide and the trial,
Nation and Culture,
Three New Books In History,
The fourth part of the world,
How the Soviet system imploded.

More Martin Lewis:
Guantanamo Bay,
Africa,
Descriptive and prescriptive mapping,
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures.

Water - Paradigms

A podcast that was recommended to me and nearly got lost, because the reporter's mail ended up in my spam inbox was the podcast Paradigms. (feed)

Baruch Zeichner produces a weekly thematic program in subjects of ecology and environmentalism that is offered as a podcast as well as broadcast on a Vermont radio station, WBKM. Apart from interviews and discussions, Baruch intersperses the segments with his own thoughts and with befitting music. Among the latest programs were issues about Nuclear Energy, pros and cons, social justice, native Americans a lot of music and more.

An issue that stuck out for me was the one about Water. Paradigms had several guests from all over the world to tell how drinking water is being turned into a commodity and about the serious effects this has on the population and the environment. The bottom-line is that an essential to life is commercialized. The drinking water is getting more expensive and the exploitation for profit is mostly badly affecting environment as well as the quality of the water. One of the messages to take away from this program, and I was surprised by that one, is to stop drinking (and buying) bottled water. I had gotten used to that in the past decade and Baruch has given me some good reasons to rethink my habits in this respect.

Improv Everywhere - The Ice Podcast

I am not overly fond of podcasts that have a crew that is freely engaging in small talk among each other. It can be thrilling, but it is mostly boring and eavesdropping upon other people's conversations is not exactly my cup of tea. And so, I was not sure how to tackle a review of the reported podcast The Ice Podcast. (feed)

But then, the host of the podcast Chris Crookall was kind enough to point out to me that his podcast had also the occasional interview. He especially recommended the conversation with Matt Adams from Improv Everywhere. And rightfully so. In a very natural and accessible way we get to know the project of Improv Everywhere in which Matt Adams is part and about which he attempts to make documentaries (see Matt's web page). The idea is that we are all stuck in our routine perceptions of the world and the people of Improv Everywhere operate in the everyday world (mostly in New York city) and create scenes that force the bystanders to look at their surroundings freshly again. One of the discussed examples is a scene in which the agents of Improv Everywhere start singing in the food court - see video.

The Great War - WW1 in podcasts

About a week ago I already wrote a Dutch post about the First World War in podcasts and that is because one of the very best podcasts about The Great War is in Dutch (Veertien Achttien), more about this by the end of this post. If you wish to make a study of WW1 through podcast alone, you have many formidable other podcasts to choose from as well.

There are two big stories about WW1. One is the geopolitical, diplomatic one, which goes back until the 1870's and arguably shows the effect of WW1 until at least the Cold War, if not until today (look at the Middle East for example). This perspective that can be stretched over a near century and a half is fantastically covered by Stanford's James Sheehan in the lecture series The History of the International System (feed). Part of this story is the question how the war came about and who is to blame, which is an issue every modern history series will deal with (History 5, MMW 5, European Civilization 1648 to 1945, History 1c) but is especially well done by Margaret Anderson in an old version of Berkeley's Renaissance to Today. Also interesting is the interview in New Books in History with Norman Stone.

Another big story of WW1 is that of Trench Warfare, or a little bit more broadly, how the war went and how it culminated in the wretched peace of Versailles. Many good podcasts give ample attention here. (New Books in History, History 151c, France since 1871, The Armistice Podcast)

The special quality of Veertien Achttien ('14 - '18) lies in this that it takes on both these themes and more by the method it applies. Veertien Achttien brings every week a short biography of one of the people involved in the war. Through this you get some chronology of the war, and frequently one stretching from earlier to way beyond, highlighting aspects that go beyond the to big narratives referred to above. Especially in this podcast you can find the effect of WW1 on everyday life, on the peripheries of the war, on culture, on science and as such, mare than any other podcast it convincingly shows how deep and fundamental the war altered our world.

While Veertien Achttien is expected to run until 2012 in Dutch, there are some rumors it may be translated into English at some point in time. We can only hope that this challenge will indeed be met.

De onschuld van Lucia de B.- Simek 's Nachts in 2006

In de Volkskrant stond bij het artikel over de vrijspraak van Lucia de B. een foto van haar dochter Fabienne. In 2006 was Fabienne te gast bij Simek 's Nachts - toen stond ze nog alleen in haar overtuiging van haar moeders onschuld. Hoewel de site van Simek alleen nog maar via het internet archief te zien is, staan sommige van zijn interviews nog on-line, al zijn die bestanden haast niet te vinden. Abonneer je op een van de volgende feeds en Fabienne zit er tussen: Huffduffer feed of
Anne is a Man, googlereader feed.

Op de site van Simek stond destijds: "Fabienne (1981) is de dochter van Lucia de B.. Haar moeder werd veroordeeld tot levenslange gevangenisstraf vanwege een groot aantal moorden die ze als verpleegster zou hebben gepleegd. Fabienne is overtuigd van de onschuld van haar moeder. Hoe gaat ze om met haar machteloosheid? Of kan ze nog iets doen? Martin Simek vraagt het zich af in Simek 's nachts."

In de uitzending blijkt Fabienne een jonge vrouw die maar moeilijk los komt en openlijk aangeeft dat ze Simek niet helemaal vertrouwt. Van de vijftig minuten die ze hebben, lopen de eerste vijfendertig tamelijk stroef. Fabienne geeft wat ontwijkende antwoorden; je moet de werkelijke antwoorden erbij raden. Maar dan, wanneer je denkt dat het niet meer gaat lukken, komt het interview los en in het laatste kwartier krijg je iets meer te zien. En als je na het luisteren naar de foto van het ANP (zie onder) kijkt, dan herken je haar toch.

University lecture podcasts - collected by Princeton

We frequently look at podcast lecture series of University courses, but in addition to that, Universities have a lot of one off guest lectures with specialized speakers and quite often record them as well. At the University of Princeton, many of these lecture from all around the academic world are bundled in the UChannel Podcast, which has both an audio feed and a video feed. Personally, I think most of the time the audio is enough. The art of effectively registering a lecture on video and producing the visuals with shots of the lecturer and the audience is not fully mastered or invested in.

One such lecture was Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature. Architect Douglas Farr spoke at at Case Western Reserve University about the problems with sustainable architecture these days. A nut shell example is the following: a new school building is produced and it does everything right with regards to sustainable architecture. The materials are the best, the design takes care of proper use of energy and water. The waste problem has been addressed and on and on. Indeed, the building is awarded the highest measure of sustainability that can be given. However, the building is erected outside the city and whereas kids would previously walk to school, in the new situation, an enormous parking lot is made for all those cars that bring the kids. Farr takes on the challenge and proposes methods for not only building sustainable buildings, but for making those plans part of a wider planning, making entire cities sustainable. When you choose to listen to the audio (as I did), be prepared to miss out on the shots Farr shows. I am not sure how well they are shown in the video, though.

Many of the lectures previously come out in the podcast feed of the specific institute. Among them is The London School of Economics (LSE podcast), from which I download very frequently. Two recent lectures were Secularisms in crisis with John Bowen who brought a lot of examples from France to show how the modern secular state is struggling with the rise of religiousness and the visibility of religious signs in public places. And A Broken Middle East: a wasted decade of war on terror with Fawaz A Gerges who shows how the war on terror has disrupted especially Afghanistan and Iraq and brought about more lawlessness, social, political and economic insecurity than there was before. These two lectures have not yet appeared in the UChannel feed, but I am sure they soon will.


More UChannel Podcast:
Ceasefire,
Capitalism and Confusion - Amartya Sen,
Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and the Middle East,
Taming Religion - Ian Buruma trilogy,
Averting the disasters of climate change.

More LSE:
The China Hegemony,
The myth of work,
Pasts and futures of Christianity,
Global capitalism - the Gray view,
Israeli at the London School of Economics.