Tony Blair - Forum Network

Maybe I should start by explaining I follow a great deal more podcasts than I listen to. I like to be subscribed in my RSS reader of choice and simply browse through the titles in order to know what is going on in the feed. I will give a quick listen left or right, but that kind of browsing does not frequently lead to reviewing. And so, it could happen, that I had been following the podcast Forum-Network for years without ever reviewed it. So here is a first. (feed)

I would want to recommend to you, listening to the issue of 16 September, in which Tina Brown interviews Tony Blair about his political life, which is also the title of the book Blair recently published: My Political Life. Brown seems to be off with too much praise for a good interview. And for a moment I felt this podcast would, yet again, not be reviewed as it could not manage to keep me engaged. Yet, soon enough, Brown drops the sweetening up and builds some challenging interrogation for the former prime minister.

Blair, in turn, avoids that common pitfall for politicians in interviews to just cough up standardized, evasive and non-committal answers that make politician interviews frequently so irritatingly tedious and unimaginative. Maybe it is his elevated skill and maybe it is the circumstance of his retirement from British politics that he can simply afford to be more candid about his career as a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. By all means, I was fascinated and listened in suspense while he told about the details of how his politics worked and especially about his cooperation with Clinton and with Bush afterwards.

Note that on the site, you can even watch the interview. I listened of course to the audio which is podcast.

432 podcasts reviewed on Anne is a Man

Today I will be updating my podcast list. Here you can find all the podcast titles that were reviewed on this blog with a link to the latest review. There are 432 in total.

I am still not at the two posts a day rhythm I want to achieve. The Jewish High Holidays very much came in the way. In the coming month my day job is bound to draw me away from the blog, but I keep on trying.

New podcasts in September 2010 - Anne is a Man

Newly reviewed podcasts (14) this month:

Korea Society Podcast (review, site, feed)
Lectures recorded by the Korea Society containing a lot of Korean history content as well as contemporary Korean issues.

China History Podcast (review, site, feed)
Laszlo Montgomery's history of China.

Short history of Japan (review, site, feed)
Cameron Foster's history of Japan.

What is the stars (RTE) (review, site, feed)
Short monologues by astronomer Frances McCarthy pointing out a tidbit of astronomy and the history of astronomy.

Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik - audio (review, site, feed)
Lectures at the Institute. Most of these are in German.

Philosophy 139x: Heidegger: Being and Time (Harvard) (review, site, feed)
Sean Kelly's teachings on Heidegger and his book Being and Time.

Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (review, site, feed)
Dialogs about economics.

Metropolitan Museum of Art - Medieval Art (review, site, feed)
Lectures at the Museum about or related to new exhibitions.

Making Love in the Kitchen (review, site, feed)
Health podcast concentrating on right food, right ingredients and right cooking.

Office Hours (review, site, feed)
Dialogs about theory and research in Sociology.

Neuropod (Nature) (review, site, feed)
Short podcasts about issues related to neurology.

Roundtable (WAMC) (review, site, feed)
Extracts from the radio program Roundtable. Interviews, dialogs and more.

The ripple that drowns (review, site, feed)
Lecture about famines in China and Bengal.

Religion in history (Open University) (review, site, feed)
Assorted dialogs about religion and diversity accompanying a much wider (paid) course at the Open University.

Heads-up for 29 September 2010

Witness (BBC)
Silent Spring
When Silent Spring, a book about the effect of pesticides, was published in 1962 it prompted a new way of looking at the world. It was written by Rachel Carson, and her adopted son Roger Christie has been talking to Witness.
(review, feed)

Rear Vision
The Middle East conflict and the two-state solution
American president Barack Obama is committed to the Middle East peace process and the two-state solution. That is, that between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there should be two states: one Israeli and the other Palestinian. We take a look at the history of the two-state solution. First broadcast on 23 September 2009
(review, feed)

The China History Podcast
The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward ( 大跃进) from 1958-1960 caused death and suffering to dozens of millions of people. It sounded like a workable idea but it didn't turn out like Chairman Mao hoped. When looking back on the life of Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward is always viewed as a black mark against his legacy. I welcome you to listen to the podcast and learn all about what happens when central planning goes awry.
(review, feed)


New Books In History by Marshall Poe
Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides”
Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mass death. In total, Stalin is responsible for the murder of roughly 10 million Soviet citizens. Again, this is well established.
What is not well established is what to call Stalin’s crimes.
(review, feed)

Philosophy Bites
Daniel Everett on the Nature of Language
Since John Locke declared the child's mind a blank slate, philosophers have long debated the degree to which language-learning is innate. Are there are universal grammatical features that all languages share? Daniel Everett, who has spent many years among the Piraha, an Amazonian people who have a highly unusual language, believes that some of Noam Chomsky's claims about language acquisition are mistaken. Listen to him discussing the nature of language with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Philosophy Bites is made in association with The Institute of Philosophy
(review, feed)

Book

Enjoy this while I am working on the next post

Being, formerly known as Speaking of Faith

Here is a short indicator about the podcast Speaking of Faith that I have been reviewing on and off. This public radio program has changed its name to Being which uses, still, the same feed. If you are a regular listener, you surely already know all about it. In case you are the kind of pick and choose listener I am, you may miss out on this.

Host Krista Tippett also did a special show in which she looked back at 7 years of Speaking of Faith and digging a little bit into why the name change: From Faith to Being. This show contains many highlights, many of which I recognized. It also reveals the trepidation there was when the show started. Faith was not exactly a good subject for public radio and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 did not contribute to the word. Nevertheless the program took off and went through its own evolution.

Conform the times of modern media, Speaking of Faith and Being, is open to audience participation, feedback and influence. There are user forums, a Facebook community and of course there is the podcast. The podcast has also brought content that was not broadcast on the radio. Short issues and the unedited interviews have been made available over time.

Speaking of Faith on this blog:
Alan Rabinowitz at Speaking of Faith,
Desmond Tutu,
China, secularism, religiosity,
Three issues of Speaking of Faith,
Preserving Ojibwe,
The story and God,
Fragility and Humanity,
The Sunni-Shia divide and the future of Islam,
Wangari Maathai,
Rumi,
The Buddha in the world,
Doubt,
Listening Generously - Rachel Remen, (recommended)
The Sunni-Shia Divide and the future of Islam,
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Faith based diplomacy,
Karen Armstrong,
New Evangelicals,
V. V. Raman,
Reinold Niebuhr.