Listening ideas for 4 May 2011

New Books In History
Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution”
In his excellent The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), Francis Fukuyama bucks the trend. Of course, he’s done it before with elegant and persuasive books about the fall of communism, state-building, trust, and biotechnology among other big topics. Here he takes on the emergence of modern political institutions, or rather three modern political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. He begins with human nature, takes us through a massive comparison of the political trajectories of world-historical civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, European), and, in so doing, tells us why the world political order looks the way it does today. His answers are surprising, and not directly in line with what might be called the “conventional thinking” about these things.
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Rear Vision
Syria
Popular unrest in Syria has been met with violent government repression and hundreds have been killed. The Alawite elite have ruled a predominantly Sunni Muslim country for more than 40 years.
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Leonard Lopate Show
The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother
Award-winning reporter Janny Scott talks about Stanley Ann Dunham, President Barack Obama’s mother. To write A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, Scott interviewed nearly 200 of Dunham's friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this independent woman's inspiring and nontraditional life. Scott shows how Dunham shaped the man Obama is today.
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Listening ideas for 3 May 2011

We The People Stories
Encore: How Your Next Career Can Change the World
More and more, Americans are driven to careers that connect us to the social challenges of our time. How are we shifting from jobs to “encore careers” that embrace civic engagement? Renowned social entrepreneur Marc Freedman addresses these issues as he kicks off his book tour at the Center in support of The Big Shift. In a conversation with National Constitution Center President and CEO David Eisner, Freedman discusses the challenge of transitioning to and making the most of this new stage, which he believes is an urgent social imperative. He urges people to rethink their civic connections and to do work that matters, helping Americans realize the vision of the founders – an engaged citizenry.
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Mahabharata Podcast
Amba, part 1
Episode 56 - Bhisma begins telling the story of Amba/Sikhandin-- the only person, barring the Pandavas, whom he will not fight in the coming battle. The reason for this is that Sikhandin had once been a female. She was not just any female at that-- she was Draupadi's sister, and in her past life, she'd had a bad run-in with Bhisma, making her his sworn enemy from beyond the grave.
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KQED's Forum
Chris Hedges: 'The World as It Is'
Chris Hedges uses his moral compass to guide us through Iraq, Afghanistan, the West Bank and other hairy places in his collection of essays, "The World as It Is." The former New York Times war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner joins us to discuss his latest book, as well as his views on the decline of the American empire and the death of the liberal class.
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Listening ideas for 2 May 2011

Kol Hadash
Guest Speaker: Aaron Elster
Aaron Elster is a child survivor of the Holocaust. He was born in 1933 in the small northeastern village of Sokolow, Podlaski in Poland. Aaron lived in the Sokolow Ghetto with his two sisters, mother and father until the liquidation of the ghetto in September, 1942. He escaped the liquidation and hid in the surrounding forests and farms. Eventually, Aaron found refuge in the attic of a Polish family, where he hid for two years until the war's end.
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New Books in Public Policy
Walter Olson, “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America”
What kind of education are students at top American law schools getting? And how does that education influence their activities upon graduation? In Walter Olson’s Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Encounter Books, 2011), the author, an economist and not a lawyer, looks at what is happening at our nation’s elite law schools, and its implications for citizens, businesses, and taxpayers. Olson, a Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, describes what he calls the consensus view of law school faculties, and how hard it is for law students to find alternative points of view. He describes how the litigation explosion’s origins stem from the views of one influential professor, and the costs that this “American disease” imposes on our economy. In addition, he describes some revealing conflicts between trial lawyers and their allies that reveal the financial incentives motivating the testimony of certain scholars in favor of costly and often frivolous lawsuits. Read all about it, and more, in Olson’s penetrating new book.
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The History of Rome
Let This Be Our Final Battle
War between Licinius and Constantine flared up again in 324 AD. This time Constantine would finish the job.
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Paradigms
Paradigms - May 1, 2011
Diane Wilson talks about what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, British Petroleum, and her new bookDiary of an Eco-Outlaw. Heidi Stevenson talks about new restrictions in the EU regarding access to herbal remedies. Deb Reich talks about her new book No More Enemies.
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Het Marathoninterview
Theun de Vries, Spinozist
Op vrijdag 13 juli 2001 praatte Geert Mak met de winnaar van de P.C. Hooftprijs en de verzetsprijs; de schrijver Theun de Vries (1907-2005). Hij vertelde over zijn jeugd, de politiek, de oorlog en romans uitdokteren.
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Listening ideas for 1 May 2011

The Invisible Hand
Overconnected
Overconnected: Chris Gondek interviews Bill Davidow about the negative aspects of being overconnected on the internet.
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Tapestry
Lighten Up
Laughing and praying don't often go hand in hand. It seems that somewhere throughout the long march of time, levity has been leached out of religion. We'll hear from Susan Sparks, a Baptist minister who's also a stand-up comic, about why she's on a mission of mirth. And Mark Simpson talks about his book, The Gospel According to the Simpsons.
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Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean
Social, Religious, and Burial Activities of Associations
Here I explore the internal activities of associations, pointing to intertwined social, religious, and burial purposes that these groups served for their members. We take a close look at one particular association devoted to the god Zeus and the goddess Agdistis at Philadelphia in Asia Minor (LSAM 20). This is part of series 6 (Associations in the Greco-Roman World) of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast.
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Veertien Achttien
Robert Nivelle
Vijf maanden maar heeft Robert Nivelle aan het westelijk front op de bok mogen zitten; vijf maanden, waarin zijn koets in het spoor geraakte van Adélaïde noch Victoire.
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458 podcasts reviewed on Anne is a Man

Yesterday I updated my Podcast List. By now I have reviewed 458 different podcasts. Eight podcasts were reviewed for the first time in the past month:

New Books in Law
Jim von der Heydt interviews authors of recently published books in Legal Studies.
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New Books in Public Policy
One of the new podcasts that come out of the recently instituted New Books Network (NBN) is New Books in Public Policy. On this show Tevi Troy interviews the authors of recently published books in this field. Troy is a very engaged interviewer which makes this podcast a valuable addition to the NBN.
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Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC)
Radio show with Leonard Lopate
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Book Review (NYT)
Short interviews with authors.
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Thoughtcast
Jenny Attiyeh does in podcast what I believe podcast is fitted for most well: interviews and she does it very professionally on her podcast Thoughtcast, which, if I understand it correctly, is also being broadcast on a variety of radio stations in America. Attiyeh interviews authors from various backgrounds and speak with them about their work, their theories and thoughts and about their life.
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History 182G (UCLA) Secular Jewish Culture
David Myers teaches a relatively small group of students, so it sounds, the history of Jewish people looking for their secular versions of Judaism. The fact that this is a small group, warrants a lot of interaction with the audience, which on the one hand makes it extra fascinating. On the other hand, for the passive podcast listener, breaks up the structure of the lecture frequently especially when you cannot hear the questions and remarks by the students.
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Partially Examined Life
This podcast has very long (up to two hours) episodes in which a panel of philosophy students discuss an important philosopher or work of philosophy. They try to abide by two important rules that should make the podcast accessible for you and me: not to assume the listener has any prior knowledge or understanding of the matter; no name-dropping.
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Good Story Is Hard to Find
A Good Story Is Hard To Find is made by Julie Davies (Forgotten Classics) and Scott Danielson (SFF Audio). The two come together as believing Catholics and discuss their favorite books and movies and express what they find in these stories that strikes them as Christian content or a Christian message.
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Listening ideas for 30 April 2011

New Books In History
David Shneer, "Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust"
We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West from a pre-modern to a modern condition.
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Philosopher's Zone
Hume on cause, effect and doubt
The sun rose today and it has risen on every morning that we know about. But is that a reason for thinking that it will rise tomorrow? Hume thought not and today we examine the reasons for his scepticism.
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Radio Open Source
Maya Jasanoff on this Empire we Inherited
Maya Jasanoff is letting me lay down my how-did-we-become-an-empire obsessions before a rising star among imperial historians. She teaches the Harvard course on the British Empire. William Dalrymple calls her "a bit of a genius" for her big new book Liberty's Exiles — representative tales of the 60,000 English loyalists who fled the independent United States after 1783 and remade Britain’s fortunes around the world in a century-plus of glory. My questions are: how did we Americans — with anti-imperialism in our revolutionary roots, in our sentimental DNA — let ourselves in for the burdens and sorrows of empire, the corruption and disrepute of empire? And what should we suppose is our chance of escaping the fate of empires?
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Wise Counsel
Ellen Walker, Ph.D. on Childfree Living
Psychologist Ellen Walker, Ph.D. is the author of the book, Complete Without Kids: An Insiders Guide to Childfree Living by Choice or by Chance, written in reaction to her own decision to forgo having children and consequent awareness of many people who have made the same choice. Social pressure to have children cause this choice to be stigmatized unfairly. In response, she uses the term childfree rather than childless to emphasize that the choice to not have children can be a deliberate decision and not an absence. Childfree adults can be organized into three categories depending on their motivation to become childfree: deliberate choice, happenstance (where the person might have been happy to go either way) and circumstance (where the option to have children was blocked). Though there are many advantages to not having children (including the opportunity emphasize career and interests, to put more energy into maintaining marital happiness, and to save and spend money for/on ones self), there are also challenges, including a widespread perception that other people view childfree adults as selfish and concerns about retirement planning and legacy. Childfree orientated adults can have difficulties when in relationships with partners who have children due to competing expectation around who is the center of the parent partners attention.
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The Economist
America's jobless men
It is harder than ever for American men to find employment. The recession did not help, but the problem may be structural
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