Louis Th. Lehmann - Marathon Interview

Een aaneenschakeling van aforismen en intellectueel op het verkeerde been gezet worden. Ik kan het wel waarderen, kan ervan genieten, maar kan het geen 5 uur aan een stuk uithouden. Het Marathon Interview met Louis Lehmann is er een om in stukjes te genieten - niet in een gehele, lange zit.

"Als dit een interview was," verklaart Lehmann in de uitzending, "dan zat ik hier niet." Wat is er dan mis met een interview? Lehmann legt de vinger op de pijnlijke plek. Interviewers kennen hun subject niet, hebben geen boeken gelezen en verder is het interview toch alleen maar om ongezonde nieuwsgierighied te bevredigen. Waarom zit hij dan toch hier? De interviewer Wim Noordhoek is een bekende, dus die heeft wel weet van de man tegenover hem en komt niet met de obligate nieuwsgierighied, mag je hopen. Het is merkbaar dat Noordhoek en Lehmann goede bekenden zijn, maar het draagt niet overal bij tot de kwaliteit van het interview, want dat is het uiteindelijk toch wel.

Verder verklaart Lehmann dat hij niet is opgevoed, maar 'neergevoed' en omschrijft hij zijn huis als de verschrikkelijkste plek van zijn leven -- of iets dergelijks. Je wordt er een beetje duizelig van, ik wel. Het is ontegenzeggelijk prikkelend en komisch en bij tijd en wijle verrassend diep, of verrassend raak. Wat te denken bijvoorbeeld van Lehmann's haast terloopse opmerking dat de grootste bedreiging voor de mensheid het moslemfundamentalisme is. Let wel, het is 1990. Hoe dan ook, dit is een terzijde in weer een ironie. Ironische terzijdes te over.

Meer Marathon Interviews:
Marita Mathijsen,
Ruud Lubbers,
Jan Leijten,
Bertus Hendriks,
Gerrit Wagner.

Podcast listening for Beginners (4)

In the first post in this series, I gave the shortest way to listening to a podcast: clicking on it in the web and playing it in your browser or media player.
In the second, I explained how you can download and store podcast files.
In the third, you were guided through downloading and installing iTunes - the easiest and most wildely used all-round application for finding, downloading and listening to podcasts.

Now that you have iTunes installed on your computer, behind the scenes something very important has happened: this application can be called any time. This helps you when you find a podcast on-line. You may notice a button that allows to 'subscribe through iTunes'. This means, by clicking the button, you will call iTunes and you will automatically be subscribed to the podcast. As of that moment, iTunes will know when there are new episodes of this podcast and will automatically download the latest (or do something else, according to the preferences you set).
The buttons look like this:
or this:

Alternatively, you may find a link that says 'iTunes', 'subscribe through iTunes' or 'direct subscription'. Clicking these will have the very same effect: iTunes is called and the takes care, automatically of subscription.

If you hover over these links or buttons, you will come to recognize the link, which is that they link to phobos.apple.com. Other subscribe links will look different and only in exceptional circumstances call iTunes. More likeley are they going to link you through to an XML file, or to feedburner. However, also these subscription links can be used with iTunes, only not automatically. Nevertheless, after having applied them manually in iTunes, the effect will be the same as described before: you will be subscribed and iTunes will download the latest episode, when it comes in.

Here is how you subscribe manually to a podcast in iTunes: right-click the subscription link and copy it (in Internet Explorer choose copy shortcut and in FireFox copy link location). Then open iTunes and choose Advanced | subscribe to podcast... from the menu. In the next dialog, paste the link and click OK. Thus, you have manually subscribed to a podcast.

Once you have experienced this way of getting to podcasts, you will not bother with the previously described approaches. As an additional advantage, podcasts arrived at this way, will be organized by iTunes, in the podcast folder, giving you a very friendly and accessible overview.


Previously:
Downloading and installing iTunes,
Downloading audio files from the web,
Listening on line.

Rabbi Heschel - SOF podcast review

Speaking of Faith did a program about the late rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It is not the first podcast I heard about this figure. Larry Josephson's Only in America about 350 years of Jewry in the US, had an interview with Peter Geffen, which extensively commemorated Heschel. (feed)

Thus, I had some previous knowledge. I knew he had marched with Martin Luther King and he had opposed the Vietnam war. He was a theologian to take both his studies and his activities seriously. He and King found each other in their views on the prophets. Krista Tippett speaks with a student of Heschel's: Arnold Eisen.

Eisen not only brings in these facts about Heschel, but also a fine point how Heschel had inspired Eisen. How Heschel had explained secularism by typifying religion as having become dull and irrelevant. Yet Heschel was deeply religious and a mystic to boot. All this led to a remarkable life and work delivering much inspiration, also in the indirect podcasts as Tippet's and Josephson's.



More Speaking of Faith:
Karen Armstrong,
Wangari Maathai,
Faith based diplomacy,
Rachel Naomi Remen, (highly recommended)
Rumi.

The Great Dictators

From 1914 to 1941 European History takes on a certain fateful dramatism that implies a turn for the worst for nearly everybody, but the unbelievable rise of two individuals: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Neither would have made any career of substance under any normal circumstance, but since 1914, history took a taste for the unexpected and the confusing.

In Berkeley's History 5, four lectures pass from one world war to the other. There is a detour to the Russian Revolution (and the groundwork to a third outcast's rise to dictatorship; Joseph Stalin), but apart from that it is mostly Adolf's and Benito's biographies that are aligned to the continent's history.

I was struck by a couple of similarities. In World War I, Germany lost the war, without being defeated and Italy was on the side of the winners, without any victory. Both were seriously discontented with Versailles and both were flailing democracies, raging towards decay. Benito rolled into power in the same way Adolf would afterwards. greater politicians than them, made them government leaders assuming they could depose of the nitwit afterwards - not so. And thus, step by step, Hitler moved the next war closer.

Apart from this drama to begin with, Professor Anderson, by the fourth lecture, has a refreshing approach to Munich 1938 - the conference that proverbially symbolizes the cowardice of the international system to stop the usurper. In her version, there was not much choice and Munich went as it did, not out of cowardice. The English and the French had no political power to go to war, as their leaders and their people lived with the memories of 14-18, making war unacceptable. Besides, the chaos in the world in those days, consisted of more and worse elements than the slowly expanding Hitler Germany. Unless there was the true violation that occurred by 1939, with the invasion of Poland.

More History 5:
New Europe, Old Europe,
Women and Freud,
Romanticism and Bismarck,
Capitalism and Socialism,
Enlightenment and French Revolution.

Science Friday - podcast review

A fellow blogger by the name of Micheal Barton, from the blog The Dispersal of Darwin, sent me a comment containing his list of scientific and history of science podcasts. Many of the podcasts in this list, such as The Missing Link and In Our Time are well known to readers of this blog. An NPR classic on the list, Science Friday, had not yet appeared on my blog yet - in spite of wide acclaim I have been aware of since my early listening days. Time to take a pick out of their archive.

I tried six episodes, two of which I left rather swiftly. A recent issue about nanotubes went over my head and another one about crystal skulls in archeology had me irritatedly feel the program was riding the publicity wave of a movie sequel (the skulls are a scam, needless to say). Four others had me glued to my earphones though.

My favorite, though not the easiest listen was about the Sahara, since I am in an Africa mood so much lately. I had a vague notion the Sahara had not always been dry, but this program taught me some of the background. It dried up in about 6000 years time. I thought that was quick, but actually this is slower than previously assumed. There is still a huge reservoir of ancient water left, deep in the ground. Tapping into that is neither easy nor necessarily good.

Another good subject was HIV research, which 'celebrated' a 25 year anniversary. Interviews are done over the phone and one of the connections was absolutely terrible, full of echoes, bad sound and overlapping tracks; it practically spoils the episode. Nevertheless it is very interesting to learn where the research stands today.

Two other items were about food. One on Food and methane. Methane is a bad greenhouse gas and your choice of food correlates to methane emissions. The advice is to eat less red meat and diary. Will that stop cow flatulence?

The other food item is not about what you eat, but rather when your eat. Your internal clock is set at lunch time. This could be a recipe against jet lag: have lunch when you need to re-adjust to the time zone you are in.

More Science:
Domestic Science,
Human rights and the body,
The dialectic of knowledge and culture,
The brain,
Life and bio-engineering.

Repairing Failed States

What we look for as the unity we live in, the law-giver, the protector of rights and obligations, the sovereignty to rule economy, organize infrastructure and education and the agent in foreign relations is that flailing fiction the state. No matter how unrealistically imagined, the state is still what we look for and if we want to have national and international order, we'd better have functioning states.

Too many states are failing though. It has been the topic of many other podcasts, also reviewed below, and it came up again at LSE (and possible will in due time be re-published at UChannel) where Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart were invited to speak. The subject was the repair of failing states, as was the subject of their recently published book: Fixing Failed States; A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World. Ghani and Lockhart are claimed specialists on the nuts and bolts of state - what makes states succeed. From that insight they have drawn conclusions as to what are the recipes for repairing failed states.

The lecture is not terribly accessible, if not for the slightly dull speakers' tone than for the rather technical nature of the subject. The bottom-line is, what make states succeed is healthy finances and proper infrastructure and the way states can be helped is by programs that build these, but not any which way - the change must be sustainable. The importance is huge though, needless to say.

More LSE:
Europe and the Middle East,
Nuts and bolts of empire,
Islam and Europe - LSE podcast review,
Beyond the genome.

More on states and international politics:
The State in The International System,
A century of geopolitics,
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis,
History of the International System.