Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk - TED

More TED:
Rise of women, fall of men - inequality again,
Rory Sutherland,
Dimitar Sasselov,
Sir Ken Robinson,
Photos that changed the world - Jonathan Klein.

More Naomi Klein:
Naomi Klein on Media Matters,
Naomi Klein on Big Ideas.

What is hot on 20 January 2011

In Our Time
The Mexican Revolution
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The revolution last for the next ten years and included the radical peasants’ revolt of Zapata in the south, the warlord banditry of Villa in the north, and a succession of presidents who often tried to put in place remarkably modern constitutions, but usually failed. But was the revolution ultimately successful and how did it actually change things for the people? Melvyn is joined by Alan Knight, Professor of the History of Latin America at the University of Oxford; Paul Garner, Cowdray Professor of Spanish at the University of Leeds; and Patience Schell, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester.
(review, feed)

Forum Network
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein discuss Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between. Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein achieved bestselling fame with their first book, Plato and a Platypus Walked Into a Bar, a survey of key philosophical concepts through jokes. This newest book is a hilarious take on the philosophy, theology, and psychology of mortality and immortality. That is, Death. Philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre have been wrestling with the meaning of death for as long as they have been wrestling with the meaning of life. Fortunately, humorists have been keeping pace with the major thinkers by creating gags about dying. Death's funny that way--it gets everybody's attention.
(review, feed)



Making Love in the Kitchen
Tap Your Worries Away
Title: Tap Your Worries Away Guest: Nick Ortner, the founder of Try It Productions and the Producer of "The Tapping Solution." Nick is a "searcher" constantly reading, exploring, experimenting with the incredible information all around that can change lives. When he found Tapping, and was startled by the results, he knew he had to find a way to get this information into the mainstream. He also produced the worldwide online event, "The Tapping World Summit" which has been attended by over 75,000 (all for free!). Check out The Tapping Solution
(review, feed)

Justice according to Michael Sandel - Philosophy Bites

Philosophy Bites just had a show in which they had Michael Sandel explain the ideas of Justice. The best podcast on philosophy with the most clear mind in the field of Justice - what more do you want? (feed)

If you have followed Sandel's vodcast about Justice (at Harvard), what he says is not new. Yet he manages to sum up in twenty minutes what takes hours in the series. The two polar approaches to justice are consequentialist utilitarianism on the one hand, which tries to capture justice by looking at the outcome of behavior and law and the measure to which the outcome is worthy or not. On the other side is the idea of fundamental right and wrong, which tries to find justice in a priori values. Sandel chooses neither side nor makes a suggestion for a third way as the one right approach, but rather comes up with the third approach in order to further inform and balance out the polarity.

The remaining thought then is that the search for Justice continues yet Sandel has enriched our tool box which helps us on the way.

More Philosophy Bites:
Three issues of Philosophy Bites,
Morality,
The genocide and the trial,
Dirty Hands,
Understanding decisions.

Needham about China

Here is an issue of Big Ideas I do not want to say too much about. I just want to encourage you to go and listen. Not only is the subject very interesting, the speaker also managed to deliver his talk in the most captivating way. (feed)

The podcast description goes:

Journalist, broadcaster, and bestselling author, Simon Winchester, tells the remarkable story of Joseph Needham, an eccentric English chemist who wrote a vast book on Chinese science which remains the longest book about China ever written in the English language. Winchester's lecture on The Man Who Loved China was delivered at the Royal Ontario Museum on October 14, 2010.

This should be enough, but let me add that apart from Joseph Needham coming alive and having us share his fascination with China, also Winchester comes alive. He manages to take you in with his fascination for Needham and has some spectacular tales about the road to his book.

More Big Ideas:
The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam,
Jewish Humor,
JRR Tolkien versus CS Lewis,
Malcolm Gladwell.

The mysteries of whites and of mass

New Books In History is my weekly stop for good history podcast (feed). Apart from some recurring themes in the series, host Marshall Poe frequently comes up, also, with very unusual, sometimes obscure, but invariably hugely interesting unexpected subjects. Take these two:

Massive for example, is a book about the history of the hunt for the Higgs-boson, the sub-atomic particle that is supposed to make up for the lack of mass in the known particles that atoms are comprised of. Marshall Poe speaks with Ian Sample who wrote the book and tells the most fascinating tale of this project in physics. It appears it is not just a project in physics, it is also about huge building projects (the Large Hadron Collider) therefore about money, politics and also about prestige.

Another subject was Poe's interview with Nell Irvin Painter about the history of white people. It is not politically correct and not even fashionable to speak of white or black or colored people anymore, but these ideas about different races among humans did arrive in the collective conscience at some point in time. Painter sought the origins of this racial thinking out and especially the origins of the concept of white people and skin color as the defining element of race.

More NBIH:
A Soviet Memoir,
This I accomplish,
Not your idea of World War II,
When Akkadian was Lingua Franca,
The 1910 Paris flood.

Moby Dick - Entitled Opinions

For the die-hard quality podcast lovers this week is a most splendidly happy one: Entitled Opinions is back. Last Tuesday with a great discussion of Moby Dick with repeat guest Andrea Nightingale. (feed)

Moby Dick is so much more than a novel, or an epic. It is an artful description of man's search for God, meaning and the essence of his being - man's or God's. This is not a claim of my own, but trather what one learns from Robert Harrison and Andrea Nightingale's discussion. For those who have read Moby Dick with Hubert Dreyfus's philosophy course at Berkely (Philosophy 6) this comes as no surprise.

Today Entitled Opinions moves on in full swing with a discussion about Classicism in America.

More Entitled Opinions:
Two issues of Entitled Opinions,
Heidegger,
Pink Floyd,
Alexander the Great,
Athanasius Kircher (Giordano Bruno).

More Philosophy 6:
KQED - all things shining,
Heidegger in Podcast - news,
Heidegger in podcast,
Philosophy 6 - Berkeley lecture series.