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.

Patterns of Authoritarianism and Resistance in Iran

Another interesting lecture at the Center for Near Eastern Studies (UCLA) was A panel discussion with Mehdi Khalaji, Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Majid Mohammadi, Writer, moderated by Nayereh Tohidi. (feed)

They speak of the recent history of Iran and try to show how the current 'Green Movement' which resists the establishment has its roots in other resistance movements of the past two centuries in Iran. They also discuss how the clergy from being part of the resisting powers had to reinvent itself as it acquired the regime since 1979.

More from the Center of Near Eastern Studies:
Palestinian perspectives - LSE and CNES,
History, linguistics and the downside of society,
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer on Indus Valley Civilization.

Palestinian perspectives - LSE and CNES

Here are two podcasts I heard in the past week which take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective.

At the London School of Economics (LSE Podcast) spoke Professor Yezid Sayigh about the Palestinian Authority. Much of what he relates confirms what has been said by others in other podcasts before: Palestine is a failed state. Sayigh however does more than just state this, he also elaborates and thus makes clear the lack of political strategy and coherence especially with Fatah. Hamas on the other hand, as it controls Gaza, it has a bit more of a consistent policy, yet remains isolated. In addition, he shows how the foreign policies towards the Palestinian Authority also fails to establish, support or even encourage a coherent polity. (feed)

As the conflict with Israel is fought on many fronts, it is interesting to listen in on the podcast of UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies where Basem Ra'ad takes on the conflict of narratives. As the Zionist side relies on main stream interpretations of the Bible and World History, in which God promised the land to the Jews and Arabs invaded as Islam spread. Ra'ad proposes that the Palestinians are not simply Arabs, but rather the descendants of the Canaanites. He connects the Canaanites to the Phoenicians as they are the inventors of the Alphabet that forms the basis for the Hebrew as well as the Arab script (and the Greek, by the way). He also makes a case that God is the god of the Canaanites and Yahweh is his son, who is the god of the Hebrews. It is a rather stretched lecture, but one simply must experience how the Israeli-Palestinian struggle extends as far as the making of narratives. (feed)

More LSE:
The impending war,
Quest for meaning,
The plundered planet,
China and India,
The China Hegemony.

More from the Center of Near Eastern Studies:
History, linguistics and the downside of society,
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer on Indus Valley Civilization.

What is hot on 15 January 2011

The Biography Podcast
Bill Clinton
Chris Gondek interviews Michael Takiff about his new biography, A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told By Those Who Know Him.
(review, feed)

New Books In History
Nell Irvin Painter, “The History of White People”
We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton, 2010), it wasn’t always so.
(review, feed)

Big Ideas
Jordan Peterson on The Necessity of Virtue
University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson, delivers the 2010 Hancock Lecture entitled The Necessity of Virtue. He discusses virtue from a contemporary perspective that both encompasses and extends beyond moral and religious contexts. Through compelling stories and research, Dr. Peterson illustrates the necessity of virtue both for the individual and for society at large.
(review, feed)

Wise Counsel
Liana Lowenstein, MSW on Play Therapy
Liana Lowenstein, MSW on Play Therapy. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Adult-oriented psychotherapy is talk-focused, making it inappropriate for children who are for developmental reasons less able or inclined to be able to talk about emotional difficulties. Play therapy involves a therapists systematic use of structured games and play activities to bond with, assess and treat children's psychosocial issues. Play activities allow children to approach their issues indirectly and (often) in a physical, primarily non-verbal manner. Play activities are orchestrated by the therapist according to one or more clinical play therapy models (e.g., this is not simply play but instead real therapy). Lowenstein describes several named therapeutic play activities variously designed to elicit discussion of feelings, elicit a ranked list of worries, or to enable children to act out their issues using the sand-tray or dollhouses. The entire family is frequently included in therapy so as to assess family dynamics that may be interfering with healing (such as when children feel the need to protect their parents), and to help parents become more aware of children's issues so that they can act on the information to alter their behavior.
(review, feed)