Listening ideas for 25 March 2011

The China History Podcast
The Qing Dynasty Part 2
In this episode we examine the Yongzheng emperor, the second of the three great Qing emperors who reigned during the most golden of times for the Manchu dynasty. A tireless emperor who was a wizard at managing the machine of state, he reigned for only thirteen years before his son later brought the Qing dynasty to its greatest heights.
(review, feed)

On Being aka Speaking of Faith
Sidling Up to Difference
Our Civil Conversations Project continues with the Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. His parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He's studied ethics in a world of strangers and how unimaginable social change happens. We explore his erudite yet down-to-earth take on disarming moral hostilities in America now.
(review, feed)

Forgotten Classics
Genesis, chapters 22-23
In which Abraham and Isaac go to the mountaintop and Abraham buys at top dollar.
(review, feed)

Making History! with Ran Levi
הקוף שידע לאהוב, או איך התחלנו ללכת על שתים
בפרק זה נעקוב אחר אחת מההתפתחויות החשובות והדרמטיות ביותר באבולוציה האנושית: המעבר להליכה זקופה
(review, feed)

Tapestry - Karen Armstrong - Compassion (a year hence)

Remember Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion? That initiative was launched a little over a year ago and one may wonder how that went further. Armstrong returned to the CBC program Tapestry to tell about it. (feed)


I did not know the Charter started with funding by TED that Armstrong won and was to invest any which way she saw fit. It was not felt when she spoke at TED about the Charter. By now TED's money has been used, but the Fetzer institute stepped in to continue the funding. Apart from the interfaith dialog, there is also a book Twelve steps to a compassionate life - is that a paraphrase of AA's twelve steps program? We do seem to be addicted to our selfishness all right.

Listen to Mary Hines's conversation with Karen Armstrong on Tapestry and and pay attention to what she says about dialog. For me that comes straight to my heart: how I love good conversation and how rare is it. Another podcast that pointed that subject out was On Being when Krista Tippet received John O'Donohue (feed) and he asked: when was the last time you truly conversed with someone else; when you had a conversation where you heard yourself say things you did not know you had in you and thus the dialog changed you both. How often is human interaction a senseless reiteration of the same sentences we speak on and on?

More Tapestry:
Giordano Bruno,
Surviving in the Wilderness,
Survival of the Kindest,
Fear,
Terry Eagleton.

Listening ideas for 24 March 2011

Thinking Allowed
New North
Professor Laurie Taylor discusses the influence of the 19th Century Temperance Movement and examines the notion of power and prosperity shifting to the frozen North.
(review, feed)

London School of Economics: Public lectures and events
Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar
The dollar, the world's international reserve currency for over eighty years, has been a pillar of American economic hegemony. In the words of one critic, the dollar possessed an "exorbitant privilege" in international finance that reinforced U.S. economic power. In Exorbitant Privilege, eminent economist Barry Eichengreen explains how the dollar rose to the top of the monetary order before turning to the current situation. Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Political Science and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. This event celebrates the publication of his latest book Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar.
(review, feed)

KQED's Forum
Health Care Reform, a Year Later
One year ago, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as the health care reform bill. We discuss the bill's successes -- and failures -- one year later.
(review, feed)

In Our Time
The dawn of the Iron Age
In around 3000 BC European metalworkers started to make tools and weapons out of bronze. A complex trading network evolved to convey this valuable metal and other goods around the continent. But two millennia later, a new skill arrived from the Middle East: iron smelting. This harder, more versatile metal represented a huge technological breakthrough. The arrival of the European Iron Age, in around 1000 BC, was a time of huge social as well as technological change. New civilisations arose, the landscape was transformed, and societies developed new cultures and lifestyles. Whether this was the direct result of the arrival of iron is one of the most intriguing questions in archaeology.
(review, feed)

Het Marathoninterview
August Willemsen, vertaler Pessoa
Vertaler Willemsen was een begaafd stilist en ook in het gesproken woord drukte hij zich haarscherp, bijna ‘persklaar’, uit. Met relativering en humor sprak hij ook over zichzelf. Anton de Goede ging op zoek naar de ware August Willemsen op 30 juli 1999.
(review, feed)

Ottoman Age of Exploration

I am always ready to recommend any issue of the podcast New Books in History, but here is one that I consider among the essentials in history podcast listening: Marshal Poe interviews Giancarlo Casale about “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (feed)

The great thing about history podcast listening is to get a grip on the general narrative of history. That is why I keep looking in all corners for good history podcasts: I am trying to have a fairly detailed idea of human history from the moment our ancestors stood upright until today. Frequently I find immense lacunae in the narrative as I got it from school. Giancarlo Casale fills such a lacuna.

We have heard plenty about the European age of exploration and we may have heard about the explorative journeys the Chinese undertook in the centuries before the Europeans began. But in between, there are also the Ottomans. Just like everybody else, they tried to explore the Indian Ocean, found their bases and profit from the spice trade. Casale explains when they did it, why and how. Casale also gives the best concise explanation I have heard ever, why exactly spices were such an excellent commodity. In short, this is stuff you must know to get a better understanding of what you had already learned.

More NBIH:
The mysteries of whites and of mass,
A Soviet Memoir,
This I accomplish,
Not your idea of World War II,
When Akkadian was Lingua Franca.

Listening ideas for 23 March 2011

Naxos Classical Music Spotlight Podcast
Vasily Petrenko talks to Edward Seckerson about his latest Shostakovich recording
The latest instalment in Vasily Petrenko’s highly acclaimed cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies offers a telling flashback to the composer’s youth. Symphony No.1 -his sensational symphonic debut- is, according to Petrenko, a whistle-stop tour through revolutionary Petrograd with Shostakovich donning the masks of comedy and tragedy in practical pursuit of his already highly developed sense of irony. As Petrenko explains to Edward Seckerson, the really big influence here is Stravinsky’s Petrushka, (as witness the devilishly flashy solo piano part) and there is something of the feel of a silent movie in the flickering imagery. Symphony No.3 “The First of May” offers a rather more prescribed view of the Revolution with its brassy choral paean redolent of those striking propaganda posters.
(review, feed)

Fresh Air
Why Libya Matters To The Middle East's Future
Story: The future of Libya has become a key part in the rapidly changing transformation of the Arab world. On today's Fresh Air, political scientist Marc Lynch explains why the United States and its allies decided to intervene — and what's at stake for each side.
(review, feed)

Entitled Opinions
Italian Cinema - Sarah Carey
Sarah Carey specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature, visual culture and cinema. She received her B.A. from Stanford University in 2002, her M.A. from UCLA in 2007, and her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2010. Her current book project analyzes how photography has met with artistic and literary aspirations in order to collectively explore Italy's own “autobiography.” Such a study, which would be one of the first full-length works in English to explore the relationship between photography, literature and cinema in Italy in the past two centuries aspires to show how the integration of photography into literary and filmic texts is idiosyncratic – a direct result of Italian visual traditions and the nation’s need to find a way to narrate its own story. Ms. Carey has published in Quaderni d’Italianistica and CARTE ITALIANE; her most recent article, “Futurism’s Photography – From fotodinamismo to fotomontaggio,” examines the complicated and at times hostile relationship between Italian Futurism and the photographic medium. She also has two forthcoming articles: a work co-authored with Thomas Harrison on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni in Italian Culture and an essay on photography in Vittorio Imbriani’s 1867 novel Merope IV that will be included in the book Enlightening Encounters Between Photography and Italian Literature (2010). Ms. Carey currently teaches Italian cinema and literature for the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. Her present course, “Rebels, Outcasts & Iconoclasts – Italian Cinema 1943-1975,” focuses on figures of social deviance in films from the most important Italian auteurs.
(review, feed)

Meaning Systems - Big Ideas

A very worthwhile piece of audio to pick up is the podcasted lecture by David Sloan Wilson on Religions and other Meaning Systems on the podcast Big Ideas also without the additional reading and listening that embedded it for me (feed). Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist who shines his perspective on religion in general and does so in a very integrated fashion and with fascinating insights.

My perspective on religion is sociological and anthropological and it makes me always feel a bit queasy when I see biologists take on religion. Whether it is Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion that I recently read) or Stephen Gould or PZ Myers, I always feel they somehow miss a fundamental point. Sloan Wilson is an exception to that rule, he explicitly does not miss the point: even though religions carry claims about facts, claims that biology or other sciences are by far more qualified to make, religion is not essentially about facts, or even about salvation or morality - religions are a social construct that supply people with meaning. That is what Sociology and Anthropology could have told you in the first place and what Sloan Wilson presents as a zoological discovery: unlike other animals man is profoundly symbolic. And while we are at it, political ideologies and science are no less a product of that symbolic inclination of man than religion is. They all are meaning systems, in the terminology of Wilson. I would have called them symbolic universes, but again, that is my baggage from sociology.

It is also my baggage as a sociologist that I feel the social sciences are more qualified to analyze religion, yet I happily acknowledge that the biology perspectives of David Sloan Wilson and Richard Dawkins offer insight as well. It helped I was pointed by the DIY Scholar to the Stanford series with Robert Sapolsky: Human Behavioral Biology which is a very interesting and broad course in its own right, but in this context it gave me the much needed introduction in the tools, methods, terminology and mind set of the biologist. (feed)

More Big Ideas:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog,
Age of Unequals,
Dan Dennett: what should replace religion?,
Chris Hedges,
Needham about China.