Summertime tip: across podcast listening

While your favorite podcast may be on a summer break you probably are looking for something else to listen to. Suppose your favorite podcast's subject is what you are generally interested in and this might be the time to look for other podcasts who touch upon the same subject and get a broader perspective.

When I listened to the Irish History Podcast (feed) I got fascinated by its episodes about the Viking era in Irish history. For lack of a Viking History Podcast, some holes in this history are not covered by the Irish History Podcast. What was their trade? Where did they exactly come from? Why did they go on plunder?And how is it they got to be so successful? It goes to show there is much to be found out about Vikings and Normans, Scandinavian history in general and the time in the Middle Ages that they dominated Europe. Although there is not one podcast that takes care of the subject, there are several that touch upon it (like the Irish History podcast) and by listening across podcasts, a lot can be learned.

Not only Ireland was beset by Vikings, also Anglo-Saxon England was visited and the podcast History of England (feed) by David Crowther does a very good job of relating this era. In a good portion of the first thirty episodes you get to learn a lot and it wonderfully complements the Irish story. For example, from David we learn that the Vikings that landed in Ireland were mostly from Norway, whereas England was dominated by the Danes. The Swedes concentrated their efforts towards the Baltic. Those Vikings that got hold of Normandy, eventually became the Normans, a Francophone branch of this Scandinavian family. The podcast Norman Centuries (feed) is dedicated to the Normans.

The Norman story and the English story obviously come together around 1066, which is also elegantly told by Notes on History (feed), but apart from England, Norman conquests also take us into the Mediterranean and eventually all the way to Constantinople, where Normans became the famous Varangian Guard, about whom you will also learn in the podcast 12 Byzantine Rulers (feed)

There in the east, the Normans met Vikings who reached the same point but through a different route. Swedish Vikings conquered eastward and became known as the Rus, the founders of later Russia as we learn in the opening issues of the Russian Rulers History Podcast (feed)

As usual with Historic subjects, the archives of BBC's In Our Time are worth a visit and offer among others:
Athelstan,
Volga Vikings,
The battle of Stamford Bridge,
Alfred and the battle of Edington
And The Norman yoke.

More:
Irish History Podcast,
Norman Centuries,
Notes on History,
12 Byzantine Rulers,
Russian Rulers History Podcast.

Summer time tip: learn a language

What to do these months when your regular podcasts are on a summer break and you, the listener, actually has more time to spend on listening. Gotten past the backlog yet? Here is something new to try: why not take up a foreign language through podcast?

Podcasting is highly developed in the realm of language learning and although a lot of good content comes at a premium, also a lot is free. If you search 'learn nn through podcast', especially when nn is a rather commonly used language, you will find an astonishing amount of productions. Many are very similar and most of the free content is on beginners level, but through a couple of sessions of initial listening you can certainly identify the podcast that matches your level and preferences.

For example pick up some French. Here is a quick sample of what I collected when I was looking for a refresher of my high school French:

Beginners:
French for beginners; Real life French (feed)
Learn French by Podcast (feed)
Learn French With Alexa (feed)
Learn French with daily podcasts (feed)
The FrenchPodClass - Frenchie Productions (feed)

More advanced:

One thing in a French day (feed)

More learning language on Anne is a Man:
Learn German through podcast,
Learn Hebrew through podcast,

Learn Dutch through podcast.

Summer time tip: Mystery at Geneva

If you are looking for something different to listen to during long Summer days, whether on vacation or on dreary office days, you might consider listening to a piece of ironic narration from the public domain. Breakaway fro a moment from the lectures, the panel discussions and the interviews.

I was mesmerized by Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings, written by Dame Rose Macaulay and skillfully read to us by Cathy Barratt at Librivox (feed)

Henry Beechtree is a British journalist who attends a session of the League of Nations in the early twenties and tries to solve the disappearance of the president of the League. Soon enough Beechtree not only gets into trouble, he also gets involved in the case. While on the surface the story evolves around the mystery plot, some of the best stuff Macaulay has to offer is not related to the plot, but rather the elegant irony with which she describes the machinations of international politics, lobbyists and journalists. In that respect the story is just as relevant today as it was in the 1920s and it can apply just as much to the buzz around UN sessions as the activities around Capitol Hill or any other political power center for that matter.

More Librivox:
Beyond Good and Evil,
Bhagavad Gita,
Frankenstein,
History of Holland.

Listening ideas for 17 August 2011

New Books in Psychoanalysis
Susie Orbach, “Bodies”
“Why is the body the site of so much ongoing, current and growing attention in the West”? asks the feminist psychoanalyst and public intellectual Susie Orbach in her book Bodies (Picador, 2009). In this interview, the groundbreaking author of Fat is a Feminist Issue (inter alia) speaks to New Books in Psychoanalysis about how the body is “no longer a place we live from” but rather a place where the capitalist marketplace has hit a sort of pay dirt. From trendy diets to vaginal recalibration to liposuction, the body is big business. Indeed, as women and men feel a greater and greater need to control their bodies, losing touch with our natural appetites, and attempting to look a certain way, the market that exploits our fears and anxieties is making a fortune.
(review, feed)

New Books in Language
David Crystal, “Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language”
In an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced and accessible introduction to general linguistics, there a lucid specialised textbook in an emerging field. With this memoir, Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language (Routledge, 2009), he fills another gap, and offers a vivid picture of the working life of a professional linguist.
(review, feed)

New Books in Philosophy
Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction”
In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to have a structured format analogous to the structure that sentences have in natural languages. That is, according to Fodor, we must think in a Language of Thought, sometimes also called Mentalese.
(review, feed)

Summer time tip: In Our Time

During the summer in podcasting just as in other media, there is a slight dip in activity. Although there is still enough new audio coming out every day to keep you very busy, I can imagine that during the month of August you may be looking for something else. So, here is are a short series of posts where to look for old material that is worth listening to again.

My first recommendation is the famous BBC four programme and podcast In Our Time. As you probably already know, this podcast offers 40 minute episodes in which Melvyn Bragg discusses one subject from the history of ideas with a panel of three specialists.

In the past I could not have reasonably point you at this podcast over the summer, as the BBC always removed the podcast episode from the feed as soon as a new one was added. This however changed in the last season. The whole of 2010 / 2011 is still available and there is much to choose from.

An additional quality of In Our Time has become apparent to me: in the world of podcast it has authority. I have noticed over the years an increasing number of (history) podcasters that refer to In Our Time in their own audio. These references are more and more explicit, but I have also noticed implicit ones - where the content was obviously directly informed by an issue of In Our Time. For me this is very much as in books the way authors refer to standing works on the same subject within the text or within footnotes. While this kind of referencing is not yet common within podcast, where it happens, it has frequently involved reference to In Our Time.

More In Our Time:
A reminder of the great BBC podcasts,
Diarmaid MacCulloch in podcast,
The Indian Rebellion of 1857,
Frankfurt School,
The history of the Royal Society.

Listening ideas for 16 August 2011

Ideas
Citizen Mel - Part Two
His name is synonymous with the words "Canadian nationalist". Mel Hurtig's voice has been prominent in discussions about the country for almost fifty years. He is a bookseller, a publisher and a catalyst for debate on subjects ranging from child poverty to nuclear arms. IDEAS producer Kathleen Flaherty traces Mel Hurtig's lifelong quest to shape a Canada he passionately believes in.
(review, feed)

Documentary on One
Malaria 2.0
Microsoft's Bill Gates dreams of eradicating malaria; he's given millions to those working on the problem. In this fascinating story, Elizabeth O'Neill meets people receiving Gates' money, including a Dublin man with an invention inspired by spy movies.
(review, feed)

EconTalk
Brady on the Electorate and the Elections of 2010 and 2012
David Brady of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the lessons of the election of 2010 and what we might expect from the elections of 2012. Brady draws on political history as well as survey results from work with colleagues Doug Rivers and Morris Fiorina to speculate about the elections of 2012. Along the way he discusses the power of the independent vote, how ObamaCare affected the election of 2010, and the prospects for the Republican nominee in 2012. Taped a few days before the deal on the debt was reached, Brady gives his thoughts on the politics of the negotiations. The conversation concludes with a discussion of whether Obama will have a primary challenger.
(review, feed)