Samuel Kassow and the Warsaw Ghetto history - NBIH review

The recently discovered podcast New Books in History (NBIH) is putting out new issues weekly. In the mean while I am trying to catch up with the backlog and as a consequence, I have still to cover all of its work. And I want to, as this is an outstanding new podcast on my horizon.

One of those podcasts from the backlog had host Marshall Poe interview the historian Samuel Kassow. Kassow wrote a book titled: Who will write our history. It puts a finger on a very ironic, almost too sad to contemplate point that the historiography of the holocaust is mostly based upon the sources provided by the perpetrators. The Germans kept good records and the Jews that were whisked away in the shoah hardly had the time to sit down and write their history.

Kassow wrote his book about an exception to this rule. Emanuel Ringelblum was a historian of the Warsaw Ghetto who set up a team of contemporary historians and they all made efforts to chronicle their fate as long as they could. Only when this became impossible, Ringelblum hid their archives and they were sent off to the destruction camps. Part of the archives have been discovered and Kassow's book is based upon this.

Marshall Poe's interview with Kassow spends a lot of time on setting the stage in order to have the clear frame of reference in which Ringelblum and his crew worked. Apart from being a fascinating interiew, this is also a great incentive to read the book.

More NBIH:
Ronald Reagan,
Prokofiev,
Evolution, genetics and history,
Kees Boterbloem about Jan Struys.

Sparkletack - history podcast review

Here is a charming history podcast that was recommended to me by Julie Davies of the Forgotten Classics podcast. The podcast is called Sparkletack and I have no idea what connection this makes to its subject: the history of San Francisco. (feed)

There is a shared characteristic with Forgotten Classics though, as far as I can say after two really nice episodes. Host Richard Miller, a graphic designer by trade, relates the history of San Francisco to us by reading from some of his source material. Thus we have been presented an impression of the Barbary Coast and of the Cocktail Route in San Francisco. The first was taken from accounts describing events in the nineteenth century and the second from a book written in the 1930s The Champaign Days of San Francisco.

Apart from giving an excellent reading, Miller knows to choose his text very well, so that you are immersed into the historic picture of San Francisco. No wonder he calls these podcasts 'time capsules'. Apart from time capsules there are also other type of episodes to be had from Sparkletack. It seems I have only begun to listen.

Jews of the Persian Empire - From Israelite to Jew podcast

In From Israelite to Jew Michael Satlow reviews the Jewish history of the Second Temple Period (from the sixth century BCE until 70 CE) and attempts to give insight in the developments in this time that altered the Israelites, that is a loose collection of tribes, into Jews, an alleged singular ethnic group.

We have reached the 8th episode in the series and until this point, the discussion has remained rather close to the one big source: The Hebrew Bible, most notably the books of the Torah, Ezra and Nehemia. However, in episode 8, about the Jews of the Persian Empire, a non-Bible source takes center stage. Archeologists have found archives of a Jewish unit in the Persian army in Egypt (The Elephantine Papyri) that give a fascinating insight in Jewish life in the fifth century BCE.

And it is going to be much more interesting from here. Of the Persians we know so little, but now the Greeks enter scene and apart from the fact that there are many more sources about them, they have had a lot of influence on the Jews. So we are impatiently waiting for more in this series.

More FITJ:
The fox and the hedgehog,
Looking for a Persian History podcast.

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The hollow earth at The Memory Palace

The Memory Palace (feed) is a podcast that one must listen to. The less said about it the better. This is a podcast of experience one must undergo without me giving away anything of it.

But if you are still here, know at least this: episode 8 of this series is out and is titled The World Within The World and you will enjoy yet another tale Nat DiMeo dug up from history. It is about a man who posed as a doctor and dwindled into believing in his own fantasies. Told with DiMeo's style that is to apt for ironic tragedy.

If you are missing episode 7 from the feed (as I do), know then that you can download it from the site anyway (L'il Nipper - the file). I guess there is something wrong with the file that prevents feedburner from properly channeling it through. Do not let this technicality stop you from listening.

More The Memory Palace:
The Memory Palace - history narration.

People from Finland, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, the UAE, the Netherlands, the US, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Greece and Norway have participated in the Support Anne is a Man campaign. You can also do this by simply clicking the link to the campaign label. Thanks. (Clicking the label triggers no processes and causes no additional processes on your computer. It is merely a way of allowing the Statcounter software to register the click and convey this as a signal of appreciation)

Nudge: decision architecture - LSE podcast review

Last year there was an earlier lecture by Richard Thaler about Nudge on the UChannel Podcast and I reviewed it in December. What struck me at the time was the technocratic nature of Nudge. Here I'll take a look at other aspects.

This time Richerd Thaler spoke at the London School of Economics (on the LSE Events podcast) and it was a different, evolved probably, lecture by now. There were fewer examples of nudges, but more of the idea that in decision-making people tend to be human and not optimizing calculating economists. The whole idea of nudge is to help people quickly make decisions optimizing requires, without going through all the calculations.

Thaler calls his model one of libertarian paternalism. It is libertarian in the sense that freedom of choice is maintained. Options should be open, but paternalistically, people are nudged towards the choice that is deemed better for them (or for society that is). Nudge offers an alternative for policymakers who want to influence people's behavior and usually seize legal methods, either through taxation, obligation or punishment. Thaler shows that simply by creating a decision architecture, you can effortlessly induce people to go for the best decisions, because those decisions are easier, they stand out or form the default or seem to be better as the decision makers are informed of relevant data such as the choices other people made. I wonder how radical this approach is to social science.

More LSE Events:
The EU and the Middle East,
The British Mandate in Palestine,
Iran Today,
Science and Religion,
The crisis.

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Good climate for everyone - UChannel on global warming

I had never thought there would be something like climate engineering until I heard a podcast from UChannel Podcast. Daniel Schrag of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University was invited to speak about this subject at Princeton University, the home ground of UChannel Podcast. Climate engineering is what the word suggests: technological interference with the earth's climate and this is neither science fiction nor a list of possible measures that are all too expensive to contemplate.

There is little talk of what can be done, because, naturally the talk focuses on the ethics of the subject. If we can, should we be allowed. Or as Schrag has it, if we can and the dangers of global warming are as great as we can possibly fear, then maybe we must. But Schrag is no ethicist, he is a geologist, so he is most at ease and informative when dealing with the relevant facts. A bit of what can be done and a whole lot of what range of challenges and dangers are involved with global warming and the science of predicting its effects.

The magnitude of the subject is overwhelming and I must admit, I have an intuitive reaction against climate engineering. I think, messing with the environment got us in the bad shape we are in, do we need more messing. Promising a Mediterranean climate for everyone sounds worse than too good to be true, it sounds like the words of the sorcerer's apprentice. Schrag pays attention to these intuitions and replies to them. His tendency, as stated above: the situation is so bad, we have no choice. It is like applying a tourniquet to prevent us from bleeding to death. Indeed, you wouldn't apply a tourniquet to a healthy person. Question remains: do we really know how sick we are?

More UChannel Podcast:
Robots and War,
Sudan and the fallacy of nationhood,
Against intervention,
Lakhdar Brahimi on Afghanistan and Iraq,
Europe versus Islam.

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