Anne is a Man! - Podcast Reviews

Along the ancient road to Kaifeng - CHP

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 07:47:00 +0000

Whenever the Yangtze would rise and flood the city of Kaifeng, the residents would salvage their property, if possible in advance, and return after the river had fallen again. Then they would rebuild their structures until the next time. Thus also did the Jewish community of Kaifeng and in that way they lost and rebuilt their synagogue for some seven centuries. All the while they maintained their traditions, in spite of being (nearly) completely isolated from Jewry on the whole. By 1810, the last Chinese Rabbi died and in 1866 the synagogue was destroyed for the last time.

The China History Podcast in it's 112th episode gives us a riveting 38 minutes about the Kaifeng Jews. This is yet another unmissable edition in this magnificent series, by Laszlo Montgomery. (feed)

In 1163 CE the Jews of Kaifeng got official permission from the Chinese emperor to build a synagogue. From here on they have a well traceable history and Laszlo tells a couple of fascinating stories about it. For example how the Jesuits found them and there was a mutual attempt to co-opt the other. Or how when decline set it and the Jews lost their Hebrew, they'd display the Torah Scrolls in the market, hoping to run into someone who could read them. But he does not simply begin in 1163 and end in 1866. This podcast spans nearly a thousand years.

How did the Jews get there in the first place? And what was done and is done until this day to rekindle Judaism in Kaifeng? Such questions take us from the ancient Silk Road (one of my favorite history subjects) to the effects of the Boxer rebellion and the Second World War. All is told in the relaxed, yet thoroughly engaging Laszlo Montgomery style.

More China History Podcast:
Getting the Silk Road
Deng Xiaoping,
Chronology of Dynasties,
China History Podcast.

Neither orderly nor humane - NBIH

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:37:00 +0000

Population transfers are of all ages and although they are considered a crime against humanity these days, or at least bordering on it, there is a rich history of transfers and they were mostly regarded as legitimate at the time. I was aware of big transfers between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s and between India and Pakistan in 1947. I knew of the transfers in Europe after the Second World War, but had no idea that the transfer of Germans that took place was the largest in history. This is what we are told in a recent issue of New Books in History, when Marshal Poe interviewed Ray Douglas about his 10 year research project into this transfer, resulting in the book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2012). (feed)

Vae Victis, woe to the vanquished, could have been another title for the book. Nazi Germany lost the war, and after all its own demographic scheming to benefit the ethnic Germans, the ethnic Germans got to taste the reverse. What Ray Douglas adds to what we'd already know about this history is the sheer size of the transfer: up to 14 million Germans were transferred from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other places in Eastern Europe. The transfer was premeditated and sanctioned way in advance by the Allies. The swiftness of the transfer necessarily implied that the transfer was carried out neither orderly nor humanely as was originally the goal. And the Germans underwent it without resistance.

The operation added such a huge number of Germans to the other displaced multitude that was roaming about Europe at the time, that relief aid became a political hot potato - aiding the displaced persons, would imply aiding, mainly, the Germans, the vanquished. It would be a follow-up question whether this finding of Douglas's implied that for example this is another reason why the displaced Jews, were not helped at all?

I also assumed that these displaced Germans were integrated pretty well, but as Poe brings this issue up, Douglas suggest otherwise, however without much detail. More than the measure to which integration was successful, I was more surprised again by the numbers: Douglas claimed that about 20% of Germans today are transferred Germans or their offspring.

Many more surprising issues arise during this riveting interview.

More New Books in History:
Big History, Big Lands and Big Men
Hans Kundnani about Germany's left after the war,
Ottoman Age of Exploration,
The mysteries of whites and of mass,
A Soviet Memoir.

Subscribe to podcast by URL - iTunes 11

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I was about to go off about a new problem that I thought had arisen with iTunes 11 - see a previous post - but I just found out that on this particular issue I am mistaken. I thought the possibility to directly subscribe to a podcast had vanished with iTunes 11, but that is not the case. The option has moved on the menu from 'Advanced' to 'File'. For my blog this feature is absolutely critical as this allows me to continue posting feed URLs as I used to.

Copy the URL to a podcast feed anywhere you find it, for example on any post on this blog that reviews a podcast. Go to iTunes 11 and click the menu item 'File'. Under File you will find the option "Subscribe to Podcast..." - select this. A tiny window will open in which you can paste the URL you had copied to begin with. After pasting the URL, click OK and iTunes will be subscribed to the chosen podcast. Thus you will not have to look the same podcast up in the iTunes store and subscribe from there.

If you have a previous version of iTunes, you find the same possibility under 'Advanced' as explained in the old post about subscribing to podcasts in iTunes.

How to delete iTunes U files from iPod and other issues

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

The most read post on this blog is the one (actually there are several) about how to remove iTunesU files from your iPod. Until the recent upgrade to iTunes 11 that was a major problem. The great news is that with iTunes 11, this problem is finally taken care of.

Until now, iTunesU files would simply not show on the iPod, within iTunes and consequently they could not be deleted. Now, iTunesU has received its own -long in coming- folder as shown to the right. In there the files can be found and, provided you manually manage your iPod, can be at will deleted. In case you do not manually manage the pod, naturally the synchronization with iTunes will take care of that - as was one of the previously suggested solutions.

One more thing (or two)...

Of the five previously suggested solutions the two last methods were full-proof and both entailed a certain way of dealing with the iPod and with the subscription. I would like to point out that these approaches are still valid within iTunes 11.

1- Synchronize your iPod to iTunes.
I used to prefer to manually manage the pod, but in order to evade the iTunesU problem I have gotten used to letting iTunes synch my pod. It is still a valid way of dealing with the pod. You have to carefully select as what to synchronize. Generally I would not sync ALL music and not even ALL podcasts and iTunesU, but rather a selection, or a couple of specific playlists I manage centrally on iTunes.

2- Subscribe to iTunesU feeds as podcast
Copy the URL from the iTunesU section and then use the subscribe to podcast by URL method to subscribe. In my humble opinion, iTunesU series are not different from podcasts, so why not have them in that category and organize all of them together? This used to make sense, regardless of the deletion problem and therefore continues to be so. Do you have a problem finding the 'subscribe to podcast by URL' method in iTunes 11? So did I - I'll write about it in my next post.

As a last remark...

I have had an iPod nano since 2006 and have been using iTunes to manage the audio on my pod since. Once upon a time, iTunesU feeds were simply podcast feeds and the management was no different from podcast files. Somewhere around the release of iTunes 8 or 9, iTunesU got its strange state, since when the files are neither completely like podcast files nor completely like music files or audiobook files, for that matter. I first ran into the problem with the removal of those files from the pod early in 2010 and the endlessly requested post I wrote about it dates from August that year. So it has taken Apple two and a half years to solve this issue, which seems way too simple and way too critical to have had to take this amount of time.

This issue is only one of the examples of my frustration with iTunes and I am sure I am not the only one who is a disgruntled iTunes user. Before I go write about what I find wrong with iTunes, I'll have to write about the podcast subscription. Stand by.

Our brain dichotomies - Saeed Ahmed

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Here is another guest-post written by Saeed Ahmed:

Have you ever thought about the question “Who am I?” or the question “Why do I do the things I do?”

On the surface, perhaps these seem trivial questions, and yet they have been discussed by philosophers for thousands of years, with no firm answers, and the dialog continues.

Modern neuroscience has reached a point that it can in some ways inform this dialog. Three recent podcast interviews, based on books written for lay audiences, illuminate slightly different aspects of the debate, provide some answers, and raise many more questions.

Two dichotomies are emphasized in these podcasts; conscious and unconscious mental processing, and the functions of the left and right hemispheres.

Each author has been interviewed several times, and I have posted below links for sessions with three very experienced interviewers.

David Eagleman, interviewed by Terry Gross, is a neuroscientist and talks about a competition for attention among the myriad of neural processes (central, peripheral, sympathetic, parasympathetic) that we all possess. Volition and action occur on the basis of which processes “win.” Virtually all of the competition occurs unconsciously. In a way, Eagleman provides an organic basis for what an aspect of “unconscious: may be. In the latter part of the book, he discusses implications of this, including those for our legal systems. Fresh Air - (feed)

Daniel Kahneman, interviewed by Leonard Lopate, is a nobel-prize winner in economics. While this may seem a bit odd (why economics; isn’t that about supply and demand curves, utility functions and mathematical models?), it isn’t really, because aspects of behavior, particularly “non-rational” behavior, are becoming very important in economics research, as it has become more and more apparent that participants in markets often do not act as rationally as traditional models have assumed. Kahneman describes two neural systems: one that operates quickly with virtually no sense of voluntary control and a second that allocates attention to effortful activities. He too speculates about legal implications, e.g. the effect of judicial decisions on whether judges are hungry or have just eaten. Leonard Lopate Show - Feed

Kahneman also wrote an article on the same subject matter as his book for Scientific American, which can be accessed here.

My favorite interview of the three, was of Iain McGilchrist a British psychiatrist, who sat with Phillip Adams of Australia’s Radio National, who discusses the implications of the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy. The left-right dichotomy is just as fundamental as the conscious-unconscious one (although both ultimately are reductionist). Briefly summarized, just as one may hypothesize that the phenomena of perception/conception/volition/action are determined in some way by a competition between multiple unconscious processes, so too may one say that these phenomena occur due to states generated by the cooperative/competitive “discussion” between the two “persons” who exist inside us, and very different persons they are, apparently. McGilchrist goes beyond mechanistic explanations, and it is his foray into the implications of this dichotomy that I found quite compelling, speculative though they might be. The basic hypothesis he puts forth is that due to a predominance of left-dominant thinking, certain tendencies of western civilization have become damaging. In his own words (from his book’s introduction):

“Here I suggest that it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion. In our time each of these has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.”

Right/Left brain speculations, in books and blog posts on the hidden power of the right brain, are becoming quite fashionable, but they sometimes overstate the implications of the evidence they put forth to support their claims. Gilchrist advocates balance between the left and the right hemispheres. It is always hard to judge how far one may speculate, given any line of evidence, and I don’t think Gilchrist went too far, but not everyone may see his suppositions about social and humanistic issues well-grounded in research in this area. But few will fault his effort to reach this far.

More about the three books can be found at Amazon, Wikipedia (thinking fast and slow) (the master and his emissary).

The playlist these days

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:26:00 +0000

While I have virtually stopped blogging about podcasts, I am still listening. There are a couple of podcasts I keep following and here is a list.

The Early Middle Ages - Yale course. (iTunesU)
I have done this course before, but I was caught by it again. The reason I pick up certain history podcasts is because I want to wrap my mind around something. The point that was brought to my attention first by Europe from its origins is that the Roman Empire did not 'fall' in 476. Even if that was clear to anyone who was aware that it proceeded as the Byzantine Empire, which finally fell in 1453, an additional point is how Western Europe kept on developing at the hand of the Church, not being the Roman Empire, but also, in many ways as a continuation of it in its own way. The overall question being, how much western society can be coherently taken as one culture and as such be regarded as Roman.

A new podcast I have taken up is The History of World War II by Ray Harris. This is an amateur podcast which takes on the vast and unwieldy task of telling the entire history of WW2, which professionals do not begin to tackle. The result is very interesting shedding light on some less familiar parts such as Mussolini's rise in Italy. It pays ample attention to the nuts and bolts of the military campaigns in the war, which have to be to your liking of course. (feed)

Other podcasts I stick with are The China History podcast - which just finished a series about the history of Hong Kong (feed) - and David Crowther's History of England (feed). Needless to say, I also persist in listening to each week's issue of BBC's In Our Time (feed).

Apart from having a writer's block (I feel I am repeating myself on the blog and cannot bring myself to continue repeating), I also find that with the latest upgrade of iTunes, a crucial feature has been removed: the advanced subscribing to podcasts. That seems like a minor change, but I find it has great meaning and implication and first of all renders irrelevant almost all of the feed links I have been posting over the past years - 2000+ posts hurt, ouch!

I would like to revive this blog. I love to write about audio on the web, but I have to find a new way of doing it. Feel free to drop suggestions. In the mean time, I'll be silent, but there will be another guest post by Saeed coming up and maybe I'll give in to a rant about iTunes.

Taking courses with Saeed Ahmed

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Here is a guest-post written by Saeed Ahmed:

Jean Jacques Rousseau “was a charlatan,” a “moral leach,” who “consciously set out to tickle the fancy of the cultural elite in France.” Hegel “used technical terminology but wasn’t sure what he meant”; “he thought that the way to greatness was through obfuscation.” “Nobody invented jargon with the viciousness and vengeance of Kant.”
Containing such declarations, it is not surprising that Ronald Nash’s course on Modern Philosophy gets mixed reviews on itunes.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/modern-philosophy/id412910038
Nash (who died in 2006) was an unapologetic Christian apologetic. His lectures are full of attacks on moral relativism, modernism, post-modernism, enlightenment thinking, and just about anything that does not conform to his absolute, foundational belief in the Christian God.
When it comes to worldview, there is virtually nothing that I find appealing in Dr. Nash’s ideas. Nevertheless I found his course compelling at 3 levels.

First, he has a surprisingly engaging style; he is not bashful, neutral or balanced. You know exactly where he is coming from. His is a full frontal assault on virtual all liberal ideas. This is strangely refreshing and a change from the nuanced and “balanced” presentations in many lecture courses. Agree with him or not, he will capture your attention. His view is a full, undiluted measure of unabashed fundamentalist thought. There are no hidden levers; it’s all visible.

Second, his summaries of philosophers, while reductionist, are quite pithy and at least to my non-professional view, accurate enough to be good introductions. His basic approach is often something like “this guy was an idiot, but here are the three points he made” and then he lists them very systematically. For Kant he summarizes: “Concepts without percepts are empty; Percepts without concepts are blind.” Further, “Kant integrated rationalism and empiricism…rationalism entered Kant’s system because it encompassed the apriori set of categories with which experience was worked upon “; “With the categories, our minds organize percepts in ways that produce knowledge.” Kant put “human mind at the center”. “The reason we are conscious of space and time is not just because we apprehend something out there, but because our minds contribute notions of space and time to what we see.” “There are 12 apriori categories (such as unity, equality, and causation) that allow the mind to organize and relate ideas.” “Laws of nature are in a way a product of the knowing mind.” “We believe x causes y because our minds force us think in this way.” “We are never conscious of raw percepts; the moment we become conscious, of a raw percept, it has already been acted upon by the knowing mind; it has been given a structure, organization and a set of relationships.” “We cannot have knowledge of what we cannot perceive, thus we cannot know knowledge of our self” (the unifying transcendental self).
Category (apriori) -> Concept (direct object of human awareness) -> unified coherent field (transcendental unity of apperception).

Not bad. I am not a professional philosopher, and I would be very curious to know what people who really know the subject well think of Nash’s summaries.

Third, it is kind of fun to listen to someone who is confident enough to unabashedly bash some of the greatest minds of the last few thousand years. Wrong or right (and usually wrong, I would submit), this is just plain fun to listen to at times.

If Nash leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and a ringing in your ears, I recommend four antidotes: 1) Peter Milican’s general philosophy introduction (available in audio and video from Oxford), 2) Mythology by Gail Lavender, 3) episode 328 of Shrink Rap radio featuring an interview with the extremely erudite Dutch Jungian Analyst Robert Bosnak and 4) and Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch.

Unlike Nash’s survey course, Dr. Milican’s is much more balanced and accurate.

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/podcasts/general_philosophy

In Lavender’s course, I particularly direct you to the lecture on psychological theories of mythology, in which she mentions the dictum “dreams are the myths of the individual; myths are the dreams of the race”, then goes on to explain this using concepts developed by Freud and Jung.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/mythology/id497995501

In the Shrink Rap podcast (#328), Bosnak discusses the astonishing Red Book of Carl Jung (that was published in 2009 for the first time) and in a very short time. He mentions a plausible hypothesis about why religious fundamentalism is so prevalent these days.

http://www.shrinkrapradio.com/2012/11/29/328-the-red-book-and-cycles-of-change-with-jungian-analyst-robert-bosnak/

In the Buddhist Psychology course, Rosch demonstrates how in many ways, she is the polar opposite of Nash. Her style is generous, open, non-judgmental, liberal, and compassionate. She has a very deep knowledge of Buddhist philosophy and modern psychology, so is able to discuss the former, and place the latter in its context, and vice versa. I would recommend starting this course from the beginning, but if time is limited, then skip ahead and listen first to the third lecture, where a specific form of meditation is introduced. I have been doing this, and have noticed changes in me after only a few days.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/psychology-107-001-fall-2010/id391538994

These courses complement each other. Listening to lectures from all contemporaneously really blows one’s mind due to the sheer breadth of material that creates conflicts and tensions in one’s understanding and perspectives.

Saeed Ahmed

More Saeed Ahmed:
Optimizing Brain Fitness,
Wittgenstein,
Political and current affairs podcasts,
International Political Economy,
A podcast on climate, energy and food,
Two podcasts on the brain.

Ötzi in Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 05:28:00 +0000

I used to feel that prehistory were not that interesting. Too little data to go on, too few narratives that can be reconstructed. But with a find such as Ötzi the Iceman, human history of 5000 years ago suddenly bursts to life. In the twenty years that have passed since the find, Ötzi has not stopped telling us new stuff about his life in the Copper Age.

I was reminded to Ötzi by an original amateur podcast The History of Europe Podcast (feed) Christopher Linehan tells the history of Europe, as so many other podcasters do, but his starting point is the earliest of histories. Since the first episodes he has worked his way from the Paleolithic to the Chalcolithic period in the 7th issue. And it is there that Ötzi pops up. With his copper age axe and his whole body and garments preserved in the Alpine ice, he allows Linehan to tell a much more specific story in his podcast.

But if you are new to Ötzi, before listening to Linehan's History of Europe, listen first to Stuff You missed in History Class ( feed) where the basics are told of how Ötzi was found in the Alps between Austria and Italy, however they first thought it was the body of a recently disappeared hiker. Only when the forensic experts had extracted the body fully from the ice it began to dawn this might be a much older individual.

Modern technology has allowed so many ways of analyzing the remains, so that each part of it can be the subject of an entire podcast. Ötzi's shoes for example. The shoes are discussed by Linehan's History of Europe as well as the charming, but short episode of Engines of our ingenuity (feed). The shoes are made of multiple materials and considered extremely fit for the iceman's trek through the mountains. The podcast even goes as far as to claim Ötzi's shoes are even better than many shoes modern people wear. Think about that when you barge around on your crocs.

A huge subject is also Ötzi's medical record: his genetic makeup, his diseases, fractures and wounds as well as the contents of his intestines. Learn more at Medical Discovery News (feed) and Life Technologies (BTR) (feed) Ötzi, for example, was found to have Lime's disease, how that is not what has taken him in.

What actually caused his death, has proven to be one of the conundrums about Ötzi. Did he die of the arrow wound that was inflicted upon him shortly be fore his death (with the arrow head still stuck in his back), or did he die of the frost in the ice that preserved him for 53 centuries? What is certain is that he had been in a fight. It also has become clear he had two good meals with meat and vegetables on the day of his death. He was 46 years old, had brown hair and brown eyes - just like your bloghost...

The Meaning of Everything - Big Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

An exceptionally witty and entertaining lecture by Simon Winchester can be heard at the TVO podcast Big Ideas. (feed)

Winchester relates the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. How it came into being and how it attempts to be complete and impartial other than Webster's or Samuel Johnson's dictionaries. Or similar dictionaries of other languages.

A history with many maniacs, slips of paper and a huge crowd of anonymous contributors. Sounds familiarly modern?

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

Reith Lectures 2012 - BBC Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Here is a quick heads up to announce that the Reith lectures Podcast has begun publishing the lecture series that was held about a month ago. Speaker is historian Niall Ferguson and the series title is The Rule of Law and Its Enemies. (feed)

This title is rather reminiscent of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) in which he pointed at Fascism and Communism as the ideologies that held the greatest threat to society. Underlying these ideologies were theories that, in Popper's view, had the kind of tendency towards totalitarianism that brought these ideologies about and what similar dangerous ideologies could emerge.

In 2012 such discourse is not taken to ideologies, as is to be expected. Ferguson takes a look at the institutions and their role in society. But the question is still the same: what helps and what threatens the kind of nation we would like to live in?

Reith Lectures 2011:
Reith Lectures 2011.

Reith Lectures 2010:
Reith Lectures 2010 (2),
Reith Lectures 2010.

Reith Lectures in 2009:
A new politics of the common good,
The bioethics concern,
Morality in Politics,
Morality and the Market.

Football Weekly - Euro 2012 Daily (The Guardian)

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Occasionally I listen to The Guardian's podcast Football Weekly, but when major tournaments come around, this podcast changes to a daily one and is permanently on my playlist. So now we have the Euro 2012 Daily and it is a great listen (feed). In fact it is so good, I did not even bother with other podcasts.

James Richardson, is as always the witty host to a panel of guests who comment on the games and make haphazard predictions of the upcoming venues. In 30 minutes you are informed and entertained.

The podcast comes out immediately after every games night and accompanies me the morning after. And since my team has been met with defeat it was not met with much happiness, but the podcast invariably managed to cheer me up.

More:
World Cup Daily.

Moral and Political thought of Gandhi (History 175c) - UCLA

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Thu, 31 May 2012 07:42:00 +0000

Unfortunately, the audio is incomplete, but Vinay Lal's course at UCLA -History 175c- still gives a compelling series of lectures digging into the biography of Gandhi, his thought and his critics. (feed)

Even if the life of Gandhi and his thought are well-known, there are many surprises when you start digging into it. As a concept, nonviolence is not so difficult to understand, but a theory how this might work in a political theory and in a spiritual philosophy is far from self-explanatory. Vinay Lal's lectures are a good way to get acquainted. Although Lal certainly reveres Gandhi there is ample distance to let you feel you are getting a fair introduction.

In comparison, the old Berkeley courses on nonviolence are much more engaged. These two, PACS 164A&B are among those podcast lectures that are no longer available through Berkeley, not even among the classical courses on iTunesU. The Metta Center for nonviolence however still points at them, including video recordings of those lectures. Should you want to take on these, start with Lal's course.

Lal's course is a great complement to other podcasts about Gandhi. When Joseph Lelyveld published his controversial biography of Gandhi, I reviewed a couple of podcasts that paid attention to this book.

Also among other Indian History courses Lal teaches at UCLA this one stands out. It clearly is the subject that is most closely to Lal's areas of interest. The other courses are History of India and the History of British India.

Agatha Christie - Oxford Biographies

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:27:00 +0000

Oxford University Press has a Dictionary of National Biographies which probably is also available in print, but can be accessed on-line at a premium. It contains biographies of some sixty thousand people in British history, from 400 BC to today. For promotion they have a podcast every fortnight Oxford Biographies that delivers spoken biographies in seven to fifteen minutes. (feed)

Each free issue is maintained for a limited amount of time in the feed. Names I have commented on in the past such as Roald Dahl and George Best, can no longer be had, but if you are quick PG Wodehouse can still be had, along with William Morris (of the Morris cars) and Hannah Snell an 18th century female soldier.

The latest issue, Agatha Christie, is also one not to miss out on. In nineteen minutes you will get every thing you need to know. How she was shy as a youngster, still loathed being a celebrity as an elderly woman, still such a prolific and successful writer and made a Dame by the end of her life. What I particularly liked was the attention given to her writing methods and the technique she applied to giving the clues, yet manipulating their ambiguity such that it would confuse the reader towards the wrong conclusion until the truth was revealed and the right solution to the whodunnit would be perfectly correct.

More Oxford Biographies:
George Best
Roald Dahl,
Biography Podcasts,
Oxford Biographies podcast review.

Early Middle Ages (Yale)

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Wed, 02 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Open Yale is a great source for academic podcasts. Thanks to a tip from my reader Charles Lipson, I learned about a set of new courses that have become available at Yale, among others Paul Freedman's series about the Early Middle Ages (284-1000 CE) - (feed). After having heard the first four lectures (out of 22), I warmly recommend this series.

In the world of history podcasts there are a couple of other options to get information about the early Middle Ages; UCSD has an MMW part dedicated to this era and there is also a series about the Byzantine Empire that should be had when you are interested in these centuries and there is the multimedia experience of Europe From Its Origins. All of these tend to start with the Roman emperors Diocletian and Constantine to mark the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and then move on to cover the fall of Rome in the West and the consecutive developments in Western Europe.

Yale's Paul Freedman does the same, but with his lectures I was made to realize for the first time, how radical the change is, especially under Constantine and how this truly is the beginning of the Middle Ages, that era in the history of Western Europe that is dominated by Christianity and the Church power. It has been said before, but as Freedman emphasizes how odd it is that an insignificant minority sect such as the Christians, that is known for its pacifism, within a hundred years becomes the dominant creed and political power in this mighty and militaristic empire, I have come to understand more profoundly how remarkable the development is. Really the start of a new age. Neither religion nor the state were the same as before.

More Yale:
The Moral Foundations of Politics
History of epidemics,
Early Modern England,
European Civilization 1648-1945,
France since 1871,
New Testament, history and literature,
The Hebrew Bible.

More Medieval History:
Europe From Its Origins
Norman Centuries
12 Byzantine Rulers,
Byzantine Empire (UCSD),
Medieval Heritage (UCSD - Chamberlain),
Medieval Heritage (UCSD - Herbst).

Shakespeare’s Restless World

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 04:46:00 +0000

When the excellent BBC history podcast History of the World in 100 Objects arrived at its 100th episode and discussed the 100th object, sadly, this series had to end. (feed) Sadly, because with Neil MacGregor discussing history by analyzing an object from the British Museum or any other museum, the BBC had found a formula for radio and podcast that could be applied to much more than just a 100 pieces. A new subject had to be found for Neil MacGregor to tackle with the help of Museum collections, and fortunately a new subject has been found and a very promising new series has started.

Shakespeare's Restless World has Neil MacGregor discuss the history of Shakespeare's time, by looking at objects from its period and, as with the previous series, calling in various specialists to add their knowledge to the podcast (feed). Just as the previous series, these programs are carefully edited and delivered in comprehensive 14 minute episodes. An additional feature is that the series not only looks at an object, but also has quotations from Shakespeare's work to illustrate the subject at hand. Also, as an improvement on the previous series, the object is pictured in the podcast logo of the episode, so if you have a player that displays the logo while you listen, you can even take a glance at the prop that is being discussed. The podcast is published every workday. Considering that it is not called, Shakespeare in 54 objects or some such numbered title, the makers have not limited themselves from the start to a particular length.

So far, we have had five issues published, four of which I have already heard. I especially liked 'Snacking through Shakespeare' that taught me what were the 16th centuries equivalent of a box of popcorn and a can of soda. In other words: what did people eat while they attended the theater in Shakespeare's time. I was surprised by how accurate this question could be answered and how varied the menu was. Next time you try to silently open your can in the theater and dread the fizzy noise, know that in the 16th century, you'd be in the same spot, but in stead of a can with a fizzy soft drink, you'd pop a bottle of fizzy ale.

More:
A reminder of the great BBC podcasts,
AHOW is back again,

Returned from hiatus: A History of the World in 100 Objects,

Indus Seal,

First AHOW Review.

Passover joke

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:14:00 +0000

Rabbi Jack receives a letter from the Royal Court that he going to be knighted. All his friends and relatives are so proud of him, but the rabbi is concerned. "How can I be a knight? A rabbi knight, who can conceive of such a thing? And besides, I'll have to go through the whole knighting ceremony. I'll probably do it all wrong. What do I do?"
His friends try to rest him assured. "It is really simple, you kneel before the Queen, she will announce you to be Sir Jack from now on and that's it. It's easy - don't worry. And you will continue to be the same old Jack."
That sort of calms the Rabbi down, but then he finds out that every knight has to choose a motto. Some line in Latin that he has to utter when the Queen knights him. This upsets him even more. "Latin! I do not know the simplest thing in Latin. Why must it be Latin? Couldn't it be Hebrew." In order to get rid of the whining his friends agree: "Yes, choose a line in Hebrew, that will be fine."
"Good," the rabbi acclaims, "I will think of something."

And so the evening comes round that together with a whole lot of other people, Rabbi Jack is going to be knighted. Each man kneels in front of the Queen, she announces their knighthood, they say their line in Latin and the affair is done.
Rabbi Jack is the last in line. He approaches the Queen and she proclaims: "Henceforth, you will be Sir Jack." And Jack says: "Ma Nishtana."
The Queen frowns, failing to recognize his motto, leans over to her adviser and whispers:

"Why is this knight different from others??"

De duif van de directrice

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:57:00 +0000

Dit is voor mij de ultieme nostalgie

Getting the Silk Road

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:59:00 +0000

I am fascinated by the Silk Road and if you, like me, would like to learn more about it, here are some good tips. First of all, Laszlo Montgomery's great China History Podcast (feed) has begun a series about the Silk Road just now. There was also an In Our Time issue about the Silk Road in 2009 which can now be had from the In Our Time History Archive (feed). Other podcast tips I have come up with in the past are:
Zhang Qian,
The Parthians,
Turfan,
Jade artifact
The Kushan.

The basics of the Silk Road are not difficult to understand: it was -already by 200 BC and still is today- a network of land routs that connected China with the rest of Asia and Europe and which allowed for trade between distant cultures such as the Roman Empire, the Han Chinese, India and more. Notably Silk and Jade were traded along the routes and if you stop here, you are just fine. I try to imagine how this actually worked and then the idea of a Silk Road becomes very complicated to understand. If you begin considering the sheer distances, the difficulty of the terrain, the problems of logistics and so on, I fail to see how it could actually work. How could a trader from China transport something extremely valuable like silk over such a distance alone? He'd be away for at least a year, he'd take enormous risks along the road and assuming he'd manage to sell his goods in Rome, he'd have to get home safely. On the other hand, if the trader wasn't to sell the silk in Rome himself, but rather rely on a chain of middle men, I would expect that the silk, by the time it reached Rome, had become so expensive, nobody would be willing to pay the price.

I am still to get an answer to this basic question, but from Laszlo Montgomery's opening episode, I learned of a solution that addressed one of the logistic problems that would have made the journey impossible: the problem of fresh water. If traders had had to carry the water they needed for the journey, along with the goods they wanted to trade with, the amount of luggage would have become simply too large. Yet, most of the roads pass arid terrain, if not outright desert. The way this was addressed was by local populace that had dug canals from the snowy mountain tops, until numerous wells along the route. This allowed the traders to journey with just their goods. I also understand that this brought the routes down to a very limited amount of possibilities: only those places where the mountains were sufficiently close by and wells had been established.

I still have to get an answer to the practical questions of how the trade was actually pulled off, because it continues to escape me how anyone would have taken the risk of the whole journey or how it could deliver affordable goods within an endless chain of middle men. Exposes about the Silk Road, whether podcast or not, rapidly leave the subject of trade and move on to emphasize what else began to travel along the Silk Road: ideas and technologies. The Silk Road allowed Buddhism to spread from India to the rest of Asia. Along the road also spread Manicheanism and early forms of Christianity. Eventually Islam took the road. Chinese inventions such as paper made it to the west over the road and of course Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road back and forth.

Another point that is not always made, but needs to be held in mind is an inequality that also played a part in the age of exploration when the sea routes also connected China with the rest: China had all the splendid stuff, but what did the rest of the world, especially the Europeans have to offer China? In the later years it was silver from South America, but what traveled on the Silk Road from west to east? How did the Romans pay for their much craved silk? Montgomery mention that spices, ivory and horses were wanted by the Chinese, but this is stuff from other parts of Asia and possibly Africa. What came from Europe? One thing that could not possibly be all, comes as a surprise: chairs. I hope the China History podcast will have more answers in the coming chapters.

More China History Podcast:
Deng Xiaoping,
Chronology of Dynasties,
China History Podcast.

Een grote podcast voor een klein publiek

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:29:00 +0000

Veertien Achttien is een van de allerbeste podcasts die op het net te vinden zijn. Dat heb ik al vaker geschreven en om nou niet in herhaling te vervallen, zal ik het anders zeggen: Veertien Achttien is een van de allerbeste podcasts die op het net te vinden was. Verleden tijd.

Het betekent niet dat Veertien Achttien, de grote podcast over de grote oorlog, afgelopen is, of voortijdig podfaded is. Tom Tacken, de onvermoeibare maker van deze serie biografieen, gaat gewoon door. Hij gaat zelfs langer door, voorbij de wapenstilstand van 11 November 1918, wat aanvankelijk de planning was. Er wordt doorverteld tot en met de tekening van het Verdrag van Versailles in 1919. Maar al dit moois komt niet meer in de feed, zal niet meer publiek beschikbaar zijn.

Het is niet de eerste keer dat Tackens provider hem in de steek laat. Toen dat eerder gebeurde wist hij zijn feed bij een ander te plaatsen, maar nu ook deze feed niet meer werkt heeft de podcaster de moed opgegeven. Het is al genoeg moeite om de afleveringen te produceren, er moet niet teveel overhead bijkomen om al dat moois voor niets bij het internetpubliek te krijgen. Wat overblijft is om, voor een niet al te groot bedrag, volger van Veertien Achttien te worden. Dan krijg je tekst en uitleg persoonlijk toegestuurd en kan je genieten tot het einde.

Voor Tom Tacken is het een begrijpelijke beslissing, maar voor het medium podcast is het een grote klap. Ooit leek het mogelijk om met bescheiden middelen, uitzonderlijke audio bij een geinteresseerd publiek te krijgen. Voor de maker eiste het nauwelijks meer dan de inzet van het produceren en voor het publiek was het aanbod gratis. Het klonk altijd al een beetje te mooi om waar te zijn, maar het impliceerde wel een fantastische vrijheid van expressie. Het leverde een prachtig rijk geschakeerd en geinspireerd medium op. Veertien Achttien is niet de eerste podcast die ik zie verdwijnen van dit utopische toneel. Ik vrees een beetje dat het symptomatisch is en dat we geleidelijk terug komen bij wat media in de tijd voor internet ook al was: een wereld gedomineerd door giganten en tamelijk flauwe main-stream produkten.

Als er al een weg daaruit is, terug naar de vrolijke anarchie van podcast uit, laten we zeggen, 2007, dan lijkt mij dat het publiek moet gaan betalen. Als een podcast als Veertien Achttien voldoende volgers heeft, kan het zijn onafhankelijkheid terugwinnen. En dan kan Tacken doorgaan tot 1948 - om maar eens wat te noemen.

Meer Veertien Achttien:
Sholem Schwarzbard,
Bernard Freyberg,
Richard Huelsenbeck,
Veertien Achttien nieuwsbrief (PTSD versus shellshock)
Sir Mark Sykes.

India and the Mahabharata

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:14:00 +0000

Professor Vinay Lal (UCLA) can be heard again on podcast with his History of India (UCLA - History 9A) (feed), about which I have written before in 2009 when it was also podcast. As then, also this time, there is a considerable difference in the characteristics of the material delivered between the first lectures and that those towards the end of the course. Whereas the history is more recognizably history, that is political history, economic history, as we approach the present, the very early history of the Indian subcontinent is presented by Lal with very little political and economic data. Much of the first 10 lectures are spent on discussing culture, religion (as much as the term can be applied, which is doubtful according to Lal) a bit of archeology and the literary traces of old India the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

Two years ago, the series of lectures that discussed hardly any data, but delved into those texts were very hard for me to follow and I am happy to report it is different this time around. The kudos in this respect go entirely to another podcast: The Mahabharata Podcast (feed). Lawrence Manzo's retelling of the Mahabharata, which has progressed to the 90th episode (Bhisma's Final Teachings part 2), has made the story as well as the cultural scope of the epic much more familiar to me. As a consequence, whenever Lal is referring to the Mahabharata's characters and anecdotes, they are familiar, easy to place and his point is coming through.

I want to recommend Manzo's podcast to anyone, regardless whether you are thinking of latching on to History 9A. The Mahabharata is a most fascinating, entertaining and at times mind boggling tale to engage with. Should you seek some shorter preparation, you can also turn to Rick ALbright's series on World Literature (feed) which has a two part issue addressing the Ramayana.

Next on Lal's schedule is the Kama Sutra, which, incidentally was also discussed on the last program of BBC's In Our Time. (feed)

More History of India:
History of India - the search goes on
8 podcasts I listened to,
History of India or Europe?
History of India.

More Mahabharata:
The Temptation of Karna,
Flood tales; Noah, Gilgamesh and Manu,
Indian roots of the Unicorn,
Endless cloth,
The Mahabharata Podcast.

More Rick Albright's English 205:
World Literature.

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

In Our Time archive

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:58:00 +0000

How long has this been going on? I do not know since when, but this morning I suddenly noticed that the BBC has opened up the entire In Our Time archive for podcast.

I used to write that one should always download the In Our Time podcasts and keep for ever. The BBC used to keep only the last episode in the feed. In case one had not kept the episode, the only option to listen was to go to the on-line archive and listen while streaming. While that has become less and less of a bother with WiFi all around and capable smartphones, it still was a pity you had no option. All of this now belongs to the past; the archive is also available for download and one can lay ones hands on any chapter ever.

The archive has been broken down in five subject feeds:
In Our Time Archive - Culture, (IOT Culture feed)
In Our Time Archive - History, (IOT History feed)
In Our Time Archive - Philosophy, (IOT Philosophy feed)
In Our Time Archive - Religion, (IOT Religion feed)
In Our Time Archive - Science, (IOT Science feed)

I immediately tried the history archive in order to find an issue from 2006, that I remembered as especially informative and the copy of which I had long lost: The Diet of Worms - which has nothing to do with food, in case you wondered. The Diet was an imperial assembly held in the German city of Worms and this program was about the one in 1522, during which Martin Luther had to defend his theology in public. If you ever needed 40 minutes to get a handle on Luther, the man and his ideas, this is the place to go.

Not only the Diet of Worms can be found in the feed, I saw the archive goes back as far as 1998 with promising titles such as Money, Byzantium, the Celts, the Aztecs, the East India Company, the Mughal Empire and on and on. A veritable treasure trove.

Melvyn Bragg and the Written World

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:18:00 +0000

It is in the style of Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that the BBC offers us Melvyn Bragg and the Written World. What showed up in the podcast feed of In Our Time (with Melvyn Bragg) and consequently disappeared, has now been published as an independent podcast: Written World with Melvyn Bragg (feed).

As I reported in the past days about this series, I got a comment from reader Richard Walker, to point out that this podcast had been spawned from In Our Time. Thanks Richard.

Update to the break update for 2012

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Did I write In Our Time started a miniseries The Written World? Well they did and for 24 hours the first two parts were in the feed. Even the third part was there for a couple of minutes, but now, the feed has been cleaned. The series exist, but not in podcast - what a shame. And sorry about sending you on a wild goose chase.

In case you really want to listen, check with In Our Time, The Written World and invoke the BBC iPlayer.

Break update for 2012

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:35:00 +0000

Also in 2012 I will be on a prolonged break for the blog. 2011 has been a very busy year, simply too busy to engage in blogging. What has contributed to that, among others, is the fact that I have changed jobs twice. However, I have not stopped listening to podcasts and so let's have a couple of recommendations from my playlists.

The first is In Our Time, which has started a five part series about the human invention of writing and how writing and its innovations have had a fundamental impact on human history. Subscribe to In Our Time's feed and look for the episodes about The Written World.

The second is a sub-series in the China History Podcast which has been going on for 7 episodes already and is still running. Laszlo Montgomery is telling us the biography of Deng Xiaoping and this is the best introduction to recent Chinese history I have had in a long time. (feed)

Break update

noreply@blogger.com (The Man called Anne) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 08:41:00 +0000

Dear Readers,

Here is to tell you I am still on my break. It is a relief to be exempt from the pressure of posting every day. It is also a relief to be listening fewer podcasts and only those that I feel like listening to and not all those that I have to get a bite of in order to be able to write about them. The blogging and the listening had begun to resemble a job rather than a hobby. If it were a job, I'd do it with pleasure and ten times better than I ever did. But it is not and to have to squeeze it in with a real job and family life, while the blog was becoming more and more demanding (more and more podcasts to keep track of) got just a tad too much.

So, that is why I am away. That is why I listen less, but surely,while updating you, I might as well relate what I am listening to these days.

I find myself with three podcast about the First World War:
Veertien Achttien, the unmatched weekly bio of a participant in the war, be it on war or the home front. This remarkable Dutch podcast aims to supply a weekly bio for as long as the Great War itself lasted, that is for some 230 weeks. By now the podcast has reached week 170 without ever failing and at an outstanding constant quality. Another aim is said to translate the podcast into English and to start repeating the weekly feat from 2014 until 2018. Stay posted! (feed)

First World War Centenary podcast by the Imperial War Museum, offering extracts from their unique oral history program.

History of the First World War, an amateur podcast that offers a very accessible military history of the first world war. Currently the podcast is on hiatus, hopefully not for long. (feed)

As the Palestinian bid for statehood is pending at the UN, I also want to point you to a couple of podcast episodes that offer an unexpected perspective on the Middle-East conflict, but that I will report in another post. Stay tuned.

Anne