In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, from BBC Radio 4, is consistently smart, in depth and so briskly paced that I'm often too tired to listen to it because I just can't keep up. Melvyn Bragg tends to choose historical or scientific topics, everything from the Great Fire of London to Ediacara Biota, and his invited academics take turns chiming in with their angle of expertise over about forty-five minutes. These programs are done live so there's some variation week to week in the quality but there are plenty of gems in the archive.
Here's a few clips from one of my favorite episodes, on the philosopher Kierkegaard. You can listen to the full episode here.
We don't have many opportunities on broadcast public radio in the U.S. to hear a full hour on a single topic or a single subject. A lot can be conveyed in two minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, but sometimes a longer format allows for a stronger story and more empathy for the characters.
One of my favorite episodes of This American Life is one of the special episodes where they devote a full hour to one story. "Duty Calls" from June 2008 is Josh Bearman's story of helping out his semi-estranged mother and brother after his mother almost dies from self-neglect. Despite the tragic parts, Bearman's take on the story is sincere without being melodramatic, and he's good at showing the humor and absurdity in his situation. I appreciate the original way he approaches some pretty familiar themes, like interdependence within family and the practical challenges that keep people in poverty.
I never read Slate because I always find it overstuffed with ads and really irritating to navigate, but I regularly tune in to three of their podcasts, the Culture Gabfest, the Political Gabfest and the Double X Gabfest. Relatively relaxed and unorganized, their approach is a welcome difference to the way NPR presents the same kinds of subjects. When I first started listening I was a little surprised as to how much real information I took away from shows, which can feel haphazardly put together. It made me wonder, for news, political analysis and cultural analysis, how does the style and structure (or lack of structure) of the discussion affect how much we absorb and understand? I find that I easily tune out monotone voices and uninterrupted, flat sounding dialog. On NPR, despite the attempts to give a naturalistic quality to the conversations and reports, it's still hard to escape the fact that a lot of their content is written content which is then read aloud. This is very different from spontaneous conversation where the participants speak mostly from memory, and it's hard to fake that. For something that's very simply produced, the Slate podcasts deliver a lot of interesting shows.
Here's a clip from the Slate Double X gabfest from September 23rd, 2009 about recent studies on female happiness. (Please note, these clips take awhile to load):
