Teddy Diaries

Last week's episode of Thinking Aloud exposed the novel idea of using the classroom tool of Teddy Diaries as a sociological resource. Teddy Diaries are where young children take a class teddy bear home and write a diary entry with their families, then return the teddy bear to class, and the next child brings the teddy bear home, and so on. Sociologist Randi Waerdahl is pouring over Teddy Diaries to take a peek into how families want present themselves to the rest of the class or to the outside, and she's comparing them from different communities around the world.

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PHOTO: OCCAM

The Sound of Young America: The Best Comedy of 2009 Special

 Great collection of 2009 comedy clips compiled by Jesse Thorn on The Sound of Young America. Below is my favorite, by John Mulaney.

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PHOTO: Brainware3000

Studio 360 Story on Avatars, Generally

"So if I'm running around or flying around or sexing around in a virtual world, my brain still ultimately reads that as real. Media is real. It ultimately says that you're living this experience that you're viewing."

A story this week by Eric Molinsky from WNYC's Studio 360 discusses the nature of avatars and the mind/body questions they play around with.  How do we represent ourselves online and how do we control that image? It's a pretty short report, but it enouraged me to re-examine the contradiction between our desire and interest in worlds online and the very constrained physical mode of interaction, screens and keyboards, that we have to use to participate in that world.
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PHOTO: JARED TARBELL

Code Switching

I grew up hearing the voice of Bob Edwards almost every day on the radio. When he left NPR, I didn't get satellite radio, so he was just gone, and I hadn't heard him since. A couple weeks ago I discovered his shows, The Bob Edwards Show and Bob Edwards Weekend, finally, through podcasts. Hearing his voice again, and his voice is unchanged, gives me solemn, nostalgic, near-religious feelings that the world really does have some kind of continuity and that Bob Edwards will live forever.

Below are a couple segments from a recent episode where he interviews writer Sarah Lyall about British culture. It's a good interview in its own right - she's got plenty to say - but it's also good example of Bob Edwards' interviewing style.

Bob Edwards' shows are on Sirius XM satellite radio, in itunes and on the websites.

(Update 8/2012, Links no longer available, sorry)

PHOTO: Jonathan Gill

Kierkegaard on In Our Time

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.

Florida and Recovery

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.

You can listen to the full mp3 here.

PHOTO: Julia Rubinic

Slate Podcasts

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):


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Feed for Slate Double X Gabfest.

This clip is from the Slate Political Gabfest from October 1st, 2009, about the timeline for the health care bill:



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The Slate podcasts are all available through itunes.

Vija Celmins - Background Sound

Here are two clips of the artist Vija Celmins talking about two pieces of artwork, one a painting and the other a small sculpture work. These clips were produced by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for their audio guides for visitors.

I saw "To Fix the Image in Memory" at the museum, which looked like a pile of small brown stones in a glass box, and I would have completely passed it by and not realized what she'd done if I hadn't listened to her talk about it in the audio guide.

Even though these clips are very short you get a good sense of her approach to making art.

Gun with Hand #1
The picture Vija Celmin's is available here, on the MoMA website.



To Fix the Image in Memory
This work is viewable here.





PHOTO: David C. Foster

Interview with Guillermo Del Toro

I really admire how Terry Gross can turn a minor starting point, like the release of a new movie, into a thoughtful, far-reaching conversation. A lot of credit goes to the interesting people she interviews, but it seems like she goes in to every interview with the assumption that the interviewee, no matter how minor, has something fascinating to talk about.

I recently remembered this excellent Fresh Air interview from 2007, with Mexican movie director Guillermo Del Toro. The conversation begins with his movie, Pan's Labyrinth, but goes on to talk about fairy tales, horror and the psychological function of dark stories. He explains how his approach to stories and art came out of childhood experiences of fear and trauma. Del Toro is articulate and heartfelt and the interview is one-of-a-kind.



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IMAGE: JOSEF STUEFER

"It was not love, and it was certainly not a momentary weakness. It was an attempt to ward off chaos."

The New Yorker's monthly fiction podcast gives me a fluttery feeling whenever I see a new episode materialize in my itunes. When the shows are good, they're very good- the voices, the story, the language and the analysis. When they don't work, it's usually because the reading is halting or stilted, and I often don't finish those episodes.

I'm posting this one because the story, a quasi-personal history by Sergei Dovlatov, amazed me with its deceptively straightforward writing. Dovlatov finds a way to write about mixed emotions, odd circumstances, and contradictory characters in a way that feels realistic, sometimes humorous, and quietly reverent.

It's read by David Bezmozgis with an accent carrying Russian and Canadian inflections (I think?). His pacing harmonizes perfectly with the story.




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Page for the podcast episode on the New Yorker website.

PHOTO: BOLSHAKOV