Antonio Forcellino on Michelangelo
Click on the image to hear the interview:
Author: podmeister
city-pick Amsterdam
The latest volume in the city-pick series – on Amsterdam – has just been published. When their Berlin book came out, Podularity carried an interview with the book’s editor, Heather Reyes. This time, we go one better and present an audio diary which I compiled on location in Amsterdam with Dutch poet and critic, Victor Schiferli, the co-editor of city-pick Amsterdam. Our main project was filming a number of interviews with Dutch writers, currently going up on Vimeo and YouTube, and in the interstices, we made the sound recordings that you can listen to below – a sort of audio introduction both to Amsterdam and Victor’s book. Just click on the pictures below to hear the sound clips. 1. Spui Square and the Athenaeum Bookshop 2. De Zwart cafe and literary feuds 3. Dam Square 4. Amsterdam in wartime 5. The Vondelpark (and who was Vondel?) 6. In the Red Light District 7. Amsterdam on Two Wheels 8. Victor’s Thoughts on Compiling the Book
Le Monde diplomatique podcast – James K. Galbraith
This morning I spoke to leading US economist James K. Galbraith on the phone from Athens for this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast. James is professor of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He’s the author of six books, including The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps” The interview accompanies and amplifies his article in the current issue of Le Monde diplo, which looks at what he calls “the Europeanization of Mediterranean debt” forced on the EU by speculators, and what he predicts will become a vicious circle of budget cutting, debt deflation and depression. He further predicts that old patterns of hardship migration will re-emerge: “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps because they weren’t willing to deal with them at home”. To listen to the podcast, click here.
Le Monde diplomatique podcast – “Blame the Grand Mufti”
After a gap of a couple of months, the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is back. This month I talk to Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese academic who is professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS in London and author most recently of The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, published this month. His subject in the article – and in this podcast – is Israel’s propaganda war with the Palestinians and the Arab world in general, and the intensification it has undergone in recent years. In the interview we talk about the propaganda use to which the “abject” wartime behaviour of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has been put by Israel and how Holocaust denial in the Arab world differs from that in the West. To listen to the podcast, click here.
Latest Podularity videos
Click on the image below to see the latest Podularity videos on Vimeo:
In search of happiness
I met François Lelord in London recently to discuss his international bestseller – just released in English – Hector and the Search for Happiness (Gallic Books). François is a psychiatrist by training, so it’s no coincidence that the hero in his first venture into fiction is a Candide-like young practitioner of that profession who becomes dissatisfied with his life and goes off round the world in search of the meaning of happiness…
44. Dancing on the heads of snakes
“Dancing on the heads of snakes” is how President Ali Abdullah Salih of Yemen describes the near impossibility of governing his country. He should know; he’s managed to cling on to power by keeping up the dance for the past three decades. The challenge is certainly considerable: Yemen has been a united country for only 20 years and it’s far from certain that it will remain one. Tribalism make governance a tricky business at the best of times as does poverty: around 40% of its rapidly growing population live on $2 a day. The country’s oil and water supplies are both dwindling at an alarming rate. It’s relations with its northern neighbour, Saudi Arabia, are strained. And since the failed suicide bomb attempt on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, Yemen is once again in the full glare of international attention as Al-Qaeda’s home base on the Arabian peninsula. British journalist Victoria Clark, who was born in the city of Aden in the south of Yemen when it was still a British …
Michelangelo: A Tormented Life
The return of The Return of Captain John Emmett
43. In praise of Germany
In this week’s podcast, I talk to Simon Winder about the challenges of making a book on German history entertaining. It’s a challenge he rose to magnificently in his quirky new book, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern. He takes the reader along the highways and down many of the byways of German history to reveal aspects of the country’s past which are rarely encountered. It would be a flinty soul who read this book and didn’t at least feel the first stirrings of a desire to holiday in Germany for the first time. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast and hear Simon’s views on German cuisine and his tips for where to discover the delights of the “real” Germany.