All posts filed under: history and politics

Le Monde diplo site relaunched

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The English-language edition of Le Monde diplomatique, for which I produce a monthly current affairs podcast featuring an in-depth interview with one of that month’s contributors, has just relaunched its website, and very smart it is too! I’m delighted to say that there is a podcast page, where all the podcasts are archived (click on the screen grab below to visit the page). And it’s always interesting to see how designers respond to the challenge of coming up with a logo that says “podcast”…

23. Exploring the haunted city

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Neil Gregor: Haunted City – Nuremberg and the Nazi Past “By the end of the war, Nuremberg had a reputation second to none as a Nazi town.” In this week’s podcast I talk to historian Neil Gregor about Germany’s often difficult process of coming to terms with the second world war in the decades that followed its defeat. To bring sharper focus to his book, Neil decided to concentrate on how one city in particular – Nuremberg in Bavaria – reached its accommodation with the past. Neil’s own father grew up in the city and one of Neil’s earliest memories of learning about history was hearing his German godparents describe RAF bombing raids on Nuremberg.

De profundis

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I’ve begun producing a podcast for Blackwell Bookshop Online, which you can find here. In the first podcast, I talk to Philip Hoare about his book on the whale, Leviathan (so I suppose in a sense a literal podcast). The book, which was one of my favourite non-fiction titles of 2008, explores both the author’s own response to the whale (including swimming with them) and that of science and literature. It contains many fascinating pages on Melville, Moby Dick and the whaling industry; indeed, it presents a compelling case for seeing nineteenth-century American as being built on whaling. It also sounds a profound warning note for the fate of the whale and their marine environment; ironically, it turns out that commercial whaling was not the most damaging thing we could do to whales. Philip’s pages on whale society, culture and longevity are deeply sobering. His book is highly recommended. I’ll post links to other titles included in the first podcast here shortly.

Greece in flames

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Click here to listen to the podcast I recorded earlier this month for Le Monde diplomatique with Valia Kaimaki of the Eleftherotypia newspaper. In it we talk about the mass uprising of Greece’s youth following the death on 6 December of Athenian teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos at the hands of the Greek police. As she explains, the boy’s death ignited the flames, but there was already a great deal of combustible material available. You will find Valia’s article from this month’s edition of Le Monde diplomatique here. (Image © Vasiliki Varvaki)

20. “Grub first, ethics later”

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The first Podularity podcast of 2009 is an interview with polymath Raymond Tallis about his most recent book, Hunger, which appears in the Art of Living series from Acumen Publishing. The Times has described Tallis as “the Lennox Lewis of the intellectual world – a formidable heavyweight” and, as you might expect from such a wide-ranging thinker, his essay on hunger goes beyond the satisfaction of our physiological desires to look at a whole range of human appetites and desires.

Resumption of normal service

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Podularity has been off air for the last month while I’ve been finishing a book (and so busy, in fact, that Podularity’s first birthday went unrecorded). But as of 4.15pm yesterday the book has gone, so normal service will shortly be resumed. Coming up before the end of the year are podcasts on Russia’s national poet, Pushkin, an interview with Raymond Tallis on hunger and my long-promised interview with Julian Baggini on the nature of complaint in contemporary life, to name but three. Looking further ahead, the plan for 2009 is to make Podularity podcasts a regular fortnightly event, with much more content on the site. Meanwhile, here’s a link to a podcast (scroll down the page on their site to find it) which I made recently for Yale University Press featuring Philip Pullman, Bettany Hughes and Leonie Gombrich. Philip and Bettany, I’m very pleased to say, have agreed to be future guests on the programme. This recent podcast is about Ernst Gombrich’s Little History of the World, a book the great art historian wrote …

18. Julian Baggini: Mistrust the lucky ducky

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“In marketing and in politics people have got more sophisticated in their manipulation techniques, so more than ever we need to know what they are, so that we can spot the truth when we see it.” Julian Baggini is the first guest to pay a return visit to the Podularity studio. I last interviewed him back in March in programme 8, A Philosopher in Everytown, when he talked to me about the folk philosophy of the English.

Troubled Rainbow Nation

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The third podcast I’ve recorded for Le Monde diplomatique has just gone up on their site. In it I interview Johann Rossouw, editor of the publication’s Afrikaans edition, about the recent violent events in his country. He talks about what sparked those events, but looks behind the proximate causes to the deeper roots in the way in which South Africa emerged from its colonial and apartheid-governed past. Listen to the podcast by clicking here. The abstract-looking image that accompanies this post was taken in Durban’s Botanical Gardens by Robbie Ribeiro.

16. “Our sweaty ape hands on the thermostat”

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“The chemistry of this is more than a century old… The basic physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time. In fact some back-of-the-envelope calculations were made then which more or less stand the test of time a century later.” A few weeks back I met Mark Lynas in Oxford to talk about his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, shortly before the book won this year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize. The book looks degree by degree at the consequences for the Earth, its biodiversity and its inhabitants, as average global temperatures continue to rise throughout this century. The book is alarming without being alarmist, sobering without being defeatist. As the Royal Society recognized, the book represents a magnificent achievement on Mark’s part, who sifted through a huge amount of scientific data in order to construct such readable and readily comprehensible scenarios. Average rises in global temperature of up to two degrees have serious consequences; above that, the consequences range from the dramatic …