All posts filed under: podcasts

Paranormality: investigating the impossible with Richard Wiseman

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My guest on this podcast is psychologist (and former magician) Richard Wiseman, who has long been interested in why people are fascinated by the paranormal – and willing to believe things for which there is not a shred of scientific evidence. The result of his interest is Paranormality, a book which lifts the lid on the tricks that psychics and mindreaders play and investigates why humans developed and retained a readiness to believe the impossible. In the podcast he explains how he rose to the challenge of investigating Hampton Court Palace’s ghost… To listen to the podcast, click here.

From imaginary beasts to barely imagined beings…

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Caspar Henderson‘s 21st-century bestiary, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, is one of the most imaginatively conceived and beautifully produced books I have come across in the past couple of years. In the introduction, Caspar describes how the book was inspired when he was on a riverside picnic – Alice-style – in Oxford a few years ago. He had been reading Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings, and having leafed through this book, fell asleep. Then, he writes: ‘I woke with the thought that many real animals are stranger than imaginary ones, and it is our knowledge and understanding of them that are too cramped and fragmentary to accommodate them: we have barely imagined them.’ And so was conceived this A-Z of weird and wonderful creatures – all of them real – and their unfamiliar ways of being in the world. To listen to the podcast, click here.  

Gilbert Achcar’s radical exploration of the Arab Spring

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My guest in the latest edition of the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In his recently published book, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Spring, he looks at the Arab Spring’s underlying causes, the deep roots of the social and economic problems, which elections and changes of leadership have done little to address. The book argues for seeing what is going on in the Arab world as a long-term revolutionary process rather than a sequence of rapid transformative events – an analysis which certainly seems to be borne out by recent events in Egypt. I spoke to Gilbert about Egypt’s most recent crisis midway through the 48-hour ultimatum which Egypt’s military gave President Mohammed Morsi. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

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I recently interviewed Serbian-born, London-based writer, poet, and academic Vesna Goldsworthy, whose books include a  collection of poetry, The Angel of Salonika, and a memoir entitled Chernobyl Strawberries, which one reviewer described as “suffused with a longing complicated and deepened by the eradication of the Yugoslav state”. I met Vesna to discuss Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, another book which contemplates the identity of South Eastern Europe, in this case the construction of the Balkans in the British literary imaginary – “a gently ridiculous proxy” as Vesna calls it  (typified by the fictional kingdom of Ruritania) for the real Balkans; a repository for the qualities of a region which by turn attracted, fascinated and repelled the British; a place that could be turned into farce and pastiche, or depicted as a place of potential menace, where European identify dissolved into something irredeemably alien and eastern. To listen to the podcast [22:45], click here. To find out more about the book, visit Vesna’s publisher’s site here.

Incoming!

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The asteroid belt is not the way it’s portrayed in Star Wars… It’s not this busy violent place with things colliding all the time… The meteorite that landed on Chebarkul a few days ago made me think that it was a good time to delve into the archive for the podcast I recorded with my old friend Ted Nield about his book Incoming!, which seeks to persuade us to stop worrying and learn to love the meteorite (which may be less easy if you live in the Urals). When we met to record this podcast at the Geological Society in London a couple of years ago, we began by talking about the region in the solar system between Mars and Jupiter, known as the asteroid belt, an “orphanage for homeless bits of potential planets”, which is home to meteorites… and yes, we do come round to talking about whether or not a meteorite impact was to blame for the demise of the dinosaurs… You can listen to the podcast by clicking here.

“These are a few of my favourite popes…”

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Yes, the title of this post is admittedly a little misleading – the popes in the podcast (popecast?) are not necessarily the favourites of my guest, Eamon Duffy, but those who he thinks have had the greatest impact on history – The Ten Popes who Shook the World. Eamon’s popes range from Saint Peter to John Paul II, and along the way take in reforming popes and reactionaries, and sometimes complex men who combined both instincts, faced with the challenges of establishing and shaping the church. With over 260 candidates to choose from, I bean by asking Eamon how hard it had been to come up with a list of just ten pontiffs. To listen to the podcast, click here. Eamon Duffy is professor of the history of Christianity, Cambridge University, and fellow and former president of Magdalene College. He is the author of many prizewinning books, among them Fires of Faith, Marking the Hours, and Saints and Sinners, all available from Yale University Press.

Pieter Spierenburg on Violence and Punishment

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“Pieter Spierenburg is one of the world’s experts on the history of violent crime, and his writings are filled with fascinating facts and thought-provoking insights.” Steven Pinker, Harvard University Pieter Spierenburg is professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. In 2008 Polity published his History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, and in autumn 2012 they published a collection of his essays entitled Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through Time. The book looks not only looks at broad trends in crime and punishment since the middle ages, but also attempts to explain the reduction in incidences of violent crime and in the severity of punishments. Spierenburg – who was taught by Norbert Elias and whose work is influenced by his – also looks at the interrelationship between gender, honour and the body, which he situates within his broad analysis of the civilizing process. The angle of the lens widens still further in the final chapters, which tackle corollary developments to the decline of violence, such as …

Chase Madar on the US’s growing state security apparatus

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George Miller’s guest on Le Monde diplomatique‘s October 2012 podcast is New York-based human rights lawyer Chase Madar. His article in this month’s edition of the paper is entitled “Land of the Ever Less Free”, and it looks at how America’s security state apparatus has  been significantly augmented under President Obama – contrary to election promises. So today the federal government employs 30,000 Americans to monitor the phone conversations of their fellow citizens, and in 2011 alone Washington classified 92m documents, almost double the number made secret just two years before. Chase Madar explores some of the causes and effects of a bloated security state in this interview. To listen to the interview, click here.