Tag: radio

Halloween, Martians and Radio Terrorists

On Halloween back in 1938, Martians invaded the United States.

They did it in the form of a radio play. Orson Welles was behind this invasion and he used H.G. Well’s classic story, The War of the Worlds, as the blueprint.

I have written before about when the Martians landed in New Jersey that Halloween (October 30, 1938) but I had listened to an episode of Radiolab that told me more about not only the events of that day but about the similar events that have occurred since. (The episode unfortunately does not seem to be available anymore.)

The 1938 broadcast fooled over a million people when it originally aired. That includes regular folks listening to their radios, particularly in the area around Grover’s Mill, New Jersey where the Martians supposedly landed, but also the military, police and government officials.

The amazing thing I learned is that the broadcast was imitated a number of times since then in places like Santiago, Chile, Buffalo, New York and in a quite tragic fashion in Quito, Ecuador.

In this age of heightened security and alerts, it is strange to learn that when Orson Welles played his little Halloween stunt he was labeled by the FCC as a “radio terrorist.”

The audience’s reaction of panic and mass hysteria was more than Welles had expected, though he loved the attention. It certainly had something to do with the pre-WWII atmosphere of that time. Radiolab said that some reports in New Jersey that night were that Nazis had invaded.

In the broadcast, Welles plays the role of a Princeton professor of astronomy who is called on as an expert.

I would assume that an audience today listening to the original broadcast would not be fooled by its corniness. It mixes “real” radio music and talk with the radio play and that was why listeners were taken in by it. The news breaks – which were a fairly new radio thing – get more frequent until they become all that we hear.

Of course, anyone in 1938 could have turned to another station and discovered that no one else was reporting news of an invasion by Martians. But most people didn’t change the channel.

Welles
Welles on the air

Some people after the broadcast suggested that it was all planned by Welles, but that is like planning a viral video. It just doesn’t work that way. If you are a conspiracy theory fan, you’ll like this Wikipedia report:

“It has been suggested that War of the Worlds was a psychological warfare experiment. In the 1999 documentary, Masters of the Universe: The Secret Birth of the Federal Reserve, writer Daniel Hopsicker claims the Rockefeller Foundation funded the broadcast, studied the panic, and compiled a report available to a few. A variation has the Radio Project and the Rockefeller Foundation as conspirators. In a theatrical trailer for his film F For Fake, Welles joked about such theories, jesting that the broadcast indeed “had secret sponsors.”

monument
The Martian “landing site” now has a monument in Van Nest Park in West Windsor Township, New Jersey.

I actually drove to the “Martian landing site” near Princeton. I didn’t expect to see Martians, but I was hoping for a few UFO conspiracy people to have a conversation with – but it was deserted.

Go ahead and listen to the War of the Worlds original radio broadcast and you will probably be amused and a bit bored. That is how I reacted to hearing it years ago. And that is why I was so interested in the Radiolab show that took it further.

Could it happen again? Could more modern audiences be fooled? In 1949, Radio Quito did the play in a version for their Ecuadorian listeners and it was taken quite seriously and resulted in a riot that burned down the radio station and killed at least seven people.

I think the story of how people reacted to news of a “cylindrical meteorite” landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey is a fascinating study in psychology. When that meteorite unscrews and a tentacled Martian comes out and blasts the crowd with a heat ray, all hell breaks loose.

Why Martians? They were well established as the lines to worry about in the science fiction of the 1940s and 50s.

In the program, police, firefighters, and the NJ state militia get involved, Martial law is declared in Jersey. The Martians get out their tripod machines and soldiers, citizens, power stations, transportation, and buildings fall before them.

The “Secretary of the Interior” advises the nation and there are reports of cylinders falling all across the country. Tripods cross the Hudson River and attack New York City. A reporter atop the CBS building in NYC is knocked out by some strange gas. Then we hear a ham radio operator (How did he get on the CBS bandwidth?) calling, “2X2L calling CQ. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there…. anyone?”

After a station identification, the announcer reminded listeners that this was all a story. But by then people must have been packing and heading outside. My parents, who lived through it and listened to it live, told me that people in our hometown of Irvington, NJ headed for the South Orange Mountains. People reported smelling poison gas. There were reports of flashes of light – ray guns – in the distance.

If you hung in there for the end of the original program, you got the same ending as in H.G Wells’ original The War of the Worlds novel. The Martians were defeated not by our weapons, but by our own “alien” germs and bacteria that killed them off. Orson Welles told listeners for the third time after the play that the show was just a Halloween story, but the damage (or fun) was already done.

updated post

More To This Story

Podcast Listening List 2

This is an update to my earlier What I Am Listening To post about the podcasts that are currently on my device at the end of 2017. In my case, the device is mostly my phone, but I also load certain podcasts on a flashdrive and leave it plugged in my car for driving (though I could just run my phone through the car’s audio, I like leaving the phone for call and GPS).

A study shows that one in four Americans has listened to a podcast in the past month. That number is up from 9% in 2008. The demographics of listeners shows them to be wealthier than average: 45% say they have an annual household income over $75k, compared with 35% of the general US population. The audience also skews younger, with 51% of monthly podcast listeners under age 34.

I have every day podcasts that I listen to that are mostly news. Then I save others, especially longer ones, to listen when I am walking, working outside or even working on the computer. I use them much like I used to use the radio, except now I do my own programming schedule. Those longer ones I download at home on wi-fi so that I don’t have to stream them using data when I am out in the world.

You can find these in Apple iTunes, on Stitcher’s app, and most of them are also on websites in case you like to listen on a computer.

This list is updated from the earlier post. Some shows have gone away (I am saddened by the loss of garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac and News From Lake Woebegone), some I have just lost interest in, and some are new to my list.

There are ones I listen to almost every day – many of those are short – and then longer ones that might only be released weekly or even less frequently – most of those are longer.

It should be its own post, but I also listen to books on audio, which are a big time commitment.

 

There a few I didn’t add to the list that I did sample but that just didn’t grab me. Like televisions these days, there is so much good competition that I’m a tough critic.  But you might like Pod Save America (political), Risk! (regular folks on stage telling emotional stories), Lore (urban legend weirdness stories), Welcome to Nightvale  (radio broadcasts from a fictional town where the out-of-the-ordinary is ordinary and conspiracy theories abound), two trivia shows: Doug Loves Movies  and Tell Me Something I Don’t Know ( a panel takes trivia from the audience).

 

Short and Daily Regular Listens

  • Up First – NPR’s short take on news to start the day
  • The Daily – a big story for today from The New York Times
  • NPR Hourly News Summary – in less than 5 minutes
  • WSJ Tech News Briefing
  • NPR Business Story of the Day
  • Film Reviews from WSJ with Joe Morgenstern – brief reviews of new films
  • Marketplace Tech 
  • The Poetry Magazine Podcast – looks at what’s in the newest issue of the magazine
  • Brainstuff – five-minute  answers to questions like Why balloons stick to our hair? How do squirrels organize their nuts?

Longer Shows – weekly or less frequently updated – I choose episodes I’m interested in

  • By the Book – the two hosts live for a few weeks following the suggestions of a self-help book and report back on how life changing or not the plan turned out.
  • Make Me Smart – Molly Wood and Kai Ryssdal talk about the economy, technology and culture and try to get help from listeners and experts about the ones they want to know better.
  • In Our Time – a BBC show that takes on academic topics from Moby Dick to Thomas Beckett to Plato’s Republic, but all in a listenable level although the guests are usually college professors.
  • Hidden Brain – fascinating stories that take science and research and make it interesting to anyone. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam
  • Here’s the Thing – Alec Baldwin is a terrific host/interviewer of people in many different fields
  • Poetry Off the Shelf – poets, poems, poetry topics
  • Fresh Air – one radio program that I have listened to since before podcasting – but podcasts allowed me to catch the shows I was missing. With a superb interviewer, Terry Gross.
  • The Business – is in show business, movies and television, hosted by Kim Masters
  • Slate’s Culture Gabfest – highbrow and pop topics – highbrow and pop hosts
  • How To Be Amazing with Michael Ian Black – not the usual celebrity interviews – very revealing interviews.
  • The Treatment – mostly movies with another great host who seems to have seen and read everything, Elvis Mitchell,
  • Maltin on Movies – as in Leonard Maltin, film critic and human film encyclopedia. Interviews with all kinds of movie folk. Often co-hosted by his daughter, Jessie.
  • To the Best of Our Knowledge – One of my favorites. Big ideas and themes covered in different ways.
  • FT Life of a Song – FT = Financial Times but this UK podcast is all about digging into the origins of songs in all genres.
  • WTF with Marc Maron – Long interviews that travel interesting paths with musicians, actors, writers, comedians and even Barack Obama done in his garage. I sometimes fast forward past the intros that are often promoting his own work, but great interviews.
  • On Being – formerly Speaking of Faith and wisely changed to represent what it actually covers. Krista Tippet is the amazing host.  Excellent website.  www.onbeing.org/
  • Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me – a current events quiz show that’s quite funny
  • The Sporkful – Dan Pashman’s show for eaters
  • Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen – pop culture and the arts. Great host. Special American Icons episodes are great: Wizard of Oz, Moby Dick, Disney Parks, I Love Lucy, Superman, The Outsiders…
  • 99% Invisible – the mostly invisible design of things
  • Revisionist History – Malcolm Gladwell’s series takes unusual views of one topic revisionisthistory.com
  • The Dinner Party Download – cultural oddities and drink recipes based on history
  • You Must Remember This – the first 100 years of Hollywood with host and writer/researcher Karina Longworth. Themes are things like Jane Fonda + Jean Seberg, the Blacklist, Dead Blondes, Boris Karloff + Bela Lugosi, Charles Manson
  • Bookworm – host Michael Silverblatt is a terrific reader and talks to almost everyone important in contemporary writing (fiction, non-fiction, poetry). I haven’t heard of many of the books/writers but all the shows are well done. Huge archive. From KCRW radio. www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm
  • The Nerdist – long-running show hosted by professional talker Chris Hardwick with a vairiety of interesting people. Interview runs pretty long – about 90 minutes.
  • Katie Couric – She does her interview thing that she has done well for many years in podcast form.
  • Harry Shearer – Le Show – a creative mix of news, commentary, music and original skits and songs.

Still on my list but I listen very selectively when I have time

  • The Paris Review – topics that might appear in the magazine
  • Pop Culture Happy Hour – multiple hosts on movies, books, TV and the rest
  • Radiolab – hard to pin down what it is about – it’s about almost anything
  • Planet Money – the economy explained
  • This Week in Tech TWiT – Leo Laporte and crew. I started listening to this years ago but I’ve fallen off as a listener to his shows as they tend to ramble on for 2 hours or more lately. Also the case for This Week in Google – Leo and Jeff Jarvis with some focus on Google but almost an extension of TWiT.
  • This Week in Law – Another one in the series that I listen to selectively when a topic catches my fancy.
  • On the Media – a good weekly media analysis
  • The World Next Week – a “preview” of world events from the Council on Foreign Relations
  • Triangulation – Leo Laporte (Man of a Thousand Podcasts) talks to smart people in tech. These are more controlled (and shorter) and I select based on the guest.
  • Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty – short doses of language, writing and that scary grammar stuff in an engaging way.
  • Slate’s Audio Book Club – monthly look at new and important books
  • Open Source with Christopher Lydon
  • Science Friday – just that – stories about science for the rest of us.
  • Invisibilia – the invisible forces that control us
  • This American Life – one of the originals. A theme is several acts fill up about an hour.
  • Selected Shorts – short stories read aloud by actors. I tend to select selected episodes but when I just listen to an episode I am inevitably surprised to discover some new or classic story.
  • Freakonomics Radio – an extension of the ideas in the books. Economics (ugh!) but done in a way that is interesting (Hurrah!)
  • The Carson Podcast – interviews with people who guested on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Always touches on Johnny and the show but also digs into the entertainers big and small interviewed.
  • How I Built This – interviews with innovators on how they built whatever they built
  • Stuff You Should Know – grew from the articles on the http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/ website. Two likeable guys with more information (usually) than you on a very wide variety of topics.  Most shows are about 30 minutes.
  • Things They Don’t Want You to Know – is another offshoot but needs to be seen because they are video (vodcast) and they are full of all those conspiracy theories. Fun.

Archived, Available But Not Current Programs

  • I had listened to the two previous installments of the true story Serial which were good, although neither had a real ending. During this last period, I listened to the third one called S Town about John who despises his Alabama shit town and decides to do something about it. He asks a radio reporter to investigate a murder, but it’s really about John. This one has an ending. Sort of.
  • Missing Richard Simmons – On February 15, 2014, fitness guru Richard Simmons disappeared and the host of this podcast searches for him. Much like serial, some people were disappointed that he didn’t really “find” him (like a Serial ending) but I thought it was a good ending.
  • Esquire Classic Podcast – looks back at classic pieces from the magazine
  • Unretirement – Life after you retire when you still want to do.. something.
  • By the Way, In Conversation with Jeff Garlin – crazy, funny Jeff (Curb Your Enthusiasm) does freeform interviews on stage with folks. On hiatus while he works on his TV show, The Goldbergs which is a kind of The Wonder Years for the 1980s.

A Christmas Story About Me and Shep

Jean Shepherd is best known to his devoted fans as a radio raconteur. I listened to him for about two decades on WOR-AM in New York City. Often I was listening on a transistor radio that was by my bed pillow before I went to sleep. I lived in New Jersey, and Jersey often figured in Shep’s stories, usually as the home of “slob art.”

His nighttime program was a hard-to-define blend of stories, commentary, and occasional oddities of “music” that seemed to go in ten attention-deficit directions until the program’s closing when it all seemed to somehow pull together. Though I learned via interviews and books that it was unscripted, Shep often walked into the studio with an article, letter or general theme for where the show was going to or at least where it would start.

Flick succumbs to a double dog dare to put his tongue
on the frozen pole. Don’t try this at home, kids.

To younger people or those outside of the NY/NJ metro area, he is probably best known for writing the 1983 hit film A Christmas Story. The film is now a perennial Christmas classic that is run and rerun in the way that It’s a Wonderful Life was and sometimes still is run on TV in December. Though I think of It’s a Wonderful Life as a holiday classic, it is also almost film noir and gets quite dark in its second half. But A Christmas Story is pure nostalgia.

The film was based on a half-dozen stories, mostly from his 1966 collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash which is my favorite of his books. Those stories, some of which had run in magazines as standalone tales, are connected by the protagonist, Ralphie and his brother and parents and based on Shep’s childhood in Indiana. Though the film has become known as a family or even children’s story, I always viewed the book as more of a coming-of-age book. The stories are tied together by their time and place and connected by a much older Ralphie going back to Indiana.  Jean’s alter-ego character is Ralphie Parker (Shep’s birth name is  Jean Parker Shepherd), a kid growing up in 1930’s Indiana.

I sat down this weekend to write this because I saw that A Christmas Story Live, a stage version of the movie, is on FOX tonight, December 17, at 7 pm ET. It has run on Broadway and across the country. I avoided seeing it because I feared it would ruin the film and book for me. But, it’s free on TV and I can always turn it off and not be upset that I lost a few hundred bucks on a trip to Broadway, soI will watch the show.

This live version has Matthew Broderick playing grownup Ralphie (the narrator). (He was played by Jean Shepherd and ralphie’s old man was played by Darren McGavin in the original movie version.) Maya Rudolph is the mom. (Melinda Dillon played her in the movie.) There is a nice little synchronicity in the casting because Matthews’s father, James Broderick, played Ralphie’s father (billed as “the old man” not Mr. Parker) when Shep did several PBS adaptations of his Indiana stories.

Some years at Christmastime, Jean would read a version of the original short story that became the basis for the movie on his WOR-AM radio show (see video below). The main short story for the film appeared in Playboy as  “Duel In The Snow, Or, Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid” and was reprinted as a chapter in Shepherd’s 1966 book, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.

Shep narrates the film and has a brief cameo as an adult also in the line to see Santa at a department store who tells Ralphie to get in the back of the line.

On the air before his NYC radio days.

Jean Shepherd the writer published many magazine stories in Mad magazine and The National Lampoon, The New York Times, Playboy, Mademoiselle, Car and Driver, and Omni. He was one of the early columnists for The Village Voice newspaper in New York City. I believe you can find almost all of the stories collected in his four book collections (see below).

In the 70’s and 80’s he became more interested in TV and film and less interested in radio. He did several pieces for PBS from small bits to television movies including The Phantom of the Open Hearth.

In 1975, he did a popular non-fiction PBS television series titled Jean Shepherd’s America and another series for the New Jersey PBS station entitled Shepherd’s Pie.

Jean Shepherd was born in Chicago, in 1925 and the majority of his written stories and films were set in his childhood years. From his adult life, the most we heard about was from his Army days in the Signal Corps.

The stories he told on-air were always improvised, but he later wrote some of the childhood ones down and he published them in collections like In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters.

Much of Jean Shepherd’s real life is unknown. He made the line between fact and fiction very blurry. Sometimes he said things had happened that others have found did not happen. He rarely talked about his adult life. He was married three times but didn’t talk about his wives. Did he have children? Where did he live?

I had heard that he is the basis for the Jason Robards character in the play and film, A Thousand Clowns, which was written by Shep’s friend, Herb Gardner. I didn’t know that when I saw that film (which was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar) but I liked that guy, so some Shep must have come through.

He is supposed to be the inspiration for the Shel Silverstein song made famous by Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue.” Having the gender neutral name “Jean” wasn’t easy as a kid, and in later life he was often confused with a female country singer with the same name, though Shep has certainly eclipsed her in fame by now.

The Jack Nicholson late-night radio talker in New Jersey in The King of Marvin Gardens seems like he might have been somewhat inspired by Shep.

In the film Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky who was another in Shep’s circle, the main character is a television newscaster who tells his viewers to open their windows and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” To a Jean Shepherd listener, that has got to have some basis in Shep’s frequent habit of “hurling an invective.” I remember him telling all of us to yell out the window at the same time, and another time having all of us jump up in the air at the same moment to see if we could knock the Earth a bit off its axis.

Shep once pulled off a publishing hoax by promoting a non-existent book called I, Libertine  by a non-existent author, Frederick R. Ewing. Shep was not happy with the way the best-seller lists were compiled and wanted to prove it was a rigged joke.

He told his listeners to go out and buy the book and they did try. The requests got bookstores asking their distributors for copies and that got at least one publisher (Ballantine Books) interested in creating the title. Ballantine had Shep work up an outline of the story and hired a ghostwriter, Theodore Sturgeon, who was known for science-fictions stories. It was written, published and due to the demand it actually made the best-seller list. Copies of the original paperback are now quite collectible.

Jean also did live shows. I guess it was standup comedy but not in the way that we think of that today. He appeared at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and I saw him a half-dozen times at colleges, high schools and other venues. He wasn’t Jerry Seinfeld. He wasn’t obscene like Lenny Bruce or political like Mort Sahl. He was closer to Mark Twain and James Thurber if they had done an hour on stage. Humor and comedy are not the same animal.

In the late 1990s, Shepherd was working on new film projects, but his health was failing. I lost touch with him because he stayed out of  the public eye, and his personal life had always been a mystery in a Bob Dylan way with lots of misinformation and outright lies perpetrated by him.

We do know that his longtime companion, collaborator, and third wife of 21 years, was Leigh Brown. “Little Leigh” always seemed to be in the WOR studio with him and sometimes was referenced in his comments on air. She died in 1998 and Jean died the following year in a hospital near his Sanibel Island, Florida home. I have read that he had no survivors, so his intellectual property is owned by an entertainment group.

I have discovered a good number of Shep fans over the years, from people my age who lived in the tri-state area of WOR and listened, to young people who discovered him through the film and traced their way back in his career, to other humorists influenced by him like Harry Shearer.

A good free collection of Shepherd radio show audio online is The Shep Archives. All you have to do is register and you can listen and download mp3 files of old WOR shows, interviews, and audio from some of the television shows.

There are other sites too because many devoted fans back in the day recorded the show on their reel-to-reel or cassette recorders. I’m glad they did because the radio station certainly didn’t care enough to archive shows. The Brass Figlagee podcast has 300 show files and some are on also available free at archive.org.

Bob Kaye’s Jean Shepherd Page is a nice site, and Jim Clavin has a good fan site called Flick Lives! that includes links to places where you can hear some of Shep’s old broadcasts.

“Flick Lives” is a reference to a character in many Shepherd tales from his Indiana days. Flick is the kid who gets his tongue frozen to a pole in A Christmas Story.  Fans used to write “FLICK LIVES” as graffiti in the way that soldiers once wrote “Kilroy was here.”  We marked our turf and showed that we followed Shep with those two words.  And yes, people used to often join the L and I in Flick to create a totally different message to the world.

Books

Christmas Eve 1974 – Shepherd reads the story on air at WOR-AM in NY
that would later become the movie, A Christmas Story.

 

 “Beer” from Jean Shepherd’s America

 

Opening from an episode of Shepherds’s Pie (not great audio/video quality)

What I Am Listening To

listening-statue-pixa

I had posted several times here about radio programs and then podcasts that are on my listening list. I saw that the list needed updating, so I’ll use and reuse this post to keep that list up-to-date.

I’m not going to link to all of them, because you should just search in whatever app you use to listen. I will note that many of these can be heard by going to their website on your good old-fashioned computer – just do a search on the program title. Some of these shows have very dynamic websites with lots of additional material, so I will add website links to a few titles.

I started out years ago using “pod catchers” that no longer exist. iTunes wiped a number of them out, but I have switched over to using Stitcher on my phone and tablet. Stitcher used to be called Stitcher Smart Radio and people would say that any of these applications were like a “VCR for the radio.” Now, you have to explain what a VCR is to some young people, and might need to say they are like a “DVR for radio.” And yes, I know that radio itself is an old-fashioned medium and that some of these podcasts only exist as podcasts and are never broadcast over the radio airwaves. I have written about a few podcast programs on their own, and may posts on these site were inspired by listening to a podcast.

I realized in sifting through these shows and posts I have written that I also like to think about just listening to the world – not always via electronic devices.

I like how the Stitcher app allows me to “Listen Later” by downloading episodes I want to hear when I’m home on wi-fi, and then listen to them when I’m walking or in the car without using any data.

These are the podcasts on my phone now. I was amazed (and a bit embarrassed) that I have over 50 shows that I subscribe to currently.  They are not listed in any type of ranking or even alphabetically. However, I do have the 7 news ones at the top of my Stitcher app because they are frequently updated and brief. I start my day with the shorter “newsy” podcasts and save the longer shows for other times. Some of the other podcasts only update weekly or irregularly. You can make playlists on Stitcher and I have about 20 of these titles on a second list and I select episodes to listen to later. On my main Favorites Playlist, I can just let it run through the list when I’m working for the day at my desk on wi-fi.

The list at the bottom are the podcasts that no longer update, but that you can still find “archived” online.

  1. NPR Hourly News Summary – in less than 5 minutes
  2. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor – mostly literary calendar items and a poem read by Keillor in 5 minutes
  3. WSJ Tech News Briefing
  4. NPR Business Story of the Day
  5. Film Reviews from WSJ with Joe Morgenstern – brief reviews of new films
  6. Marketplace Tech with Ben Brock Johnson
  7. CNET Update – pop tech
  8. The Poetry Magazine Podcast – looks at what’s in the newest issue of the magazine
  9. APM: A Prairie Home Companion’s News from Lake Wobegon – my favorite segment from the longer programs. Since, Keillor has retired, these are reruns of past shows. Timeless but for the seasons.
  10. Hidden Brain – fascinating stories that take science and research and make it interesting to anyone. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam
  11. Here’s the Thing – Alec Baldwin is a terrific host/interviewer of people in many different fields
  12. Poetry Off the Shelf – poets, poems, poetry topics
  13. Codebreaker – by Marketplace This current season asks “Can tech save us?”
  14. Fresh Air – one radio program that I have listened to since before podcasting – but podcasts allowed me to catch the shows I was missing before because their broadcast time clashed with Life. Terry Gross is the renowned host.  I’ll know that I’ve made it when I’m a guest on this show.
  15. The Business – and the business is show business, movies and television, hosted by Kim Masters
  16. Slate’s Culture Gabfest – highbrow and pop topics – highbrow and pop hosts
  17. How To Be Amazing with Michael Ian Black – actor/comedian Black really surprised me as an interviewer. He gets unusual stories from all kinds of guests.  It is a sign of a good interview show and interviewer when you love an episode about someone who you had no interest in beforehand. I found the show with Tim Gunn to be a revelation.
  18. The Treatment – mostly movies with superb host (which is often a key reason why you follow a podcast) Elvis Mitchell,
  19. Maltin on Movies – as in Leonard Maltin, film critic and human film encyclopedia. Interviews with all kinds of movie folk. Sometimes co-hosted by his daughter, Jessie.
  20. To the Best of Our Knowledge – One of my favorites. Big ideas and themes covered in different ways – such as one of my obsessions, time travel.
  21. The New Yorker Poetry – hosted by poet and poetry editor Paul Muldoon. Poet guests pick a poem from the magazine to read and then one of their own. It has not helped me crack how to get published in the magazine.
  22. FT Life of a Song – FT = Financial Times but this UK podcast is all about digging into the origins of songs in all genres.
  23. WTF with Marc Maron – He totally surprised me with this show. Excellent and unusual interviews with rockers, actors, writers, comedians and Barack Obama done in his garage. He rambles and promotes a bit too much before and after the interviews but that’s why God designed fast forward. The older episodes will cost you; the newest ones are free.
  24. On Being – formerly Speaking of Faith and wisely changed as it covers much more than faith and religion. I particularly like how science and religion sit comfortably at the same table without arguing here.  Krista Tippet is the amazing host.  Excellent website.  www.onbeing.org/
  25. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me – a current events quiz show that’s quite funny
  26. The Sporkful – Dan Pashman’s show for eaters
  27. Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen – pop culture and the arts. Great host. Special American Icons episodes are great: Wizard of Oz, Moby Dick, Disney Parks, I Love Lucy, Superman, The Outsiders…
  28. 99% Invisible – the mostly invisible design of things
  29. The Dinner Party Download – cultural oddities and drink recipes based on history
  30. You Must Remember This – the first 100 years of Hollywood with host and writer/researcher Karina Longworth. I binged through the series on Charles Manson and another about the Hollywood Black List
  31. This Week in Tech TWiT – Leo Laporte and crew. I started listening to this years ago when Leo started his pioneering podcast network. I’ve fallen off as a listener to this and TWiG because the shows ramble on to 2 hours or more lately.
  32. This Week in Google – Leo and Jeff Jarvis with some focus on Google but almost an extension of TWiT.
  33. This Week in Law – Another one in the series hat I listen to selectively when a topic catches my fancy.
  34. On the Media – the best weekly media analysis
  35. Pop Culture Happy Hour – multiple hosts on movies, books, Tv and the rest
  36. Love + Radio – hourlong interviews but not with celebrities and not on common topics
  37. Radiolab – hard to pin down what it is about – it’s about almost anything
  38. Internet History Podcast – interviews with important figures from the Net
  39. Planet Money – the economy explained
  40. The Ezra Klein Show – in-depth, longform talks mostly on politics and media.
  41. The Book Review – from The New York Times
  42. Death, Sex and Money – and more than that in half hour installments
  43. The World Next Week – a “preview” of world events from the Council on Foreign Relations
  44. Triangulation – Leo Laporte (Man of a Thousand Podcasts) talks to smart people in tech
  45. Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty – short doses of language, writing and that scary grammar stuff in an engaging way.
  46. Slate’s Audio Book Club – monthly look at new and important books
  47. Open Source with Christopher Lydon
  48. Science Friday – just that – stories about science for the rest of us.
  49. Invisibilia – the invisible forces that control us
  50. This American Life – one of the originals. A theme is several acts fill up about an hour.
  51. Selected Shorts – short stories read aloud by actors. I tend to select selected episodes but when I just listen to an episode I am inevitably surprised to discover some new or classic story.
  52. Star Talk Radio – with Neil degrasse Tyson. Mostly out in space but not always.
  53. Freakonomics Radio – an extension of the ideas in the books. Economics (ugh!) but done in a way that is interesting (Hurrah!)
  54. The Carson Podcast – interviews with people who guested on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Always touches on Johnny and the show but also digs into the entertainers big and small interviewed.
  55. How I Built This – interviews with innovators on how they built whatever they built
  56. Lore – an odd one that explores the darker and more frightening sides of history
  57. Stuff You Should Know – grew from the articles on the http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/ website. Two likeable guys with more information (usually) than you on a very wide variety of topics.  Most shows are about 30 minutes.    * Things They Don’t Want You to Know – is another offshoot but needs to be seen (vodcast) and is full of all those conspiracy theories. Fun.
  58. Bookworm – If I wrote a novel, i would want all my readers to be as perceptive as host Michael Silverblatt. Anybody important in contemporary writing (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) probably has talked with him, Huge archive. From KCRW radio. www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm

Archived But Not Currently Active Programs

  • Esquire Classic Podcast – looks back at classic pieces from the magazine
  • Unretirement – Life after you retire when you still want to do.. something.
  • Serial – Year one about a 1999 murder investigation about Hae Min Lee, a high-school senior who seems to have been murdered by her classmate and ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. Did he do it? ,The series led to the case being reopened. Year two dealt with Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl who went AWOL from a U.S. Army outpost in eastern Afghanistan.   serialpodcast.org
  • By the Way, In Conversation with Jeff Garlin – crazy, funny Jeff (Curb Your Enthusiasm) does freeform interviews on stage with folks. On hiatus while he works on his TV show, The Goldbergs which is a kind of The Wonder Years for the 1980s.
  • The Message – a kind of radio drama in the thriller genre about a message from out there that needs to be decoded.. The new season is called a LifeAfter and is about a guy who communicates with his dead wife on his smartphone.
  • Revisionist History – Malcolm Gladwell’s 10-show series taking a new look at topics revisionisthistory.com

 

Becoming Wiser

krista-tippettI have been listening to Krista Tippett on her radio program, Speaking of Faith, since back in 2003. Though it changed its name in 2010 to On Being, the program has the same focus and appeal.

Like many programs, movies and books that I admire, it often features people who I have never heard of, and who I would probably never have encountered – but I trust her choices enough to listen, and I am usually rewarded by insights from her and the guest.

She has written several books, but her new one is Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.

On_Being_Becoming-Wise-Products-final

“I’m a person who listens for a living. I listen for wisdom, and beauty, and for voices not shouting to be heard. This book chronicles some of what I’ve learned in what has become a conversation across time and generations, across disciplines and denominations,” says Krista.

In the early days, her show did have more of an outright focus on religions. But it has always had an interest in how scientists relate to religion, faith and being. Those programs have been amongst my favorites.

For example, my own fascination with Albert Einstein seems to be shared by Tippett who has done multiple programs about Einstein. She has also written Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit. Einstein is a good example of that strange Venn diagram that many of us have where religion, God, faith, belief, and spirituality overlap. Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal God. One of the many Einstein quotes you find online is “God does not play dice with the universe.” That seems to be a clear statement of belief, but it was about quantum physics, not the God of religion. But Albert certainly spent a significant amount of his life doing thought experiments about the relationship between science and religion. How could he not wonder? Any thinking person must wonder.

I believe all of us have the same interest as Einstein (although he may have taken it further than most of us) in trying to discover the order deeply hidden behind everything. Tippett notes Einstein’s self-described “cosmic religious sense” is very compatible with twenty-first-century sensibilities.

But On Being and her new book includes the ideas of theologians from many faiths, but also poets, activists and others.

I call this post “Becoming Wiser” (as opposed to Tippett’s book title Becoming Wise)  because I know I am wiser for having listened to Krista’s programs and read her books, but they also remind me how much further I need to go to be Wise.

This is not a book review but a preview because I haven’t read this book yet, but I am confident that it will continue to help equip me “to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better.”

 

other books

Further Reading:
Amazon is getting much better with its recommendations. When I pre-ordered Becoming Wise, Amazon suggested a group of books that do belong on the same shelf. There were  four that I have already read, and the others are all books I would like to read. It included the obvious choices of her other books: Einstein’s God  and her earlier Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters–and How to Talk About It.  It also suggested Rising Strong by Brené Brown,  Felicity: Poems by Mary Oliver,  The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages by Andrew Blauner,  Gratitude by Oliver Sacks  A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, and Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart by James R. Doty. there are others I would add to that list – for example, guests from her programs, such as Parker J. Palmer and Karen Armstrong.

A Phone Booth in the Desert, a Bus in Alaska, a Dolphin in the Ocean

The idea of a working phone booth on a dirt road in the middle of the Mojave desert, over a dozen miles from the nearest pavement, is intriguing to me.

It caught the interest of the wonderful radio/podcast (I don’t really make a distinction any more) called 99% Invisible. The program is about “all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world. You probably never heard of it because somehow podcasts are still kind of a fringe thing, but with 80 million downloads, 99% Invisible is one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes.

Last week I listened to their show about that phone booth.  They track one person, Godfrey (“Doc”) Daniels, obsession with it. He read about it in a zine called Wig Out! letter to the editor back in 1997.

Dear Wig Out!,
Recently, I spotted a small dot with the word “telephone” beside it on a map of the Mojave desert, 15 miles from the main interstate in the middle of nowhere.

Intrigued, I donned a cheap, brown serape and a pair of wing-tips and headed out to find it in my old jeep. After many hours I do find it (the glass is shot out and the phone book is missing) but it works! Apparently, this booth was put in after WWII for the use of a nearby mine which ceased operations in the 60s; why the local phone company keeps it operational is anybody’s guess.

A nearby rancher told me that in the 70s they replaced the old rotary style phone with push buttons because the sheep were having trouble dialing…

Doc didn’t know where it was or if it really existed. But the letter had a phone number for it and he called. It rang, but no one answered. He continued to call and even got others to call.

After a month of tries, he got a busy signal. Someone was there. He kept calling repeatedly and finally he caught the person who was using the phone and she picked up. I’ll leave the details for you to discover when you listen to the program, but I’ll say that the phone was used by some people who had no phone of their own. This was 1997 in that distant century before cell phones. He talked to her for a bit. He was so excited that he forgot to ask about the exact location of the phone booth.

Doc eventually track down the location and went for a visit.

It was 1997 and the Internet was new for most of us, but Doc created a webpage and it went as viral as a page might go back in 1997.

People contacted him, sent him news clippings from all over the world about this off, cultish desert phone booth.

The Mojave Phone Booth started getting a lot more calls. People made pilgrimages to the site.

It became very popular. Too popular. The phone booth was located on a nature preserve and the National Park Service was not happy about all the visitors, traffic and the ringing phone. The booth was removed in 2000.

busPeople continued to visit the place where the booth had been.

It reminds me of the story of Chris McCandless who went to Alaska, somewhat ill-prepared but full of the Romance of adventure. He starved to death there.

But people continue to visit, pilgrim-like, the abandoned bus that Chris lived in. What are they hoping to find there?

A trip the Mojave location after 2000 would have found you staring at the concrete slab where the booth once sat. But even the slab was removed. Some people tried to mark it with a plaque.

The number that Doc was calling is still around, if you want to give it a try.  760-733-9969 is not the Mojave Phone Booth, but perhaps its ghost will answer. It is like making a call out to the universe.

If you’re out in the deserts of the American Southwest, you might want to combine your trip with a journey following the large concrete arrows (seventy feet in length) that are there. They may have a logical origin, but I’d like to believe that they might be landing beacons for UFOs.

dolphin56I really like these odd little items that catch people’s attention.

I’m a follower of Dolphin 56. Back in 1979, he was captured along with five other dolphins in Florida. They were assigned the numbers 55, 56, 57, 58 and 59.  Dolphin 56 was estimated to be about 12 years old. He was weighed and measured and branded with the number “56”.

He was spotted over the years from Florida to New Jersey. He was very comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, with people. He became the most comprehensively tracked dolphins on the East Coast. A Facebook page was set up in 2009 to track his movement. People posted photos and video of their sightings.

Dolphin Dolphin 56 went missing around 2012, but people continue to look for him, just like people go to Alaska and to the the place where the phone once sat. The last reported sighting I found reported was that in July 2011 the dolphin was photographed off the coast of Wales – which I find incredible, and not very believable. I prefer to think he is headed back to Jersey waters now as the ocean warms up.

Mojave Phone Booth website  http://deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.htm

There is even a film that was made about it.  I “rented” it on Vimeo for $5.

Doc did a Kickstarter to get some bucks to write a book about his phone booth adventure.