PodcastDirectory.com's listings of the ThoughtCast Podcasts

Rebecca Goldstein: the atheist with a soul

Rebecca Goldstein Rebecca Goldstein’s latest work, called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is perhaps best described as a hybrid. It is indeed a novel, with its share of psychology, mathematics and academic politics, but it concludes with an appendix outlining these 36 arguments, as well as their rebuttals, in the [...]

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The term network neutrality was the brainchild of Tim Wu of Columbia Law School. So what does this term mean, and what power does it have? Click here: (2:23 minutes)

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Note: This program was broadcast on the public radio station WCVE. bookcover Cyber law expert Jonathan Zittrain is one of the canniest thinkers out there, pondering the wide world of the web, and his new book is called The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It. It’s a call to arms. Before it’s [...]

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Note: this interview has been picked up by the public radio station WGBH, in Boston, and its sister stations WCAI and WNAN. Robert Silvers (credit Melanie Flood) The venerable New York Review of Books was launched amidst a newspaper strike in the winter of 1963, and has continued unabated ever since. Devoted to intensive and nuanced coverage [...]

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Nader Tehrani The Cambridge Center for Adult Education recently hosted a talk with the architect Nader Tehrani (an associate professor of architecture at  MIT, and the co-founder of the influential Boston-based architecture and design firm Office dA) whose work is on view, among other locations, at the Museum of Modern Art – Click here to listen [...]

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Note: this interview was broadcast on the WGBH affiliates WCAI/WNAN, on the Cape and Islands! Jonah Lehrer (photo credit: Lori Duff) Jonah Lehrer, the precocious author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has come out with a new book called How We Decide. He spoke at the Harvard Book Store, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to listen (28 [...]

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Brave New World? The Center for the Humanities at Tufts University recently held a panel discussion on “The New Biology and the Self”, an apt topic for the likes of Steven Pinker, the Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University,  Noga Arikha, a historian of ideas and the author of Passions [...]

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Ernest Fleischmann While still a green arts reporter for KCRW, the public radio station in Santa Monica, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ernest about a youth program at the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s outdoor summer ampitheatre. I have known Ernest for most of my life, largely from a distance.  He seemed a trifle [...]

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Virgil A Reading with David Ferry, discussing his translation of Virgil’s Georgics. This recording was made at Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, in May 2005. The paperback of Virgil’s Georgics, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is now available. Click here: (45 minutes) for the talk. And you can also listen to a ThoughtCast interview with David Ferry [...]

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In honor of Hispanic History Month, WGBH radio, an NPR station in Boston, broadcast this ThoughtCast interview with Ilan Stavans twice. It was also picked up by KRZA, an NPR station in Alamosa, Colorado, and Georgia Public Broadcasting. And here’s a review of the program on PRX! Ilan Stavans (Photo by Frank Ward) Ilan Stavans, the renowned [...]

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Cambridge author Carol Bundy’s first book is called “The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-1864.” It’s about her great-great-great uncle, who fought and died in the Civil War. Lowell was a reformer, a cavalryman, and perhaps also a dreamer. Click here: (30 minutes) to hear Bundy’s talk, at the Harvard [...]

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Note: this ThoughtCast interview was broadcast on WCAI/WNAN on Nov. 12, 2006 in honor of Veterans Day. Carol Bundy At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy’s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt. Carol’s book tells [...]

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Note: this program was broadcast on KYOU, open source radio. Check it out! Three Internet gurus talk with ThoughtCast about the “social architecture” of the web, and how it might bring people together, and/or pull them apart! The four of us spoke following a daylong conference on the subject. David Weinberger David Weinberger is a fellow at [...]

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Kevin Smokler Kevin Smokler, the author, critic and literary blogger, has recently edited a book of essays called “Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times.” Its aim is to remind the world of the relevance of reading, eh, books. Not just summaries of books, or book reviews, or headlines about books, but the real thing. No matter [...]

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Click here: (25 minutes) to listen to Alan Dershowitz’s talk on “Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways” at Harvard Hillel, presented by the Harvard Book Store. Among other subjects, Dershowitz discusses the doctrine of preemption, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, torture, and our ‘war on terror’. And to hear a ThoughtCast interview with Alan, click here!

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Note: The WGBH sister stations WCAI and WNAN broadcast this interview, and it also received a 5 star review on PRX! Robert Pinsky Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky tackles King David of the Bible – the shepherd, poet, warrior and adulterer – in his “Life of David.” Is David a legend? A real, flesh and blood warrior [...]

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IS THIS US? Dan Gillmor, the influential technology writer and blogger, has recently founded a new initiative called The Center for Citizen Media. Its purpose: to assist in the formation of citizen journalism and other forms of grassroots media. Gillmor, who is now a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law [...]

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Branching Out I attended the Beyond Broadcast conference at Harvard Law School in in the spring of 2006, and here are some of the participants I grabbed for a quick ThoughtCast interview: For starters, there’s Pat Aufderheide, the director of the Center for Social Media, and a professor at the School of Communication at American University, [...]

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A key panelist was Terry Heaton, the president of Donata Communications. He’s part rebel, part businessman, part visionary: (5:30 minutes) Here’s my interview with Jamie Biggar, the young but wise senior developer at WGBH Interactive: (4:30 minutes) Dan Fellini, managing producer, Public Interactive Now here’s a man with a mind of his own! (5:30 minutes) Donna Liu, Founder [...]

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PRPD Annually, public radio programmers from across the nation (and overseas) gather to talk shop. This year, the mood at the Public Radio Program Directors Association conference in Philadelphia was one of concern. With many listeners newly entranced by the gadgets and gizmos of the 21st century — podcasts, blogs, satellite radio, streaming audio — it [...]

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