Economist, author, podcaster and radio presenter Tim Harford (previously) has a fantastic new podcast: Cautionary Tales, which Tim describes as “Eight stories of mishaps, fiascos and disasters – served with a twist of nerdy social science.”
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Tag: spoken word
An interview with Andy Greenberg about his book Sandworm, on the Russian state hackers who attack power grids
Wired security reporter Andy Greenberg’s latest book is Sandworm (previously), a true-life technothriller that tells the stories of the cybersecurity experts who analyzed and attributed as series of ghastly cyberwar attacks that brought down parts of the Ukrainian power grid, and then escaped the attackers’ control and spread all over the world.
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Can we change our politics with science fiction? A conversation with the How Do You Like It So Far podcast
Henry Jenkins (previously) is the preeminent scholar of fandom and culture; Colin Maclay is a communications researcher with a background in tech policy; on the latest episode of their “How Do You Like It So Far” podcast (MP3), we had a long discussion about a theory of change based on political work and science fictional storytelling, in which helping people imagine a better world (or warn them about a worse one) is a springboard to mobilizing political action.
The wonderful You Must Remember This podcast returns to tell the secret history of Disney’s most racist movie, Song of the South
Song of the South is one of the most obscure and most popular of all the Disney movies: despite the fact that Disney has not made it available for a generation, the movie is the basis for the “Splash Mountain” flume rides at the Disney parks, and the movie’s theme, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” remains a familiar anthem.
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Talking science fiction, technological self-determination, inequality and competition with physicist Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll is a physicist at JPL and the author of many popular, smart books about physics for a lay audience; his weekly Mindscape podcast is a treasure-trove of incredibly smart, fascinating discussions with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
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Talking corruption, technology, empiricism and fairness with the Bitcoin Podcast
I’m something of a Bitcoin skeptic; although I embrace the ideals of decentralization and privacy, I am concerned about the environmental, technological and social details of Bitcoin. It was for that reason that I was delighted to spend a good long time chatting with the hosts of the Bitcoin Podcast (MP3), digging into our points of commonality and difference; despite a few audio problems at the start, the episode (and the discourse) were both fantastic.
Part two of my novella “Martian Chronicles” on Escape Pod: who cleans the toilets in libertopia?
Last week, the Escape Pod podcast published part one of a reading of my YA novella “Martian Chronicles,” which I wrote for Jonathan Strahan’s Life on Mars anthology: it’s a story about libertarian spacesteaders who move to Mars to escape “whiners” and other undesirables, only to discover that the colonists that preceded them expect them to clean the toilets when they arrive.
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Podcast: Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my Globe and Mail column, Why do people believe the Earth is flat?, which connects the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle liners to the opioid epidemic.
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“Martian Chronicles”: Escape Pod releases a reading of my YA story about rich sociopaths colonizing Mars
Back in 2011, I wrote a young adult novella called “Martian Chronicles,” which I podcasted as it was in progress; it’s a story about the second wave of wealthy colonists lifting off from climate-wracked, inequality-riven Earth to live in a libertarian utopia on Mars.
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The complicated, nuanced story of how racialized French people fought to save their local McDonald’s
On NPR’s always-excellent Rough Translation podcast comes an incredibly complex and nuanced story (MP3, transcript) about marginalized, racialized people in public housing in Marseille who found an accepting haven in a local McDonald’s franchise, and who banded together to save it — and other nearby McD’s — in a series of direct actions ranging from occupation to threats of self-immolation.
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