Things to listen to
I mentioned that I spend a lot of time listening to spoken word recordings. I thought it might be nice to list some of the other places where I find good listening:
- Democracy Now. Amy Goodman must be one of the most hyperproductive activists out there, a throwback to the living-for-the-cause agitators of the 19th century. With a small team, she somehow puts together an hour-long tv/radio news broadcast every weekday. It's campaigning journalism with production values to equal or better the mainstream media. I wish I could find a European equivalent of this; Democracy Now does a great job of picking up stories from around the world, but it's really a USian affair.
- In Our Time. The best thing on Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg and a few academics holding a no-frills discussion on some topic they know inside-out. Shamelessly highbrow, and generally fascinating.
- IT Conversations is a mixed bag. They collect (mainly) talks from computer conferences, and repackage them as podcasts. Both the content and the audio quality are very variable. Generally good are Moira Gun's 'Tech nation' series, and anything recorded at an O'Reilly conference. [The white, male faces gracing most of their listings do tell a story -- but mainly, I think, about the IT industry as a whole, rather than IT Conversations itself]
- Here is my unsorted collection of nice things to listen to. Some good, some bad, some I never got round to playing.
I've also discovered that The West Wing works even better as an audio-only experience. If only it were financially viable to get Aaron Sorking writing radio plays!