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Stream any past show with the above media player Recent shows Left-click the [download] link to play in browser; right-click or control+click it to save to disk. 11.12.15. Colin Marshall talks to Alan Nakagawa; sound artist; visual artist; installation artist; founding member of Los Angeles' long-running. multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic, soon-to-be-dissolved arts collective Collage Ensemble; director of the experimental music Ear Meal webcast; L.A. Metro public art executive; member of Otonomiyaki, the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble and Ear Diorama Ear; and very serious eater indeed. [download page and show notes] 11.11.30. Recorded on location in Mexico City, Colin Marshall talks to David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, Las llaves de la ciudad, Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, and the blog Mostly Mexico City. A native New Yorker, Lida moved to Mexico City in 1990 — a year considered by many to have been the megalopolis' absolute nadir in terms of crime, crowding, and pollution — and hasn't looked back, becoming the best-known English-language chronicler of el Distrito Federal in the 21st century. [download page and show notes] 11.11.12. Colin Marshall talks to Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly, founding editors of the new Los Angeles literary journal Slake. The magazine, which has just released its third issue, combines fiction, poetry, essays, reportage, photography, and several different kinds of visual art into a regular exploration of Los Angeles from every angle — and an exploration of the rest of the world from a Los Angeles angle. [download page and show notes] 11.10.14. Colin Marshall talks to J. Hoberman, senior film critic at The Village Voice and author of books on such cinematic subjects as 8mm and Super 8 pictures, Dennis Hopper, the 1960s, midnight movies, and Yiddish tradition. In his latest title, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, he examines the American decade from 1946 to 1956, a time of "cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, atomic tests on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy bracketed with Marilyn Monroe." [download page and show notes] 11.09.21. Colin Marshall talks to Chris Andrews, Katherine Silver, and Rosalie Knecht, English translators of the Argentine novelist César Aira, whom some readers in the Anglosphere are now finding as exciting as Borges. Despite having published over fifty books since 1975, Aira has only recently broken into English with novels such as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became a Nun, Ghosts, The Literary Conference, and the new The Seamstress and the Wind that showcase his ability to balance the fine-grained observational detail of with outlandish fantasy and the methodical work habits and genre sensibilities of a mainstream author with the experimentalism and caprice of the avant-garde. 11.09.06. Colin Marshall talks to Peter Toohey, professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Calgary and author of Boredom: a Lively History. You don't need to keep your finger on the pulse of the contemporary scene to realize how important a subject boredom has become. We've all felt the emotion often — or at least we all think we feel it often. But we've also long felt the absence of a serious exploration of boredom, one that drills down to its true nature. Could Toohey have explained what we're experiencing when we experience boredom and why? [download page and show notes] 11.08.16. Colin Marshall talks to musician, writer, and artist Nick Currie, also known as Momus. Having recently relocated from Berlin to Osaka, he returns to the program to discuss his brand new book Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans. The novel follows up his previous book Solution 11-167: The Book of Scotlands with a similarly humorous exercise in social geography but one within a richer narrative framework — a narrative framework that pits twelve Japan "experts" against twelve Japan "idiots" — dealing with issues of imagination versus experience, monoculture versus diversity, and foreign versus future. [download page and show notes] 11.08.09. Colin Marshall talks to essayist, novelist, traveler, and "global soul" Pico Iyer. Since Video Night in Kathmandu, his journey through the rapidly changing Asia of the mid-1980s, Iyer has told us all about what it feels like and what it means to exist in and pass through places from Atlanta to Kyoto to Asunción to Pyongyang. Having been born to an Indian family and grown up equally between England and Santa Barbara, California, he both embodies and tirelessly describes the hybridized, cross-pollinated, geographically conversational world culture in which we all find ourselves. [download page and show notes] 11.08.01. Colin Marshall talks to Daniel Hernandez, bilingual bicultural binational journalist, blogger at Intersections, and author of Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the 21st Century. In 2007, the Mexican-American Hernandez moved to Mexico City to explore its spirit of adventure, its multitude of youthful subcultures, its undercurrent of chaos, and its sheer day-to-day surrealism. His first book collects pieces on Mexico City subjects as far-ranging as fashion parties, kidnappings, original punk rock, death, cellphone-thieving transsexuals, a particularly intense native sauna, and the "emo riots" of 2008. [download page and show notes] 11.07.25. Colin Marshall talks to Merlin Mann, thinker, writer, and speaker on time, attention, and creative work. Following up on his June 2009 visit, he's back on the show to talk about a great many things, not least his new podcast Back to Work with Dan Benjamin, a program about productivity, communication, barriers, constraints, tools — and, nearly always, fear. The conversation also ventures into other, unusually personal topics, including dealing with entrepreneurs, trying not to hate the internet, and having one hundred dollars in the bank. [download page and show notes] 11.07.20. Colin Marshall talks to Tim Harford, also known as the Undercover Economist. He wrote the book of the same name as well as The Logic of Life and now Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. In this latest book, Harford examines the value of numerous small-scale experiments — numerous enough to try many different things, and small-scale enough to fail without serious consequence — in business, technology, medicine, finance, climate change, and even his own life and career. [download page and show notes] 11.07.11. Colin Marshall talks to Steve Himmer, editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction and author of the novel The Bee-Loud Glade, wherein an eccentric millionaire named Crane picks Finch, a former corporate blogger, out of a rapidly deepening post-firing squalor. Finch finds himself in a very particular future on Crane's intricately landscaped grounds: employed as a decorative hermit, he must do little more than eat, sleep, meditate, and accomplish occasional (if sometimes inexplicable) Crane-assigned tasks. As it turns out, this suit's Finch's sensibilities just fine, even when Crane's corporate empire begins to crumble. [download page and show notes] 11.06.28. Colin Marshall talks to Dave Kehr, former film critic at the Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune and current DVD columnist for the New York Times. In his first collection, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, he brings together his writings on some of the finest films and filmmakers of the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, including Jean-Luc Godard, Manoel de Oliveira, Blake Edwards, and Albert Brooks. [download page and show notes] 11.06.13. Colin Marshall talks to Susan Bernofsky, author, scholar, and translator of such German-language writers as the Swiss Robert Walser, the Japanese Yoko Tawada, and the German Jenny Erpenbeck. New Directions recently released a strong lot of Bernofsky-translated books from Walser, including the novels The Assistant and The Tanners, as well as Microscripts, a collection of short, hard-to-categorize works originally written in a one- to two-millimeter-high pencil script of Walser's own devising. [download page and show notes] 11.06.06. Colin Marshall talks to Aaron Katz, director of such films as Dance Party USA, Quiet City, and the new Cold Weather. Continuing his established tradition of examining the sphere of urban twentysomethings who aren't quite sure how their lives got to this point or where they're going next with a strikingly aestheticizing gaze, Katz incorporates a near-Sherlock Holmesian plot into his latest film. His central characters, a Portland ice-factory worker, his DJ buddy, and his sister, find themselves embroiled in a forbiddingly seedy mystery when a girl goes missing and it falls to them to find her. [download page and show notes] 11.05.30. Colin Marshall talks to Lee Rourke, literary critic, contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine, and author of the story collection Everyday and the novel The Canal, winner of the Guardian's 2010 Not the Booker Prize. A book ostensibly about boredom, The Canal also illustrates, within a brief span of literary time, how boredom isn't really boring — or even how boredom isn't really boredom as we usually conveive of it when we actually sit down and face it, as does the book's protagonist, who one day walks out of his office job and never walks back. [download page and show notes] 11.05.23. Colin Marshall talks to Geoff Dyer, the "intellectual gatecrasher" who has written, in addition to several novels, books on photography, World War I, jazz, John Berger, travel, and D.H. Lawrence. His essays turn out to cover an even wider span of subjects than his books, and his latest collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition includes pieces on Susan Sontag, Def Leppard, Ian McEwan, avoiding real jobs, Richard Avedon, Editions of Contemporary Music, W.G. Sebald, growing up an only child, and the search for the perfect donut and cappuccino. [download page and show notes] 11.05.12. Colin Marshall talks to Sarah Bakewell, author of biographies on Jorgen Jorgenson, Margaret Caroline Rudd, and, most recently, the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne. How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer examines the life of a man whose life you'd have thought was already pretty damned well examined. More remains to learn, it turns out, even after Montaigne himself wrote three volumes of personal essays which have attained over 400 years of success and counting. Bakewell finds a man who, despite revealing no end of personal detail and disclosing no end of his own opinions, paraxodically becomes near-universally relatable to the reading public across the world and through time. Yet could he have achieved this not in spite of his essays' specificity, but because of it? [download page and show notes] 11.05.05. Colin Marshall talks to Jeffrey DeShell, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Arthouse, a novel that takes the form, structure, and aesthetic of each of its chapters from famous films like Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, Bela Tarr's Satantango, Arthur Ripley's Branded to Kill, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, and Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. DeShell's protagonist, a "failed fortysomething film studies academic," lives through a story among the meth-dealing toughs of Pueblo, Colorado that pulls him through not the events, not the settings, but the very substance of the cinematic art of these and other classics of the "arthouse" theater. [download page and show notes] 11.04.21. Colin Marshall talks to Stephen Battaglio, business editor at TV Guide magazine and author of David Susskind: A Televised Life, the first biography of the pioneering talk show host and producer of both television and film. With his firm Talent Associates Ltd., Susskind made his name with live shows like East Side/West Side, movies like Raisin in the Sun, and theater productions for television like Death of a Salesman. All throughout The David Susskind Show's near-thirty-year tun, Susskind engaged in relaxed, incisive, long-form conversation with a vast array of luminaries from business, politics, entertainment, and the arts, virtually creating the evening television talk show form as audiences knew it at its peak. [download page and show notes] 11.04.10. Colin Marshall talks to Françoise Palleau-Papin, teacher of American literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and author of This is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson. The book comes as the first study of its length of all of the late Markson's novels, a body of work which includes such early detective "entertainments" as Epitaph for a Tramp and Miss Doll, Go Home, such intermediate and comparatively traditional yet still exuberantly inventive books as Going Down and Springer's Progress, and the final five novels for which readers know him best. Running from Wittgenstein's Mistress to The Last Novel, these brief but deep excursions into isolated creative minds showcased Markson's unmatched skills at shaping facts and ideas from art, philosophy, literature, and history into narratives like no other writer has ever written. [download page and show notes] 11.04.03. Colin Marshall talks to cartoonist and entrepreneur Hugh MacLeod. At Gapingvoid.com, MacLeod showcases his business card-sized works of art that strike several particularly tricky balances at once: between light and dark, between abstraction and representation, and between inspirational optimism and stark, abyss-gazing confrontation with the human condition. His cartoons have thus gained a following with not only artists, but marketers, entrepreneurs, job-haters, and many more variants of humanity besides. In his latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination, MacLeod combines cartoons with writing on subjects like giving artistic gifts, ditching your unsatisfactory life, waking others up, and getting woken up. [download page and show notes] 11.03.20. Colin Marshall talks to novelist and philosopher Lars Iyer, author the blog Spurious and the new novel Spurious. In both the blog and the book, the philosophers Lars and W. discuss their favorite artists and writers — Franz Kafka, Andrei Tarkovsky, Maurice Blanchot, Béla Tarr — and what they see as their own pathetic inability to live up to their collective example. As Lars deals with a dampness problem ever encroaching on his apartment, W. berates him with a seemingly endless series of insults that takes friendly verbal abuse to a high art form. [download page and show notes] 11.03.13. Colin Marshall talks to Chaz Bundick, founding member and frontman of the experimental pop project Toro y Moi. Last year, Bundick introduced Toro y Moi to the world with the electronic, relatively sample-heavy solo album Causers of This. Now he darts all the way across the spectrum of the project's sound with Underneath the Pine, a record influenced by late-seventies R&B, film scores, and the unexpected purchase of a bargain-priced Fender Rhodes. [download page and show notes] 11.03.06. Colin Marshall talks to C. Max Magee, founding editor of literary web magazine The Millions. With Jeff Martin, he’s co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, a collection of essays from such luminaries as Ander Monson, Reif Larsen, Michael Paul Mason, Jonathan Lethem, and David Gates about the next iteration of their medium, what the reading audience of today best engages with, and the relationship between the ever-evolving industrial capacity of text distribution and the artistic forms to which it gives rise. [download page and show notes] 11.02.27. Colin Marshall talks to Gabriel Josipovici, author of many novels and critical essays involved with the aesthetics and techniques of modernism. In his latest book, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, he traces modernism’s roots further back in history than perhaps any other scholar of modernism has done before. It’s all in the service of the titular question, which expresses a deep concern of anyone who enjoys modernist works today: how and why has the Western world so largely ignored the excitement and potential of modernist art, that is, art conscious of its own limits and responsibilities? [download page and show notes] 11.02.20. Colin Marshall talks to Jonathan Rosenbaum, former Chicago Reader film critic, advocate of international cinema, and author of books on Orson Welles, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. In his latest, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, he examines the way serious engagement with film has changed over the decades, what new experiences it has brought to enthusiasts and critics, and what possibilities it has opened for cinematic artists. [download page and show notes] 11.02.13. Colin Marshall talks to critic Scott Esposito, blogger at Conversational Reading, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and marketing coordinator at the Center for the Art of Translation. A lover and promoter of today's most interesting fiction, Esposito writes about fiction at the intersection of the experimental and the international. This conversation took place at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs' 2011 conference in Washington, D.C. [download page and show notes] 11.02.06. Colin Marshall talks to cultural journalist Saul Austerlitz, author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes and, most recently, Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy, which examines the careers of beloved U.S. comedy icons like Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers as well as more cultishly comedic figures like Albert Brooks as well as filmmakers not normally associated directly with comedy, like Robert Altman and the Coen brothers. [download page and show notes] 11.01.30. Colin Marshall talks to Luke Fischbeck, founder of Los Angeles experimental music group, art-creation unit, and engine of community Lucky Dragons at the 2011 Art Los Angeles Contemporary international art fair in Santa Monica. Alongside collaborator Sarah Rara, Fischbeck performs with conventional instruments, unconventional instruments, video, improvisation, incompatible technologies, and audience collaboration. The Wire calls their music "a celebration of ancient shared memory and introspective spirituality." Lucky Dragons perform at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum on Thursday, February 3 at 7:00 p.m. [download page and show notes] 11.01.23. Colin Marshall talks to David Edmonds, co-host with Nigel Warburton of the popular philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites. Edmonds and Warburton have also collaborated on a new book, Philosophy Bites: 25 Philosophers on 25 Intriguing Subjects. The text features conversations from the podcast, including Peter Singer on animal rights, Alain de Botton on architecture, Adrian Moore on infinity, and Barry Smith on wine. [download page and show notes] 11.01.16. Colin Marshall talks to Darcy Paquet, film critic and author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves. Since 1999, Paquet has maintained the web site Koreanfilm.org as the premiere destination for Anglophone lovers of Korean cinema, which has experienced an unprecedented explosion of creativity and artistry since the beginning of the decade. In his book and on his site, Paquet discusses such vital Korean filmmakers as Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), Hong Sang-soo (Woman is the Future of Man, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, 3-Iron), and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Joint Security Area). [download page and show notes] 11.01.09. Colin Marshall talks to book critic and former Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin. He’s also the editor of several anthologies of Los Angeles writing and the author of The Myth of Solid Ground. His latest book The Lost Art of Reading examines changes in his own and others’ style of engagement with books in the age of fragmented attention, always-flowing information sources, and countless outlets for on-demand media. [download page and show notes] 10.12.25. Colin Marshall talks to design philosopher, bookmaker, and man of aesthetics Leonard Koren. In addition to publishing WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing in the 1970s and providing consultancy on certain aesthetic matters, he’s created books like Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, How to Rake Leaves, and Undesigning the Bath. He takes on the very meaning of the term “aesthetics” in his latest title, Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions. [download page and show notes] 10.12.17. Colin Marshall talks to conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats. In addition to his well-known projects like selling his thoughts, creating pornography for plants, and genetically engineering god, Keats writes about language for Wired magazine. His new book, Virtual Words: Language from the Edge of Science and Technology, collects his examinations of neologisms both failed and successful from our age, including qubit, crowdsourcing and bacn. [download page and show notes] 10.12.12. Colin Marshall talks to Nathan Rabin, head writer at The A.V. Club, the cultural magazine published by The Onion. There, he began a regular feature called My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year writing up movies that performed poorly at the box office and with critics, categorizing each as a “Failure”, “Fiasco”, or “Secret Success”. He continued the feature after a year, and has now collected pieces on Last Action Hero, Ishtar, Battlefield Earth, and more into My Year of Flops: One Man’s Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure. [download page and show notes] 10.12.05. Colin Marshall talks to Yunte Huang, poet, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. In the book, Huang combines a personal narrative of his research into American literature’s most beloved (and loathed) Chinese detective with the stories of E.D. Biggers, the writer who invented Charlie Chan, and Chang Apana, the real-life Chinese detective on the Honolulu Police whose exploits inspired him. [download page and show notes] 10.11.23. Colin Marshall talks to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of and “Senior Maverick” at Wired magazine. In addition to his copious online writing on technology and culture, he’s published such books as New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, the Economic World. His latest book, What Technology Wants, explores the nature of what he calls the “technium”, that is, technology itself, considered as one big organism which grows, changes, and definitely wants something. [download page and show notes] 10.11.07. Colin Marshall talks to literature professor, psychotherapist, and cultural critic Mikita Brottman, author of The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. In the book, Brottman challenges a host of conventional wisdom and received ideas about the value of reading, especially the reading of "high" literature. This mission takes her through examinations of both her own history with reading and the nature of such species of the printed word as the gothic novel, the true-crime paperback, and the celebrity confessional. [download page and show notes] 10.10.31. Colin Marshall talks to documentary filmmaker Nicholas Sherman, director of Soundtracker: A Portrait of Gordon Hempton. Hempton, one of the world’s best-known field recordists, has dedicated his life to traveling the United States and the world to create “sound portraits” of distinctive places. In Soundtracker, Sherman follows Hempton’s road trip in his 1964 VW bus which becomes a quest to capture the sounds of a train and a songbird together. [download page and show notes] 10.10.24. Colin Marshall talks to film critic David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and former longtime critic at the Christian Science Monitor. Sterritt’s books, from titles on Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock to more recent ones on B-movies and even the television sitcom The Honeymooners, reveal cinematic interests that stretch from the avant-garde to the long and widely beloved to the ostensibly (but perhaps not actually) disposable. [download page and show notes] 10.10.01. Colin Marshall talks to John Rabe, longtime public radio personality and host of KPCC’s Off-Ramp, a weekly examination of Southern California and especially Los Angeles. The show’s interviews and field pieces provide, as Rabe puts it, a “pointillist” aural portrait of the city and its surrounding half-state, highlighting some of the most interesting people, places, and things there without attempting the futile task of precisely representing the massive amount and constantly changing composition of Southern California culture. [download page and show notes] 10.09.21. A regular collaboration between The Marketplace of Ideas and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum begins. Colin Marshall first talks with Barney Haynes and Jennifer Parker, professors at the California College of the Arts and UC Santa Cruz, respectively, and the creators of SonicSENSE, an expandable and evolving site for art, culture, new technologies, digital media, collaboration and participation. They’ll be performing at CAF’s Forum Lounge series on Thursday, October 7. Then, Colin Marshall talks with CAF assistant curator and development manager Valerie Velazquez about the gallery’s current exhibition, the 2010 Call for Entries, featuring work from Graham Bury, Alejandro Casazi, Madelaine Frezza, Christine Morla, and Shane Tolbert. [download page and show notes] 10.09.10. Colin Marshall talks to Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and co-founder the zine which has become the massively popular blog Boing Boing. His latest book, Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, is the story of his quest to fully customize his life by building, maintaining, and operating as much as possible with his own hands: hacking his espresso machine, making his own sauerkraut, building cigar-box guitars, brewing his own kombucha, and carving his own spoons, to name only a few of his eclectic set of pursuits. [download page and show notes] 10.09.10. Colin Marshall talks to blogger, entrepreneur, and liver of the unconventional life Chris Guillebeau. Having written his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel for “a small army of remarkable people” since 2008, he’s now the author of a book which expands on his ideas and experiences, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World. [download page and show notes] 10.09.03. Colin Marshall talks to Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor, creators of the new men’s style web series and blog Put This On, which explore all facets of the art of “dressing like a grown-up.” Thorn is also the host of Public Radio International’s The Sound of Young America as well as the comedy podcast Jordan Jesse Go; Lisagor is also a co-host and producer of the comedy podcast You Look Nice Today. [download page and show notes] 10.08.27. Colin Marshall talks to novelist Joshua Cohen, author of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and now Witz. The new book follows the cross-country (and international, and possibly even interplanetary) journey of Benjamin Israelien, born with a beard and glasses, already nearly a grown man. After a Biblical plague on Christmas Even 1999, Benjamin becomes the last Jew on Earth. He’s first celebrated, then marketed, then turned upon. [download page and show notes] 10.08.20. Colin Marshall talks to Tyler Smith and David Bax, hosts of the film podcast Battleship Pretension. For over three years, Smith and Bax have explored on the show all aspects of cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema technique, and cinema criticism, doing so with the freewheeling, humorous sensibility of the best late-night film school conversations. [download page and show notes] 10.08.13. Colin Marshall talks to Jack Hues, lead singer and, alongside Nick Feldman, primary collaborator of the rock group Wang Chung. Throughout the 1980s, Wang Chung released such albums as Points on the Curve, Mosaic, and The Warmer Side of Cool, as well as the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s film To Live and Die in L.A.. Now they’re back recording and touring again, having recently completed one U.S. tour and about to launch another in support of their new double EP, Abducted by the 80s. [download page and show notes] 10.08.06. Colin Marshall talks to music journalist, critic, and observer of America Greil Marcus. Though they span countless subjects, Marcus’ past books have been rooted in examinations of icons like Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Presley, and Bill Clinton. In his latest release, When that Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, he takes on the Irish singer-songwriter’s vast, varied catalogue, documenting his own responses to Morrison’s music as well as the far-flung cultural and psychological resonances it sets off. [download page and show notes] 10.07.31. Colin Marshall talks to Steven Moore, author, critic, former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History, Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language. [download page and show notes] 10.07.23. Colin Marshall talks to Suzanne Jill Levine, noted translator of creative, innovative, adventurous Latin American Fiction from authors like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig. She’s also a professor at UCSB and the general editor and co-translator of Penguin Classics’ five new volumes of nonfiction and poetry from widely respected Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing, On Mysticism, On Argentina, The Sonnets, and Poems of the Night. Her own book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction has been recently reissued by Dalkey Archive. [download page and show notes] 10.07.16. Colin Marshall talks to David Lipsky, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Crafted out of transcripts of a five day-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace on the tail end of the publicity tour for Wallace’s breakthrough novel Infinite Jest, the book reveals facets of the beloved author that have never before been seen publicly. [download page and show notes] 10.06.25. Colin Marshall talks to Tan Lin, professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University and author of the books Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01 and Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource). His latest book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, uses its form to escape the notions, conventions and structures of the traditional reading experience. [download page and show notes] 10.06.17. Colin Marshall talks to David Toop, composer of sound, writer about sound, curator of sound and research fellow at the London College of Communication. His works in text include Ocean of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather and the Rap Attack books. His latest is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, which explores the sound of silent art. [download page and show notes] 10.06.10. Colin Marshall talks to novelist Todd Shimoda, author of 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, The Fourth Treasure and now Oh!: A Mystery of Mono No Aware. Shimoda calls his stories “somewhat experimental, post-modernish, dealing with Asian or Asian-American themes to some degree, but also broad questions of existence,” or “philosophical mysteries.” His latest novel documents an embodies a search for the elusive Japanese literary concept of mono no aware. [download] [show notes] 10.06.03. Colin Marshall talks to Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies founder Stephen Batchelor, author on, scholar of and educator about Buddhist topics. His latest book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, recounts his journey from young spiritual seeker to devoted monk to questioning student to holder of the complex hybrid of principles and practices he has achieved today. This personal narrative builds upon and provides a background to his famously controversial Buddhism Without Beliefs. [download] 10.05.27. Colin Marshall talks to Andrew Bujalski, the young director of the films Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, which is newly available on DVD. Though Bujalski’s funny, realistic movies are often considered by critics to be of a similar genus to other independently-produced pictures of the 2000s focusing on the personal relationships of twentysomethings, they possess an intellect and an aesthetic all their own. [download] 10.05.20. Colin Marshall talks to Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant surgeries and robotics. His latest, the father-son memoir Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, comes out this summer. [download] 10.05.06. Colin Marshall talks to David Shields, professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself. [download] 10.04.29. Colin Marshall talks to two of the creators of RedBlack, the avant-garde concert event that caps off Primavera 2010, UCSB’s festival of contemporary arts and digital media. The free performance, whose doors open at the UCen Hub at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, April 30, presents new compositions of “crushed electronica” combined with a new piece of narrative dance. Ron Sedgwick is the director of RedBlack as well as a PhD candidate at UCSB, and Abby Linton is RedBlack’s choreographer as well as a senior dance major at UCSB. [download] 10.04.22. Colin Marshall talks to musicologist, writer, microtonal composer and educator Kyle Gann, author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″. The former new music critic at the Village Voice, Gann turns his eye and ear in the book to Cage’s most well-known composition, four minutes and 33 seconds in which no notes are played. Famous and infamous in equal measure, 4′33″ has been variously considered a work of genius, a game-changing musical revelation and a charlatan’s publicity stunt. [download] 10.04.15. Colin Marshall talks to Peter Brunette, Reynolds Professor of Film Studies and director of the Film Studies program at Wake Forest University. The author of books on such beloved filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai and Roberto Rossellini, Brunette has now written a book on Austrian cinematic provocateur Michael Haneke. The latest published entry in the University of Illinois Press’ “Contemporary Film Directors” series, Michael Haneke examines in depth the art of and the ideas behind the auteur’s theatrical releases, from late-1980s and early-1990s works such as The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video through his newest and best-known pictures Caché and The White Ribbon. [download] 10.04.01. Colin Marshall talks to speaker, writer, blogger and entrepreneur Seth Godin. Having already built a large body of published work on the nature of ideas, how they’re conceived, how they’re spread and how they’re executed, Godin has expanded his intellectual purview with his new book Linchpin. Extending the thoughts and observations he applied to marketing in books like Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars, his latest work examines how individual human beings, not corporations or organizations, can most fruitfully practice their art in the transforming information economy. [download] 10.03.25. Colin Marshall talks to Chris Bohn, editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership. [download] 10.03.18. Colin Marshall talks to James Donelan, lecturer and Program Coordinator in the English department and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He's also the author of Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic a study of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, poet William Wordsworth, philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and poet/philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and what their work reveals about the development of the idea of the autonomous mind and its interaction with the external world, especially its works of art. [download] 10.02.25. Colin Marshall talks to Sean Carroll, theoretical cosmologist specializing in dark energy and special relativity at the California Institute of Technology and blogger at Cosmic Variance. In his new book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Carroll explores possible answers to the question, “Why does time always move forward, never backward?” Addressing the issue necessitates drawing from various domains of physics, going all the way back to the origin of the universe. [download] 10.02.18. Colin Marshall talks to Brian Reynolds Myers, contributing editor to the Atlantic and professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his new book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters, Myers examines North Korean propaganda meant for both internal and external consumption and through it constructs the closed country’s view of itself, its relationship to other countries and the Kim dynasty that has controlled it for 60 years. This approach reveals not a Stalinist ideology but one closer to Nazi Germany’s in its prioritization of the military and fixation on racial purity and a threatening outside world. [download] 10.02.11. Colin Marshall talks to Nick Currie, better known as Momus. Since the mid-1980s he has led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands. Since 2004, he has written the blog Click Opera on his life, work and art adventures, which he closed on February 10, the eve of his 50th birthday. [download] 10.02.04. Colin Marshall talks to cinematic journalist and curator Livia Bloom, editor of Errol Morris: Interviews, a compilation of conversations with the nonfiction filmmaker behind such movies as Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. The book, which includes two interviews conducted by Bloom herself as well as other notable film writers like Paul Cronin and Roger Ebert, reveals a directorial mind filled with curiosity, love of truth and real or imagined misanthropy. [download] 10.01.28. Colin Marshall talks to Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University, research associate at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and chief scientist at Consensus Point. He’s also the thinker behind Overcoming Bias, a popular blog about issues of honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting and the far future, around which a large rationality-centric community has developed on the internet. “Flicking through Robin’s thoughts,” says the Observer, “you start to feel the ground shifting beneath you.” [download] 10.01.07. Colin Marshall talks to Rob Walker, observer of advertising and marketing in all their forms. Author of the New York Times‘ “Consumed” column and the book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, Walker is also the co-creator of the “Significant Objects” project, an experiment wherein various authors and media personalities craft fictional stories to accompany everyday objects found at thrift stores. The objects are then auctioned off, revealing the value-adding effects of narrative. [download] 09.12.31. Colin Marshall talks to Steven E. Landsburg, professor of economics at the University of Rochester, Slate's "Everyday Economics" columnist and author of The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics. A pioneer in the popular-economics genre with his 1993 book The Armchair Economist, Landsburg now focuses his quantitative mind on issues of epistemology, ontology, morality and otherwise that have heretofore remained mostly untouched by such analysis. [download] 09.12.17. Colin Marshall talks to Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of All Souls College and author of The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, the latest in Penguin’s sprawling History of Europe series. Wickham integrates textual and architectual evidence to craft a new, fascinatingly detailed historical experience of the era beginning at the decline of the Roman Empire and ending at the rise of European nations as we know them today. Eschewing both teleology and grand narratives, Wickham presents the Middle Ages not as a mere stepping stone to modernity but as a fascinating period in and of itself. [download] 09.11.05. Colin Marshall talks to Jeremy Haladyna, director of UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and composer of the sprawling 28-piece-and-counting Mayan Cycle. Drawing upon over twenty years of research and exploration, Haladyna has translated countless concepts from Mayan thought, art and architecture into music that counts strings, flutes, scratch turntables and even sampled paper towel dispensers among its sonic components. An album of selections from the Mayan Cycle is now available from Innova Recordings. [download] 09.10.29. Colin Marshall talks to Pepita Ferrari, director of Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. The first documentary film to concentrate specifically on documentary filmmaking, Capturing Reality features conversations with the likes of Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Nick Broomfield, Albert Maysles, Scott Hicks and Molly Dineen about such important issues in the genre as interviewing, editing, the line between fact and fiction, the evolutionary possibilities of individual projects and the effect of a filmmaker's presence. [download] 09.10.21. Colin Marshall talks to The Philadelphia Lawyer, author of both the web site of the same name and the book The Happy Hour is For Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World’s Worst Profession, which is now out in paperback. Combining Kafka-like tales of the gamesmanship and pedantry of the legal profession with vivid accounts of the intense debauchery required to counterbalance all that wasted time in the office, The Philadelphia Lawyer’s web presence has attracted a large, devoted audience of disaffected litigators, suspicious law students and dedicated bacchanalists alike. His book brings the distinctive sensibility of his much-e-mailed stories into long-form narrative. [download] 09.10.15. Colin Marshall talks to Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard, host and producer, respectively, of The Signal on CBC Radio 2. Since debuting in March of 2007, the program has evolved to provide a highly distinctive listening experience that offers two skillfully-curated hours of late-night contemporary music to listeners across Canada — and, via the internet, the world — that’s neither predictable nor easily genrefiable. Brown accompanies Sheppard’s unusual sonic selections with commentary that’s long impressed fans with its friendliness, intimacy and wealth of odd stories. [download] 09.10.08. Colin Marshall talks to Peter Bagge, the comic artist behind the beloved series Hate as well as Apocalypse Nerd, Neat Stuff and Sweatshop. His new book, Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations, collects his stories originally written for the libertarian magazine Reason, works of comic journalism on such subjects as the Iraq war, gun control, the “War on Drugs” and Amtrak. [download] 09.10.01. Colin Marshall talks to So Yong Kim, director of In Between Days, winner of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision, and more recently Treeless Mountain, which is now available on DVD. The story of two very young sisters in Seoul left with their distant aunt while their mother searches for their absent father, the film belongs solidly to the realist tradition while evoking the scale, perspective and feel of childhood. The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott calls Treeless Mountain one of the “vital, urgent and timely” vanguard members of the new genre of “neo-neorealism.” [download] 09.09.24. Colin Marshall talks to Ken Freedman, general manager of Jersey City’s WFMU, the longest-running freeform radio station in the United States. Since the mid-1980s, Freedman and his staff have made WFMU’s name a byword for the modern freeform sensibility with a combination of, among other factors, early adoption of new distribution technology, avoidance of identity politics and pure, unadulterated unpredictability. [download] 09.09.17. Colin Marshall talks to longtime Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger, author of Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France. An ardent culinary Francophile in earlier decades, Steinberger has, along with much of the rest of the food world, come to realize that a malaise has fallen upon the cuisine that once led the world in taste, artistry, experience and sophistication. Steinberger? book chronicles the history of French food, the recent developments that have forced it to face tough competition from countries like Spain and the United States and the importance of such things as the legality of lait cru cheese, the effects of viticultural subsidies and the fall of the once-almighty Michelin guide. [download] 09.09.03. Colin Marshall talks to three music writers who have written books on English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, whose debut album Five Leaves Left originally shipped on September 1, 1969. Joining the conversation to celebrate the record? fortieth anniversary are Trevor Dann, former head of BBC Music Entertainment and author of Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake; Patrick Humphries, noted biographer of musicians and author of Nick Drake: The Biography, the very first book on the man; and Peter Hogan, author of Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music and an enthusiast of Drake's music from the very beginning. [download] 09.08.20. A conversation about religion and falsity with Joel Grus, humorist, atheist and author of Your Religion is False. [download] 09.08.06. A conversation with Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and founding blogger of Marginal Revolution. Cowen's new book is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. [download] 09.07.30. A conversation with Greg Milner, who's written music and technology journalism for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Slate, Salon and Wired. His new book, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, tracing the evolution of music's capture from Edison cylinders to vinyl albums to waveform synthesis. [download] 09.07.23. A conversation about the early works of filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who brought an entirely new irreverent aesthetic and sociological sensibility to the 1960s Japanese film scene, with Kim Hendrickson, executive producer at The Criterion Collection and producer of their new box set Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes: Three Films by Shohei Imamura. [download] 09.07.23. A conversation about bringing intelligent video to the internet with Brian Gruber, founder and executive chairman of FORA.tv, the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates from the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences. [download] 09.07.16. A conversation with novelist, journalist, memoirist and traveler Lawrence Osborne, author, most recently, of Bangkok Days. [download] 09.07.09. A conversation about rock music's foremost intellectual "non-musician." producer and cultural theorist with David Sheppard, author of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno. [download] 09.07.02. A conversation about the dissolution of the friendship between two very different philosophers with John T. Scott, professor of political science at the University of California, Davis and co-author with Robert Zaretsky of The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding. [download] 09.06.25. A conversation with Alain de Botton, author of fiction, nonfiction, journalism and various hybrids thereof. Following treatises on Proust, philosophy, travel and architecture, de Botton's newest book of "philosophical journalism" is The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. [download] 09.06.18. A conversation about the rise, fall and rise of the long-playing album format both technologically and artistically with journalist Travis Elborough, author of The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again. [download] 09.06.11. A conversation with writer, speaker, blogger and student of the creative mind Merlin Mann. In 2004, Mann founded 43Folders, a blog and community focused on tips, tricks, tools and techniques designed to improve one's productivity, and in late 2008, he took the site in a new direction, toward the habits and thoughts of humanity's best creators and what can be learned from examining them. [download] 09.06.04. Part three of our ongoing series of conversations about the future of books and reading, this time with publishing consultant Richard Eoin Nash. Nash ran the widely-acclaimed Soft Skull Press between 2001 and March of this year. [download] 09.05.28. A conversation with Jon Raymond, editor at Plazm magazine and author of the novel The Half-Life and the new short story collection Livability. With filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Raymond co-adapted two of Livability's short stories into the critically-acclaimed feature films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. [download] 09.05.21. A conversation with Edward Champion, critic, host and producer of the cultural interview podcast The Bat Segundo Show, blogger behind Reluctant Habits and all-around "intellectual shock jock". [download] 09.05.14. A conversation with filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo. Roger Ebert calls Bahrani "the new great American director." [download] 09.05.07. A conversation about using old technology to craft modern sounds with electro-acoustic musician Ethan Rose, whose newest album Oaks was recorded with a vintage 1920s Wurlitzer organ found in the skating rink at Portland's Oaks Park. Two tracks from the record are included in this broadcast. [download] 09.04.30. A conversation about creating radio fiction and humorously raising consciousness with Thomas Lopez, founder and president of the ZBS Foundation. This broadcast contains excerpts from the ZBS productions Dreams of the Amazon, Ruby and Two Minute Film Noir. [download] 09.04.23. A conversation about iterative creative processes, building music in layers and the history of loud sound with electronic musician Tim Hecker, whose latest album is An Imaginary Country, from which two tracks are featured in this broadcast. [download] 09.04.16. A conversation about aesthetics and evolutionary biology with Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. [download] 09.04.09. A conversation with novelist, journalist, documentarian and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College Ian Buruma. His latest book is The China Lover, a historical novel examining the life and career of Manchurian-born Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi through the eyes of three different narrators. [download] 09.04.02. A conversation about appreciating the seasons, collecting international field recordings and turning others on to sound art with composer, multimedia artist, critic and ROOM40 label head Lawrence English. Two tracks from English's latest record, A Colour for Autumn, are included in this broadcast. [download] 09.03.19. A conversation about reading, writing and radio with Michael Silverblatt, who has hosted KCRW's Bookworm, the beloved forum for the discussion of fiction and poetry on public radio, for twenty years. [download] 09.03.05. A conversation about the craft of interviewing and the state of public radio today with Jesse Thorn, host of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America as well as principal of podcasting empire Maximumfun.org. [download] 09.02.26. A conversation about what's wrong with literary studies and a possible way forward with Jonathan Gottschall, English instructor at Washington and Jefferson College and author of Science, Literature and a New Humanities. [download] 09.02.19. A conversation with physicist and University of Utah adjunct professor of anthropology Gregory Cochran, co-author with Henry Harpending of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. [download] 09.02.12. A conversation about the organic basis of decisionmaking with Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large at Seed magazine and author of How We Decide. [download] 09.01.29. A conversation about what gardens say about human nature, what's missing from mainstream radio and the place of the humanities with Robert Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University and host of KZSU's Entitled Opinions. His latest book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. [download] 09.01.15. A conversation about the genesis of probability theory with mathematician Keith Devlin, author of The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern. [download] 09.01.06. A conversation about having fun with poetry, providing an alternative to academia and hosting television programs from one's own home with writer and "cultural polymath" Clive James, author of Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008. [download] 08.12.09. A conversation about knowledge, commerce and the Western canon with novelist and journalist Alex Beam, author of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. [download] 08.11.25. A conversation about the greatest British philosopher of all time with Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and the University of North Carolina and author of How to Read Hume. [download] 08.11.18. A conversation about Margaret Thatcher, the most controversial British Prime Minister of the 20th century, with Claire Berlinski, author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. [download] 08.11.11. A conversation about intellectual rigor and intellectual confusion with New York University physicist Alan Sokal, the man behind the "Sokal Hoax" and author of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. [download] 08.11.04. A conversation about art markets with Don Thompson, professor emeritus of marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business and author of The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. [download] 08.10.14. A conversation about what's next for humanity with David Friedman, professor of law at Santa Clara University and author of the classic work of 20th-century political philosophy The Machinery of Freedom as well as the new Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World. [download] 08.10.07. A conversation about technology, philosophy and a beloved American motorcycle journey with Mark Richardson, auto and motorcycle editor of the Toronto Star and author of Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. [download] 08.09.30. A conversation about demographics, punditry and American voting with Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University and author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. [download] 08.09.23. A conversation about the red tape of viticulture, huge followings in Japan and Cabernet uprisings in the streets of Indianapolis with wine educator and blogger Tyler Colman, known in the blogosphere as "Dr. Vino", author of Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists and Mobsters Influence the Wines We Drink. [download] 08.09.16. A conversation about the workings of the novel, the world between journalism and academia and literary versus religious belief with James Wood, book critic for the New Yorker and author of How Fiction Works. [download] 08.09.02. A conversation about what's wrong with American education's priorities and how to fix them with the American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray, author of Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. [download] 08.08.26. A conversation about econophysics, generating genuine randomness and the rise of blogs with mathematical journalist and blogger Brian Hayes, author of Group Theory in the Bedroom. [download] 08.08.19. A conversation about the dictionary-reader's ultimate challenge, all 21,730 pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, with Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED. [download] 08.08.12. A conversation about one man, one son, and one D.I.Y. film school with novelist and former CBC film critic David Gilmour, author of The Film Club: A Memoir. [download] 08.07.22. A conversation about art, criticism, literature, philosophy, and a certain Belgian boy reporter with novelist Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature. [download] 08.07.15. A conversation about science, aesthetics and the crossing of disciplinary boundaries with David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard, author of Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, and founder of Le Laboratoire. [download] 08.07.01. A conversation about asymmetrical warfare, Red Dawn and the Hmong in Fresno with Gary Brecher, "War Nerd" columnist from The eXile. [download] 08.06.20. A conversation about the rise of cultural blogs, using one's own life as novel source material and the genius of Rupert Thomson with literary blogger Maud Newton, founder of MaudNewton.com. [download] 08.06.13. A conversation about the encyclopedic novel, female creativity and Rush Limbaugh with novelist, essayist and poet Alexander Theroux, author of Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual. [download] 08.06.06. Part two of our special series on the future of books and reading: conversations with writer, thinker, entrepreneur and maker of mischief Kevin Smokler [site] and Dave Weich, director of marketing and development at Portland's Powell's Books. [download] 08.05.30. A conversation about art school, the Milgram Experiment and Andres Serrano photos as bible covers with graphic designer and novelist Chip Kidd [site], the man responsible for countless bestselling (and some not-quite-bestselling) book jackets. His new novel is The Learners: The Book After The Cheese Monkeys. [download] 08.05.23. Part one of a special Marketplace of Ideas series on the future of books and reading: conversations with Daniel Menaker and Odile Isralson, host and executive producer of Titlepage, the first book-themed internet TV show. [download] 08.05.02. A conversation about the climate change debate, the evolutionary psychology of art and bad academic writing with Denis Dutton [site], founder of Arts & Letters Daily and editor of Philosophy and Literature. [download] 08.04.25. A conversation about swinging, eating, strip clubs, lying, gambling, consumption and pornography with Peter Sagal [site], host of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me and author of The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them). [download] 08.04.18. A conversation about personality, innovation and openness in cities and "mega-regions" with urban theorist Richard Florida [site], author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City? [download] 08.04.04. A conversation about experimental philosophy with Kwame Anthony Appiah [site], Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and author of Experiments in Ethics. [download] 08.03.27. A conversation about life in film and literature in Japan and America with translator, filmmaker and Japan expert John Nathan, author of Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. [download part one] [download part two] 08.03.21. A conversation about the art of engineering, the value of jokes and the nuisance of spam with Steve Wozniak [site], co-founder of Apple Computer and author of iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. [download] 08.03.14. A conversation about speed-dating, the advantages of city life and the fun economists are having with "Undercover Economist" Tim Harford [site], author of The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World. [download] 08.03.07. A conversation about Generation X, penciling techniques and libertarianism with Peter Bagge [site], creator of Hate and Apocalypse Nerd. [download] 08.02.29. A conversation about Texan cotton-growing, Chinese manufacturing and African entrepreneurship with Pietra Rivoli, Georgetown business professor and author of The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. [download] 08.02.22. A conversation about education, urbanism and Abbas Kiarostami with essayist, novelist, poet and film writer Phillip Lopate [site]. [download] 08.02.15. A conversation with Gail Pool [site], author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. [download] 08.02.08. A conversation about economics, evolutionary biology and Ayn Rand with Michael Shermer [site], publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. [download] 08.02.01. A conversation about the interplay between early modern science and poetry with Angus Fletcher, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate School and author of Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare. [download] 08.01.25. A conversation about the unification of history and prehistory with Daniel Lord Smail, professor of history at Harvard and author of On Deep History and the Brain. [download] 08.01.18. A conversation about using incentives, eating ethnic food and becoming a cultural billionaire with Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and blogger at Marginal Revolution. [download] 08.01.12. A conversation about publishing, book criticism and LA literary culture with David L. Ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. [download] 08.01.05. A conversation about literature, the human brain and umami with Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large at Seed magazine and author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. [download] 07.12.29. A conversation about college towns, the importance of story and MFA programs with novelist Joshua Henkin [site], author of Matrimony. [download] 07.12.22. A conversation about online journalism, travel writing and H.L. Mencken with Jason Wilson, editor of The Smart Set from Drexel University and The Best American Travel Writing series. [download] 07.12.15. A conversation about consciousness, free will and toilet training with David P. Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington and author of Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars and Other Realities of Evolution. [download] 07.12.08. A conversation about the revolution in decisionmaking brought about by large-scale quantitative analysis with Yale law professor and economist Ian Ayres, author of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart. [download] 07.12.08. A conversation about voting one way and living in a place that votes another with David Starkey, poet, playwright, professor of English at Santa Barbara City College and editor of Living Blue in the Red States. [download] 07.12.01. A conversation about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind on the 20th anniversary of its publication with Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion. [download] 07.11.24. A conversation about Barry Goldwater with his granddaughter CC Goldwater, producer and narrator of a new documentary about the man, Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater. [download] 07.11.17. A conversation about ridiculous military hardware and highly un-epic science fiction with Zack Parsons, editor at humor site Something Awful and author of My Tank is Fight!: Deranged Inventions of World War II. [download] 07.11.17. A conversation about the 1960s with Cathy Wilkerson, former member of Students for a Democratic Society and Weatherman, whose new book is Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman. [download] 07.11.10. A conversation about the very definition of a powerful idea with Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA and former president of the American Historical Association. Her latest book is Inventing Human Rights: A History. [download] 07.11.03. A conversation about food writing, Lost Girls and the disappointing DVD of David Lynch's Lost Highway with Jessa Crispin, founder and editor of Chicago-based literary webzine and blog Bookslut. [download] 07.10.27. A conversation about that most revered of all beverages and the devices that close our bottles of it with George M. Taber, wine journalist and former business editor of Time magazine. His new book is To Cork or Not to Cork: The Billion-Dollar Battle for the Bottle. [download] 07.10.20. A conversation about optimism, eternal studenthood and funny conservatives with entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha [site]. His most recent book is My Start-Up Life. [download] 07.10.13. A conversation about hybridizing genres, using future technology and reading Dwell magazine with Josh Conviser [site], author of Echelon and its sequel, Empyre, to be released October 30th. [download] 07.10.13. A conversation about book criticism, the Los Angeles literary scene and Michiko Kakutani with Mark Sarvas, author of weblog The Elegant Variation. Harry, Revised, his first novel, hits shelves in May 2008. [download] |