If you need someone to host a multi-decade podcast on James Joyce’s Ulysses, then why settle for less than the most eloquent man in the world? Visit Frank Delaney’s site, and you’ll find it less than shy about proclaiming that National Public Radio once dubbed him just that.

Few propositions in film scholarship inspire as much controversy as the so-called “auteur theory,” which holds that a film’s director imbues the work with its strongest and most identifiable creative influence. Some consider this notion laughably implausible; others consider it untouchably self-evident.

Recorded live in front of an audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles, The Dead Authors Podcast—“Unscripted, barely researched, all fun!”—showcases raucous conversations between “time-traveler” H.G. Wells (Paul F. Tompkins) and various “dead authors.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a podcast. I repeat, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a podcast. If you’re unfamiliar (and you shouldn’t be), Tyson is Astrophysicist-in-residence at New York’s Natural History Museum and Director of its Hayden Planetarium. He’s also the most prominent advocate for a revitalized U.S. space program. Okay, back to the podcast.

After receiving 121 rejections from publishers, Robert Pirsig finally got Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published in 1974, which subsequently sold over five million copies and put Pirsig in high demand.

While we’re catching up with historical podcasts, note that BBC Radio 4′s The History of the World in 100 Objects (iTunes – RSS Feed – Web Site) has wrapped up and covered all 100 objects.

Last August, we featured Peter Adamson‘s podcast The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (iTunes – RSS Feed – Web Site), a chronologically uninterrupted “look at the ideas and lives of the major philosophers (eventually covering in detail such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant) as well as the lesser-

Each major print publication expands into podcasting differently. Some, having failed to find a suitable form for the audio companion to their text, scale the operation way back and declare podcasting dead or dying.

Proust. Mimetic desire. The inflationary universe. 1910, American writers in Paris. The history of the book. These topics may sound unusual enough to pique your interest. They may float through your mind once in a while, capturing an hour or two of your curiosity. They may periodically send you to the library on reading binges.

What with so many open-ended internet media projects out there, I admire any that come to a close. People start plenty of things on the net that wind up petering out, but few display the conviction to work toward a decisive end.