Listen to Ira Glass’ 10 Favorite Episodes of This American Life

in Radio | November 3rd, 2015

Even when one is a long­time, jad­ed denizen of a major city, celebri­ty sight­ings can still induce a thrill. Dur­ing my tenure in New York City, I ran across my share of famous names, though I’ve nev­er been one to both­er a stranger, world famous or no. This almost changed when I ran past Ira Glass one evening and found myself sore­ly tempt­ed to chat him up. I’m sure he’d be glad I resist­ed the urge, but hav­ing heard his voice on the radio every week for well over a decade… well, I felt like I knew him.

Since 1995, Glass has host­ed This Amer­i­can Life, per­haps the most pop­u­lar pub­lic radio show ever pro­duced and—before its huge­ly suc­cess­ful spin-off Ser­i­al—the most pop­u­lar pod­cast in the U.S. The show is quick­ly approach­ing its twen­ty-year anniver­sary (its first episode aired Novem­ber 17th; hear it here), and in hon­or of that mile­stone, we revis­it anoth­er: the show’s 500th episode, which aired in 2013. For that occa­sion, Buz­zfeed vis­it­ed with Glass for a reveal­ing inter­view.

Though he respond­ed to episode 500 with typ­i­cal understatement—saying it felt “more like an odome­ter rolling over than any­thing else”—many fans of the show, myself includ­ed, felt a great deal more enthu­si­asm, as did Los Ange­les’ KPCC, who brings us the list below of Glass’ top ten episodes (includ­ing one two-parter). Glass not­ed that his top picks also hap­pen to be fan favorites as well. You can hear all of his favorites at the links below:

• Notes on Camp
• Harp­er High School One and Two
• The Giant Pool of Mon­ey
• Some­where in the Ara­bi­an Sea — “I love how fun­ny and human-sized every­one is in this show. It’s a sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny show about the war on ter­ror,” Glass writes.
• Switched at Birth — Glass: “The struc­ture of this show — where the whole episode you won­der how a mom could know for decades she was rais­ing the wrong baby and final­ly, she answers it in the end — is per­fect.”
• Break-Up — “The stand­out sto­ry is Star­lee Kine’s essay on breakup songs, which includes an inter­view with Phil Collins that’s so men­schy and real, it changed how I saw him for­ev­er.”
• Babysit­ting — “Espe­cial­ly the inter­view with Myron Jones, which is the best inter­view I’ve ever done, main­ly because he had so much grace and humor talk­ing about his past. Any ques­tion I could think of, he’d come back with an amaz­ing sto­ry, which is rare.”
• My Big Break — “David Segal takes a turn in the mid­dle of this sto­ry that’s one of my favorite reveals in any radio sto­ry ever.”
• Harold Wash­ing­ton — “How can you go wrong when the cen­tral fig­ure in your sto­ry is fun­ny and can­tan­ker­ous and big­heart­ed and ide­al­is­tic and utter­ly prag­mat­ic and on top of all that, total­ly charis­mat­ic? If you don’t know who Harold is, be pre­pared for a treat.”
• Heretics — “Carl­ton Pear­son, like Harold, is some­one they should make a movie about, for lots of the same rea­sons. An ide­al­is­tic preach­er whose ide­al­ism costs him pret­ty much every­thing: the church he runs, his rep­u­ta­tion, his for­tune, near­ly his fam­i­ly.”

As a spe­cial treat, Glass also shared with Buz­zfeed the doc­u­ment at the top of the post, a page of ideas for alter­nate titles for the show orig­i­nal­ly called Your Radio Play­house. Before renam­ing the show in March of 1996, Glass and his crew con­sid­ered such titles as the unin­spir­ing “Amer­i­can What­ev­er,” weird “Mouth Noise,” and goofy “Ira Glass and his Radio Cow­boys.”

I kind of wish they’d gone with the lat­ter, but it’s hard to imag­ine the show we know as This Amer­i­can Life could ever have been called any­thing else. (See it pen­ciled in almost as an after­thought above.) The show’s title per­fect­ly sums up the breadth and scope of a pro­gram that tack­les every­thing from the triv­ial to the high­ly con­se­quen­tial, often back-to-back in the same themed hour. Though Glass would sure­ly balk at such high praise, I think his show has done more to help Amer­i­cans know and under­stand our­selves over the last twen­ty years than near­ly any­thing else on radio, TV, or the pod­cast­ing world.

via KPCC

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ira Glass’ Advice on Achiev­ing Cre­ative Excel­lence Pre­sent­ed in Two Art­ful, Typo­graph­ic Videos

Ira Glass on the Art and Craft of Telling Great Radio Sto­ries

This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies the Amer­i­can Health­care Sys­tem

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Musician Plays Signature Drum Parts of 71 Beatles Songs in 5 Minutes: A Whirlwind Tribute to Ringo Starr

in Music | October 30th, 2015

Kye Smith, a drum­mer based in New­cas­tle, Aus­tralia, recent­ly hauled his drum kit to a near­by rooftop (an homage to The Bea­t­les’ 1969 rooftop gig?) and start­ed bang­ing out a pret­ty won­der­ful trib­ute to Ringo Starr, play­ing drum parts from 71 Bea­t­les songs in 5 quick min­utes. Smith moves chrono­log­i­cal­ly, play­ing the songs in the order they were released (not record­ed). We start in 1962, move through 1969, and even momen­tar­i­ly vis­it 1995. On his Face­book page, Smith had this to say:

Way before I found out about punk rock or even knew what a snare drum was I spent my child­hood play­ing vinyl records at my grand­par­ents place spin­ning artists such as Slim Dusty, ELVIS PRESLEY and The Bea­t­les.

This chronol­o­gy called for some spe­cial treat­ment and got me out of the stu­dio and onto the rooftop of The Great North­ern Hotel — New­cas­tle, Aus­tralia for a pret­ty stun­ning view of New­cas­tle, New South Wales in the back­ground.

Thanks to every­one at The Great North­ern for let­ting me make some noise up there and to Elu­mi­nate for help­ing me shoot it and lug heaps of gear up 7 storeys of stairs!

Below the jump, you can find the list of songs that appear in the video, com­plete with cor­re­spond­ing time stamps. And keep in mind that Smith, as he men­tions on Youtube, is “avail­able for stu­dio and live work and will be open­ing up some slots for drum lessons short­ly.” Con­tact him here.

PS: If you can name one of the drum parts that was orig­i­nal­ly played by Paul McCart­ney, you get bonus points.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

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The Worlds of Hitchcock & Kubrick Collide in a Surreal Mashup, The Red Drum Getaway

in Film | October 18th, 2015

If you read Open Cul­ture even casu­al­ly, you know we love Alfred Hitch­cock, Stan­ley Kubrick, and videos that make us see film in a new way. It only makes sense, then, that we’d jump right on Adrien Deza­lay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe’s The Red Drum Get­away, which mash­es Hitch­cock and Kubrick up into a four-minute shot of dis­tilled cin­e­mat­ic col­li­sion. “Jim­my was hav­ing a rather beau­ti­ful day,” reads the video’s prepara­to­ry descrip­tion, “until he bumped into Jack and things got weird.”

“Jim­my” refers, of course, to Jim­my Stew­art as seen in the work of Alfred Hitch­cock. “Jack” refers to Jack Nichol­son seen in the work of Stan­ley Kubrick — which, of course, means Jack Nichol­son of The Shin­ing. Strange enough, you might think, that those two would ever encounter each oth­er, but what might hap­pen if the gang of droogs from A Clock­work Orange also turned up? Or if poor mild-man­nered Jim­my found him­self at the aris­to­crat­ic, NSFW fetish par­ty from Eyes Wide Shut?

When an auteur suc­cess­ful­ly taps into our sub­con­scious minds, as Hitch­cock and Kubrick so often did, we describe their work, in a com­pli­men­ta­ry sense, as “dream­like.” But art that feels like a dream can also feed mate­r­i­al to our night­mares, and as The Red Drum Get­away more close­ly inter­twines these two dis­parate cin­e­mat­ic worlds as it goes, it begins to resem­ble the most har­row­ing filmic freak­outs any of us have ever endured. It makes a per­fect set­ting for Jack, who, as we know, has already gone insane due to his own alco­holism and the goad­ing of the spir­its who haunt the Over­look Hotel. And as for Jim­my, sure­ly Ver­ti­go put him through enough of the sur­re­al to pre­pare him for the psy­che­del­ic end of 2001.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Two Gen­tle­men of Lebows­ki: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebows­ki?

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Cre­ative Mashup of Hitch­cock and Gus Van Sant’s Psy­cho Films

Dis­cov­er the Life & Work of Stan­ley Kubrick in a Sweep­ing Three-Hour Video Essay

Alfred Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Sal­vador Dalí Cre­ates a Dream Sequence for Spell­bound, Hitchcock’s Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Thriller

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable Vinyl Records

in Music, Random | October 16th, 2015

The tiny, Himalayan king­dom of Bhutan has a unique nation­al aspi­ra­tion that sets it apart from its neigh­bors, Chi­na and India. (And cer­tain­ly the Unit­ed States too.) Rather than increas­ing its gross nation­al prod­uct, Bhutan has instead made it a goal to increase the Gross Nation­al Hap­pi­ness of its cit­i­zens. There’s wealth in health, not just mon­ey, the Bhutanese have argued. And since the 197os, the coun­try has tak­en a holis­tic approach to devel­op­ment, try­ing to increase the spir­i­tu­al, phys­i­cal, and envi­ron­men­tal health of its peo­ple. And guess what? The strat­e­gy is pay­ing off. A 2006 glob­al sur­vey con­duct­ed by Busi­ness Week found that Bhutan is the hap­pi­est coun­try in Asia and the eighth-hap­pi­est coun­try in the world.

It’s per­haps only a nation devot­ed to hap­pi­ness that could throw its sup­port behind this — postage stamps that dou­ble as playable vinyl records. Cre­at­ed by an Amer­i­can entre­pre­neur Burt Todd in the ear­ly 70s, at the request of the Bhutanese roy­al fam­i­ly, the “talk­ing stamps” shown above could be stuck on a let­ter and then lat­er played on a turntable. Accord­ing to Tod­d’s 2006 obit­u­ary in The New York Times, one stamp “played the Bhutanese nation­al anthem,” and anoth­er deliv­ered “a very con­cise his­to­ry of Bhutan.” Thanks to WFMU, our favorite inde­pen­dent free form radio sta­tion, you can hear clips of talk­ing stamps above and below. Don’t you feel hap­pi­er already?

via The Reply All Pod­cast

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Clean Your Vinyl Records with Wood Glue

Sovi­et Hip­sters Boot­legged West­ern Pop Music on Dis­card­ed X‑Rays: Hear Orig­i­nal Audio Sam­ples

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

Amazing Miniature Sculptures of New York City Landmarks: CBGB, Katz’s Deli, Vesuvio Bakery & More

in Art | October 13th, 2015

If you’re near Pasade­na, Cal­i­for­nia, stop by the Flower Pep­per Gallery and see Facade, the new exhi­bi­tion fea­tur­ing the work of visu­al artist Randy Hage. For decades now, Hage has been fas­ci­nat­ed by the beau­ty of aging struc­tures in New York City. This led him, begin­ning in the late 1990s, to start pho­tograph­ing aging store­fronts in the city, “with their hand paint­ed signs, lay­ers of archi­tec­ture, won­der­ful pati­nas and intrigu­ing his­to­ry.” Lat­er, he decid­ed to pre­serve their mem­o­ry in minia­tur­ized, hyper-real­is­tic sculp­tures (like the ones now on dis­play in Pasade­na through Novem­ber 18th). In the video above, see just how per­fect­ly Hage man­ages to recre­ate New York store­fronts in minia­ture. Here’s anoth­er famous-but-now-defunct facade you might rec­og­nize:

Minia­ture sculp­ture of CBGB. Real struc­ture was locat­ed at 315 Bow­ery, LES, NYC. Shown light­ed. Piece mea­sures 19″ x 17″ x 7″. Fol­low me on FB for event info. If you have friends who might be inter­est­ed in see­ing my work, please pass this on. Many thanks! #cbgb #omfug #bow­ery #scale­mod­el #Randy­hage #dis­ap­pear­ingNY #façade #flow­er­pep­per­gallery #graf­fi­ti #graf­fitinyc #minia­ture #minia­tureart #nyc #newyork #nycde­cay #nyc­store­front #nyc­store­fronts #newyork­store­front #newyorkin­spiredart #old­NYC #store­front #vin­ta­ge­newyork

A pho­to post­ed by Randy Hage (@rhageart) on Oct 5, 2015 at 8:19am PDT

To take a clos­er look at his work, vis­it Hage’s Insta­gram page where you will see mini sculp­tures of fad­ing New York insti­tu­tions like Katz’s Deli, CBGB, McSor­ley’s Old Ale House, Vesu­vio Bak­ery, and more.

via Super­Son­ic Art/Boing­Bo­ing

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Innovative Film Visualizes the Destruction of World War II: Now Available in 7 Languages

in Animation, History | October 7th, 2015

Back in June we high­light­ed Neil Hal­lo­ran’s 15 minute film, The Fall­en of World War II, which used “inno­v­a­tive data visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques to put the human cost of WW II into per­spec­tive, show­ing how some 70 mil­lion lives were lost with­in civil­ian and mil­i­tary pop­u­la­tions across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945.” It’s a pret­ty stag­ger­ing illus­tra­tion of the dead­liest war. As the film went viral, Hal­lo­ran raised mon­ey that would enable him to devel­op new films explor­ing “oth­er trends of war and peace — from drones and ter­ror­ism to democ­ra­cy and peace­keep­ing.” He has also trans­lat­ed the film into six dif­fer­ent lan­guages. They all went online in the last few weeks. Here they are: Russ­ian, Japan­ese, Pol­ish, French, Ger­man, and Ser­bian.

Above, you can watch the orig­i­nal in Eng­lish (cer­tain­ly worth doing if you were vaca­tion­ing in June), and you might also explore the accom­pa­ny­ing inter­ac­tive web site here.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

How a Virus Invades Your Body: An Eye-Popping, Animated Look

in Biology | October 4th, 2015

It’s get­ting close to that time of the year again, when the flu starts to wreak hav­oc. And so, with the help of NPR’s Robert Krul­wich and med­ical ani­ma­tor David Bolin­sky, we’re tak­ing an ani­mat­ed look at what actu­al­ly hap­pens when a virus invades your body and tricks a sin­gle cell into mak­ing a mil­lion more virus­es, and how your immune sys­tem even­tu­al­ly deals with the whole mess. It’s a nice demys­ti­fi­ca­tion of phe­nom­e­na that affects our every­day lives. If you feel inclined to get a flu shot after watch­ing this clip, I can’t say that I blame you.

Fol­low us on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

What Makes Us Tick? Free Stan­ford Biol­o­gy Course by Robert Sapol­sky Offers Answers

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Fantastic Mr. Fox Meets The Shining in an Animated, Cautionary Tale About Consumerism

in Animation, Business | September 28th, 2015

In this short stop-motion film, Alexan­dra Lemay draws some cre­ative inspi­ra­tion from Wes Ander­son and Stan­ley Kubrick and leaves us with a “cau­tion­ary tale of what hap­pens when we don’t think enough about what we buy.” Pro­duced as part of the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s Hot­house appren­tice­ship pro­gram, All the Rage fol­lows a mink’s expe­ri­ence shop­ping in a lux­u­ry fur store. It’s per­haps not too much of a spoil­er to say, it does­n’t end well. Lemay tells you more about the mak­ing of the film here. And don’t miss the many great films in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

The Syrian Conflict & The European Refugee Crisis Explained in an Animated Primer

in Current Affairs | September 27th, 2015

In a quick six min­utes, the ani­ma­tion above explains the ori­gins of two very relat­ed prob­lems — the Syr­i­an Con­flict & the Euro­pean Refugee Cri­sis. How did the cri­sis first erupt? How did it lead to a refugee cri­sis? And why should we why put xeno­pho­bic fears aside and pro­vide refugees with a safe haven in the West? All of these ques­tions get addressed by “Kurzge­sagt” (“in a nut­shell” in Ger­man), whose time­ly ani­ma­tions you can find on Youtube (includ­ing a sep­a­rate video on the rise of ISIS in Iraq).

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 370 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy

in Philosophy, Podcasts | September 25th, 2015

Per­haps you’ve heard of a phe­nom­e­non called “pod­fade,” where­in a pod­cast — par­tic­u­lar­ly an ambi­tious pod­cast — begins by putting out episodes reg­u­lar­ly, then miss­es one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceas­ing to update entire­ly. It pleas­es us to report that The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, the pod­cast offer­ing just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you post­ed over the past three years, not only shows no signs of pod­fade, but has even broad­ened its man­date to include a greater vari­ety of philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions than before.

For those who haven’t heard the show, The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps comes from Peter Adam­son, phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Lud­wig Max­i­m­il­ians Uni­ver­si­ty Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, and “looks at the ideas, lives and his­tor­i­cal con­text of the major philoso­phers as well as the less­er-known fig­ures of the tra­di­tion.”

The main show has put out 379 episodes so far, begin­ning with the pre-Socrat­ics (specif­i­cal­ly Thales) and most recent­ly exam­in­ing Fran­cis­can pover­ty, and now a new branch has grown, start­ing from Adam­son and col­lab­o­ra­tor Jonar­don Ganer­i’s intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy. (Hear the first episode of the Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy series below.)

Episodes of this new series on the Indi­an tra­di­tion, Adam­son writes, “will appear in alter­nat­ing weeks with episodes on Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy.” He also men­tions a “fur­ther ambi­tion to cov­er the oth­er philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions of Asia (espe­cial­ly Chi­nese) and also African phi­los­o­phy and the phi­los­o­phy of the African dias­po­ra, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are wait­ing for me to get to that!”

You can sub­scribe to The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps’ Indi­an phi­los­o­phy series on its very own pod­cast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed binge-lis­ten­ers beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. “I’ve been doing my laun­dry to it for months and I’m only up to Mai­monides,” says one com­menter on a Metafil­ter thread about the new series. “I am total­ly not ready for this Patañ­jali.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.