The War of the Worlds on Podcast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riveted A Nation

in Books, Literature, Media, Most Popular | February 8th, 2007

Today, by pop­u­lar demand, we’re run­ning an updat­ed ver­sion of one of our more pop­u­lar posts to date. Enjoy…

At has­tened speeds dur­ing the past year, we have seen book lovers record­ing home­grown audio­books and post­ing them on sites like Lib­rivox (see our col­lec­tion of free audio­books here). For obvi­ous copy­right rea­sons, these audio texts large­ly come from the pub­lic domain, and, yes, they’re some­times of uneven qual­i­ty. Some good, some okay. Among the recent releas­es, you’d expect to find great clas­si­cal works — the major plays by Shake­speare, the essen­tial trea­tis­es by Pla­to and oth­er philoso­phers, etc. — and you do get some of those. How­ev­er, far more often you get texts by more mod­ern writ­ers who wrote with­in the thriller, sci fi and adven­ture gen­res. Here, I’m talk­ing about Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Robert Louis Steven­son, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. (Find these pod­casts here.)

It seems rather fit­ting that Wells, the father of sci­ence fic­tion, would be among the first to have his writ­ings dig­i­tal­ly record­ed and dis­trib­uted. Nowa­days, you can down­load, sync and lis­ten to his major works – The New Accel­er­a­tor (mp3), The Invis­i­ble Man (iTunes — feed), The Time Machine (iTunes — feed), and The War of the Worlds (iTunes). But what’s bet­ter than all of this, at least in our minds, is this vin­tage gem …

Here you can down­load the ver­sion of The War of the Worlds that Orson Welles famous­ly adapt­ed and aired on nation­al radio in Octo­ber 1938. Pre­sent­ed so that it sound­ed like an actu­al news broad­cast, the Orson Welles ver­sion was mis­tak­en for truth by many lis­ten­ers who caught the pro­gram mid­stream (more info here), and, soon enough, they found them­selves flee­ing an unfold­ing Mar­t­ian inva­sion, run­ning down into their base­ments with guns cocked and ready to fire. You can catch the mp3 ver­sion of the famous Welles record­ing here (and also alter­na­tive­ly here). Have fun with this broad­cast. It’s a clas­sic.

Relat­ed con­tent: For more old time, sci-fi radio broad­casts, check out this nice col­lec­tion on iTunes.

Also see: Vin­tage Radio Archive: The Lone Ranger, Abbott & Costel­lo, and Bob Hope

Sub­scribe to Our Feed and peruse our col­lec­tion of Free Audio­book Pod­casts

NPR’s Fresh Air Now Available as a Podcast

in Media | February 2nd, 2007

A quick fyi: As of this week, Fresh Air, the pop­u­lar pro­gram host­ed by Ter­ry Gross, is now avail­able as a free pod­cast on iTunes or via feed. Along with Fresh Air, NPR has just issued many oth­er new pod­cast offer­ings, includ­ing Xeni Tech, a dai­ly pro­gram fea­tur­ing Boing­Bo­ing blog­ger Xeni Jardin, who explores the inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­o­gy and con­tem­po­rary cul­ture (iTunes — Feed). For the com­plete list­ing of NPR pod­casts, see this web page or vis­it NPR’s main page on iTunes.

Book Talks on Demand

in Books | February 1st, 2007

Okay, this prob­a­bly won’t be our high­est rat­ed post ever. We’ll con­cede that. There’s noth­ing chic
and hip about C‑SPAN. But there’s some good sub­stance here, and sub­stance is what we’re about first and fore­most. So give us the ben­e­fit of the doubt for a moment.

C‑SPAN’s Book-TV lets you stream videos of talks, long and sub­stan­tive ones, giv­en by most­ly seri­ous authors. You can catch Pres­i­dent Jim­my Carter talk­ing about his new con­tro­ver­sial book, Pales­tine Peace Not Apartheid (plus Alan Der­show­itz’s response); Niall Fer­gu­son, the Har­vard his­to­ri­an, speak­ing on his recent work, The War of the World: Twen­ti­eth-Cen­tu­ry Con­flict and the Descent of the West; Howard Zinn, anoth­er his­to­ri­an, dis­cussing his col­lec­tion of essays, A Pow­er Gov­ern­ments Can­not Sup­press; and Adri­an Goldswor­thy giv­ing a talk on his new biog­ra­phy, Cae­sar: Life of a Colos­sus. For a com­plete list of book talks, click here.

In many ways, C‑SPAN’s offer­ing is no dif­fer­ent in qual­i­ty or sub­stance from the video ser­vices offered by FORA.TV and Prince­ton’s Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel — two oth­er high-qual­i­ty ser­vices that we like and have pre­viewed here before. If you can set aside your gen­er­al impres­sion of C‑SPAN — your mem­o­ries of the unedit­ed, end­less talks from the Sen­ate floor that lead to nowhere — you’ll find enlight­ened video here that’s well worth your lim­it­ed time.

Why 160 Scientists Are Optimistic in 2007

in Science | January 19th, 2007

Not too long ago, we men­tioned the Edge.org, the web site run by John Brock­man, the lit­er­ary agent of some very impor­tant sci­en­tif­ic minds. Now it’s worth men­tion­ing it again. With the start of the new year, the web site asked 160 influ­en­tial thinkers “what are you opti­mistic about?” And, as you’d expect from some pret­ty smart peo­ple, you get some pret­ty intrigu­ing respons­es. Below, we’ve includ­ed five exam­ples, but you can and should access the full list of replies here:

Richard Dawkins — The Final Sci­en­tif­ic Enlight­en­ment
“I am opti­mistic that the physi­cists of our species will com­plete Ein­stein’s dream and dis­cov­er the final the­o­ry of every­thing before supe­ri­or crea­tures, evolved on anoth­er world, make con­tact and tell us the answer. I am opti­mistic that, although the the­o­ry of every­thing will bring fun­da­men­tal physics to a con­vinc­ing clo­sure, the enter­prise of physics itself will con­tin­ue to flour­ish, just as biol­o­gy went on grow­ing after Dar­win solved its deep prob­lem. I am opti­mistic that the two the­o­ries togeth­er will fur­nish a total­ly sat­is­fy­ing nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tion for the exis­tence of the uni­verse and every­thing that’s in it includ­ing our­selves. And I am opti­mistic that this final sci­en­tif­ic enlight­en­ment will deal an over­due death­blow to reli­gion and oth­er juve­nile super­sti­tions.“

Matt Rid­ley — The Future
“The future. That’s what I’m opti­mistic about. The his­to­ri­an Macaulay said, in 1830: ‘We can­not absolute­ly prove that those are in error who tell us that soci­ety has reached a turn­ing point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much appar­ent rea­son.’ The eter­nal, endur­ing pes­simism of human beings about the future does real harm by per­suad­ing peo­ple, espe­cial­ly the young, to retreat from adven­ture and enter­prise into anomie. Sure, the world has prob­lems: AIDS, Islam­o­fas­cism, car­bon diox­ide. But I bet we can solve them as we have solved oth­ers, such as small­pox, the pop­u­la­tion explo­sion and the high price of whale oil.”

Jared Dia­mond — Good Choic­es Some­times Pre­vail
“I am cau­tious­ly opti­mistic about the state of the world, because: 1. Big busi­ness­es some­times con­clude that what is good for the long-term future of human­i­ty is also good for their bot­tom line (cf. Wal-Mart’s recent deci­sion to shift their seafood pur­chas­es entire­ly to cer­ti­fied sus­tain­able fish­eries with­in the next three to five years). 2. Vot­ers in democ­ra­cy some­times make good choic­es and avoid bad choic­es (cf. some recent elec­tions in a major First World coun­try).”

Leonard Susskind — Going Beyond Our Dar­win­ian Roots
I am opti­mistic about the adapt­abil­i­ty of the human brain to answer ques­tions that evo­lu­tion could not have designed it for. A brain that can rewire itself to visu­al­ize 4 dimen­sions, or the Heisen­berg uncer­tain­ty prin­ci­ple, is clear­ly going way beyond the things that nat­ur­al selec­tion could have wired it for. It makes me opti­mistic that we may be able to go beyond our Dar­win­ian roots in oth­er ways.

Stew­art Brand - Cities — Glob­al Pop­u­la­tion Shrink­age And Eco­nom­ic Growth
”…Cities have always been wealth cre­ators. Cities have always been pop­u­la­tion sinks. This year, 2007, is the crossover point from a world pre­dom­i­nant­ly rur­al to a world pre­dom­i­nant­ly urban.

The rate of urban­iza­tion is cur­rent­ly about 1.3 mil­lion new city dwellers a week, 70 mil­lion a year, still appar­ent­ly accel­er­at­ing. The world was 3% urban in 1800, 14% urban in 1900, 50% urban this year, and prob­a­bly head­ed in the next few decades to around 80% urban, which has been the sta­bi­liza­tion point for devel­oped coun­tries since the mid-20th-cen­tu­ry.

Almost all the rush to the cities is occur­ring in the devel­op­ing world (though the coun­try­side con­tin­ues to emp­ty out in devel­oped nations). The devel­op­ing world is where the great­est pover­ty is, and where the high­est birthrates have dri­ven world pop­u­la­tion past 6.5 bil­lion.

Hence my opti­mism. Cities cure pover­ty. Cities also dri­ve birthrates down almost the instant peo­ple move to town. Women lib­er­at­ed by the move to a city drop their birthrate right on through the replace­ment rate of 2.1 children/woman. No one expect­ed this, but that’s how it worked out. As a result, there will be anoth­er bil­lion or two peo­ple in the world total by mid­cen­tu­ry, but then the total will head down— per­haps rapid­ly enough to be a prob­lem, as it already is in Rus­sia and Japan.

Pover­ty in the megac­i­ties (over 10 mil­lion) and hyper­ci­ties (over 20 mil­lion) of the devel­op­ing world will be high­ly vis­i­ble as the dis­as­ter it is. (It was worse out in the bush, only not as vis­i­ble there. That’s why peo­ple leave.) But the poor who were trapped in rur­al pover­ty cre­ate their own oppor­tu­ni­ty once they’re in town by cre­at­ing their own cities— the “squat­ter cities” where one bil­lion peo­ple now live. They reca­pit­u­late the cre­ation of cities past by gen­er­at­ing a seething infor­mal econ­o­my in which every­one works. The dense slums, if they don’t get bull­dozed, even­tu­al­ly become part of the city prop­er and part of the for­mal econ­o­my. It takes decades.…”

Again, the com­plete list of 160 respons­es can be found here.

Steve Jobs Presents the iPhone and the Podcast World Reacts

in Apple, Technology | January 12th, 2007

Each year, Steve Jobs kicks off Mac­World with a big address, which either con­firms or quash­es all the rumors and spec­u­la­tion about the new wave of Apple prod­ucts. It’s usu­al­ly a big deal, and this year did­n’t dis­ap­point. Jobs deliv­ered with flair the iPhone, which Apple hopes will rev­o­lu­tion­ize the cell phone mar­ket as the iPod did the portable music play­er mar­ket, if not the entire music mar­ket itself. And then there is Apple TV, which will let you wire­less­ly play your iTunes con­tent (movies, TV shows, music, pho­tos and pod­casts) on your widescreen TV.

If you have some down­time, you can check out the video of Jobs’ speech on iTunes or via Quick­Time. For ini­tial thoughts on the iPhone, you may want to read David Pogue’s and Wal­ter Moss­berg’s ear­ly reviews (and also Pogue’s iphone FAQ), and for com­men­tary across the pod­cast world, you can lis­ten in on:

• GeekBrief.TV’s quick sur­vey of announce­ments iTunes Feed
• Engad­get’s pod­cast com­men­tary of new prod­ucts iTunes Feed
  • also see Engad­get’s web page ded­i­cat­ed to Mac World.
• Mac­World’s review of the keynote and new prod­ucts iTunes Mp3 Stream
• Robert X. Cring­ley’s take on Apple’s trade­mark con­flict with Cis­co iTunes Feed
• MacBreak Week­ly iTunes Feed
• Forum on Tech­nol­o­gy & Soci­ety — A pan­el dis­cus­sion on the new gad­gets and how they affect our soci­ety iTunes Feed

Also see Open Cul­ture’s Tech­nol­o­gy Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

Podcasts to Hit Inflection Point in ’07

in Podcasts, Technology | January 12th, 2007

Dur­ing a radio inter­view yes­ter­day (iTunes — mp3), Jon Gor­don, the host of Future Tense, asked me

whether uni­ver­si­ties will con­tin­ue pour­ing con­tent into their iTunes troves in 2007. The answer boiled down to this: Pod­cast­ing stands poised to pro­lif­er­ate in ’07, much like the web did back in ’95 and ’96. Just a year ago, the New Oxford Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary select­ed “pod­cast” as the “Word of the Year.” The buzz is out there. But how many peo­ple have ever lis­tened to a pod­cast first­hand? It turns out not too many. In a recent sur­vey, the Pew Research Cen­ter found that only 12% of web users have ever worked with pod­casts (as com­pared to 7% one year pri­or), and only 1% down­load them dai­ly. These num­bers are part­ly a reflec­tion of sup­ply and demand. Not too long ago, pod­casts were fair­ly lim­it­ed in num­ber. But, dur­ing the past 12 months, many uni­ver­si­ties (see our full col­lec­tion) have carved out some space on iTunes and devel­oped sub­stan­tial col­lec­tions. Some­where in ’07, we should hit an inflec­tion point. Sup­ply will increase demand. Demand will trig­ger more sup­ply. We’ll see expo­nen­tial growth and nev­er look back. The days where you could per­son­al­ly keep tabs on all the great new pod­casts will sim­ply be over, although we’ll sift through them and high­light what’s worth your time.

Resources Men­tioned in Inter­view:

• UC Berke­ley’s 59 cours­es avail­able via pod­cast
• Stan­ford cours­es avail­able via Pod­cast
  • The Lit­er­a­ture of Cri­sis
  • Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Quan­tum Entan­gle­ment (Video)
  • The His­tor­i­cal Jesus
• Stan­ford Lec­tures
  • Fac­ul­ty Lec­tures
  • Vis­it­ing Lec­tures

Worldly Citizens Take Notice

in Current Affairs | January 11th, 2007

FORA TV
offers you some­thing that you’ll most cer­tain­ly want: an on-demand video por­tal that lets you access wher­ev­er, when­ev­er you want the lead­ing-edge ideas of promi­nent news­mak­ers — politi­cians, busi­ness lead­ers, authors, sci­en­tists, artists and more. All of the video comes from well-regard­ed orga­ni­za­tions (C‑SPAN, The Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, The Com­mon­wealth Club of Cal­i­for­nia, The Cato Insti­tute, to name a few). And a quick tour gives you access to some note­wor­thy talks. A few that stood out were those by Jim­my Wales (Founder of Wikipedia), George Pack­er (the New York­er writer who has report­ed exten­sive­ly on Iraq), Karen Arm­strong (the best­selling writer on Islam and oth­er world reli­gions), Isabel Allende (the Chilean writer who authored House of the Spir­its), and Andrew Sul­li­van (a sen­si­ble con­ser­v­a­tive & blog­ger who just pub­lished The Con­ser­v­a­tive Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back). A good com­ple­ment to FORA’s col­lec­tion is the Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel, a project orga­nized by Prince­ton that we wrote about not too long ago. Both are worth a good look.

The Art of Reading a Poem (According to Harold Bloom)

in Literature | January 10th, 2007

Most uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts allow the out­side world to lis­ten in on fair­ly pol­ished and for­mal cam­pus lec­tures. But this pod­cast is dif­fer­ent. As part of its new iTunes ini­tia­tive, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty has recent­ly released a record­ing of famed lit­er­ary crit­ic Harold Bloom (see bio) teach­ing a sem­i­nar on “The Art of Read­ing a Poem” (lis­ten above). Here, Bloom endear­ing­ly takes his stu­dents through a poem by Wal­lace Stevens, Parts of a World, and con­stant­ly moves between inter­pre­ta­tion and digres­sion — digres­sions that are often filled with intrigu­ing per­son­al anec­dotes (as well as fre­quent laments for oth­er thinkers from Bloom’s gen­er­a­tion who have since passed away).

The pod­cast is notable for being remark­ably unedit­ed, which has its plus­es and minus­es. On the down­side, the sem­i­nar does­n’t real­ly get going until 13 min­utes in (so con­sid­er start­ing there), and the first few min­utes include a long stretch of silence when Bloom excus­es him­self from the room. On the upside, the unedit­ed cut cre­ates a kind of ciné­ma vérité expe­ri­ence for the lis­ten­er. You get to hear Bloom, one of Amer­i­ca’s best lit­er­ary crit­ics, work­ing in the class­room in an unadul­ter­at­ed way, teas­ing apart a poem by one of Amer­i­ca’s best poets. There is some­thing imme­di­ate, pure and excit­ing about this way of using the pod­cast, an approach that uni­ver­si­ties should look at more close­ly.

See more Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts here.

A Mention in the Christian Science Monitor

in MIT | January 5th, 2007

Just a very quick fyi: Open Cul­ture got a nice lit­tle men­tion in yes­ter­day’s Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor. It’s with­in the con­text of a very good arti­cle about MIT’s Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive, which is def­i­nite­ly worth know­ing about.

Free Beethoven and Mozart Recordings via Podcast

in Most Popular, Music | January 4th, 2007

See our fol­low up piece: More Free Clas­si­cal Music Pod­casts: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wag­n­er and Some Yo-Yo Ma

Cour­tesy of Deutsche Welle, the Ger­man inter­na­tion­al broad­cast­ing ser­vice, you can fill your iPod at no cost with some excep­tion­al clas­si­cal music. We’d par­tic­u­lar­ly encour­age you to focus on two pod­casts. First, Beethoven­fest (iTunes Feed Web Site), which lets users down­load “Beethoven’s most famous sym­phonies per­formed by excel­lent young orches­tras.” Next, Clas­si­cal Mas­ter­pieces (iTunes Feed Web Site), which gives you free access to sym­phonies by Mozart, Strauss, Schu­mann, Brahms, and Bruck­n­er, each pre­sent­ed by con­duc­tor Kent Nagano and the inter­na­tion­al­ly known DSO Berlin. (Inci­den­tal­ly, a quite large col­lec­tion of free clas­si­cal music can also be found on Wikipedia. Thanks to one of our read­ers for let­ting us know.)

Final­ly, we should men­tion that Deutsche Welle offers a lot of oth­er free pod­casts in Eng­lish. Take for exam­ple Inspired Minds (iTunes Feed Web Site), a series of pod­casts explor­ing the world’s great thinkers, or Deutsche Warum Nicht? (iTunes), a mul­ti-part series that will teach you Ger­man from the ground up. A great trove of con­tent that’s worth your time.

You can find more clas­si­cal music in our Music Pod­cast Col­lec­tion .

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