The iPod is not just for groov­ing to music any­more. Muse­ums are using pod­casts to help vis­i­tors bet­ter explore their
art col­lec­tions (See our relat­ed arti­cle). Uni­ver­si­ties are doing the same for their cam­pus­es (see UC Berke­ley’s tour on iTunes). Doc­tors are now using iPods to improve their stetho­scope skills. And, trav­el­ers can now use them to tour through the great cities and coun­tries of the world.

Along these lines, a ven­ture called Sound­walk pro­vides engag­ing, some­what off­beat audio tours of New York and Paris. In New York, they offer indi­vid­ual tours of Lit­tle Italy, the Low­er East Side, Times Square and the Meat Pack­ing Dis­trict. They also get into Brook­lyn and the Bronx. Mean­while, in Paris, they take you through the Marais, St. Ger­main, Pigalle, Belleville, and the Palais Roy­al. Each tour is nar­rat­ed by fit­ting fig­ures. The writer Paul Auster leads you through Ground Zero in New York. Vin­ny Vel­la, who has played roles in The Sopra­nos and Mar­tin Scorce­se’s Casi­no, takes you through Chi­na­town. To get a feel for whether it’s the right kind of expe­ri­ence for you, Sound­walk lets you lis­ten to a sam­ple of each tour. Unlike most things that we fea­ture on Open Cul­ture, these audio files are not free. They’ll run you $12 a piece. But in the scheme of a big trip, it may be worth the cost.

Now if you’re look­ing for free trav­el pod­casts, then you’ll want to give some time to Trav­el with Rick Steves (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Some recent episodes look at Sici­ly, Spain, Cuba and Mex­i­co. You can also find a sep­a­rate col­lec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to trav­el­ing in Paris and its envi­rons (iTunes). Lis­ten­ers give these pod­casts high marks.

See all of Open Cul­ture’s Pod­cast Col­lec­tions:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School) — Pod­cast Primer

We live in a moment when every­thing — includ­ing some­times think­ing itself — gets done fast and on the cheap. The Long Now
Foun­da­tion hopes to change all of that, to encour­age “slower/better” think­ing that fos­ters more respon­si­bil­i­ty. To ful­fill this mis­sion, the foun­da­tion runs a month­ly speak­ing series host­ed by Stew­art Brand, cre­ator of the icon­ic The Whole Earth Cat­a­log and author of How Build­ings Learn and The Clock of the Long Now. You can access the series via pod­cast (get feed here) and lis­ten in on some excel­lent talks — talks with Jim­my Wales (Wikipedia founder), Chris Ander­son (author of The Long Tail), Sam Har­ris (Let­ter to a Chris­t­ian Nation), Bri­an Eno (musi­cian), and Jared Dia­mond (Guns, Germs and Steel). And while you’re at it, you may want to spend some time with the accom­pa­ny­ing blog.

If you’re used to access­ing pod­casts through iTunes, you can read our pod­cast primer and we’ll explain how to access the feed not­ed above with the Apple soft­ware.

For more think­ing pod­casts, check out our Arts & Cul­ture Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

Since we’re already talk­ing today about Orson Welles (see imme­di­ate­ly below), it seems worth doing a reprise of anoth­er arti­cle that looks at Welles’ famous radio broad­cast. It’s per­haps our most pop­u­lar entry to date. Enjoy.

Over the past year, we’ve seen tech-savvy book lovers start record­ing and issu­ing their own home­grown audio books and aggre­gat­ing them on sites like Lib­rivox. The audio texts most­ly come from the pub­lic domain for obvi­ous copy­right rea­sons (though you can find some excep­tions), and, yes, they’re some­times of uneven qual­i­ty. Among the first releas­es, you’d expect to find a lot of the great clas­si­cal works – the major plays of Shake­speare, the foun­da­tion­al philo­soph­i­cal works by Pla­to, etc. – and you do get some of those. But what you find more often are texts by more mod­ern writ­ers work­ing in the thriller, adven­ture, and sci fi gen­res: Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Robert Louis Steven­son, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. (Find these pod­casts here.) It seems entire­ly fit­ting (and, when you think about it, unsur­pris­ing) that Wells, the father of sci­ence fic­tion, would be among the first to find 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 even bet­ter and cool­er than all of this, at least in our minds, is that you can now also 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 cow­er­ing in base­ments or flee­ing in cars with guns cocked and loaded, all in a des­per­ate attempt to avoid an unfold­ing Mar­t­ian inva­sion. You can catch the mp3 ver­sion of the famous Welles’ record­ing here. Or here is an alter­na­tive in case the orig­i­nal file gets over­ly traf­ficked. Enjoy.

See our com­plete Audio Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and oth­er pod­cast col­lec­tions.