Podcast to the wind

I listen to podcasts. Sometimes I have thoughts about them.

It wouldn’t be fun unless we started on something of a downer: first, a terrific excerpt on This American Life from Mike Daisey’s one-man show about Apple and the factories in China, and then Radio Lab’s examination of evil, ending with the strange and awful story of Fritz Haber. It’s hard not to look twice at your electronics after hearing Daisey’s story — that is, if the news out of Foxconn, about the conditions there, hasn’t already), but Apple does at least seem to be taking some steps towards ensuring some basic human rights. Arguably not enough, but at least they’re doing something.

Anyway, on to more happy audio experiences. I really enjoyed Studio 360’s piece on music, Autotune, and distribution — specifically on how the problem isn’t recording tricks and artificiality in popular music. Recording is itself unnatural, and the tricks are nothing new, from the slap-back reverb of the 1950s to Phil Spector’s famed “wall of sound.”

Angelina Jolie also comes across as interesting and intelligent in her interview with Kurt Andersen, and I’m actually interested to see her new film set during the Bosnian war, despite some decidedly mixed reviews. It doesn’t hurt that I’m currently reading Téa Obrecht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which takes place in the aftermath of this (or at least a literally similar) war.

I didn’t, alas, win the listener challenge of writing a 420-character story. (Question: Is this actually a limit currently on Facebook? I don’t really post there.) But I enjoyed the stories that won, and I had a few minutes of fun writing mine:

There was nothing he could learn from the books he had not already learned from the old woman. She did not speak, or perhaps could not, but had revealed her secrets in gestures and glances, in subtle signs she traced in the dirt floor or across the cold, still surface of water from the well outside. No book, not even the gold-leafed pages that lined the magician’s shelves, could offer the boy that. And so he left.

I also continue to enjoy the reformatted Bullseye with Jesse Thorn (previously The Sound of Young America), which really does feel a lot more like a polished public radio show — even if I am pretty sure Jesse briefly called it “tublic radio.” Some of that might occasionally feel like pandering, or watering the show down to make it more palatable to a wider audience, but I like how the show can naturally segue from an interview with the cast of Downton Abbey to a (NSFW, lyrically) song by rapper E-40. The most recent episode has finally convinced me to check out My Brother, My Brother and Me, one of the other Maxfun podcasts. (I also enjoy Jordan Jesse Go! and Stop Podcasting Yourself.)

Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! is always fun, but I particularly enjoyed the story about how President Obama did not — repeat, did not — teleport to Mars. This is weirdly disappointing.