I’m just getting back into listening to podcasts again, and noticed that the New Yorker Fiction podcast hit episode number 100. Congratulations to Deborah Treisman! If you’re not a subscriber already, definitely listen to some of the old episodes, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. This T.C. Boyle story is up there with the best of them.
Two stories read by Colum McCann
I’d like to point out two New Yorker Fiction podcast episodes read by Colum McCann.
- “Transatlantic”, a story by McCann about the first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Ireland. It’s interesting how much less familiar I was with this earlier instance than Lindbergh’s first solo flight across the Atlantic.
- “Bluebell Meadow” by Benedict Kiely, about a romance between a Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland. There’s something very real about how this story conveys young love, remembered later.
Also, here’s a Q&A with McCann in text form instead of the usual interview before and after the reading.
All In The Mind on Dolphin brains
All In The Mind is a great Australian radio show on a variety of mind-related topics: “dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting.”
The most recent episode describes dolphin brain biology and explores the philosophical status of the animals, as well as the ethics of keeping seemingly intelligent animals captive in aquariums.
The segment includes an interview with Thomas I. White (starting around 22:20) who wrote In Defense of Dolphins. He argues that dolphins have cognitive traits that qualify them as “non-human persons.”
TSOYA interviews Ira Glass
For my Multimedia 1 class tomorrow we’ll be covering audio, looking at interviewing as a form. I’m going to play an excerpt of an interview with Ira Glass from one of my longtime favorite podcasts, The Sound of Young America. I’m most interested in the last part, which starts around 33:38.
As part of the weekly homework assignment we’ll listen to a Studs Terkel piece from Fresh Air.
Cass Sunstein on group decision making
A little economics geekery on topics including the wisdom of crowds, futures markets and group deliberation. I was most interested in the deliberation part, which starts about 25 minutes in.
It’s even worse than garbage in, garbage out in deliberating groups. Typically some garbage in leads to more garbage out. So errors with respect to human cognition are frequently not just propagated in a deliberating group but actually amplified.
Often groups emphasize shared information at the expense of uniquely held information. So if you’re a deliberating group where a bunch of people actually know something, little bits of information that no one else has, those tend to play very little role in the deliberation. And the shared information, what everyone knows, that isn’t dispersed, that has the dominant role.
And this can get groups in big trouble where the uniquely held information, that is crucial, is downplayed or disregarded. And the deliberating group marches happily in the direction indicated by the shared information.