Category Archives: Web/Tech

Podcasts I love: The Night Air

I hope you know more stuff today than you did yesterday, because today's podcast I love is going to grab your mind and take it on a journey through The Night Air.

This incredible podcast comes to us from Radio National in Australia, and they describe it as "an audio adventure in which ideas, sounds and music are remixed around a new theme each week." They also call it "a listening experience" which would seem super pretentious to me if I didn't already listen to it and agree fully with that description. The best way I can think to describe it is "the lovechild of Joe Frank and This American Life, babysat by William S. Burroughs."

I discovered The Night Air pretty much by accident, just grabbing things that looked interesting from the Podcast directory in iTunes…

Imagine that it's July 2005, and you're sipping on an Anchor Steam next to the pool at the Mirage in Las Vegas. You've just busted out of your first World Series of Poker, but you're staying in town for a few days to play in another event. This is what you see when you look around:

Half of the pool area is populated by beautiful twenty-something girls in tiny bikinis that make me wonder why they bothered to put anything on in the first place. The other half is populated with middle-aged men and their unfortunate wives who may as well be wearing housecoats. Throw in a few frat guys unsuccessfully trying to put the moves on the aforementioned beauties, and it makes for great people watching.

You remember that you have this new Podcast on your iPod, so you lay back on a lounge chair, and listen to Islands. For the next 40 minutes or so, Las Vegas vanishes as you go on a journey: "Whether caught in the crosshairs of an exact latitude and longitude or existing somewhere in a faraway place of the mind, islands seem always on the horizon of fantasy. Tonight we venture to and fro' seeking, as Captain Cook once said 'a convenient situation' where we might trade commodities and replenish our stocks for journeys new. Way off the coast of Prosaic we fetch up on the shores of Speculation Island."

I was utterly and completely captivated. I didn't even realize that my beer had gotten warm, so after quickly correcting that egregious error, I played another episode, Holes: "Is there such a thing as a bottomless hole? Do they go on forever? Do some holes have a will of their own, durable, transient, and just waiting to stave you in? This Night Air is full of holes: architecture, the body and reminiscence. We fathom a suite of works about emotional absence and gutted structures; and finally see what's at the centre of a donut."

Each show combined interviews with music and soundscapes to create something unique and remarkable. I was hooked, and I've made countless commutes endurable by leaving my body on the train and letting my mind go wherever The Night Air takes me.

Unlike all the other podcasts I've featured this week, The Night Air truly must be experienced to be appreciated. I could tell you about it until I used up all my English, and it would still be inadequate. The audio archive doesn't go as deep as it once did, so you can't listen to Islands or Holes right now, but I wil direct you to a recent episode called Once Upon A Time. "Are you ready? Then I'll begin: Once upon a time there were fairytales, stories, fables and myths … distorted and passed down from generation to generation—some you remember and some you think you remember. This show re-tells many of them—as well as the art of telling the stories themselves—which lived on, and on, and on, sometimes happily, sometimes not but, of course, always ever after."

I hope that week's brief guide to some podcasts that I love has been informative and useful to you. I enjoyed writing these entries, so I made a new category here called Things I Love, which I plan to use for sharing…wait for it…things that I love, like board and video games, movies, beers, blogs, and other, um, things that I love in the weeks and months to come. If enough people are into it, I may even do a week of reader requests.

Until next time, here's a podcasts I love roundup:

Pseudopod

60-Second Science

Driveway Moments

Stuff You Should Know

The Night Air

Podcasts I love: Stuff You Should Know

So did you spend some time in your driveway listening to yesterday's suggestion? Well, maybe not your actual driveway, but that metaphorical driveway that's next to the little birdhouse in your soul? Oh, good. I knew you would.

Kids, learning isn't just fun, it's awesome. There is a huge world out there and it is just filled with all kinds of interesting and astonishing information. It's also filled with Stuff You Should Know, which is an appropriately-named podcast from the guys at How Stuff Works.

This podcast usually runs between 15 and 25 minutes, and covers diverse topics like How Moonshine Works, How Cannibalism Works, and How Abandoned Cities Work. Our two hosts, Chuck and Josh, are staff writers for How Stuff Works, and the podcast is worth listening to for their amusing interaction as much as it is the fascinating "wow, I did not know that" information they dispense.

Earlier this week, they did a show called Why Do Some People Believe The Moon Landing Was A Hoax? which is a great example of why I love this podcast. It'd be really easy to say, "because some people are so fucking stupid they believe every conspiracy theory, no matter how outrageous and disproved by science. Thank you for listening. The end." but they actually dig much deeper, and truly examine the question in an entertaining and informative way.

I've told iTunes to keep and sync all unheard episodes of just a few podcasts, because I love them so much I don't want to miss a single one. Stuff You Should Know is one of them, and listening to it has made several commutes and short-haul business flights more enjoyable than I ever thought possible.

Next time: it comes from a land down under

Podcasts I love: Driveway Moments

Is your brain embiggened from last time when we talked about 60-Second Science? Good, good. Glad to hear it. Take good care of your brain, and it'll take good care of you.

Today, we're turning to one of my favorite old media broadcasters, who have done an outstanding job embracing new media: National Public Radio. NPR offers a huge selection of podcasts, including powerhouses like This American Life[1] and Fresh Air,[2] but since everyone in the universe know about those, today I will share something that never fails to entertain, inform, or inspire me, and is rarely longer than 5 or 6 minutes: NPR's Driveway Moments.

This ingeniously-named podcast is chosen by listeners from NPR stories that are so compelling, they stay in the driveway when they get home and listen to them until they're over.

Some of them are inspiring. Some of them are funny. Some of them are so sad it's hard to listen to them. All of them are incredibly awesome, and make me grateful that NPR embraced podcasting as long ago as they did.

Way back in podcasting's early days, I gushed about the technology and its implications to a good friend of mine who has enjoyed a very long and very successful career in radio. He was unmoved, and figured that, like blogging, "a thousand flowers will bloom, and we'll be left with 999 weeds." He has since changed his tune.

At the time, I thought he was missing the point, but he was correct in a certain sense: radio isn't easy, and not everyone can find success as a broadcaster or producer. I don't know how many podcasts from the early days are still around, and if any of podcasting's early breakout stars are now laughing at us from their private yachts, but the point is, they were there at the beginning, and they helped prove to the world that this on-demand style of radio was viable. Without those pioneers, I don't think the list I'm doing this week would exist. The next time you listen to one of your favorite podcasts, honestly ask yourself: would I make this appointment listening? All the podcasts I'm talking about this week — and they represent just a small percentage of all the ones I listen to — are wonderful, but I wouldn't be able to stop everything I'm doing to listen to them if they weren't available when it was convenient to me. This, I believe, is the future of radio, and even television.

Next time: …i did not know that.

[1] Did you know that I'm a writer because of This American Life? It's true, and is a story I should tell one day. Perhaps on a podcast of my own.

[2] Just in case anyone from either one of these shows sees this: I dream of one day earning the chance to be on your program.

Podcasts I love: 60-Second Science

Last time on Podcasts I Love, I showed you Pseudopod, a terrifically entertaining horror podcast that updates once a week.

Now, it's time for something completely different: 60-Second Science, from Scientific American.

Every day, the geniuses at Scientific American spend just one minute sharing something cool and interesting from the scientific world. Their stories are all over the place, too, from planetary science to neuroscience to genetics.

One of the things I love about the podcasting medium — and new media in general — is how there aren't any rules about content and length, so on the same day that I listen to a 40 minute horror story from Pseudopod, I can also get a 60-second lesson about the Triceratops, on the same device, delivered in the same way.

Next time: this is worth the wait.

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