What’s your least favorite summer activity? Mine is beach reading. It seems to me as much an oxymoron as ice fishing. In both cases: great activity, wrong time and place.
What’s wrong with beach reading? Bright sun makes the page almost blinding. Wear reading glasses, and it’s even worse. Wear sunglasses, and you feel better, but you can’t read as well. Wear both and you look distinctly eccentric. If it’s windy, you cling to the pages; sand blows between the leaves, somebody drips on the book, or you wet it when returning from cooling dips. Worst of all, when reading, the only beach you actually experience is the sound of the waves (along with many others you’d just as soon avoid, from loud horseplay to outboard motors). No sun glinting on water, no waves rolling gently or plunging majestically, no sails on the horizon, no human forms in infinite variety strolling or splashing before you.
The solution: beach listening on your iPod, iPhone, or some other portable, Internet-enabled, smart device you can stuff in your pocket. Just put in your earbuds, sit back, and let your eyes wander, while your ears take in language as surely as your eyes could, and more soothingly. For your summer pleasure, then, a potpourri of listening experiences, focusing specifically on aural forms, rather than, say, audiobooks.
I suggest four major sources of podcasts: National Public Radio (npr.org); international radio networks from Britain (bbc.co.uk) and Australia (abc.net.au); print media with online programming (the New Yorker, Harvard Business Review), and universities such as Duke and Stanford (most easily available at Apple’s iTunesU, but also from individual schools at their .edu). The numbers are staggering: NPR lists thousands, as does iTunes U; I stopped counting BBC’s at 300. Even Al Jazeera English has 100. At NPR you can choose from the playful (such as Car Talk and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, both of which will continue on the airwaves long after their hosts’ planned retirements this year) to the political (The Diane Rehm Show), social (Tom Ashbrook’s On Point), scientific (Talk of the Nation Science Friday), economic (Planet Money), or eclectic (TED Radio Hour).
In place of classic beach reading, NPR provides several series of narrative shows. Ira Glass’s This American Life covers several thematically related stories each week. Its teasers are exceptional: who can resist listening to a show entitled “Shoulda Been Dead” (1/7/97), or one with this promo: “A perfectly normal guy gets rid of everything he owns, changes his name, says goodbye to his friends, and begins walking — in the name of peace. And Honduran government officials try to heal their corrupt country by starting a perfect city, from scratch. For the new year, we bring you stories about how far some people go in hopes of a better life” (1/4/13).
The Moth Radio Hour also features a cluster of stories, told live on stage by those who answer a call when the show visits their town. No program more perfectly illustrates the adage that “everyone has a story to tell,” and most stories, from the hilarious to the poignant, are told eloquently. One recent episode (#1304) featured a psychologist describing her longtime encounter with a terminally ill client, and the lessons she learned about the fixable and the unfixable.
Similarly, StoryCorps, a collaboration with the Library of Congress’s American Folk Life Center, is building a massive archive of oral history from living individuals, young and old. Some of the best are conversations between family members. One man, Brian Wilmoth, tells how he was thrown out of his parents’ home because he was gay, and how over the years he reconnected with each of his seven siblings as they too fled or were expelled. When his younger brother thanks him for rebuilding the family, you will be glad you’re not driving, because I believe your vision will be blurred. From the renowned (Studs Terkel) to those who were present at an historic moment (the man who carried the first named victim out of the World Trade Center), to people remembering a grandparent, a dog, or a teacher, these stories reach deep into the heart.
Podcasts provide other narratives as well. The New Yorker Fiction podcast offers the best of several worlds: a well-known writer and contributor chooses a story from the New Yorker archives to read aloud, then discusses the story with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor. Some choose past icons (Allegra Goodman on John Updike’s “A&P”), some their own contemporaries (Louise Erdrich on Lorrie Moore’s “Dance in America”). The range of cultures represented reminds us of how far the magazine has come from its Algonquin Club days: Junot Diaz on Edwidge Danticat, Orhan Pamuk on Vladimir Nabokov. Finally, for the original broadcast experience, type in “old time radio” at iTunes and find all the comedy, drama, mystery, horror, and variety that filled the airwaves a half century and more ago, now come full circle through the technology that is replacing the TV that once decimated radio.
If you’re in a more cerebral mood, the 100-year-old Poetry magazine has been using part of its $200 million endowment from the Ruth Lilly Foundation to create numerous podcasts — nine at current count — at poetryfoundation.org. The readings range from the canonical greats (Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Amy Clampitt) to the contemporary — the latter drawn from the website’s Donald-Hall-curated Essential American Poets as well as from its Poem of the Day collection. In the Poetry Off the Shelf collection, one also finds thematic conversations and readings about a variety of topics from baseball (“Poems That Knock It Out of the Park,” 10/17/12) to poetry and drinking (“Two Poets Walk Into a Bar,” 2/6/13).
For the more pragmatic, subscribe to Harvard Business Review’s Idea Cast through iTunes. Instead of spending $14 for the magazine, listen free to pithy interviews from its authors. Some are strictly for management mavens, but others feature such diverse figures as Christiane Amanpour on leadership (4/12/12) or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on career transitions (1/26/12).
For a lighter look, try Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. In Arming the Donkeys (iTunes U), a show whose title is as quirky as its author, Ariely interviews researchers from his own and other institutions about current explorations into human behavior, usually over a meal or on a campus bench. Again, some topics are obscure, but who would not want to know more about “Why Willpower Doesn’t Work” (11/12/12), “Making Difficult Decisions” (5/21/12), or “Changing Our Perception of Time” (10/7/09)? One warning: These pieces are only a few minutes in length, so load up several for a day in the sun.
On the other hand, if you want lengthy discussions about Big Ideas, turn to Stanford or to BBC or Australian Radio. Stanford offers two serious podcasts, with vastly different hosts and tones. In Philosophy Talk, John Perry and Ken Edwards, both noted scholars, raise questions both eternal and current: on love, human rights, neuroscience, and climate change. Each episode features the two hosts in an often animated and playful discussion, a visiting expert, audience participation, and a person-on-the-street interview. (Note: This is the only podcast that is not free, but subscribing at philosophytalk.org gives you each week’s new episode for free. Start now and you’ll have a decent collection for July and August.)
Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions takes itself as seriously as Philosophy Talk does lightly. Harrison, a Stanford Italian literature professor and rock band member, combines those and many other interests into an erudite, wide-ranging show on big books (Moby Dick, Aristotle’s Poetics), big ideas (Beauty, Extinction), and the unclassifiable (Blues, Tennis, Hermaphroditism, the Unabomber). If you enjoyed college profs with giant vocabularies, creative minds, and large egos, you’ll love Harrison. Even if you are annoyed by him, you’ll learn a lot.
Finally, our English-speaking cousins across the Atlantic and the Pacific also offer big thinking, but in a characteristically understated way. David Edmonds (Oxford) and Nigel Warburton (Open University) provide succinct insights into major philosophers and issues in the aptly named Philosophy Bites. Each episode consists of an interview with a contemporary thinker on his or her work, covering literally everything from nonexistence on up. Warburton’s recently published A Little History of Philosophy (Yale) demonstrates in print how well the show can make difficult ideas comprehensible.
In Our Time, from bbc.co.uk, pre-sents a weekly discussion of topics in philosophy, religion, history, science, and culture. Host Melvyn Bragg asks three British dons to explain the nature and significance of great authors, thinkers, events, and eras. Although the content is as esoteric as Harrison’s — the Upanishads, Fermat’s Last Theorem, Neoplatonism, the Druids — the show is conducted with understated learning and dry wit. In just under 45 minutes, each topic is defined, explained, and put in perspective.
Finally, try The Philosopher’s Zone from Australian broadcasting, in which host Alan Saunders, literally up until the day of his untimely death in 2012, talked about philosophical ideas with wit, passion, and compassion — and with one of the richest voices on radio since Orson Welles. His range can be seen in a single episode, “The Evil of the Daleks” (1/13/12), in which he uses the utterly amoral aliens of the “Dr. Who” TV series to explore the extreme end of the moral spectrum.
You’ll certainly come home with new ideas, maybe some new course materials, or some reading plans. Just don’t become so engrossed you forget the sunscreen.