Sunday!

Michael M. says:

Since folks in these parts, except for Saul, tend not to mention podcasts, I thought I’d recap a few I enjoyed this past week, in case anyone wants to check them out. I’m always on the lookout for other recommendations.

Point of Inquiry – Steven Pinker: Using Grammar as a Tool, Not a Weapon. Monday, 11/10/14

On occasion of the publication of his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, POI talks to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker about the modern day Assault on Language, which turns out to be about as real as the modern day War on Christmas. Pinker
waxes about what makes good style and debunks many phony controversies about made-up rules that either were never legitimate (for example, it is perfectly fine to use the pronoun “they” to refer to a singular antecedent, because “they” in such a construction refers to a bound variable, not an individual) or contrived for ulterior motives (John Dryden claimed that you should never end a sentence in a preposition to argue that Ben Jonson was an inferior poet) with no basis in the logic of English grammar. We are such stuff that dreams are made on — take that, Grammar Pedants. Host Lindsay Beyerstein and Pinker also discuss more overtly political usage controversies, like the term
“cisgender” as a counterpoint to “transgender.”

Pinker notes: “One can find the defenders of the language saying that [language is in decline] in every decade in every century. And they can’t be right, otherwise we would be grunting like Tarzan…. Language is doing fine.”

Stuff You Missed in History Class – The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Monday, 11/10/14

I’ve only been listening to Stuff You Missed in History Class for a few months, but this is the first episode I’ve heard where the topic was, I thought, too big for the show’s format to do justice to. SYMHC works really well when looking at at more focused events with narrower implications. I have been
thinking of it (and enjoying it) more as “Forgotten Headlines/Figures of History.” For example, last month they did a series of riveting Halloween-themed shows on subjects like the “Beast of Gevaudan” about a mysterious series of animal attacks that terrified the French countryside in the 1760s and the “Villisca Ax Murders” about the horrific, unsolved 1912 murder of a family in small-town Iowa. On a lighter note, they also had a good episode on “The History Halloween Candy.” Here, they do an admirable job of situating the 1492 expulsion in the contexts of the history of Jewish (and to some extent, Muslim)
persecution by Catholics, talk about the resurgent wave of expulsions that followed Spain’s actions, examine how different groups of Jews coped and reacted, and discuss what historians still debate about the specific motivations of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their rationale for picking this topic is that in American history classes it tends to be overshadowed by that other thing that happened in Spain in 1492, when Columbus set sail for India and inadvertently laid the groundwork for the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I Was There Too – Aliens with Ricco Ross. Wednesday 11/12/14

Wolfpop is a brand new podcast network curated by Paul Scheer, who co-hosts How Did This Get Made? for Earwolf and co-stars on FX’s The League. This is only the second episode of I Was There Too, the premise of which is to offer a “fly-on-the-wall” perspective from a non-star/non-lead in a particular movie. This week’s guest played Private Frost, one of the crack team of colonial marines, almost all of whom were wiped out by the titular xenomorphs in James Cameron’s sequel. Ross, who came from a large, poor family in Chicago, talks about how he almost didn’t take the part because he was simultaneously offered an unspecified role in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, about the difficulties he had adjusting to Michael Biehn’s style after having bonded with James Remar (the original actor cast as Cpl. Hicks), about Sigourney Weaver mediating a labor dispute between Cameron and the British crew (thus saving the movie as well as saving Newt in the movie and saving the Earth from Paul Reiser!), and about his dreams coming true. He also explains the origin of Arcturian Poontang and the meaning of “Heath” on his armor — an explanation that might turn out to be a disappointment for gay men everywhere. Ross comes across as an all-around awesome guy and this is an excellent and entertaining new podcast.Report