Archive for the ‘radio’ tag
Dylan on the Radio #
News to me: the notoriously secretive Bob Dylan has a radio show on XM. Vanity Fair has compiled an excellent list of the show’s features and quirks. If the graphic’s too hard to read, or you just want more details, the expanded text is available here.
(via kottke, who explains the inspiration for the graphic)
Interviewing Radio Lab #
The A.V. Club has a short interview with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. This fascinates me:
RK: We were talking to these kids who work with this bacteria called E. coli that smells like poop. It’s uncomfortable. So as a matter-of-fact solution to their practical problem, they designed a different E. coli. A friend of theirs at Purdue sent them a wintergreen gene, plucked from some other creature, and they plopped in the wintergreen to mask the poop smell, thereby solving the yuck factor of being in the lab by simply creating an E. coli that had never existed in the 70- to 100-million-year history of E. coli. Suddenly, their lab is smelling wintergreeny as opposed to poopy. Then they have another problem: How long do they have to wait to work with it? So they put a trigger onto the E. coli, which when it actually slows down its multiplication rate, it smells like a big, rich, creamy banana. If they smell banana, then they go in and do their work. I sat them down and said, “Did any of you consider the sheer awesomeness of what you just did? You created essentially a creature new to nature.” And this 19-year-old goes, “Uh, yeah?”
Parsing Gladwell’s Story #
A few weeks ago, This American Life (the radio version) played an excellent story (TAL episode/original) that Malcolm Gladwell performed at The Moth. At the end, Ira Glass says that The Moth is a place where “people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales.” If you’re like me, after hearing it you desperately wanted to know how much truth was in Gladwell’s story.
Jack Shafer decided to find out, and make himself into something of a grinch along the way:
A storyteller can’t have it both ways, instructing listeners to “look it up” while stretching the yarn beyond the breaking point or claiming that smuggling the “baffling” phrase into Post copy became “literally” an “obsession.” Gladwell’s method, and his decision to let This American Life air his tale, raises … well, new and troubling questions about his attitude toward his audience.