15 years ago the very first episode of Radiolab, fittingly called “Firsts,” hit the airwaves. It was a 3-hour long collection of documentaries and musings produced by a solitary sleep-deprived producer named Jad Abumrad. Things have changed a bit since then.
Kudos to them for 15 years…I had no idea it had been that long.
The Rosses were expecting twins but learned that one of the two, Thomas, wouldn’t live much past birth. They decided to donate Thomas’s body to science. And then, they decided to investigate just what it was they had given and how it had helped others. Great piece by Radiolab.
The next day, Gray met James Zieske, the institute’s senior scientist, who told her “infant eyes are worth their weight in gold,” because, being so young, they have great regenerative properties. Thomas’ corneas were used in a study that could one day help cure corneal blindness.
Thirteen more studies had cited that study. Gray felt a new emotion: pride.
In their latest full episode, Radiolab examines the concept of worth, particularly when dealing with things that are more or less priceless (like human life and nature).
This episode, we make three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss.
I have always really liked Radiolab, but it seems like the show has shifted into a different gear with this episode. The subject seemed a bit meatier than their usual stuff, the reporting was close to the story, and the presentation was more straightforward, with fewer of the audio experiments that some found grating. I spent some time driving last weekend and I listened to this episode of Radiolab, an episode of 99% Invisible, and an episode of This American Life, and it occurred to me that as 99% Invisible has been pushing quite effectively into Radiolab’s territory, Radiolab is having to up their game in response, more toward the This American Life end of the spectrum. Well, whatever it is, it’s great seeing these three radio shows (and dozens of others) push each other to excellence.
“Napkin #1” is Bradley’s drawing for This American Life, a structure Ira Glass has talked about ad infinitum: This happened. Then this happened. Then this happened. (Those are the dashes.) And then a moment of reflection, thoughts on what the events mean (the exclamation point).
The description of Radiolab is the most fun to read. That show doesn’t quite have the non-linearity of Pulp Fiction, but it’s a good example of hyperlink radio (a la hyperlink cinema). (via explore)
Late in his life, just after the invention of the metronome and after completely losing his hearing, Beethoven went back and adjusted the tempos of his symphonies to much faster than you might expect. Radiolab investigates.
The brand-new Radiolab episode “Words” is characteristically terrific; I tweeted this after listening to just the opening section:
I love hearing @JadAbumrad’s voice fill my room, but @wnycradiolab’s “Words” is fucking me up right now. You’ve made a grown man cry. Shit.
There’s also an accompanying video, made by Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante, and Keith Kenniff:
Also, it’s not the VERY best section of the program, but there is a very nice exploration of Shakespeare’s inventive use of language that word/history nerds like me will especially enjoy. (I’m using inventive in its proper dual sense of innovative inventory, making new use of material already at hand. It’s easy to overstate how many words Shakespeare “actually” “invented.”)
Now “Words” is mostly about the relationship between language and our ability to make conceptual distinctions to connect or distinguish between different things. The 2006 episode “Musical Language” traces the other path words take to the brain, through our ears. (Note: I still think this is the greatest episode of Radiolab of ALL TIME. Story, reporting, production - just note and letter perfect.)
This show starts out by introducing a random earworm so insistent and amazing, it would wreck everything if I were to give it away. Instead, I’ll just give you the summary of the historically-tasty middle of the show, and let you take it away from there:
Anne Fernald explains our need to goochie-goochie-goo at every baby we meet, and absolves us of our guilt. This kind of talk, dubbed motherese, is an instict that crosses cultural and linguistic boundaries. Caecilius was goochie-goochie-gooing in Rome; Grunt was goochie-gooing in the caves. Radio Lab did our own study of infant-directed speech, recording more than a dozen different parents. The melodies of these recordings illustrate Fernald’s findings that there are a set of common tunes living within the words that parents all over the world intone to their babies.
Then, science reporter Jonah Lehrer takes us on a tour through the ear as we try to understand how the brain makes sense of soundwaves and what happens when it can’t. Which brings us to one particularly riotous example: the 1913 debut performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Jonah suggests that the brain’s attempt to tackle disonant sounds resulted in old ladies tackling each other.
What are you waiting for? Go! Listen to them both!
Based upon what I read, and what I learned about the hookworms I decided that I was going to try and infest myself with hookworms in an attempt to cure my asthma. I was not willing to wait ten or more years for the drug companies to bring a drug to market. It was obvious to me that hookworms, for a healthy adult with a good diet, are quite benign. This account details my experiences, how I went about it, and the things I have done since infestation to calibrate my level of infestation so that in the end I was able to cure my asthma and hay fever with hookworms. These same techniques are of course applicable to any hookworm infestation, whether you want to control asthma, hay fever, colitis, Crohn’s disease or IBD.
Lawrence even sells hookworms to others so that they won’t have to travel to a third world country to contract them.
Radiolab has been getting some love from quite a few of the sites I read (Snarkmarket originally turned me on to the show), so I thought I’d offer mine as well. I don’t listen to the radio or to podcasts, but lately I’ve made an exception for Radiolab. It’s about science, the editing is wonderful and unique, Jad Abumrad is one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard, and to top it off, their shows are really fascinating.
