Welcome to ThoughtCast! (www.thoughtcast.org) A podcast and public radio interview program with authors, academics and innovators, hosted by Jenny Attiyeh.ThoughtCast offers something that is glaringly absent from the media today: a bridge between the publications and pursuits of the intellectual world and a curious, informed, mainstream audience. By providing detailed, unhurried and personal conversation with current writers and thinkers, ThoughtCast is that rare hybrid - a show that is both informative and engaging - a synergy between mass media and the ivory tower. Think of it as “Terry Gross comes to Harvard.”Examples of upcoming guests are: the scientist Eric Lander, the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, author of “The Secular City”, and Harvey Mansfield, the defender of all things “manly.”In addition to podcasting ThoughtCast, my current distribution mechanism is the Public Radio Exchange (prx.org), which provides public radio stations throughout the country the means to broadcast my work. WGBH, an arts and culture public radio station in Boston, has broadcast several ThoughtCast programs, as has WCAI/WNAN. ThoughtCast is also featured on WGBH’s Forum Network.I would appreciate your thoughts. So post a comment, or send me an e-mail to feedback at thoughtcast dot org!
Simon Johnson, the Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is an outspoken critic of the US government response to the financial crisis. Now he takes on the “too big to fail” banks which continue to threaten our economy. In his latest book, called 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, which he co-wrote with James Kwak, Simon argues that if the biggest banks aren’t cut down ...
The Cambridge Science Festival returns this week with Inspiring Minds: Meet Women in Science, a program at the Museum of Science that includes a talk by Randi Rotjan, a coral ecologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. Randi has been stung by jellyfish, coral, you name it. It’s all part of the job, studying coral reefs on location in exotic locales like the Red Sea or the Phoenix Islands, the world’s largest marine protected area. She goes face to face with hermit crabs as they line up, a...
Henry David Thoreau is justly famous for his book Walden , which tells the story of the two years he spent living by the pond , in the Concord woods. But he also wrote a journal, which he started at age 20 in 1837, and kept up until 1861, shortly before he died. This diary of Thoreau’s daily thoughts and experiences has just been published by New York Review Books Classics , which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this autumn. Edwin Frank , the editor of the series, speaks with ThoughtCast ...
About 40 years ago, farms were thick on the ground in Andover, a rural town in southern Vermont. Today, 75-year-old Lydia Ratcliff’s Lovejoy Brook Farm is the last working farm still in operation. But can it survive much longer? ThoughtCast's Jenny Attiyeh grew up visiting Lydia each summer, listening to her tales, eating fresh corn and carrots from her garden, and watching the animals give birth, and grow old.
This year’s Narrative Journalism conference, sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, was titled “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times.” ThoughtCast spoke with several of the presenters at the conference, including keynote speaker and Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz, award-winning author and journalist Adam Hochschild, and Nieman’s own Joshua Benton. The title does indeed appear to be apt…
At the first ever Open Video Conference, held at New York University in Manhattan, participants pondered the significance of the "open media" movement, at a time when its tools are being put to use by protesters in Iran. ThoughtCast spoke with the new media guru Jonathan Zittrain, who's a professor at both Harvard and Oxford, Xeni Jardin, of Boing Boing fame and Peter Kaufman of Intelligent Television, among several others, about the potential of this movement to effect social change.
What is the right expression to describe today’s economic nightmare? I’m sick of “mess” and “crisis” is too bland. What about “cesspool”? Well, I compromised with “pits” — feel free to add your own juicy descriptions in ThoughtCast’s comments section! Either way, I dived into the “pool” with MIT’s Mitsui Professor of Economics James Poterba, who’s also the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the think tank in charge of determining when recessions start … and end. Wouldn’t that be...
Turbulent Times for Truth Tellers? Just ask the Nieman Foundation… This year’s Narrative Journalism conference, sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, was titled “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times.” ThoughtCast spoke with several of the presenters at the conference, including keynote speaker and Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz, award-winning author and journalist Adam Hochschild, and Nieman’s own Joshua Benton. The title does indeed appear to be apt…
The term network neutrality was the brainchild of Tim Wu of Columbia Law School. So what does this term mean, and what power does it have politically? ThoughtCast spoke with Tim Wu at the "Future of the Internet" conference, held at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Josh Marshall, the creator of the highly successful news blog "Talking Points Memo" tells Jenny Attiyeh of ThoughtCast how he came up with that name... To hear (rather than view) more Josh Marshall on ThoughtCast, go to www.thoughtcast.org, and search for Josh.Thanks!Jennywww.thoughtcast.org
