Favorite Episodes of Radiolab
Submitted by lukeprog on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 14:55
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- My favorite radio show is Radiolab, which offers tightly-edited investigations of the science and philosophy behind everyday issues of life. Here are my favorite episodes.
- New Normal
- Morality
- Detective Stories
- Race
- Musical Language
- Time
- Memory and Forgetting
- Where am I?
- Animal Minds
- Who Am I?
- The Ring and I
- Sperm
- So-Called Life
- War of the Worlds
- Pop Music
- Placebo
- Choice
- Numbers
- Stochasticity
- Sleep
- Beyond Time
Pretty interesting and very well produced show. I like the "hand-holding" journalism style a la Popular Mechanics for Kids, easy to understand and immersive. I liked the Race episode, because I actually learned something from it. New Normal was painfully hopeful. These guys make Malcolm Gladwell look like a visionary prophet (he's not). The whole show stinks of liberal naivity (and not the good kind, you know, like Hilary Duff's vag).
What does the show have to do with Gladwell? Can you give an example of what you mean by "liberal naivity"?
Gladwell often makes dubious leaps based on individual cases, all the while reciting it to you like a bedtime story. The show is more diverse than that (as it Gladwell) but the episode New Normal was like 5th rate Gladwellian. Trying to prove that one day there might be no more wars, because some baboons were able to become tame and this fag became mayor; personally I was rolling my eyes quite violently.
I don't think they were trying to prove any such thing. They just wanted to show it might be possible in ways that may turn out to be counter-intuitive to us.