Slate critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and John Swansburg discuss the Joe Swanberg film "Drinking Buddies," Laura Helmuth's piece on the impact of longevity on humanity, and Simon Doonan's new book on his life. Get show links here.
The Culture Gabfest: Working Class Slag from a Crap Town Edition
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#3570: New Music From England
Hear new music from England, including brand-new off-world music from ”The Red Book,” the second record by the global chamber/world music group Penguin Café, (as led by Arthur Jeffes, the son of the late Simon Jeffes, founder of Penguin Café Orchestra). These Penguin Café works were written for the International Space Orchestra and NASA Ames in 2012, and were beamed into space as part of NASA’s Kepler project.
Also, there’s new music by Jocelyn Pook, from a new score for the dance-theatre piece “iTMOi (in the mind of igor)” by Akram Khan written for the centennial celebration of Igor Stravinsky in 2013. Then, out of Newcastle, hear music from the Unthanks, which is Rachel and Becky Unthank, rendering a tune by Robert Wyatt, “Sea Song.” Plus, listen to music by the British composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Max de Wardener for percussionist Joby Burgess, working as “Powerplant.”
PROGRAM #3570 New Music from England (First aired on 2/25/2014)
ARTIST(S) | RECORDING | CUT(S) | SOURCE |
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset | The Bairns | Robert Wyatt: Sea Song, excerpt | Real World #158 |
Penguin Café | The Red Book | Aurora [5:00] | |
Jocelyn Pook | iTMOi (in the mind of igor) | Sacrfice [6:16] | Available as a download from Emusic.com |
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset | The Bairns | Sea Song (Robert Wyatt) [6:19] | Real World #158 |
Powerplant | 24 Lies Per Second | Max de Wardener: Until my blood is pure [6:34] | Signum SIGCD313 |
Graham Fitkin /Smith Quartet | Slow/Huoah/Frame | Slow, excerpt [12:16] | Argo 433-690 |
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This English chef is bringing working-class 'bread and dripping' to his finest patrons
You could call Tom Sellers a "culinary wunderkind." At 26, he already has his own award-winning restaurant in London. Now, he's trying to bring "bread and dripping" — a traditional dish for many working-class Britons — to the plates of England's most refined foodies.
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Reading, math and ... Javascript? Coding is now mandatory in English schools
This month, England launched one of the most ambitious computer education programs in the world. Every child from 5 to 16 will now learn computer programming, and advocates say it's not only vital but easier than you might think to teach schoolkids how to code.
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Josie Long Plans On Staying Here Illegally
The British writer and comedian, known for her work on the BBC’s teen comedic drama Skins, is in the U.S., and she has big plans. On this week’s episode, Josie Long talks joining the mafia; making a Hangover-style film with the Middletons; forming a Kickstarter to get her face on Mt. Rushmore; and translating Walt Whitman into British English.
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John Boorman's Playful Wit Continues in "Queen and Country"
Director John Boorman’s 1987 Oscar-nominated film, “Hope and Glory,” was about 9-year-old Bill Rohan, who rejoices in the destruction of his school by an errant Luftwaffe bomb. Boorman’s new movie, “Queen and Country” is set in a still-recovering postwar England, and picks up the story nearly a decade later as Bill (Boorman’s alter-ego) begins basic training in the early fifties, during the Korean War. Bill, joined by a trouble-making army mate, engage in a constant battle of wits with the Catch-22-worthy Sgt. Major Bradley. The film opens February 18 at Film Forum.
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Geoffrey Chaucer, Detective
Medievalist Bruce Holsinger writes historical fiction starring some names familiar to English majors -- Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. They were poets but in Holsinger's novels they also deal in secrets.
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#3570: New Music From England
Hear new music from England, including brand-new off-world music from ”The Red Book,” the second record by the global chamber/world music group Penguin Café, (as led by Arthur Jeffes, the son of the late Simon Jeffes, founder of Penguin Café Orchestra). These Penguin Café works were written for the International Space Orchestra and NASA Ames in 2012, and were beamed into space as part of NASA’s Kepler project.
Also, there’s new music by Jocelyn Pook, from a new score for the dance-theatre piece “iTMOi (in the mind of igor)” by Akram Khan written for the centennial celebration of Igor Stravinsky in 2013. Then, out of Newcastle, hear music from the Unthanks, which is anchored by Rachel and Becky Unthank, rendering a tune by Robert Wyatt, “Sea Song.” Plus, listen to music by the British composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Max de Wardener for percussionist Joby Burgess, working as “Powerplant.”
PROGRAM #3570 New Music from England (First aired on 2/25/2014)
ARTIST(S) | RECORDING | CUT(S) | SOURCE |
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset | The Bairns | Robert Wyatt: Sea Song, excerpt | Real World #158 |
Penguin Café | The Red Book | Aurora [5:00] | |
Jocelyn Pook | iTMOi (in the mind of igor) | Sacrfice [6:16] | Available as a download from Emusic.com |
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset | The Bairns | Sea Song (Robert Wyatt) [6:19] | Real World #158 |
Powerplant | 24 Lies Per Second | Max de Wardener: Until my blood is pure [6:34] | Signum SIGCD313 |
Graham Fitkin /Smith Quartet | Slow/Huoah/Frame | Slow, excerpt [12:16] | Argo 433-690 |
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A Comedic Counternarrative
British police continue to combat ISIS' successful recruitment of teens. Humza Arshad, a British-Pakistani and Muslim comedian, has joined their efforts, creating YouTube videos and making school appearances in which he pokes fun at jihadists. Brooke talks with Arshad about using humor to resist extremism.
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Live And Let Spy
Former Soviet spymaster Oleg Kalugin reminisces about his time
recruiting Americans to spy for the USSR-- and how the U.S. eventually became his home.
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Mau Mau
This is the story of a few documents that tumbled out of the secret archives of the biggest empire the world has ever known, offering a glimpse of histories waiting to be rewritten.
Just down the road from a pub in rural Hanslope Park, England is a massive building — the secret archives of the biggest empire the world has ever known. This is the story of a few documents that tumbled out and offered a glimpse of histories waiting to be rewritten.
When professor Caroline Elkins came across a stray document left by the British colonial government in Nairobi, Kenya, she opened the door to a new reckoning with the history of one of Britain's colonial crown jewels, and the fearsome group of rebels known as the Mau Mau. We talk to historians, archivists, journalists and send our producer Jamie York to visit the Mau Mau. As the new history of Kenya is concealed and revealed, document by document, we wonder what else lies in wait among the miles of records hidden away in Hanslope Park.
Produced by Matt Kielty with reporting from Jamie York
Special thanks to:
Mattathias Schwartz for first bringing us this story. Martin Mavenjina and Faith Alubbe of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission.
Nyakinyua Kenda for the use of their music, Rose Mutiso and Anne Moko for translation help, and Sruthi Pinnamaneni for production support.
Correction: An earlier version of this episode contained two errors, which we have corrected.
The first was our mention of Israel as a former British colony where official documents were purged. In fact, Israel was a successor to the British mandated territory of Palestine, which we also listed, and so we removed the redundancy.
The second was that we qualified our statement about Kikuyu support for the Mau Mau. Some listeners misinterpreted our claim that support for the Mau Mau cut across all demographics among the Kikuyu to mean that all Kikuyu supported the Mau Mau, which is untrue. We tempered the language in that spot.
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Mau Mau Deleted Scene
Here's a deleted scene from our Mau Mau episode. I wish we didn't have to delete it. Maybe we didn't have to. But we just couldn't figure out where to put this little bit of conversation.
The podcast, if you haven't listened, is about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950's and a massive trove of hidden colonial documents that are just now starting to trickle out (and that could rewrite significant portions of history). The guy talking here is historian David Anderson.
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A Policy Reporter Takes a Stab At Fiction
Seasoned economic policy reporter for The New York Times Jonathan Weisman discusses his debut novel, No. 4 Imperial Lane, about a young man from Atlanta thrust into a fallen aristocracy when studying abroad at the University of Sussex.
EVENTS: On August 15th at 4:00pm, Jonathan will be at Book Court joint event with Jeff Bartsch (Two Across).
Address: 163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
On August 16th at 6:00pm, Jonathan will be at Book/Plate Event at Peck’s Homemade (in conjunction with Greenlight).
Address: 455A Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn NY, 1120
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Was Charles Dickens the first celebrity medical spokesman?
Charles Dickens was a great supporter of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London.
Yet such effective fundraising practices are hardly new. They predate the Internet, television, radio and even the movies.
This Feb. 6, we celebrate Charles Dickens, the novelist and literary superstar of his day. He may well have been the first celebrity spokesman for a medical charity. The cause was London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and it first opened its doors 164 years ago today in 1852. As an added bonus, we have the opportunity to celebrate Charles Dickens’s 204th birthday, which falls the on following day, Feb. 7. (He was born in 1812 and died in 1870).
Dickens’s interest in helping to establish a children’s hospital should not be surprising to those who have read his wonderful novels. His works teem with the stories of children and especially those youngsters who were rejected, orphaned, or stricken by physical and social calamities. Charles, too, suffered a traumatic childhood when his father was declared insolvent and the Dickens family was sentenced to the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. It was then that the 12-year-old Charles was removed from school and forced to work at Warren’s Blacking (shoeshine) Warehouse for five months. He recreated this trauma, of course, in his favorite novel, “David Copperfield,” but it continued to fester in his psyche as one of the most harrowing events of his life.
Moreover, Dickens often portrayed real diseases (both physical and psychological), which many of his various characters developed in the course of his story telling. The illnesses he describes are accurate and based on real disorders rather than invented maladies with inconsistent symptoms, as was the more common practice among many Victorian novelists.
But his careful attention to detail went far deeper than leafing through the pages of a medical textbook or pestering the many physicians he knew. In fact, Dickens was a regular reader of medical journals and followed the latest advances in public health and medicine. He was also a frequent visitor to several London hospitals where he observed sick people to incorporate into his fiction.
Part of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, seen today.
Thanks to the tireless activism of a physician named Charles West, a 32-bed hospital for children did open, in a house on Great Ormond Street, on Feb. 6, 1852, just one day before Dickens’ 40th birthday.
Dickens’s involvement with this great cause began at the request of several friends of his who just happened to be trustees of the nascent Great Ormond Street Hospital. At their invitation, Dickens visited the hospital during its first weeks of operation. The writer was so moved by what he saw that he and an assistant named Henry Morley composed an essay about the sick children recuperating there, entitled “Drooping Buds.” It appeared in the April 3, 1852 issue of Household Words, the magazine Dickens edited from 1850 to 1858. In the essay, Dickens describes the alarming infant and childhood mortality rates in Victorian England, the need to develop a better understanding of children’s health and the then revolutionary point that children are, indeed, different in the diseases they develop and how their bodies confront such illnesses. A line or two of this essay merits repeating:
“Our children perish out of our homes: not because there is in them an inherent dangerous sickness (except in the few cases where they are born of parents who communicate to children heritable maladies), but because there is, in respect to their tender lives, a want of sanitary discipline and a want of knowledge…It does not at all follow that the intelligent physician who has learnt how to treat successfully the illnesses of adults, has only to modify his plans a little, to diminish the proportions of his doses, for the application of his knowledge to our little sons and daughters. Some of their diseases are peculiar to themselves; other diseases, common to us all, take a form in children varying as much from their familiar form with us as a child varies from a man…”
The essay was widely read by 40,000 readers of the magazine but its influence hardly stopped there. Dickens gave the hospital trustees permission to reprint the essay and distribute it to potential donors as a publicity tool.
A few years later, on Feb. 9, 1858, the Great Ormond Street trustees asked Charles Dickens to chair a “festival benefit” at the Freemason’s Tavern. The event was so important that Queen Victoria herself consented to be its royal patron but it was Dickens’s sterling celebrity who really attracted a crowd of potential donors.
He did not disappoint. Always a brilliant speaker and actor (he gave public readings of many of his works across England and the United States to great acclaim), Dickens delivered a rousing speech on the plight of ill children and the need to support the children’s hospital. As an extra bonus, the author threw in a reading of his beloved “A Christmas Carol.” The journalist T.A. Reed, said of Dickens’ performance that night, “I never heard him, or reported him, with so much pleasure … his speech was magnificent.”
Magnificent, indeed. The speech raised more than £3,000 (nearly £270,000 or almost $400,000 in 2016) for the hospital, which was desperately needed to increase both bed space and the medical staff.
Dickens made many more trips to the hospital and participated in several fundraising events. He also wrote about the Great Ormond Street Hospital in his collection of essays “The Uncommercial Traveler” (1860), in an essay entitled “From Cradle to Grave,” which ran in Feb. 1, 1862 issue of another magazine he edited, All the Year Round, and in his last complete novel “Our Mutual Friend” (1865).
So vital was his advocacy for the Great Ormond Street Hospital that in 1867, its founder, Dr. Charles West wrote, “Dickens, the children’s friend, first set [the hospital] on her legs and helped her to run alone.”
Upon his death in 1870, at age 58, the British Medical Journal eulogized Dickens with the statement, “what a gain it would have been to physic [medicine] if one so keen to observe and facile to describe had devoted his powers to the medical art.”
To this, we say “Bah Humbug.” We have plenty of doctors but we have only one Charles Dickens.
Dr. Howard Markel writes a monthly column for the PBS NewsHour, highlighting the anniversary of a momentous event that continues to shape modern medicine. He is the director of the Center for the History of Medicine and the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.
He is the author or editor of 10 books, including “Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892,” “When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed” and “An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine.”
The post Was Charles Dickens the first celebrity medical spokesman? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
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Who is Banksy? New mathematical analysis claims to know
A Banksy artwork is pictured opposite the French embassy on Jan. 25, 2016, in London, England. The graffiti, which depicts a young girl from the musical Les Misérables with tears in her eyes as tear gas moves towards her, criticizes the use of teargas in the ‘Jungle’ migrant camp in Calais. Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images
A team led by Steven Le Comber at the Queen Mary University of London analyzed 140 pieces by the infamous street artist in London and Bristol using geographic profiling. The resulting “geoprofile” pinpointed a pub along with an address in Bristol and three others in London, all places where Gunningham has lived or appeared.
Banksy, who is behind pieces including a recreation of Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and the satirical amusement park “Dismaland,” does not sign his pieces, so the analysis looked at works that he is suspected of creating.
A Palestinian boy walks past a drawing by British graffiti artist Banksy, along part of the controversial Israeli barrier near the Kalandia checkpoint in the West Bank on Aug. 10, 2005. Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters
The team at Queen Mary University said in the report’s summary that the same process could be used as a model to locate potential terrorism suspects.
But likening Banksy’s work to “minor terrorism-related acts,” as the report puts it, drew criticism from Gizmodo, which also pointed out several flaws in the analysis:
The method itself is incredibly imprecise, and uses only suspected cases of Banksy’s artwork (Banksy performs his art anonymously, so it’s not obvious which pieces belong to him, or if the work is performed by multiple people). What’s more, outliers in the location data were not excluded, and the researchers did not use a timeline to consider when the art appeared.
This is not the first time that a group has claimed to identify Banksy as Gunningham. A Daily Mail investigation in 2008 claimed that Gunningham, who grew up in Bristol, was “the Scarlet Pimpernel of modern art.”
The post Who is Banksy? New mathematical analysis claims to know appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
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U.K. Gamblers Spend Millions Betting on American Elections
March Madness unofficially started yesterday with "Selection Sunday." Basketball fans and novices alike began filling out brackets to try to guess which college teams might make it to the final four this year.
March Madness is an effective distraction from the news cycle and the presidential election, and it's a potential way to make a buck—literally billions of dollars are wagered every year.
What if it were legal to bet on the political elections in the United States? Wouldn't that get more people excited about politics?
In the United States, federal law prohibits gambling on local or national elections. But across the pond in the United Kingdom, people don't just bet on their elections, they can also bet on our elections. In fact, millions of British pounds have already been wagered on the race for the White House.
Mike Smithson is one of these British gamblers, and he tells us all about it. Mike is editor at PoliticalBetting.com
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Kids crossing borders – alone
In a collaboration with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the United Kingdom and KQED in California, this episode of Reveal tells the stories of children crossing borders alone. You'll hear about the wars they’re fleeing, where they’re trying to go and what happens to them when they get there.
We followed migrants who traveled from Afghanistan to Sweden to London, from El Salvador and Mexico to California, and we found that kids seeking safe harbor in Europe and the U.S. often confront years of uncertainty and insecurity when they arrive.
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Indian Migrant Workers Struggle to Start Over in Britain
The Guardian has called The Year of the Runaways, the second novel by Man Booker Prize nominee Sunjeev Sahota, a "brilliant political novel about migrant workers in Sheffield." It tells the story of three young men and one woman who immigrate from India to England each with their own hopes, plans and ambitions -- and nearly no idea of what awaits them.
Events: Sunjeev Sahota will be in conversation with Dinaw Mengestu on Saturday, April 30th at 2:00 p.m. at BookCourt (163 Court Street, Brooklyn).
Also on Saturday, April 30th, he'll be in conversation with John Freeman at 7:00 pm at McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street).
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Leicester City Football Club: This Underdog Soccer Team Could Win Big
Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.
If you follow English soccer, you already know about the big clubs like Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal, but this weekend a team unknown to most outside the U.K. is poised to pull off one of the greatest sporting upsets.
Leicester City has been enjoying a remarkable run in the English Premier League. Before this season, an English bookmaker gave Leicester odds of 5,000 to 1 to bag the Premier League trophy. You will get the same odds on Bono becoming the next Pope. This Sunday, the team could win one of soccer's most prized titles for the first time.
The Takeaway talks with Manish Bhasin, a BBC TV soccer presenter and lifelong Leicester City fan, about the team's sensational run.
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London Voters Elect First Muslim Mayor
Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.
London has a new mayor. Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan, a 45-year-old son of a bus driver and a Muslim, was elected to lead the city of 8 million Friday.
Khan defeated conservative Zac Goldsmith, the son of a billionaire, in a campaign full of contradictions about the future of the city and the United Kingdom.
Joe Twyman, head of political and social research at YouGov, reflects on the results.
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