Brief Summaries of Public Radio #5: Radio Lab (7/11/2008)

Show: Radiolab   

Episode Date: February  11, 2005, "Stress"

Length: 60 Minutes.

Producer: Radiolab is a 60 minutes audio collage/narrative exploration of a scientific issue. Its the kind of show built for trivia nerds who like to know a lot of silly factoids about subjects that are otherwise baffling or too obvious to have anything cool to comment upon.

Radiolab is produced by WNYC in New York and syndicated nationwide (podcast feed, blog). Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.

What I Knew:

• Stress can be good for you. Its focuses your attention in dangerous or paramount situations and serves as a motivator to be better than we thought we could be. However...

• Constant stress is very bad for you. It sends your system into a flight-or-flight state when the situation does not warrant it. Repeated flight-or-flights over time can lead to weakened blood vessels, hypertension and adult onset diabetes no matter what your level of fitness. Adult Onset Diabetes is a disease entirely the product of our moden, high-stress age.

• It is better to suffer a clean, deep cut than a shallow jagged one as clean cuts merge the skin together easier and heal faster. It's a similar principle to that of "clevage planes" in geology. No matter where you apply force to them, rocks will only break along at certain angles due to the arrangement of their molecules. In the organic world, this works the same way: A clean cut severs molecules in a fashion that they can be fused back together easily.

What I Didn't Know:

• Stress can be measured by listening to the electrical charges that pass between our fingers (who knew that happened?). The faster the charges jump from one finger to another, the more stressed we are.  

• In stressful situations, our bodies begin to shut down all non essential systems. This explains why we get dry mouth when under stress. Producing saliva and its digestive enzymes is considered superfluous by the body if, say, the stressful situation is being chased by a lion. Strangly enough, this is also why we often don't feel pain in a situation that causes us harm. The body also shuts non pain sensors s non essential functions in stressful situations.

• Continuous trauma can cause children to stop growing because, if the stress is bad enough, the body will begin to consider growth a low priority. Apparently, this happened in the case of J.M. Barrie, author of the Peter Pan books. Barrie's older brother was killed when both were still children and Barrie's mother never got over his death, even confusing Barrie with his dead brother, who in his mother's eyes, would forever ramain her perfect little boy. In response, Barrie never grow beyond 5 feet tall, never had an adult relationship with a woman. In response to the terrible rejection of his mother, Barrie's body tried to make him the son she had lost.

• Type A Personality theory was discovered by an upholsterer. In the 1950s, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and R.H. Rosenman noticed the chairs in their waiting room wore out incredibly fast and had to be refurbished every month. One month, their regular upholsterer was unavailable. The substitute came to their office and immediately asked the doctors, "Why are your patients sitting on the edge of the chair seats and shredding the armrests." Friedman and Rosenman noticed a correlation between the chair shredding patients and those prone to heart attacks. And thus was born the theory of Type A Personality and its relation to heath and heart disease.

• Shoot out The Lights, the legendary 1982 album of Richard and Linda Thompson's was released  as their marriage was breaking up. Just before the album's tour, Linda began suffering from Spasmodic Dysphonia, a disease which renders the sufferer unable to speak. Linda Thompon's voice  disappeared upong discovery of her husband's infidelity, returned for the tour, then vanished again. She's continues to battle with it to this day.

Brief Summaries of Public Radio #4: Nextbook.org (6/23/2008)

Show: The Nextbook Podcast   

Episode Date: June 23, 2008, "Within Four Walls." 

Length: 9 Minutes.

Producer: Nextbook is consistently strong web-based/print/podcast on "Jewish literature, culture and ideas." (rss, podcast subscription).

What I Didn't Know:

• Eastern State Penitentiary, on the outskirts of Philadelphia and defunct since the 1970s, once housed a synagogue. Discovered during a recent archaeological dig (the prison has been museum and site of scholarship since 1988), the synagogue served Jewish inmates beginning in the 1920s. The site is now under study and restoration. This report from Nextbook includes a fascinating oral history from the synagogue's rabbi (still alive) and a kosher butcher who used to supply the congregation with meat.

Brief Summaries of Public Radio #3: NPR: In Character (6/6/2008)

Show: NPR: In Character

Episode Date: June 23, 2008, "Nancy Drew" 

Length: 8 Minutes

Producer: NPR's special series on famous American fictional characters. Some of my favorite entries so far have included Charlie Brown, Long Duk Dong, Hester Prynne and The Dude. This episode is about Nancy Drew.

What I Knew:

• Nancy Drew, like many fictional heroes of children's literature, does not have a mother. Just her and her dad, the dashing attorney Carson Drew.

• All Nancy Drew novels are attributed to an author named Carolyn Keene. Carolyn Keene is a pseudonym as the series has been written by numerous authors since the first Nancy Drew book was published in 1930. 23 of the first 25 novels were written by one Mildred Benson, a staff writer for the Toledo Blade for 58 years. When she died in 2002 at aged 96, she was still writing a weekly column for the Blade.

• Frank Lebowitz is a lifelong fan. As is Laura Lippman, a mystery writer I admire.

• The first Nancy Drew book was called The Secret of the Old Clock, a common Trivial Pursuit question.

What I Didn't Know:

• Nancy Drew is a big goody-goody, a All (Middle)-American girl seized by a need to snoop. Unlike her younger counterpart Harriet the Spy (also an In Character subject) who grew up in privilege in Manhattan and feels entitled to her sleuthing. Both are held up as icons of feminism in children but even the girls NPR interviewed for the Nancy Drew piece found her perfectionism annoying.

• Those same girls pay a lot of attention to how Nancy dresses. This could be a gender thing because I don't ever remember taking sartorial cues from Encyclopedia Brown or The Hardy Boys.

• Nancy Drew's car (a roadster) is nearly as iconic as her. In more recent titles, the car has been changed to a hybrid.

Brief Summaries of Public Radio #2: This American Life (6/13/2008)

Show: This American Life

Episode Date: June 13, 2008, "The Truth Will Out" 

Length: 60 Minutes

Producer: WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International

What I already knew:

• Israeli author Etgar Keret returns to TAL with a story read by actor Dermot Mulroney. Keret had previously been on the program in a 2005 episode called "Know Your Enemy."

• Investigative journalist Lawrence Wright has talked to more members of Al-Queda and their associates than just about any journalist alive. He won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11.

What I didn't:

• Under the pretense of using him as a source, the FBI wiretapped Mr. Wright's phones. He wrote about in in a New Yorker article titled "The Spymaster."

• The US intelligence community doesn't have nearly enough agents or analysts who can speak fluent Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu, the languages most used by the terrorist groups it now targets.

Notes: When working at a slow, data entry job in the late 1990s, I listened to 4 episodes of TAL via their web archive every day. Far as I know, they were one of the first public radio shows to do this. But they were quite slow coming to podcasting, so there's probably an 18 month dead zone in my relationship with the show.

Now the show is the most popular podcast on iTunes, which is costing WBEZ a ton of cheddar. They're fundraising for it as we speak. I'm probably going to toss a few coins their way.

Brief Summaries of Public Radio #1: Marketplace (6/6/2008)

Show: Marketplace

Episode Date: June 6, 2008

Length: 30 Minutes

Producer: American Public Media

What I already knew:

• Oil topped $139 a barrel and is projected to hit $150 by July 4. Plan on taking out a mortgage to own a car.

• Barrack Obama is demanding the Democratic National Committee not take a dime from lobbyists. Does this mean the shift toward lots of small campaign contributions could be permanent?

What I didn't:

• Nearly 50,000 jobs were lost in May, making it the largest job in unemployment since 1986.

• Thanks to a meager job market and lean economic times overall, Los Angeles has a growing population of working people living out of their vehicles.

• The horseracing industry is in big trouble. Why? Gambling revenues are way down and the rise of OTB means fewer folks at the track.

Notes: I've subscribed and unsubcribed to the Marketplace podcast more times than I can count. Since the show airs in the afternoon, I always get it a day late and, since my life doesn't revolve around financial news, a 4 day-old episode loses its appeal a lot quicker than that. But I love the show and, this time, may have found a solution: I always listen to around 4 o'clock, right around when it normally airs, even if I've only got a podcast. Since I'm usually taking a break then anyway, I use the time to answer email, do dishes or putter around.

So far, so good.

Brief Summaries of Public Radio: An Introduction

I listen to an obscene amount of public radio, mostly in podcast form, but also on 91.7 KALW, the local outfit here in San Francisco and KCRW in Los Angeles via streaming. At any given time my iPod has been 95-110 unlistened-to episodes of radio programs. I also use Radioshift to grab shows outside the Bay Area that don't podcast and have an online subscription to XM.

To say I have an addiction is being kind. I haven't even mentioned my erotic dreams staring Korva Coleman. Or how I would probably switch teams for Kai Ryssdal.

And yet bottom candy bowls of information (phrase cribbed from Merlin Mann) do not make me happy or productive. They make me want to yell "shut up!" at strangers and hide behind bookcases. Like my friend Josh said and I paraphrase "It can't be all content in or you'll explode. You've got to do something with this massive intake of information. You've got to push it out"

So here's my idea: Whenever I listen to a public radio program, I'm going to write up a short summary of it, what I learned and what I already knew, complete with links. Use this info for a regular injection of factoids, NPR-Cliff Notes or to impress at parties.Your choice.

I'll post these summaries here under the headline "Brief Summaries of Public Radio" here and on Twitter (add me to receive). Also send along suggestions for your favorite public radio program although I can't promise I'll add it to regular rotation. 110 is a big pile of audio to dig out from under.