Category: Culture

Douglas Murray on The War on the West: Race, Politics, and Culture

The Michael Shermer Show | 3 May 2022 | 0h 59m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Douglas Murray about his book The War on the West. Argues that many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. Discusses whether at least some of the criticisms of Western civilization are a corrective to past wrongs, critical race theory and racism, colonialism and decolonizing cultural things, anti-Semitism, objectivity and the search for truth, and reparations.

How Chinese Language is the Core of its Culture: A Conversation with Jing Tsu

Talk Cocktail | 4 February 2022 | 0h 22m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Jing Tsu about her book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. Describes how the Chinese language has been reinvented, iterated and adapted to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

Chad Orzel: A Brief History of Timekeeping

Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning | 4 February 2022 | 0h 54m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Chad Orzel about his book A Brief History of Timekeeping. Discusses cultural, engineering, historical and archaeological aspects of timekeeping; astronomical calendars; water clocks; how Greenwich Mean Time emerged; the cultural changes wrought by standardised time; and the effects of relativity and gravity on time.

Razib’s Substack is a joy to read.

Oliver Roeder on the Enduring Appeal of Chess and Other Games

Perpetual Chess Podcast | 25 January 2022 | 1h 08m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Oliver Roeder about his book Seven Games, a Human History. Backgrounds the history and current competitive contexts of Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Go, Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. Discusses why people love games, why people love chess, the methods and costs of achieving high proficiency in Scrabble, and how AI is changing games.

Markets, Growth, and the Arts

The New Bazaar | 27 January 2022 | 1h 12m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Tyler Cowen about his book In Praise of Commercial Culture. Argues that markets and commerce offer the best societal arrangement for promoting creativity and cultural novelty. Discusses the effects on creativity of streaming, smartphones, and more recently Tiktok and NFTs.

Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon

Solvable | 13 December 2021 | 0h 32m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
An Excerpt from Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam. Discusses Paul Simon’s controversial journey to apartheid-era South Africa to record the distinctive sounds for his Graceland album.

Erin Meyer on The Culture Map

Armchair Expert | 18 February 2021 | 1h 21m | Listen Later | Spotify
Interview with Erin Meyer about her book The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. Discusses how feedback is interpreted differently in various cultures, who the most direct and confrontational culture is, and how to move beyond stereotypes to understand the more complex issues we are unaware are affecting us.