I’ve been listening to all of Darknet Diaries this year and it’s been amazing. Hoping 2022 will be filled with similar gripping brain food. Happy new year.
Have to recommend the podcast from No Agenda. No Agenda, a show where former VJ Adam Curry and columnist John C. Dvorak, two experts from the media industry, have a conversation about politics. Twice a week they deconstruct the news cycle and give insights into the narrative of the mainstream media, political campaigns and the government.
This is not a great. I used to listen to it late 2000s-early 2010s era and honestly it was one of the worst podcasts I have heard when it comes to begging for money. Think the Wikipedia call to donations banner times 20. Whenever there used to be a week where they didn't get as many donation as they expected the hosts (esp Adam) would literally throw a fit on air acting pissy and threatening to quit the show. All the whining about the donations completely turned me off and have never looked back, also not to mention a good 20-30 mins of each episode was a glorified add/call for donations.
I don't have time to get into this, but I think it's pretty embarrassing that this podcast is still recommended. It's not "media deconstruction", it's two out-of-touch, low information conservatives repeatedly being incorrect and then changing their narrative to fit whatever is currently popular in conspiratorial conservative media.
i would agree. i was a listener from 2007 to 2017, the only value that they have provided for me was the obscure and the absurdist humour with jingles and banter.
it does not make you smarter or more aware of what’s happening, but you can have an occasional laugh.
A HN comment turned me onto this podcast several years ago and its one of the ones that has endured and is part of my regular rotation. The hosts present and comment on the coverage of various current events in the broadcast press. Because so much of current events is political, there are plenty of opportunities to quibble regarding opinion and some people get annoyed at their style that lampoons the morning zoo formay. But, I get value from their aggregation and analysis, since I don't own a TV and am kind of insulated from the day-to-day press narrative.
So as to not post again in the thread, Le Show by Harry Schearer is a political satire radio show from a man who used to voice a ton of characters for The Simpsons. Hes been doing his show for over 30 years and its still very entertaining. I have listened to it for the majority of my life, when it used to broadcast on the radio (it still does). Give it a listen!
I used to listen to This Week in Virology every week, but I found that their scientific, er, restraint and skepticism of results unless and until they were Peer Reviewed and Randomly Controlled with huge sample sizes meant the info I was getting from the podcast was perpetually 1~4 months behind.
Granted you listen to TWiV exclusively for hits, not for misses, but since I’m not a doctor myself and I was listening to keep abreast of the pandemic, wildly out-of-date info and dismissive attitudes toward anything without an RCT weren’t doing it for me.
Security Now is quite a jewel of a podcast. I admire Steve Gibson for paying for transcriptions of each of his episodes [0]. That way, you can actually search for something you remembered being mentioned in an episode.
Good production values, the hosts and guests are great, and I love that they’re long enough to really get in depth on whatever subject they’re covering. Big back catalog as well.
Particularly interesting was the recent episodes on edibles, lobster, and smoke, but I can’t think of one that I didn’t enjoy and listen all the way through.
I like to listen to Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan when they have guests that I'm interested in. Between the two of them, it's a rare opportunity to see some really interesting people being themselves.
One very unconventional suggestion for HN but I really enjoyed the "Trash Taste Podcast". The three hosts have really funny stories and talk about a variety of interesting topics, more than just Anime, despite being branded as an Anime podcast. They also bring in a great selection of guests.
Fall of Civilizations podcast is great, and I also loved the Sumerian episode. I had no idea they predated even Egypt for so much; giving us writing, accounting, base-60 numbers for time and angles, and so many myths (especially the flood) that seeped into all western religion.
I started contributing to a cuneiform Python repo. With Unicode, it’s incredible to see symbols from 5000+ years ago in your terminal!
Not necessarily meaningful for technologists, but Joe Rogan's interview of North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park, is up there with reading one of the great fictional dystopian novels (1984, brave new world, fahrenheit451).
I'd be careful that you yourself don't try exaggerate your claims either. In the exact source your article links describing "serious inconsistencies in her story":
He has capitalistic incentives to keep good ties with senior executives of North Korean government agencies and enterprises. Here's an interesting tweet regarding the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act:
On the whole, he seems to think the Chinese government is better than the US, to which I'll say you're entitled to your own opinions.
In the "serious inconsistencies" article he focuses on one statement:
> “Every morning at riversides like this you can see dead bodies floating. If you go out in the morning, they are there.”
His rebuttal came with a:
> a photo on his Twitter account that appears to show children happily at play in a North Korean river.
But that original statement in the article comes with an asterisk stating that the reporting was erroneous:
> *Update: It appears the newspaper misquoted Park. What she actually said was: “Every morning and every … like … some riverside like this [gesturing out the window] you can see the dead bodies floating, and if you go out in the morning and just people dead there.” It should also be noted that the BBC did in fact film a body in the Tumen river on the Chinese side of the border in 2008.
I don't doubt there were exaggerations of the story from Park. But the source of the accusation has a rather extreme personality himself.
Lastly, you should at least read the article you linked all the way through the section "UPDATE: A Response from Yeonmi Park" until the very end. I would be more surprised to see no exaggerations from a child who left a dictatorship surviving under nutritional deficiencies. Lastly, if you have ever written journalistic articles, you would know reporters oftentimes take aggressive stances to support their own arguments for the sake of publicity. I personally find the claims made in the article to be a bit reaching for straws.
As for myself, I don't think it matters if a few details were embellished, when the message still holds as a warning about authoritarian governments, generational forgetfulness, and a climate of increasing censorship.
To me, what was important about the podcast was the realization that the things described in dystopian novels are not just works of fiction, nor events of the past, but that it is happening somewhere in our world at this very moment, and that there is a very good possibility that the US can fall into such a reality as well given the increasing levels of censorship and misinformation that various parties all seem to be fighting for in order to control the minds of others.
What really scares me is that everyday people like you and me read news like this and go back to our living our normal lives afterwards as if it does not exist, and that reality goes back to being fiction as if it never existed when in fact it is the reality we live in.
Hey thanks for your thoughtful engagement on this!
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in the middle of Siberia, and witnessed the “glory” of a totalitarian communist government first hand. It was a different government, but also to a much more mature age than what Park saw herself. Since move abroad, I’ve seen “testimonials” from people with my background that were not technically wrong, but certainly were purified to fall into a specific spectrum of truth that is rewarded by the Western media. What strikes me the most is the way Park responded to the article - essentially she didn’t deny/engage any objections, and said she needs to review her (primary) sources. This position is as strong of an admission of “I don’t actually know what I’m talking about; these are folk stories I heard from someone else” as I’ve seen from my fellow countrymen and women. It’s not wrong, it’s “not even wrong”.
It's difficult to compare regimes based on individual narratives - in the USSR example, we have The Gulag Archipelago that is extremely rigorous, popular, and compelling (I read it in both the original and translated versions), but historically questionable, and the author's wife called it "folklore". For North Korea, the Wikipedia page for Ms. Park says this: "Many North Korean defectors accounts of North Korea, both good and bad, contradict claims Park has made. She has been accused of exaggeration and tall tales by some."
I looked into it. No one ever pointed to any significant discrepancies, not even on the wiki page. Does it really matter if her fathers was released a month earlier? Or that she mixed up some mountains names? I suspect she is being attacked for the political views she developed while living in US. Similar story with Ayana Hirsi Ali. Honestly, in todays climate Solzhenitsyn himself would have been cancelled within minutes
* Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience
* Park says her father was sentenced to 17 or 18 years in prison. Her mother told us he was initially sentenced to a year, but later it was increased to ten years.
* Park’s mother told us prosecutors interrogated her on and off for about a year – sometimes at home in Hyesan and sometimes elsewhere [...] But, in a recent BBC radio interview, Park claimed her mother was imprisoned for six months
* When she spoke with us, Park told of how her and her sister, at just nine and eleven, were left to fend for themselves after their parents were jailed. “We have shower and wash our clothes there and then we go to the mountain to get the grass to eat,” she said. But, in the BBC radio interview, Park claimed her sister went to live at her uncle’s house
* .... the host of the show says to Park’s mother, “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju (Park’s pseudonym) says, ‘Oh that never happened…’
* The story of her escape has multiple versions with incompatible fundamentals (like who escaped, when, and how), and increasing in brutality over time.
The foundation of her story is a collection of self-contradicting childhood memories, making this case closer to the narration arc of Life of Pi (where the viewer is left guessing if the story was true or they were in the imagination of the protagonist). Even recent "vetted" "auto-biographical" stories like Lone Survivor can get so carried away in presenting the feeling of the situation that they sacrifice the facts, and we must be careful when trying to extract facts from the other side of the communication.
No Such Thing As A Bad Movie is consistently entertaining and has helped me find some truly weird bad movies, like The Legend of Simon Conjurer and Night Train to Terror. It's my go to when I want to learn about bad movies but don't have the option to watch video (in which case I watch Best of the Worst).
Both are very well-made and entertaining. The second might actually be the highest quality series of lectures I’ve ever heard (including sources in person like at university).
Besides a few other that have been mentioned, I like You're Wrong About (https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1112270.rss). It covers ... let's say pop culture history, and how we often are ... completely wrong about how certain events really happened.
Atlas Obscura have a podcast, too: https://www.atlasobscura.com/podcast If you like the website, you're probably going to like the podcast as well.
If you know German, I can recommend Sternengeschichten (about astronomy) and Einschlafen Mit Wikipedia (they read articles from the German Wikipedia in a very quiet voice, great for falling asleep, as the title suggests).
Of those already mentioned, Fall Of Civilizations deserves special praise.
80 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadhttps://www.noagendashow.net/
Spinning the call for donations into a segment of content this way is pretty brilliant.
it does not make you smarter or more aware of what’s happening, but you can have an occasional laugh.
So as to not post again in the thread, Le Show by Harry Schearer is a political satire radio show from a man who used to voice a ton of characters for The Simpsons. Hes been doing his show for over 30 years and its still very entertaining. I have listened to it for the majority of my life, when it used to broadcast on the radio (it still does). Give it a listen!
https://www.wwno.org/show/le-show
https://malicious.life/
and other good ones.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
https://theintelligence.economist.com/
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/
https://www.newscientist.com/podcasts/
https://twit.tv/shows/security-now
https://www.hanselminutes.com/
and here
https://www.securitydegreehub.com/best-cybersecurity-podcast...
Granted you listen to TWiV exclusively for hits, not for misses, but since I’m not a doctor myself and I was listening to keep abreast of the pandemic, wildly out-of-date info and dismissive attitudes toward anything without an RCT weren’t doing it for me.
[0]: https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
Good production values, the hosts and guests are great, and I love that they’re long enough to really get in depth on whatever subject they’re covering. Big back catalog as well.
Particularly interesting was the recent episodes on edibles, lobster, and smoke, but I can’t think of one that I didn’t enjoy and listen all the way through.
Also, “In our time”, which is my go-to for standalone episodes.
Always Sunny in Philadelphia podcast (if you love the show)
Two awesome Aussies talk about all kinds of insane stuff. Coast to Coast Art Bell style.
I especially enjoyed https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA, as I had no idea the first cities were already so advanced and lasted for so many centuries.
I started contributing to a cuneiform Python repo. With Unicode, it’s incredible to see symbols from 5000+ years ago in your terminal!
𒉢𒁓𒆷 𒆠 𒆤!
https://github.com/wanderingstan/cuneifyplus
Yes, it's a bit trite, but actually thinking about the media I consume is very enlightening.
https://www.bloomberg.com/oddlots-podcast
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0G5o6GYjWgbSvKG3W2W2xO
> https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/north-korea-defectors-and-th...
The rebuttals come from a Swiss-born businessman, Felix Abt, who I would say is an "interesting" guy himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Abt
https://twitter.com/felixabt
He has capitalistic incentives to keep good ties with senior executives of North Korean government agencies and enterprises. Here's an interesting tweet regarding the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act:
https://twitter.com/felixabt/status/1471787670003228680
On the whole, he seems to think the Chinese government is better than the US, to which I'll say you're entitled to your own opinions.
In the "serious inconsistencies" article he focuses on one statement:
> “Every morning at riversides like this you can see dead bodies floating. If you go out in the morning, they are there.”
His rebuttal came with a:
> a photo on his Twitter account that appears to show children happily at play in a North Korean river.
But that original statement in the article comes with an asterisk stating that the reporting was erroneous:
> *Update: It appears the newspaper misquoted Park. What she actually said was: “Every morning and every … like … some riverside like this [gesturing out the window] you can see the dead bodies floating, and if you go out in the morning and just people dead there.” It should also be noted that the BBC did in fact film a body in the Tumen river on the Chinese side of the border in 2008.
I don't doubt there were exaggerations of the story from Park. But the source of the accusation has a rather extreme personality himself.
Lastly, you should at least read the article you linked all the way through the section "UPDATE: A Response from Yeonmi Park" until the very end. I would be more surprised to see no exaggerations from a child who left a dictatorship surviving under nutritional deficiencies. Lastly, if you have ever written journalistic articles, you would know reporters oftentimes take aggressive stances to support their own arguments for the sake of publicity. I personally find the claims made in the article to be a bit reaching for straws.
As for myself, I don't think it matters if a few details were embellished, when the message still holds as a warning about authoritarian governments, generational forgetfulness, and a climate of increasing censorship.
To me, what was important about the podcast was the realization that the things described in dystopian novels are not just works of fiction, nor events of the past, but that it is happening somewhere in our world at this very moment, and that there is a very good possibility that the US can fall into such a reality as well given the increasing levels of censorship and misinformation that various parties all seem to be fighting for in order to control the minds of others.
What really scares me is that everyday people like you and me read news like this and go back to our living our normal lives afterwards as if it does not exist, and that reality goes back to being fiction as if it never existed when in fact it is the reality we live in.
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in the middle of Siberia, and witnessed the “glory” of a totalitarian communist government first hand. It was a different government, but also to a much more mature age than what Park saw herself. Since move abroad, I’ve seen “testimonials” from people with my background that were not technically wrong, but certainly were purified to fall into a specific spectrum of truth that is rewarded by the Western media. What strikes me the most is the way Park responded to the article - essentially she didn’t deny/engage any objections, and said she needs to review her (primary) sources. This position is as strong of an admission of “I don’t actually know what I’m talking about; these are folk stories I heard from someone else” as I’ve seen from my fellow countrymen and women. It’s not wrong, it’s “not even wrong”.
* The British History Podcast
* The History of English Podcast
Both are very well-made and entertaining. The second might actually be the highest quality series of lectures I’ve ever heard (including sources in person like at university).
Atlas Obscura have a podcast, too: https://www.atlasobscura.com/podcast If you like the website, you're probably going to like the podcast as well.
If you know German, I can recommend Sternengeschichten (about astronomy) and Einschlafen Mit Wikipedia (they read articles from the German Wikipedia in a very quiet voice, great for falling asleep, as the title suggests).
Of those already mentioned, Fall Of Civilizations deserves special praise.
https://podcastaddict.com/episode/57657880