1) I am finally catching up on Gimlet’s Every Little Thing and The Senate Whisperer was a delightful look at how the unsexy sounding world of parliamentarians can be a life saver for any organization.
You might learn: Out of any kind of meetings, those with dog breeders or homeowner associations come the closest to breaking out into physical violence.
2) Civics 101 has perfected extracting the maximum amount of useful info from experts in the shortest amount of time. Their Federalism episode looks at the tug of war for power between central and state/provincial governments.
You might learn: The 20th century has seen a gradual centralization of power in the U.S., but one important aspect of ensuring state power is their ability to experiment to see what actually works.
3) Word for Word is an Australian podcast from Macquarie Dictionary and their recent episode Spin and Speechify looks at all the new political words that have cropped up over the past few years. There’s also a great interview with a long time Trump impressionist on how he has had to drastically change his impression over the years.
You might learn:: It’s almost impossible to control which new words gain traction and there is a long history of failed attempts by politicians to thrust new terms into popular culture.
4) I love well produced narrative podcasts that narrow their stories to one topic. There's 99 Percent Invisible for design, Planet Money for economics, 20 Thousand Hertz for sound. And now there is Sum of All Parts for math. Shoal Attack is the story of how looking at the behavior of large groups of animals helped Australia win the Netball championship vs their long time nemesis, New Zealand.
You might learn:: Collective Behavior is a new field of scientific research that quantifies how and when the sum is greater than the parts.
PODSKETCHES
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The first episode of a new indie podcast called Ministry of Ideas, which is "devoted to exploring the philosophy, history and ideas of our world". Here is one thing I learned from The Shape of History.
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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is one of the few things I read in middle school that I remember clearly. It's a fairly short story that has a pretty mind bending ending. Check it out on the Audible app under the Masters of Fiction channel or read it here free. #inktober
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VIDEOS, ARTICLES, AND OTHER LINKS
The Sum of All Parts episode mentioned above was the first time I had ever heard of netball. Here's a video explaining what it is. For other regional but extremely popular sports you've probably never heard of, check out Ireland's Gaelic Football (rugby + soccer + football) and Hurling (lacrosse + baseball + field hockey).
If you want to feel dirty and fascinated at the same time, this latest video from Kurzgesagt about the trillions of microorganisms that live on you (but mostly in you) will do the trick.
p.s. I just figured out how to make an image show up if you share this Mailchimp link on social media. So now it will actually look nice! At the top of this email, you can click 'view this email in your browser" and that link is now very shareable if you are so inclined :)
That's all for this week!
Connect with me @erikthejones on twitter and if you've learned anything interesting, please forward this link to any curious natured friends or family so they can subscribe. Many thanks!
Erik
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