I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts – maybe a little less than back in Normal Times when I was commuting 1.5-2.0 hours a day, but if I’m putterin’, I’m pod-listenin’.

I find it wearying to envelope myself in coronavirus or political podcasts these days. I’m not sure why. Maybe you have some ideas. In any case, I’ve been turning to comedy more and more.

Here’s a list, in alphabetical order. I am not necessarily proud of any of these.

• Alchemy This. Kevin Pollack – yes, that Kevin Pollack – has assembled a troupe of improvisers who do three scenes in each hour. At their best, they find an absurd narrative coherence that is mindblowing and reminiscent of Firesign Theatre’s scripted pieces. At their worst, I can’t make sense of the flow of the scene – too many of their voices sound the same to me – but still find the moments of it funny.
• Behind the Bastards. Each episode tells the story of some despicable person, often someone I have never heard of. It’s not flatout comedy, but the tone is comedic. Often excellent.
• The Dollop. Much like Behind the Bastards, but not focused purely on bastards. One of the two comedians who put it together reads an essay about some odd incident in history while the other reacts while hearing it for the first time. Ranges from hilarious to never quite getting up to comedic speed. And it’s entirely possible that the comic style is not exactly to your taste. It’s not exactly to mine.
• Good One. This is one of my favorites. Each episode interviews a comedian for an hour about one single joke of theirs. The interviewer is a total comedy nerd, and the interviews can be very revealing about the comic process.
• How did this get made? Usually recorded live at a theatre, three funny people riff about some terrible movie. Funny bad taste all around.
• Improv4Humans. Matt Besser’s improv troupe improvs scenes, much like Alchemy This. I personally find it less consistent, but it came be very good. For example, the archival show with Zach Woods, recently re-released, has some very funny stuff on it.
• Mike and Tom Eat Snacks. This ended a couple of years ago, but its hundred episodes of Michael Ian Black and Tom Cavanagh are still available. The two of them, unscripted, review snack foods, a timeless topic. (Spoiler: The snack reviews are just a pretense.)
• Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. As a tote-bag carrying NPR supporter (and once time serial All Things Considered commentator), this one is obvious. It’s also consistently funny.
• WTF. Marc Maron’s podcast used to focus on comedians but has expanded wildly. Which is good, because he is an excellent interviewer. The recent interview with Dan Ackroyd, for example, is great. It turns out that the real Dan Ackroyd is like a Dan Ackroyd character.

I also listen to many other podcasts that don’t talk about current events but are not comedic. Some are fantastic. But it’s comedy tonight!

What would you add to this list?

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My book Everyday Chaos launched last week. Yay! As part of the launch, I gave some talks and interviews. Here are three of the conversations, three three great interviewers:

Leonard Lopate, WBAI

Hidden Forces podcast

Berkman Klein book talk, and conversation with Joi Ito:

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Steve Thomas [twitter: @stevelibrarian] of the Circulating Ideas podcast interviews me about the messiness of meaning, library innovation, and educating against fake news.

You can listen to it here.

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On Friday I was part of the This Week in Law vidcast, hosted by my it’s-been-too-long friend Denise Howell [twitter: dhowell], along with Nina Paley [twitter: gorgeous + righteous. You must see it. That is an order.) It was a non-lawyerly discussion, which I was relieved to find out not because I dislike lawyers but because I could not have participated except by intermittently interjecting, “I object! On the grounds of say what now?”

Anyway, I can’t remember everything we talked about, except I know there was stuff about the effficacy of online advertising, the emerging norms for privacy, Amazon’s weaponized drones, Google Real-Death Bumper Cars, and nude photos of Robert Scoble.

You can get the vidcast/audiocast here. It’s a 1:35 long, where the first digit represents HOURS.

A Nina sample:

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I know it’s the day after the day after Christmas, but I’m still going to give you a gift. A gift of Schiff.

I heard Andras Schiff on the radio a couple of days ago and it reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed his discussions of Beethoven’s piano sonatas before he’s performed them. He plays with passion but has an analytic understanding of the compositions. And, no, I’m not sure why I used “but” as the conjunction in that sentence.

Anyway, you can download the lectures here, thanks to The Guardian. (Thank you, The Guardian!)

Schiff said on the radio the other day that as he gets older, his understanding increases but his technical ability decreases. It makes me hope that we get some software that lets a master like him manipulate musical notation to produce a digital version of the performance that he would have liked to be able to give. Or will it turn out that there are so many variables for how you strike a note and string them together that such software is like wishing that Meryl Streep could instruct a digitizal avatar to act as well as she does?

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I’m a little bit proud that Radio Berkman is on The Verge’s list of top 9 technology podcasts.

Radio Berkman is produced by Daniel Dennis Jones (twitter: blanket) who does a fabulous job and deserves the credit for this. The podcasts are generally 20-30 mins, although they go longer when it makes sense to. Generally they are interviews with people passing through the Center. (I am the interviewer in many of them.)

Yay for Radio Berkman!

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The latest podcast in the Digital Campus series focuses solely on the current state of the Digital Public Library of America. The discussion includes Dan Cohen who has just accepted the position of Executive Director of the DPLA, which is just wonderful news. Not only does he have a rare combination of skills and experiences — ever hear of Zotero, hmm? — but he is also — and there’s no other way of putting this — nice.

Also on the podcast is Nicholas Carr, who wrote an excellent, skeptical (or at least questioning) article for MIT Tech Review on the DPLA a year ago. Also, Mills Kelly and Tom Scheinfeldt. And me.

Dan explains what the DPLA is. Nick wonders if if the DPLA will hurt public libraries. I try to explain why I think it won’t. Amanda suggests the DPLA is the Mr. Potato Head of libraries. I thought it was a good discussion.

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I was on On the Media this morning. I love OTM, a radio show that loves the Internet, and I love Brooke, so this was a thrill. In fact, I was so smitten, and Brooke’s questions were so good and hard — not antagonistic, just thoughtful and hard to answer — that I gave barely coherent replies. Fortunately, they managed to find 6.5 minutes in which I didn’t ramble off the pike too far.

Also, AOL TV ran a 1.5 minute piece with me in their “You’ve Got…” series. Embarrassing story: In the first take, I confidently looked in the camera and gave their standard opening: “This is David Weinberger, and you have…zettabytes!” The friendly folks (I had a good time) politely asked me to try again. I thought I’d said it with appropriate verve, but it turns out that with a two-word opening, I still managed to get it wrong. It’s “You’ve got…” not “You have…” (In the next take, I nailed those two words, the professional that I am.)

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I’ve posted a brief video interview with Avi Warshavsky of the Center for Educational Technology, the leading textbook publisher in Israel. Avi is a thoughtful and innovative software guy who has been experimenting with new ways of structuring textbooks.

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