UtneCast

Download Standard PodcastWallace Shawn is perhaps best known for his roles in commercial blockbuster films like The Princess Bride (where he played the conniving Vizzini) or the Toy Story movies (where he's the voice of Rex the dinosaur). The more refined among you may know him from Woody Allen's Manhattan or the film My Dinner With Andre. Shawn is also a playwright and an essayist. His essays—all of them—are collected in a book published last year by Haymarket Books and called, rather succinctly: Essays. The late historian Howard Zinn called the book "deceptively simple, fiercely honest ... and provocative." Shawn is a radical, and his essays are blunt critiques of class and power. I talked to him about his essays and the evolution of his politics.

Download Standard PodcastLinguistic anthropologist Flagg Miller spent years transcribing the contents of Osama bin Laden's personal cassette collection. In the May-June 2010 issue of Utne Reader, we reprinted an article on Miller's work from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's an excerpt: The tapes surfaced in December 2001, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, when CNN acquired them from a prominent family in bin Laden’s former neighborhood. CNN turned the tapes over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which eventually deemed them of limited intelligence value. The FBI then passed them along to the Afghan Media Project at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. That’s when Miller’s phone rang. It made sense to call him. Miller, a linguistic anthropologist, is fluent in Arabic and was working on his first book, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen. When the bin Laden tapes arrived, they were dusty, poorly marked, and crammed haphazardly into cardboard boxes. Of the more than 1,500 tapes, 23 feature bin Laden himself; the rest are an assortment of sermons, lectures, and scripted melodramas. They were recorded at weddings, in mosques, and in the backs of taxicabs. For several years, Miller would fly to Massachusetts and spend days transcribing, translating, trying to make sense of what he heard. In this episode of the Utnecast, Utne Reader Editor in Chief David Schimke talks to Flagg Miller about the tapes and what he's learned from them.

Download Utnecast: Weatherman Paul Douglas on Global WarmingMeteorologist Paul Douglas knows that the climate is changing and that people are to blame. In this podcast, the veteran weatherman talks about the science behind global warming and why other meteorologists have a hard time believing it.

Download Standard PodcastImagine a city transformed. High-rises become layers of indoor farms that grow produce 365 days per year. Skeletons of old houses sheathed in plastic are now greenhouses. The goal is immediate access to food. That’s what investigative journalist Mark Dowie imagines for Detroit. But this isn’t some utopian vision. Dowie visited Detroit and traveled around with residents there who are transforming their city. He reported his findings in an article we reprinted in our November-December 2009 issue from the online art and politics magazine Guernica. The article was called Food Among the Ruins. Jeff Severns Guntzel spoke with Dowie about what he found in Detroit.

Download Standard PodcastSenior editor Jeff Severns Guntzel talks to the drummer of the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda about living through three wars.

Download Standard PodcastNovelist and essayist Arundhati Roy turns her critical eye to her home country of India in her latest collection of essays. Fieldnotes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers is published by Haymarket Books.

Download Standard PodcastIn Jailing the American Dream, reprinted in our March-April 2010 issue, investigative reporter and policy analyst Tom Barry documents the collision of profits, poverty, and injustice in America's borderland prisons. In this episode of the UtneCast,Barry talks about his quest and the obstacles along the way.

For his latest book, Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco traveled to Gaza to find eyewitnesses to an Israeli army massacre of Palestinians in 1956. To get the story, Sacco also had to confront the history being written minute by minute in Gaza.

Download Howard Zinn Talks About His New DocumentaryOn Sunday, December 13, the History Channel will air The People Speak, a documentary based on historian Howard Zinn's book Voices of a People's History, a collection of 200 documents and speeches that serve as the raw material to Zinn's classic book A People's History of the United States.The People Speak features dramatic and musical performances by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, Marisa Tomei, Sandrah Oh, Matt Damon and more. I asked Zinn to pick a speech he'd like to have performed for President Obama and who he'd pick to read it. He picked a piece read by David Strathairn and we've included a recording of the Strathairn reading here. Music by the Bombay Sweets. Enjoy!