Review of SciPod: The New Scientist's Podcast

Podcast: SciPod

Feed URL: http://www.newscientist.com/podcastfeed.ns

Website: http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns

Rating: 5 stars out of 5

Appropriate for science enthusiasts, environmentalists, news junkies, Anglophiles, skeptics, students, and teachers

All good things must come to and end. And so it was with SciPod, the New Scientist's podcast. For a year and a half, the New Scientist, a British popular science magazine, brought high-quality science reporting weekly to podcast listeners around the world. SciPod was simply the best popular science podcast out there. The show was a multinational production, professionally hosted from London by Caroline Williams and from Boston by Ivan Semeniuk. Music by the Damn Neighbors and others filled the gaps and helped the show assume an informal air. Still, the content was sometimes challenging for amateurs. The show never shied away from tackling complicated concepts.

It is a shame that SciPod has gone off the air. The exchange between Semeniuk and Last Word column editor Mick O'Hare was one of the better aspects of the podcast. In the segment, O'Hare would answer questions from New Scientist readers dealing with mundane mysteries, such as why bananas turn brown in the refrigerator or, in a particularly British conundrum, why sheep refuse to simply move to one side when confronted by a car attempting to pass. Banter between Semeniuk and O'Hare was always friendly, entertaining, and full of bad jokes.

Valerie Jameson charmingly narrated a weekly science news roundup in her Scottish accent, never heard in news programs in America.

The reasons for SciPod's demise, however, are easy to understand. A podcast of such quality must have cost a good deal of money to make. Semeniuk intimated as much in the last weekly podcast on May 11. It was a marketing device conceived in the best spirit of the Internet: build something and offer it for free, and people will listen.

And yet SciPod was most certainly a marketing device. Listeners were reminded that these articles and more are covered in greater depth in this week's issue of the New Scientist. Such podcasts abound on the Web, but most have more marketing than content, and so are pointless to listen to.

SciPod was an exception. In the end, producers of the podcast must have asked themselves why they bothered offering so much original content free to nonsubscribers. The number of subscriptions may not have increased due to the podcast, or what must have been the high cost of production did not exceed the return on investment. Why buy the cow? as the saying goes.

If you missed SciPod, you can still get archived shows at the Podcast Directory. The publisher promises “occasional in-depth reports,” the first, a timely and useful survey of climate change, its myths, and the debate about the topic in the United States, appeared on July 2. This was a promising start. Perhaps some good things don't have to end after all.

Review of Pepys' Diary

Pepys' Diary, by Samuel Pepys

Narrated by Kenneth Branagh

Abridged; 9 Hours

HighBridge Company

$30 U.S.

Copyright 1994

ISBN: 1-56511-134-6 (cassette; also on CD)

Listen to a clip

My rating: 4 stars out of 5

Suitable for: history enthusiasts, anglophiles, thespians, Kenneth Branagh fans

Kenneth Branagh must feel he belongs in the 17th century, so competently does he narrate the diction of the era. The listener will have little trouble following Pepys' (pronounced “peeps”) tale of a bureaucrat's dissipatory existence in Tudor England.

Branagh, film enthusiasts may recall, is the founder of the Renaissance Theatre Company and has starred in and directed numerous adaptations of Shakespeare's plays for the silver screen, notably 1989's Henry V, 1993's Much Ado About Nothing, 1996's Hamlet, and 2000's Love's Labour's Lost.

Pepys, it turns out, was a theater junkie, constantly vowing to spend less money on plays, which he sometimes attended nightly. He saw a great many of Shakespeare's plays. The listener may note the amusement in Branagh's voice when Pepys pans A Midsummer Night's Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”

Samuel Pepys kept his diary for nearly ten years, from 1660 to 1669, starting in his late twenties. He gave up writing them, much to our regret, when his eyesight began to fail under the strain of writing by candlelight. Pepys was commissioner of the navy, a corrupt bureaucrat, which was not unusual for the time, and a prolific philanderer. No belle dame or demoiselle was beyond his desires, from the wives of noblemen to his wife's teenage handmaid.

The manner in which Pepys kept his diary is rather curious. He wrote it in a sort of shorthand and when he describes his sexual liaisons, and there were many, he reverts to a mixture of French, Spanish, and what I assume is Latin. A speaker of any of the languages would have little problem discerning what he is describing. The rest of us can guess. Branagh's voice slips into a lower register as he reads these scenes, becoming throaty and sensual, effectively evoking Pepys' grasping desire.

Pepys must have kept his diaries locked away, as he was married to a literate French woman whom he assumed was a Huguenot, but who later confessed to him being a secret Catholic, a big deal at the time. Using a pidgin French to describe sexual encounters seems an odd choice given the circumstances. In any case she discovers his dabbling with her maid, and threatens to slit her nose, which seems to be a practice of the time.

We are lucky that Pepys had a catbird seat on some of the salient events of the time, including the London Plague, the Great Fire, and war. Pepys also described the more commonplace: a handful of executions, infestations of lice and bedbugs, political intrigue, and the lives of courtiers and commoners.

After spending more than nine hours in Pepys' world as performed sympathetically by Branagh, one grows to like the lout (Pepys) despite his utter lack of devotion to anything but his own pleasure. It is with sadness that we learn his eyesight is failing and that all the well-intentioned but fruitless remedies cannot correct the condition. Pepys stopped writing his diary in 1669.

The quality of Branagh's reading encourages the listener to find out more about Pepys and perhaps read the diaries, which are freely available online. I include a few links here.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)

This website, maintained by Phil Gyford, has an encyclopedia of terms, a list of the people mentioned in the diary, articles related to the diary, and a daily entry from Pepys' diary pegged to the current month and day.

Historic Figures: Samuel Pepys (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pepys_samuel.shtml)

This site from the BBC is helpful in understanding the historic and cultural context of Pepys' England. Illuminating content includes “Sex, Lice and Chamber Pots in Pepys' London” and a detailed interactive British History Timeline.

Project Gutenberg's The Diary of Samuel Pepys (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4200)

The full text, for free, online. Download it or read it from the website. If you're not familiar with Project Gutenberg, I suggest you check out their vast catalog of free, public-domain books and other materials. Their audiobooks are of varying quality, as they are read by either volunteers of differing abilities and computers. Some are quite excellent. Steer clear of the machine-read books, however, unless you're desperate. No one, it should be noted, has yet narrated Pepys. Perhaps they are discouraged by Branagh's inimitable performance.

Internet Movie Database: Kenneth Branagh (IMDb) (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000110/)

All you need to know about Kenneth Branagh and more.

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