FanFare

Incredible, true, love story of Canadian Meg and Russian Elena who find each other online and meet in Kiev in 2006. Their love is very real, but now Elena is in danger. They decide to flee Russia together. Meg mortgages her home back in Canada and buys a sailboat in Turkey. They head out to the Atlantic and hope to eventually reach Vancouver, halfway around the world, in order to live a life together. Kismet, From Russia with Love. [more inside]
posted by dog food sugar on Feb 17, 2019 - 0 comments

Meet the man who figured out how to reshape national politics by making tiny investments in the smallest of places. [more inside]
posted by Monochrome on Jun 15, 2018 - 2 comments

Hidden Brain: a podcast about "life's unseen patterns" but I guess more about cognition and behavior with a strong data focus.
posted by latkes on Dec 9, 2015 - 2 comments

Patty McCord helped create a workplace at Netflix that runs more like a professional sports team than a family. If you're not up to scratch, you're off the team. Is this the future of work?
posted by schmod on Sep 2, 2015 - 8 comments

Glen Weldon and Chris Klimek discuss Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller's cinematic return to a post-apocalyptic wasteland that boasts a weirdly thriving car culture.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on May 23, 2015 - 0 comments

This week, our friends Tanya Ballard Brown and Gene Demby join us to talk about Fox's hit show Empire and to follow up on a recent public discussion of the need for diverse radio voices. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on Feb 6, 2015 - 16 comments

Alex Blumberg is a former producer for This American Life and Planet Money. Last year he founded Gimlet Media, a podcast network, and hosts its first show, StartUp. “When someone starts talking about something difficult, when they get unexpectedly emotional, your normal human reaction is to sort of comfort and steer away. To say, ‘Oh I’m sorry, let’s move on.’ What you need to do, if you want good tape, is to say, ‘Talk more about how you’re feeling right now.’ It feels like a horrible question to ask. It feels like you're going against your every instinct as a decent human being to go toward the pain that this person is experiencing.” Thanks to TinyLetter, Lynda and Alarm Grid for sponsoring this week's episode. [more inside]
posted by bq on Jan 30, 2015 - 1 comment

This week on Pop Culture Happy Hour, NPR Monkey See's Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon are joined by NPR Code Switch's Gene Demby to discuss the Civil Rights Era film Selma. They'll discuss the direction by Ava DuVernay, the Oprah of it all, and how well it brings Martin Luther King, Jr. to life. Then they'll discuss other historical dramas and the advantages and limitations of dramatic license. All that plus What's Making Us Happy this week.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on Jan 22, 2015 - 1 comment

A simple primer on (and multiple warnings about) short-selling stock. Fun fact: Unlike the risk of buying a stock, shorting one opens the trader to possibly losing much more than the original investment. [more inside]
posted by psoas on Jan 22, 2015 - 2 comments

In this Pop Culture Happy Hour extra, Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson chat about the Oscar nominations. They'll discuss the idiosyncratic men up for nominations and the films, actors, and directors who the Academy decided not to recognize.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on Jan 19, 2015 - 0 comments

In "Fearless," co-hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller explore what would happen if you could disappear fear. A group of scientists believe that people no longer need fear — at least not the kind we live with — to navigate the modern world. We’ll hear about the striking (and rare) case of a woman with no fear. The second half of the show explores how the rest of us might "turn off" fear.
posted by edbles on Jan 16, 2015 - 9 comments

In this Pop Culture Happy Hour extra, Linda Holmes talks with Gene Demby about the podcast Serial, a spin-off of This American Life. They'll discuss the podcasts created to discuss Serial and why listeners are picking apart episodes as if it's True Detective.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on Dec 23, 2014 - 2 comments