ThoughtCast®

Note: this mini-documentary, which was broadcast in 1996 on WNYC TV, a public television station in New York City, charts the creation of Les Enfants Terribles, a dance opera by the composer Philip Glass and the choreographer Susan Marshall.

Over the course of three months, Jenny Attiyeh saw this work of art, based on the novel by French Surrealist Jean Cocteau, take shape. The story of Les Enfants Terribles, which is also the final part of a Philip Glass trilogy inspired by the work of Cocteau, tells the tale of Paul and Lise, two adolescent siblings who are bound to each other in an unholy mix of love and jealousy. When they come into volatile contact with two other adolescents, the result is indeed terrible.

Click here: to listen (14 mins).

I’ve decided to re-post this ThoughtCast program from July 1, 2009 because my friend Lydia Ratcliff died yesterday, February 14th, 2018. The New York Times has written an obituary of her that I think is worth reading. She fought COPD for over a decade, so she could remain involved in the life of her Andover farm, her friends, and the ideas and preoccupations which sustained her.

Note: this audio program was broadcast on WAMC and WGBH radio in Boston, and the audio program and slideshow were featured on NHPR.org.

About 40 years ago, farms were thick on the ground in Andover, a rural town in southern Vermont. Today, 75-year-old Lydia Ratcliff’s Lovejoy Brook Farm is the last working farm still in operation. But can it survive much longer? ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh grew up visiting Lydia each summer, listening to her tales, eating fresh corn and carrots from her garden, and watching the animals give birth, and grow old. On a recent visit to see Lydia, Jenny brought along her microphone …

Lydia Ratcliff is a survivor. She’s farmed her 90 acre plot of land in Andover Vermont for 43 years, and though she’s now come down with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, she still climbs on top of that tractor in hay season.

Click here to listen (9 minutes.)

The remarkable rise of Donald Trump, fueled in large part by his determination to keep immigrants out of his Greatening America, has caused many to re-examine the key concerns of the controversial political scientist Samuel Huntington. His writings on immigration and American national identity seem today to be sad prophecies of what has come to pass. In light of last year’s headlines — extreme vetting for Syrian refugees, Presidential dithering on DACA, white nationalist riots — I decided to re-post my 2005 ThoughtCast interview with Huntington, who died in late December, 2008.

Note: This interview was broadcast twice on WGBH in Boston.

Click here: to listen (30 mins).

The press barely noticed former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith’s bid for the presidency in 2000, so entranced were they over the newly candid Arizona Senator John McCain as he crisscrossed Bob Smith’s state in the “Straight Talk Express.” But McCain fever was quickly quenched by the more conventional conservatism of Texas Governor George W. Bush once the race headed south. And what became of the dogged Republican Senator Bob Clinton Smith? Well, he hung onto his seat till 2003, in his own unique, aw shucks fashion.

When you watch this ThoughtCast interview, you’ll form your own impression of a candidate who didn’t make it — and you might also come away with some interesting hypotheses on how US Presidential politics has evolved (some would say devolved) since the turn of the century.

Click here: to listen (4:43 minutes).

Now that we’re faced with Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel, it is tempting to ask, again: What if he’d actually won the Presidential election back in 2000? Remember when the century turned, the chads clung and hung, Florida was in Republican hands, and the Supreme Court ended up deciding the race in favor of the fortunate son of a former president? How many wayward chads would it have taken to give us 4 years of Al Gore, the “beta male” who wore sweaters in heather hues, and spoke calmly about the calamitous state of our global environment? For one thing, I don’t think we’d have pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. But what else might have — or not have happened?

I had the chance to interview the Vice President for NHPTV in the autumn of 1999, prior to the New Hampshire Presidential Primary. Little did I know of what was to come, or I might have asked somewhat different questions.

https://youtu.be/YJ0_Uo9Hywk?rel=0

So let’s say you have leukemia. You have relapsed. What can art therapy do for you? Here at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, young cancer patients struggle with their treatment. But they also have an outlet, a safe place to express themselves.

This “WNYC Cultural Minute” was broadcast on the public TV station WNYC in the late 1990s, before it went off the air. I’m including it here, on ThoughtCast.

The inimitable Tom Hoving discusses art forgeries, and how to spot them, on ThoughtCast!

Note: this interview has been picked up by the public radio station WGBH, in Boston, and its sister stations WCAI and WNAN.

The venerable New York Review of Books was launched amidst a newspaper strike in the winter of 1963, and has continued unabated ever since. Devoted to intensive and nuanced coverage of politics, the arts, literature, science (and now movies and the Internet!), the paper, as it’s called, is considered to be the premiere journal of the American intellectual elite.

Click here: to listen (40 minutes).

Note: Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column each week at Inside Higher Ed, contributed an excellent question to the interview – thanks!

When I interviewed Paul Pascarella, back in the 90s, I confess he was kind of a friend. Which made following him around with a camera in his Arroyo Seco studio a lot smoother than usual. It’s not easy to gain this access, to watch an artist at work, especially if you’re trying to record each idea as it hits the canvas. The act is extremely revealing.

Perhaps this is why Paul doesn’t stick with his “work-in-progress” for very long. The hands-on phase of this WNYC TV story is relatively brief, followed by a show-and-tell of various examples of his work. Paul has always been a flexible artist, never adhering to just one style. He is, I think, a happy painter, not one gripped by terrors in the small hours, or as they used to say, existential dread.

For an audio version of this story, click here: to listen. (4:42 mins).