My Word with Douglas E. Welch

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This is our annual holiday reading of this classic Dickens’ story. Recorded Sunday, December 20, 2020 via Zoom.

Each year we bring together friends, and family to read sections from a condensed version of the story — made by Charles Dickens himself — for his own live, public readings. Follow Scrooge, Bob Crachit, Tiny Tim and all the familiar characters as they both teach and learn what Christmas is all about.

Listen while you prepare your Christmas cookies or wrap your Christmas presents. Join the “spirits” of the season!

Listen to Our Annual Live Reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 

Read the entire short story with the electronic copy from Archive.org

Albrecht Düre – BBC In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) who achieved fame throughout Europe for the power of his images. These range from his woodcut of a rhinoceros, to his watercolour of a young hare, to his drawing of praying hands and his stunning self-portraits such as that above (albeit here in a later monochrome reproduction) with his distinctive A D monogram. He was expected to follow his father and become a goldsmith, but found his own way to be a great artist, taking public commissions that built his reputation but did not pay, while creating a market for his prints, and he captured the timeless and the new in a world of great change.

With

Susan Foister
Deputy Director and Curator of German Paintings at the National Gallery

Giulia Bartrum
Freelance art historian and Former Curator of German Prints and Drawings at the British Museum

Ulinka Rublack
Professor of Early Modern European History and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge

Listen to this podcast

Links and Further Reading on the BBC Web Site

In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, dentists’ offices, even prisons. There are mascots in cities that tell people not to litter, or remind them to be quiet on the train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. The reason why mascots and character culture flourish in Japan is connected with the nation’s fascinating history with mythical monsters known as Yokai.

In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running experiments have been interrupted. But there are some researchers for whom the shutdowns have provided a unique opportunity—a whole new data set, a chance to gather new information, or to look at information in a new way. And so, this week, we’re bringing you stories very different academic fields, about researchers who are using this bizarre, tragic moment to learn something new about the world.

Singing with others is a powerful form of expression. That’s why the composer Eric Whitacre started the Virtual Choir; an experiment that connects singers from every corner of the globe. In this episode, we hear how a choir can unite people from different backgrounds to achieve a common goal – creating beautiful music.