SCALES #67: overtone green
Hello!
I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy. This is a Very Special podcast-heavy edition of SCALES.
So I was listening to a podcast…
…though maybe not quite as many podcasts right now. My listening, long something I did in transit, has become something I do mostly in and around the kitchen. Because a lot of my enjoyment comes from the texture of each individual show—the voices, the cadence, the sound design—I’ve extracted a short clip, one or two minutes, highlighting a few recent episodes I’ve liked.
I link to each clip below, or here’s a page where you can play all of them.
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives on the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is capacious on purpose. You can unsubscribe at any time (link at bottom), forward, subscribe, or reply!
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Ed Yong talking on Longform about his instant classic late-March “How Will the Coronavirus End?” piece for The Atlantic, including how he built on work he did for a 2018 piece. (Also, where I learn of his British accent!) [📻 MP3 excerpt - 2:01]
ᴀʟsᴏ: Yong, of course, having gone on to write a series of instant classics, the latest of which wisely points out:
“The idea that there are no experts is overly glib. The issue is that modern expertise tends to be deep, but narrow. Even within epidemiology, someone who studies infectious diseases knows more about epidemics than, say, someone who studies nutrition. But pandemics demand both depth and breadth of expertise. To work out if widespread testing is crucial for controlling the pandemic, listen to public-health experts; to work out if widespread testing is possible, listen to supply-chain experts. To determine if antibody tests can tell people if they’re immune to the coronavirus, listen to immunologists; to determine if such testing is actually a good idea, listen to ethicists, anthropologists, and historians of science. No one knows it all, and those who claim to should not be trusted.”
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Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway has an uncanny resemblance to a more off-the-cuff The Splendid Table, but also features plenty of ribbing between the hosts that’s almost, to stretch the weekend public radio metaphor way too far, like… Car Talk?? To take one example in Episode 3: outrage over profligate vanilla use in cookie baking. [📻 MP3 excerpt - 1:50]
ᴀʟsᴏ: Yes, I ordered the fundraiser merch.
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A Gastropod on cockles, specifically restoration work done in the Puget Sound in collaboration between the Suquamish Tribe and marine biologists. [📻 MP3 excerpt - 1:31]
ᴀʟsᴏ: A full Welsh? Gotta have the cockles and laverbread.
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An interview with Andrew Blum on 99% Invisible about the accumulated infrastructure that enables weather forecasting, with a mention of foundational work done by Vilhelm Bjerknes (father of Jacob Bjerknes, mentioned in 32 for his study of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation). [📻 MP3 excerpt - 0:51]
ᴀʟsᴏ: Courtesy of the highly recommended Royal Netherlands Meterological Institute (KNMI) Instagram account comes a summary of uitzonderlijk blauwe voorjaarsluchten, exceptionally blue skies over the Netherlands (machine translation): half of the top twenty bluest skies in March and April in the past 15 years (as measured daily in Cabauw, NL, comparing the solar spectrum to the cloud-free, particle-free Rayleigh limit) were in 2020. KNMI attributes the observations to a combination of high-pressure weather systems (April 2020 was the “zonnigste april sinds 1901”), reduced air traffic, and reduced air pollution.
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Tracy K. Smith brings it, day in and day out, on The Slowdown, here reading from “We Have Always Been” by Kim Shuck. [📻 MP3 excerpt - 1:18]
ᴀʟsᴏ: A source of additional great poetry listening recommendations: this issue of Written Out, especially an excerpt of Inger Christensen’s “Light: Blue Poles” (“metallic leaps Jackson Pollock / silvery streams Jackson Pollock”).
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Rossini’s La Cenerentola discussed on the Rhiannon Giddens-hosted Aria Code with the typical chorus of voices describing the opera, including in the clip Joyce DiDonato, Alma Salcedo, and Fred Plotkin. [📻 MP3 excerpt - 1:59]
ᴀʟsᴏ: A music video for a Rameau piano transcription feat. robot, book, and pinball machine collectors (!?).
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Jonathan Goldstein, in his comedically sincere, long-suffering way, learning about Minnesota winter and spring on a Heavyweight check-in. [📻 MP3 excerpt - 1:34]
ᴀʟsᴏ: Ohio spring is coming on strong, according to the…
Yard news
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Thanks for reading! Take care,
—Adam