The New Books Network History of Science podcast channel recently released an interview by Dr. Morteza Hajizadeh of Prof. Al Coppola about his 2016 book “The Theater of Experiment; Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”
While Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is likely a poem that most of us studied in our school years, it is not perhaps one that we actively think about as we go about our daily lives, or that we would necessarily reference in regard to matters of contemporary conservation or environmental ethics. However I suspect that I now shall be re-reading it, and in a much more nuanced and better informed manner since listening to the 4 March 2021 podcast episode of BBC Radio 4’s superb In Our Time program
After my beloved wife and daughter, one of the people who has most helped me to survive the madness of this past year is Melissa Harrison. Although we’ve never met in person, hearing her gentle and soothing voice asking me “Hi, how’re you doing?” at the beginning of each episode of her superb “The Stubborn Light of Things” podcast has more times than I can recall helped me to pick up and carry on in the face of all that was wearing me down.
Melissa Harrison has begun a podcast – and it is absolutely brilliant.
Recording her walks through the Suffolk countryside where she makes her home, “The Stubborn Light of Things” offers listeners an exquisitely gentle, relaxing, running – well, walking, perhaps even ambling, actually – commentary on the nature she observes around her on her journeys, as well as the sounds of the English countryside that are more than enough to make a Anglophile pastoralist weep tears of joy.