RHODcast: Jan 14, 2021

Republic of Broken Windows, 2 – Ethan Zuckerman

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It took a vastly complicated apparatus for my words to reach you now. Any number of interventions could have forced them off the information superhighway and into the digital ditch. Which is, sort of, what’s happened this week to the Thoughts of President Trump. For the moment, a number of hugely powerful private enterprises – Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and others – seem to have ganged up on a president whose greatest delight of a morning was to pick up his phone and, with a flourish, dispatch joy or sorrow to all parts of the known world. But not now. One of the great students of the internet, ETHAN ZUCKERMAN, reminds us that it’s very hard to kick someone off the web.

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Tim’s Comedy Links

Early in 2002, Tony Staveacre proposed a radio show to his friend, the beloved British comedian Tim Brooke Taylor. They would celebrate at least two of Tim’s great loves, after his family – golf and comedy – by playing a round together at the club where Tim grew up and learned to play, the Cavendish in Buxton Derbyshire. Actually Tim would play and Tony would caddy for him. Tim’s Comedy Links is a celebration of some great radio comedians who were to Tim what he was to a new generation.

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Allan Schiller – Music Made Me, part two

ALLAN SCHILLER launched his professional career as a concert pianist at the age of nine, playing Haydn’s D major Concerto with the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra at Leeds Town Hall. He went on to make his name as a soloist, playing for audiences near and far with great international orchestras. In this second part of “Music Made Me” we can hear a shy and gifted young student grow into his illustrious career while coming to terms with life in 1960s U.S.S.R.

Allan Schiller – Music Made Me, part one

ALLAN SCHILLER is a modest maestro, acclaimed in The Guardian as the best Mozart interpreter of his generation. Now aged 80, and still playing his Steinway for several hours a day in his Bristol home, he has taken time out to write and record an account of his life in music. Here it is, read by the author, who also provides the elegant musical illustrations.

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