Quick Recs

Three Poems from Musical Tables – Billy Collins, The New Yorker, 10 October 2022, 47

I love Billy Collins. Delighted to read new works.

“An Ode to Being Read To” – James Parker, The Atlantic, October 2022, 100

As an insomniac in need of a cure, I could find worse ones than Parker’s: “I fixed my insomnia with whiskey and audiobooks.”

The Slate Culture Gabfest

Longtime listener. These folks are my three best friends I’ve never met. In their “Plus” segment in this week’s podcast, they riff on Parker’s ode and talk about their own experiences with the pleasures of being read to and of reading aloud. (You have to be a “Plus” subscriber in order to get that content, but the main pod is free.)

A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail

A product of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, this is a nerdy podcast perfect for nerdy me. In Series 1, Episode 2 which I listened to this morning, they talk about how parallax is used to measure the distance to stars—one of those crazy coincidences, listening to this the same day I posted the review of A Tenth of a Second.