Did you know that in order to buy a gun in Mexico, legally that is, you have to go to the only gun store in the country, which is on an army base near Mexico City?
Did you know that in Berlin after World War I, there was a rise in demand for prostitutes who were missing limbs or were otherwise disfigured? This has been attributed to the increase in the population of war veterans who had been maimed during the conflict.
Did you know that the only way to become a citizen of Palau, which hosted a season of “Survivor”, is to have been born there? And although they have a restrictive citizenship policy, the residents of Palau enjoy a special favored status with the United States, including being able to serve in our armed forces.
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=6661111I learned these disparate facts listening to National Public Radio’s Foreign Dispatch podcast. A weekly roundup of reporting from around the globe, the podcast runs a very manageable twenty minutes and usually contains four segments, each from a different region of the world. And it is global; NPR’s correspondents are all over the place.
As might be expected, the podcast always contains some news from the current war zones. These segments generally depict how culture and politics interact and are affected by military actions. For example, there was a story in a recent podcast about the improvement of traffic patterns in Tehran after the removal of concrete blast barriers from the downtown area. They had been there so long that younger residents were unsure of what streets were on the other side of where the barrier had been.
From there, the podcast hops around the globe a few times. Maybe a discussion of how Norway avoided the recent financial crisis. Maybe a view of the effects of Twitter on dissent in China. Believe me, it is nothing if not diverse.
The final segment generally deals with an aspect of popular culture or the Arts. It might be about musicians in a different part of the world (Camilo Lara’s Mexican Institute of Sound), or a profile of a writer ( Philip Kerr, author of the Detective Gunther series). It’s usually something that makes me want to make a note of a title or a person who is speaking or being discussed. All segments make full use of the audio capabilities of radio, with background noises and clips from the people involved in the story. It is not a voice droning o and on. It is a true multi layered experience for the listener.
I get most of my news from the internet and it tends to be a very general level of information. Foreign Dispatch drills down into many subjects I have only a cursory knowledge of. I thank NPR for helping round off my understanding of a least a few things that are happening on our planet.
