rrol Morris is a legendary fact-hunting documentary sleuth. His film The Thin Blue Line has been credited with overturning a murder conviction, and freeing an accused man from a death sentence. For him, the search for truth shouldn’t stop short of insanity. He tells Jad and Robert a story about his obsession with one particular photograph. Taken in 1855 during the Crimean War, the photo — titled "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" by its photographer, Roger Fenton — is one of the first photos ever taken of war. And it may also hold the title of First Faked Shot.
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Tagged with “radiolab”
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In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt
Tagged with radiolab errol_morris
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Radiolab “Memory and Forgetting”
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Radiolab: Memory and Forgetting
From http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08
This hour of Radiolab, a look behind the curtain of how memories are made…and forgotten.
Remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process—it’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated, and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7-second memory.
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Radiolab: Detective Stories
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Radiolab: Words that Change the World
Susan Schaller believes that the best idea she ever had in her life had to do with an isolated young man she met one day at a community college. He was 27-years-old at the time, and though he had been born deaf, no one had ever taught him to sign. He had lived his entire life without language—until Susan found a way to reach out to him.
Charles Fernyhough doesn’t think that very young children think—at least not in a way he’d recognize as thinking. Charles explains what he means by walking us through an experiment in a white room. And Elizabeth Spelke weighs in with research from her baby lab—which suggests a child’s brain begins as a series of islands, until it can find the right words and phrases to bridge the gaps.
James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia, argues that Shakespeare behaved more like a chemist than a writer: by smashing words together—words like eye and ball—he created new words, and new ways of seeing the world.
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New Words, New World - Radiolab WNYC
In the late 1970s, a new language was born. And Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology at Barnard, has spent the last 30 years helping to decode it. In 1978, 50 deaf children entered a newly formed school—a school in which the teachers (who didn’t sign) taught in Spanish. No one knows exactly how it happened, but in the next few years—on school buses and in the playground—these kids invented a set of common words and grammar that opened up a whole new way of communicating, and even thinking.
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Radiolab: Words
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that.
We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.
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Radiolab: Bliss
Moments of total, world-shaking bliss are not easy to come by. Maybe that’s what makes them feel so life-altering when they strike. And so worth chasing. This hour: stories of striving, grasping, tripping, and falling for happiness, perfection, and ideals.
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Radiolab: Colors
Our world is saturated in color, from soft hues to violent stains. How does something so intangible pack such a visceral punch? This hour, in the name of science and poetry, Jad and Robert tear the rainbow to pieces.
To what extent is color a physical thing in the physical world, and to what extent is it created in our minds? We start with Sir Isaac Newton, who was so eager to solve this very mystery, he stuck a knife in his eye to pinpoint the answer. Then, we meet a sea creature that sees a rainbow way beyond anything humans can experience, and we track down a woman who we’re pretty sure can see thousands (maybe even millions) more colors than the rest of us. And we end with an age-old question, that, it turns out, never even occurred to most humans until very recently: why is the sky blue?
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Radiolab: Escape!
The walls are closing in, you’ve got no way out… and then, suddenly, you escape! This hour, stories about traps, getaways, perpetual cycles, and staggering breakthroughs.
We kick things off with a true escape artist—a man who’s broken out of jail more times than anyone alive. We try to figure out why he keeps running… and whether he will ever stop. Then, the ingeniously simple question that led Isaac Newton to an enormous intellectual breakthrough: why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? In the wake of Newton’s new idea, we find ourselves in a strange space at the edge of the solar system, about to cross a boundary beyond which we know nothing. Finally, we hear the story of a blind kid who freed himself from an unhappy childhood by climbing into the telephone system, and bending it to his will.
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