I mentioned that I spend a lot of time listening to spoken word recordings. I thought it might be nice to list some of the other places where I find good listening:
* [Democracy Now](http://www.democracynow.org/). Amy Goodman must be one of the most hyperproductive activists out there, a throwback to the living-for-the-cause agitators of the 19th century. With a small team, she somehow puts together an hour-long tv/radio news broadcast every weekday. It’s campaigning journalism with production values to equal or better the mainstream media. I wish I could find a European equivalent of this; Democracy Now does a great job of picking up stories from around the world, but it’s really a USian affair.
* [In Our Time](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/). The best thing on Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg and a few academics holding a no-frills discussion on some topic they know inside-out. Shamelessly highbrow, and generally fascinating.
* [IT Conversations](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/) is a mixed bag. They collect (mainly) talks from computer conferences, and repackage them as podcasts. Both the content and the audio quality are very variable. Generally good are Moira Gun’s ‘[Tech nation](http://www.technation.com/)’ series, and anything recorded at an O’Reilly conference. [The white, male faces gracing most of their listings do tell a story — but mainly, I think, about the IT industry as a whole, rather than IT Conversations itself]
* [Here](http://delicious.com/oedipa/audio) is my unsorted collection of nice things to listen to. Some good, some bad, some I never got round to playing.
I’ve also discovered that
The West Wing
works even better as an audio-only experience. If only it were financially viable to get Aaron Sorking writing radio plays!