Aural Sex

Podcasts have become one of the media students use on a regular basis. Some people read the newspaper in the morning; others listen to podcasts when they take a walk. Frankly, I have only recently noticed that it’s become the twenty-first ­­century, so I am unsurprised that I might well be catching up to a trend started twenty-five years ago with This American Life. For historians, something that began in 1995 is cutting edge. Agreeing to review a podcast and actually reviewing it are two separate matters. As much as historians incorporate artifacts, material culture, cinema, ­­photographs, and so on into our sets of sources, the act of studying history largely remains a sedentary and visual practice. But in order to do a podcast review, I couldn’t sit in a comfy chair to read. I couldn’t annotate. My review didn’t end with a published book transformed by a cracked...

Art · Art history · Media studies · Movie theater · Newspaper · Order (exchange) · Sociology · Visual arts · History · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media