Books Shows Tunes & Mad Acts

Christmas music seems to be unstoppable with new songs and albums coming out every year, so Bill and Jennifer have a lot to talk about from traditional, classic tunes, whether they're overplayed and fall out of fashion; to innovative covers; to novelty and funny songs, new and old; to caroling and kids' TV shows; to artists who unexpectedly turn in an awesome song; and those we'd rather forget, es...

Michael Nesmith, the cap-wearing Monkee, passed away last week. Jennifer and Bill talk about Michael's life and legacy in depth, from fleeing Texas to landing in the concoction that was the Monkees, and then moving on to myriad projects in music, video, and prose, often with instincts before his time. Productive, thoughtful, with a playful side, he has left us a big legacy of gifts that keep on gi...

Jon Teichman and Geoff Walker join Bill and Jennifer to talk about the allure and resilience of vinyl LP records. Jon and Geoff are experts about vinyl and organize the multi-day and multi-city Ore Dock Record Show which features 10,000 LPs and thousands of visitors from around the world. Here they talk about sound quality, equipment, bootlegs, what people are buying, music communities, and more....

Join LolaGeek, a former sales consultant for LuLaRoe, for the lowdown on that business and other multi-level marketing schemes. Get the insider's view on how LuLaRoe, a billion-dollar direct sales clothing company, recruited, targeted stay-at-home moms, manipulated its messaging, enriched its founders and impoverished its workers, and ultimately became the subject of multiple lawsuits. An eye-open...

A galloping mile-a-minute ride through the career of Elliot Kendall, from his early days as a struggling musician in the Bay Area to waiter days in LA, his dream job as the Catalog Guy at Universal for 13 years, and now his constant reinvention. What fuels him? What's happening today with music promotion? How do we find good music? Does radio matter? Elliot answers these questions and many more. A...

Join social scientist and poverty expert Mark Rank to discuss his recent book, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty," and common misconceptions about being poor in the US. He explains that not only do many millions find themselves in poverty today, the risk of YOU finding yourself in poverty at some point during your life is surprisingly high. We consider poverty statistics, p...

Join Jenny and Jeanne Abel as they discuss the life work of hoaxer Alan Abel, the genius behind such pranks as The Society for Indecency to Nude Animals, the fainting incident on Phil Donahue, presidential candidate Yetta Bronstein, Omar's School for Beggars, and mockumentaries, such as Is There Sex After Death . Daughter Jenny and wife Jeanne describe Alan's early career and progression into come...

 Music with the Michiganders Jennifer, Bill, and Doug discuss their first memories of music and early influences that turned them into giant life-long music fans, starting with bubblegum music and novelty songs. They talk about the importance of friends, a band’s covers, and passion versus production. They also celebrate the breakdown of musical genres and the many ways to access and discover musi...

Happy New Year, everybody. Ta-da! The new show will be called "Books, Shows, Tunes & Mad Acts." It will be classified on Podomatic under Art: Books, but if you have trouble finding it, write me at jennifer@discreetguide.com or catch me on Twitter @DiscreetGuide, and we'll hook you up. See you on the other side!

Nick Brown is back! Former IT guy and now psychologist, Nick talks about some counter-intuitive policy changes for improving the efficiency and lowering costs of IT, by actually making users happier. It's a recognition of the importance of treating co-workers as humans instead of enemies, and an argument for a new way of thinking. This is a great episode to end our run with, as we have been moving...

Upon the launch of their new book, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, join us to talk about what forces have been at work undermining public education in the US. We talk about public funding of religious schools, edupreneurs intent on pocketing tax monies, and edu-marketing, especially of online schools--all ways of diverting money away from traditional public schools--and the growing gap betw...

The Hades Factor, a bad-guys-with-a-virus story, was written by Gayle Lynds based on a treatment by Ludlum and published in 2000 shortly before his death. Ludlum wrote 21 books on his own, but his brand marches on, having produced another 26 books after his death, including 13 of the Bourne series. His decline after heart surgery and the death of his beloved longtime first wife was accelerated by...

University of Virginia professor and director of EdPolicyWorks Jim Wycoff joins us to discuss efforts to tie teacher pay to performance. Following on research about teacher effectiveness, especially in low-performing schools, Jim reviews programs in New York and Washington DC that emphasized teacher evaluation and rewarded high performance with significant financial compensation. He explains how s...

Education researcher and Indiana University professor Chris Lubienski joins us to talk about what charter schools are, how they were and are created, what their promise was, how they are marketed in the US and abroad, and what the research shows about their effectiveness, especially in Indiana where the state has encouraged their formation in the name of school choice. Chris discusses Horace Mann'...

Rebecca Makkai's 2018 book The Great Believers was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, for good reasons. It is two stories, one about the AIDS epidemic moving through a gay community in Chicago in the 80s and another of a mother searching for her daughter in Paris in 2015. The book is about death and grief, but that means it's also about love and life, and so...

On October 16, 2020, a French history teacher was beheaded by an Islamic terrorist while walking home from school. Controversy had arisen around the teacher when he used several satirical cartoons depicting Muhammad earlier in the month in a section on free speech. Demonstrations and tributes have followed, as well as aggressive action by French authorities to identify all those involved and shut...

We review a virus-related thriller published in March 2020 and written by Chris Bohjalian. A beautiful cover and an intriguing beginning set in Vietnam sadly lose their momentum in this thriller which suffers from minimal character development, a weak climax, and sloppy writing, perhaps because of hurried writing. We check in on reviews from the NYT Review of Books (loved it!) and the Amazon crowd...

Indiana University education professor David Rutkowski joins us to talk about school assessment tools and outcomes inside the state of Indiana, across US states, and internationally, with lots of surprises. Going beyond the headlines and politics, results may not be what you think. David explains why schools are more than their assessments and why it's important for us to be smart about these meas...

Published in April 2020, the book has been acclaimed for its ability to predict what would happen during a pandemic. Well, kinda, Wright got some things right, but Covid-19 is not nearly the apocalypse that he predicted. More problematic is the organization and editing of the book; the raw material for an interesting product is there, but it doesn't hang together as a novel: long educational secti...

Labor economist Dan Goldhaber joins us to talk about research findings regarding teacher scarcity and the correlations between teacher qualifications and their measurable impact on student learning. He explains how typical pay schedules reward or ignore teacher characteristics that seem to be related to student gains. He also discusses some research about non-credentialed teachers who come from pr...

Peng Shepherd's first book, The Book of M, received some accolades when it was published in 2018 though it doesn't quite fit in the post-apocalyptic genre and creeps over into fantasy. We take a critical look, along with other reviewers, at what makes this story intriguing but how ultimately the writing doesn't live up to the tantalizing premise that losing your shadow means losing your memories....

USC School of Ed professor Larry Picus talks us through the nuts and bolts of local, state, and federal financing of school districts in California, including Prop 13, school bonds, and this year's Prop 15. He explains how districts are equalized, adjusted for special student populations, how differences persist, and compares other states' systems. We also talk about how money is generally spent (...

We discuss both Contagions, one, a medical thriller by Robin Cook, that turns out to have nothing to do with the 2011 Steven Soderburgh movie with the same title that continues to freak people out today. We learn about the careers of both creators and how these two works have stood the test of time, especially the movie seen through today's experienced and knowledgeable Covid-19 lens. We also talk...

We take on the toughest topics in teaching today with Doug McKee who teaches or has taught economics at Cornell and Yale: what makes a good teacher, teaching like a scholar, what good are grades, why we love our teachers, are students now worse than they used to be, avoiding burnout, why use group work, and recent research findings about effective online teaching. This is the second in our series...

American sci fi writer Greg Bear has written over 50 books during a career that has spanned 50 years. Blood Music was an early prize-winning novel about an infection caused by nanotechnology which took over reality. Published 15 years later, Darwin's Radio explored the notion of a prehistoric retrovirus that spread around the globe and caused evolution to take a giant step forward. We explore the...