The Point

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Undressing Money


So, I'm back into the podcasting game, this time with an amazing co-host and a brand new show. It's called Money Undressed and you can find it here, where there'll be a link to the iTunes feed and info about how to tune in on Trent Radio here in Peterborough very soon.

I'm really excited about this show. As someone who actively resisted learning about economics until recently (and is, admittedly, pretty poor with personal finances), I never imagined how fascinating and horrified I'd be to learn about how our financial system works via lessons learned from its sudden unravelling. It's a weekly show, and we've got some great topics lined up, from what a credit crisis is to why our situation in Canada is different from what's going on in the US.

Check it out at moneyundressed.blogspot.com!

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posted by Christopher at 4:56 a.m. | link | 1 comments

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Where We Are

Hi guys, thanks for continuing to stop by. I'm not back yet, but here's the official state of the union from Chris these days.

So I live with these two amazing friends of mine, Kate and Thalia. Kate used to be my editor at Arthur, and we have a lot of conversations about journalism and about the state of the world etc. A couple weeks ago we went to go see Frost/Nixon. It was fantastic, particularly for aspiring writers looking for some validation about the importance of what we do. We've also had a sort of research project going on since September, though, and that is learning about the implosion of the global economy as it happens.

You may have seen my post about the incredible special on radio show and podcast This American Life last year that told the story of all kinds of people connected to the market for mortgages. Homeowners, people who sold them mortgages, people who sold hundreds of thousands of mortgages to investors looking for a safe investment that'd make them a nice fat, dependable return. They got such a huge amount of feedback that two of the hosts on that episode, Adam Davidson and David Kestenbaum, have started a show about economics called Planet Money on NPR. And three times a week now, they blow my mind. And Kate's, incidentally.

We talk about the what the credit crisis means, and what money is, and what this recession is doing, so often that we decided we had to start our own radio show to figure out some of these questions we have. We haven't come up with a name for it yet, but it's going to be a half -hour show you can stream from Trent Radio's website or download. Or I guess listen to it on the air, if you live here and you kick it old school like that. The focus will be on trying to explain what this global recession looks like, and what's behind it, especially from here in Canada. I feel like I know US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner better than anyone in Parliament these days, so it'll be nice for me to learn a bit about what's going on up north. Any title suggestions are welcome - Canadian Bacon has already been brought up, as has Cheddah.

And besides that, my life has been eaten by classes and helping plan the Community Movements Conference here at Trent on Food Sovereignty and the Changing Face of Agriculture. It went great, and we took videos of most of the sessions so I'll try to get those linked once they're put online.

I think I'm starting to get the feel of this writing thing with a couple pieces I've written for Arthur this year. Two of my favourites to work on have been an article on the lack of prayer space on campus at Trent, which helped spark a nasty riot in our forums but also got some good dialogue started, and an article on how screwed cities in Ontario are as this recession starts to claw away at the commodity markets our recycling systems are dependent on. There's going to be a follow-up piece on it in next week's issue that you can catch online here.

What else? Well, I'm reading Raj Patel's stellar book Stuffed and Starved, about the grotesque architecture of the global food system, which I could safely say I hadn't even heard of until last year. I've been reading all of these blogs lately, and as usual soaking in the wondrous writing over at The Walrus. I've taken up jiu jitsu. I've been eating poorly lately. And I've learned an incredible amount over the past week about ecological sanitation, or the art and science of turning poo into soil into food again, and around and around and around.

If you really are desperate to have your mind broken learning about money, watch this video (thanks to Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying for the link). Take care.

Chris


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posted by Christopher at 3:09 a.m. | link | 3 comments
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