Radio Curious

New born babies have a wide range of behaviors used to communicate with the adults around them – the language of yawning, the varied and rich range of crying, sense of touch, their feeding and sleeping, listening to your voice and recognizing your face.

Kevin Nugent, Ph.D., author of “Your Baby Is Speaking to You:  A Visual guide to the Amazing Behaviors of Your Newborn and Growing Baby,” is the director of the Brazelton Institute at Children’s Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts, where he has studied newborn infants and early parent-child relations for thirty plus years.  This book reveals how infants are able to communicate with the adults around them.

We visited by phone with Dr. Nugent from his home near Boston, on January 14, 2011 and began with his description of the research that resulted in his book “Your Baby is Speaking to You.”

The books Dr. Kevin Nugent recommends are, “Touchpoints-Birth to Three,” by T. Berry Brazelton.

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In 1988, rather than comply with an ecclesiastical summons issued by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, to move to Chicago and give up his work on Creation Spirituality in Oakland California, Matthew Fox, a Dominican Priest, left the Dominican Order, remained in Oakland, and established the University of Creation Spirituality.   Matthew Fox is the author of 28 books and most recently published “The Hidden Spirituality of Men:  Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine,” and is our guest on this edition of Radio Curious.

Matthew Fox first visited Radio Curious in 1999 when his book “Sins of the Spirit, Blessing of the Flesh: Lesson for Transforming Evil, in Soul and Society,” was published.  So, when we came across “The Hidden Spirituality Men,” the latent curiosity of Radio Curious about spirituality was awakened.

Fox and I spoke by visited again, by phone from his home in Oakland, California on January 11, 2011.  Our conversation, which explores male and female spirituality, began with Matthew Fox distinguishing spirituality, faith, religion and dogma.

The book Matthew Fox recommends is “Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy and the World Soul,” By Steven B. Herrmann.

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In my opinion, when my friend Ed Reinhart comes here to Ukiah, it is well worth the effort to track him down and listen to him play someone else’s piano and sing along.

And that is what happened the last few days of 2010. The sign said Ed would be playing at the Himalaya Café at the south end of town on New Year’s Eve beginning at 6:30 pm. Now it may seem a bit early to start a New Year’s Eve Party, but Ed is always ready to do things his way, and under the guise of liking to get to bed early, he played and sang Old Lange Syne when it was New Year’s in New York, or in the Ukiah vernacular, 9 p.m.

Now Ed, who masquerades as Earl Dixon, a semi-unknown sort as he likes to say, and/or Rico Suave, a moniker he adopted while living in Ecuador, can play boogie-woogie piano better than most anyone. And that to me makes Earl and Rico all the more confusing as to who they may or may not be.

Ed, etc. have been guests on three previous editions Radio Curious, and those visits are available at www.radiocurious.org. Why so much Ed on Radio Curious? I like him and his music and enjoy our visits. We hope you do too. So Happy New Year to each of you and welcome to the first Radio Curious program recorded in our 21st year on the air.

This interview with Ed Reinhart was recorded in the studios of Radio Curious, in Ukiah, California on January 7, 2011.

The book Ed Reinhart recommends is “World Without End,” by Ken Follett.

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In this edition, we visit with Denis Dutton, author of ‘The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.”  A quote from this book, at page 46, provides a good idea of who we are and what the book is about.  “As much as fighting wild animals or finding suitable environments our ancient ancestors faced social forces and family conflicts that became a part of evolved life.   Both of these force fields acting in concert, eventually produced the intensely social, robust, love making, murderous, convivial, organizing, technology using, show off, squabbling, game playing, friendly, status seeking, upright walking, lying, omnivorous, knowledge seeking, arguing, clubbing, language using, conspicuously wasteful, versatile species of primate that we became.  And along the way in developing all this, the arts were born.”

Denis Dutton was a professor of ‘Philosophy of Art’ at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. We visited by phone from his home in Christchurch, New Zealand on July 17th, 2009 and began our conversation by asking him to further explain the birth of the arts.

The books Denis Dutton recommends are “Before The Dawn: Recovering The Lost History Of Our Ancestors,” by Nicholas Wade and “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution,” by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. You can listen to a radio curious interview with Gregory Cochran by visiting the 2009 Radio Curious archives on our website www.radiocurious.org.

Denis Dutton died on December 28, 2010.

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The power of any criminal prosecutor and especially a local district attorney, is immense.  The given job of the DA is to serve justice, and the on-going question is what process to employ in order to achieve justice.  Not all prosecutors have experience as a defense attorney and as a prosecutor.  In Mendocino County, California, David Eyster, an attorney with experience on both sides of criminal cases, was elected to the office of District Attorney and will assume the position of chief law enforcement officer of the county on January 3, 2011.  When he visited the studios of Radio Curious on December 27, 2010, we had a conversation about the role of a criminal defense attorney and how that will affect his new role as prosecutor; his attitude toward “overcharging” criminal violations, what he calls “leveraging the defendant;” the use of the grand jury in criminal cases; and his plans to prosecute unfair business practices.  We began when I asked him about the role of the criminal defense attorney.

The book David Eyster recommends in the “Autobiography of Mark Twain.”

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