Week of October 24, 1994
Featured: The first half of a two-part interview with Steve Silberman and David Shenk, authors of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads, taken from a live broadcast on KPFA.
Grateful Dead 11/10/85 Meadowlands, E. Rutherford NJ
CASSIDY
FEEL LIKE A STRANGER
MISSISSIPPI HALFSTEP->
I KNOW YOU RIDER
Jerry Garcia, David Crosby et al, January 1971 (unreleased)
LOSER
Steve Silberman's articles appear regularly in Wired, Dwell, the Shambhala Sun, and other magazines. Recently, he has written about neurologist Oliver Sacks and music, the health of veterans returning from the war in Iraq, and the Jewish/Buddhist teacher and author Sylvia Boorstein.
Steve is very pleased to say that after ten years of trying, he was finally successful in convincing the powers that be to officially release "Kids and Dogs," a luminous 1970 recording by David Crosby and Jerry Garcia. The song appears on Crosby's 3-CD box set Voyage -- which Steve helped create -- and on the enhanced version of Crosby's masterpiece If I Could Only Remember My Name, which features performances by members of the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and others.
David Shenk Writes:
Here's an update on what I've done in the 14 years since this crazy fun book: I've written four other books: The Forgetting, The Immortal Game, Data Smog, and The End of Patience. The Los Angeles Times called The Forgetting "A remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind." he Immortal Game was hailed as "superb" by The Wall Street Journal. Data Smog was praised by The New York Times as an “indispensable guide to the big picture of technology's cultural impact.” Sven Birkerts called The End of Patience “Exhilarating . . . a startling glimpse of where we are.” Most meaningfully of all, Steve has liked my books.
I've also contributed to National Geographic, Harper's, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Gourmet, Wired, The American Scholar, NPR and PBS. I've advised the President's Council on Bioethics, co-founded the "Technorealism" movement, and directed four short films on Alzheimer's. In 2004, the PBS documentary The Forgetting won an Emmy. Coolest of all, by far, my original term "data smog" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. (That's immortality, baby).
Right now, I'm working on a book about the new science of genetics, talent and intelligence. It's a very hopeful book that shows -- contrary to popular myth -- that we are not born with strict genetic limitations on capabilities and IQ. You can find out more than you'd ever want to know about me at davidshenk.com.
You can browse and/or search the Grateful Dead Hour program logs on the GD Hour web site. Let me know if there's a particular program you'd like to hear, and feel free to post requests and comments here or by email to gdhour [at] dead.net
Thanks for listening!
David Gans
gdhour [at] dead.net