Showing results by author "Bret Wallach" in All Categories

This podcast can be divided into three sections. There's a middle section, with episodes numbered 1-13. These episodes constitute the core of the podcast and were written in 2018 and 2019. (The podcast takes its name from those numbered episodes. ) There's a newer section with episodes written since then, and there's an older section consisting partly of readings from materials published conventionally before 2018 but also partly of episodes produced only as podcasts and written in the same period as the numbered episodes.

A spirited and incisive survey of economic geography, A World Made for Money begins with the author stopped at a red light in Norman, Oklahoma. Observing the landscape of drugstores and banks, and for that matter the stoplight and roads themselves, Bret Wallach observes, "Everything I see has been built to make money" or, at the very least, to facilitate making money. This, he argues, is a global phenomenon that nonetheless has occurred only within the past hundred years or so.

Call it Miscellany, if you prefer. This podcast contains several pieces that I've written over the years and that I like well enough to read aloud. More current stuff can be found under the title The Itinerant Geographer, and you can find a more sustained effort, amounting to an audio book, under the title The Places Where We Belong.

The title of this podcast comes from a newsletter compiled and written for perhaps 20 years by the late Professor James J. Parsons of UC Berkeley's Geography Department. That department has moved on, as departments do, but this podcast pays homage to the department as it was when I was a student there in the 1960s. I think of these episodes as a continuation of my two other podcasts, The Places Where We Belong and The Geographer's Scrapbook.