I recently discovered a new podcast that I think is a keeper: Big Ideas. It’s a series of university lectures, each on a different topic, with no connection to each other. I’ve listened to three so far, on detecting planets outside our solar system, T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Wasteland, and a Darwinian consideration of sexual reproduction.

All were fascinating, and all made me think. Having something engaging to listen to is essential for my commuting sanity, and these lectures will be a good source for new material. It can sometimes be a little daunting jumping into some of these, because they aren’t created especially for the podcast, they are simply recordings of one lecture in a semester-long university course. So when the biology prof says, “As I said last week, alleles are the blah blah...,” I had to just nod and pretend I remembered that stuff from high school.

It seems to me that there must be lots of other university content out there, but a quick search didn’t land on any goldmines. Any suggestions?

BTW: I linked to the Apple iTunes page for the podcast above, because the Big Ideas official site is so dreadful. In this day and age, how can people still be making pages like this?