Great Planet Money podcast on why lard fell out of favor.

I have been listening to The Moth podcast for a little while now, and I love it. So far these are my favorites:

• Sherman “O.T.” Powell: Cocktails in Attica
• Christian McBride: The Gig
• Matteson Perry & Jeff Simmermon: GrandSLAM Stories
• Anthony Griffith: Best of Times, Worst of Times

Warning: the first three are fun and entertaining but that last one is absolutely heart-rending.

Ran into this recently, with a buddy of mine recommending an old Fresh Air episode that didn’t show up on the list of available episodes in iTunes. I wanted to get it on my iPod in with the other Fresh Air podcasts, rather than dumping it into the “music” folder (which would have worked, if you aren’t compulsive about where things go).

Download and install an MP3 tag editor that can view/edit extended tags. I use Mp3tag.

Download the old podcast you want, and open it in Mp3tag. Pick “extended tags” and create the following tags:

PODCAST = 1
PODCASTDESC = episode name
PODCASTID = episode URL
PODCASTURL = podcast subscription URL

You can look at the extended tags for an existing podcast to see sample values.

Save the tags, and then drag and drop the podcast into iTunes. It should appear where it belongs.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror nicely summarizes a great episode of This American Life, Ruining It for the Rest of Us. Conventional wisdom says that group dynamics trump the individual, but sociology professor Will Felps’ work suggests one bad apple can be surprisingly damaging. In his experiments, groups with one bad apple were up to 30-40% less effective than the untainted bushels.