Results for “satellite radio” 33 found
Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate!
I had heard the rumors for years, but I didn’t think it actually would happen. My takes on a few Dylan albums:
FreeWheelin’ Bob Dylan: One of his most listenable and underrated albums, the same is true for Another Side of Bob Dylan.
Bringing It All Back Home: The album I fell in love with as a kid. Some of it is overwrought but mostly still amazing, perhaps his highest peaks.
Highway 61 Revisited: Half of it is wonderful, but it contains excess and some so-so judgment.
Blonde on Blonde: Many see this as Dylan’s peak, but I don’t listen to it much. Somehow the sound is a little harsh for my taste.
The Basement Tapes: The most overrated, too much murky slush and slosh.
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, vol.II: The perfect medley.
Blood on the Tracks: Maybe the most consistent and listenable album, though it’s not pathbreaking in the way that the mid-sixties work was.
Time Out of Mind: An amazing “late career” work.
Dylan’s memoir is excellent, and his most underrated contribution outside of creating music is the CDs he edited for satellite radio, many hours of Dylan selecting and playing classics from early American musical history, blues, country, mixed styles, perhaps the single best look at the early evolution of American popular music. Many hours of listening pleasure. Bob Dylan Radio Hour. And the Martin Scorsese four-hour bio-documentary on Dylan is one of the better movies ever made, No Direction Home it is called.
If I recall correctly, three of the Conversations with Tyler turned to the topic of Bob Dylan. Camille Paglia loves the song “Desolation Row,” Cass Sunstein is a big fan, especially of some of the early period work, and Ezra Klein feels he is overrated, I guess that means especially overrated now.
Here are my earlier posts on Bob Dylan. Complain all you want, I say Bob Dylan is a better and more important artist than say Philip Roth. It’s not even close.
Congratulations to Bob Dylan, polymath!
Friday assorted links
1. Did Singapore’s National Service improve you?
2. Research position at GiveWell. And is Norway taking too much from its sovereign wealth fund?
3. Is materialism and interest in “stuff” in decline?
4. Should we regulate medicine like public utilities?
5. It is sad how much they play Steely Dan on satellite radio — could it be some strange form of payola?
Observations on seeing Paul McCartney
1. Many of the best songs were from his solo or Wings period, especially those designed to be played live, and designed to work without the backing voices of the other Beatles.
2. The first two-thirds of the concert pulled out an impressive number of obscure songs, most of which worked, including a bluesy “Letting Go” (can anyone other than Kelly Jane Torrance place that one without using Google?). Paul flat out told the crowd he doesn’t care if they like these other songs less.
3. Often the best Beatle song vocals were Paul doing either John or George parts, because you didn’t know exactly what to expect and thus you were let down less by his 74-year-old vocal cords.
4. His stamina was remarkable. The show was almost three hours long, with little in the way of breaks for him, and he is playing two nights in a row.
5. At the time of its release, “Hi Hi Hi” seemed like a commercial piece of crud, but it has become iconic and satellite radio treats it with respect as well.
6. Paul has been with his current touring band for fifteen years, far longer than he ever was with either Wings or the Beatles.
7. There is a fellow who collects “album covers that are parodies of Beatle album covers,” and he has over 2,000 of them. How is that for markets in everything?
Assorted links
1. Bob Dylan’s satellite radio theme hour to return.
2. New uses for old soda bottles. And looming peak dirt?
3. Really fast urban evolution of animals.
4. Nudging the poor to consume more medical services: is time more important than money?
Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday
It is today, here are a few underrated highlights of his career:
1. No Direction Home, the biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s one of the best documentaries on American music more generally, and a superb albeit hagiographic portrait of Dylan and his music.
2. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks and most of all Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volume II are the albums I listen to most often. The last one sounds horrible from its name, but it was conceived conceptually, avoids the traditional problems of greatest hits albums (unlike Vol. I), and has some not otherwise available tracks; highly recommended. Then comes Time Out of Mind. I think of Bringing it All Back Home as the “best” Dylan album, but I enjoyed it so much at age fifteen that I don’t listen to it much today. Blonde on Blonde is overreaching and Highway 61 Revisited is half wonderful, half embarrassment in the lyrics.
3. Dylan as disc jockey is first-rate, and you can buy his XM Satellite Radio selections of early American music. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the period.
4. As a singer Dylan is influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, as an acoustic guitarist he remains underrated.
5. Dylan once said that Barry Goldwater was his favorite politician.
The Tyranny of the Market
This new book is by sometimes Slate.com columnist and U. Penn economist Joel Waldfogel, of "Deadweight Loss of Christmas" fame. The subtitle is "Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want."
This well-written monograph is the best extant non-technical treatment of fixed costs and how they limit product diversity. On a given night, you can’t see a live performance of Samuel Beckett in Topeka, Kansas but maybe you can in the larger New York City; fixed costs are why they won’t set up the stage and hire the cast for only five viewers.
But Waldfogel is more pessimistic about the market than I am. The book’s opening example is about how hard it is to find radio stations in underpopulated areas; satellite radio is mentioned on p.120 but I would have started with its reach and also its limitations (and here). There is internet radio as well. The first example in the empirical chapter is that it takes $900 million on average to develop a new drug, but regulations and the FDA are not mentioned.
I can recommend this book but I do not agree with its central conclusion: "Markets do not avoid the tyranny of the majority." There are very few areas of my life, if any, where markets force me to follow the wishes of the majority.
Oddly the biggest problem is not mentioned and that is style and marketing. Retail outlets do not carry many items, not because they couldn’t hang some of the stuff from the ceiling, but rather because they wish to project a focused image. In other words, the real problem, when there is one, is the very limited attention spans of the consumers and the ad watchers and the product line gossipers.
My podcast, #2
Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George
Mason University, talks with Bloomberg’s Tom Keene from Fairfax, Virginia, the
impact of celebrities on politics and the economy, XM Satellite Radio Holdings
Inc.’s possible combination with Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., and the effect
of blogs on the news industry.
Scroll down from here, there are many other economist podcasts as well. I predict that both XM and Sirius will go under, the iPod is the real competitor.
Addendum: Here is the new podcast link.
Markets in everything
Welsh expatriates missing the sweet smell of home can now buy a bottle of air from the hills of Wales – for £24.
Businessman John Gronow will launch walesinabottle.com on Thursday to sell Welsh atmosphere around the world.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Chris Tracey for the pointer. And while we are on the "Markets in Everything" topic, did you know Sirius Satellite Radio is starting an all-Elvis channel?
Markets in everything
Price a Chilean cemetary charges for an alarm built into coffins to ensure against mistaken live burial: $462
That is from Harper’s Index, in the latest issue of Harper’s. Here is a related link.
Here is some evidence on the likelihood of being buried alive.
The Italians take things further, albeit at a higher price:
In 1995 a $5,000 Italian casket equipped with call-for-help ability and survival kit went on sale. Akin to bleeping devices which alert relatives to an elderly family member’s being in trouble, this casket is equipped with a beeper which will sound a similar emergency signal. The coffins are also fitted with a two-way microphone/speaker to enable communication between the occupant and someone outside, and a kit which includes a torch, a small oxygen tank, a sensor to detect a person’s heartbeat, and even a heart stimulator.
What I would want: Satellite radio, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and a cell phone with a good battery.
Does anyone listen to XTC anymore?
I’ve had satellite radio for over a year now, and even they don’t play XTC. Once seen as one of the UK most vital independent pop bands, XTC first rose to popularity and now seems to have fallen out of both indie and pop markets.
To be sure, the group had its problems. They don’t have a single album you can listen to straight through without wincing at least occasionally [Black Sea comes closest, though English Settlement has their highest peaks], the fey Britishisms can be offputting, and the vocals are sometimes monotonous [have I sold you on them yet?]. Plus they don’t have a truly convincing greatest hits collection. But their very best songs are among the most significant achievements of rock and roll. Andy Partridge’s songwriting, polyrhythms and studio sense have given me some of my most treasured musical moments. Let’s hope they stand the test of time.
I don’t do iPod (I can’t stand the poor sound quality), but buy the following if you can: 1) No Language in our Lungs [Partridge’s favorite song from the group], 2) Helicopter, 3) Ladybird, 4) Snowman [my favorite], 5) No Thugs in Our House, 6) Senses Working Overtime, 7) I’d Like That, 8) Crocodile, 9) Rocket from a Bottle, 10) Yacht Dance, 11) Brainiac’s Daughter [technically by the “Dukes of Stratosphere”], and 12) Holly up on Poppy, just to name a few. Those songs are my nomination for what belongs in the canon but isn’t yet there.
Addendum: Economist Dan Klein, who first turned me on to XTC, adds the following:
“I liked Tyler’s post on the British rock band XTC. But there is something about XTC he didn’t mention. Not sure how to describe it. Something like the soul wrenching sound of focus and determination. In Led Zeppelin and NWA you also get a pure sense of masculine being, but there’s something special about it in XTC. The self as a team of men in a boiler room making a machine serve an over-riding purpose. I think of songs like “Paper and Iron,” “Travels in Nihilon,” “Heaven is Paved with Broken Glass,” “Tissue Tigers,” and, above all, “Roads Girdle the Globe.” I’d say the peaks come on the albums Go 2, Drums and Wires, and Black Sea.”
“Hail mother motor!
Hail piston rotor!
Hail wheel!””
CDs as loss leaders
An increasing percentage of compact discs are sold in mega-chains, such as Best Buy or Wal-Mart, as loss leaders. Offer the CD at a very cheap price, and hope that the buyers also take home a television set. This practice is the central reason why Tower Records recently went bankrupt.
Loss leader CDs push music in a more mainstream direction. The impulse buy is for the TV, the musical purchase is planned, which favors established stars with new releases. Sudden impulse buys of unknown musical products, by definition, do not bring people into the store. In essence consumers have decided they would rather bundle hit musical releases with TV sets and computers (the Best Buy model), than with more obscure musical releases (the Tower model).
Consumers with mainstream musical tastes are better off, but how about consumers who prefer the niche products? On the downside, hit CDs are cross-subsidizing obscure CDs to a lesser degree than before.
Nonetheless not all hope is lost for buyers with indie tastes. Amazon.com and other Internet services offer a wide variety of releases and lessen the need for such a cross-subsidy. And keep in mind that the cross-subsidy went two ways. The customers who prefer music from Madagascar no longer have to cross-subsidize the Eminem displays in Tower. The CDs are held in Amazon-linked warehouses, which is cheaper, even once you take shipping into account. Furthermore the desire to build up the Amazon brand name cross-subsidizes obscure products of all kinds, many of which Amazon makes little or no money from.
The other key musical trend of our time is illegal downloading, which hurts the top artists most of all. Indie releases use the Internet for publicity, and world music artists learned to live without copyright protection a long time ago. Legal downloading, through iPod, subsidizes music of all kinds. None of the iTunes songs make money for Apple, rather music of your choice (if they can get the rights) is a loss leader for hardware. Most people buy iTunes, not for the latest hits, but to hold a diverse mix of their past and yet-to-be-known future favorites. And most satellite radio channels do not play hits but rather serve niche tastes. XM offers a wide variety of channels, in part to make its brand name well-known and focal.
The bottom line: Don’t worry about music as a loss leader. Cross-subsidies all over the place, and point in many differing directions. But at the end of the day, both the demand and supply for musical diversity are alive and well.
Media concentration
It is commonly alleged that media concentration is on the rise. Ben Compaine, in the January issue of Reason magazine (not yet on-line), debunks this myth. In the mid 1980s, the top ten media companies accounted for 38 percent of total revenue. In the late 1990s the figure was higher, but only barely, up to 41 percent. More importantly, different companies shape our media experiences. Where was Comcast, now the largest cable company, twenty years ago? Bertelsmann, now a giant, was barely visible in American markets. Amazon.com and other Internet-related enterprises are new on the scene as well. If media companies are monopolies, their market power is extremely fragile.
Nor are smaller media outlets necessarily better than the larger conglomerates. The larger outlets are much more likely to win awards for their quality, nor are they obviously more biased. Clear Channel radio is now a poster boy for media critics, but its 1200 stations comprise only slightly more than ten percent of a total of 10,500 American stations. Note also that there were only 8000 radio stations in 1980. We now have satellite radio and Internet radio as well.
Compaine makes a nice point in closing:
It may indeed be that at any given moment 80 percent of the audience is viewing or reading or listening to something from the 10 largest media players. But that does not mean it is the same 80 percent all the time, or that it is cause for concern.
The bottom line: When it comes to media, we have more choice and more competition than ever before.
The economics of classical music
A search on Amazon.com yielded 276 distinct performances of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, many at bargain prices. Attendance at classical concerts is steady or slightly up. The classical share of the CD market is roughly constant at 3 to 5 percent. On the other hand, many orchestras are experiencing financial difficulties, and some are closing.
Complaints about the economic fate of classical music have been common for many decades. In fact parts of the 1980s and 1990s — not long ago — were a financial golden age for the classics, driven by The Three Tenors, Gorecki, and replacing albums with CDs. The entire story comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, click here.
In my view, the biggest single dilemma is whether the next generation of philanthropists will have any loyalty to classical music institutions.
How about classical music on the radio?
Classical music stations have disappeared in many cities; one-third of the nation’s top 100 radio markets do not have a classical station. After 63 years, ChevronTexaco’s radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House will be off the air next year.
I suspect that the future of classical music on the radio lies in satellite radio, read this article from today’s Washington Post. XM satellite radio has about one million subscribers and its classical stations are excellent, long pieces with high sound quality, not just another rendition of a Telemann shortie or a Boccherini guitar quintet.
Thanks to William Sjostrom for the pointer to the article.
Addendum: Kevin Brancato tells us that fewer than one percent of American symphony orchestras have gone bankrupt in recent years.
Emergent Ventures India, new winners, third Indian cohort
Angad Daryani / Praan
Angad Daryani is 22-year-old social entrepreneur and inventor from Mumbai, and his goal is to find solutions for clean air at a low cost, accessible to all. He received his EV grant to build ultra-low cost, filter-less outdoor air purification systems for deployment in open areas through his startup Praan. Angad’s work was recently covered by the BBC here.
Swasthik Padma
Swasthik Padma is a 19-year-old inventor and researcher. He received his EV grant to develop PLASCRETE, a high-strength composite material made from non-recyclable plastic (post-consumer plastic waste which consists of Multilayer, Film Grade Plastics and Sand) in a device called PLASCREATOR, also developed by Swasthik. The final product serves as a stronger, cost-effective, non-corrosive, and sustainable alternative to concrete and wood as a building material. He is also working on agritech solutions, desalination devices, and low cost solutions to combat climate change.
Ajay Shah
Ajay Shah is an economist, the founder of the LEAP blog, and the coauthor (with Vijay Kelkar) of In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy, an excellent book, covered by Alex here. He received his EV grant for creating a community of scholars and policymakers to work on vaccine production, distribution, and pricing, and the role of the government and private sector given India’s state capacity.
Meghraj Suthar
Meghraj Suthar, is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and author from Jodhpur. He founded Localites, a global community (6,000 members from more than 130 countries) of travelers and those who like to show around their cities to travelers for free or on an hourly charge. He also writes inspirational fiction. He has published two books: The Dreamers and The Believers and is working on his next book. He received his EV grant to develop his new project Growcify– helping small & medium-sized businesses in smaller Indian cities to go online with their own end-to-end integrated e-commerce app at very affordable pricing.
Jamie Martin/ The Queen’s English
Jamie Martin and Sandeep Mallareddy founded The Queen’s English to develop a tool to help speak English. Indians who speak English earn 5x more than those who don’t. The Queen’s English provides 300 hours of totally scripted lesson plans on a simple Android app for high quality teaching by allowing anyone who can speak English to teach high quality spoken English lessons using just a mobile phone.
Rubén Poblete-Cazenave
Rubén Poblete-Cazenave is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His work has focused on studying topics on political economy, development economics and economics of crime, with a particular interest in India. Rubén received his EV grant to study the dynamic effects of lockdowns on criminal activity and police performance in Bihar, and on violence against women in India.
Chandra Bhan Prasad
Chandra Bhan Prasad is an Indian scholar, political commentator, and author of the Bhopal Document, Dalit Phobia: Why Do They Hate Us?, What is Ambedkarism?, Dalit Diary, 1999-2003: Reflections on Apartheid in India, and co-author author (with D Shyam Babu and Devesh Kapur) of Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of the ByDalits.com e-commerce platform and the editor of Dalit Enterprise magazine. He received his EV grant to pursue his research on Dalit capitalism as a movement for self-respect.
Praveen Tiwari
Praveen Tiwari is a rural education entrepreneur in India. At 17, he started Power of Youth to increase education and awareness among rural students in his district. To cope with the Covid lockdown he started the Study Garh with a YouTube channel to provide better quality educational content to rural students in their regional language (Hindi).
Preetham R and Vinayak Vineeth
Preetham R. and Vinayak Vineeth are 17-year-old high-schoolers from Bangalore. Preetham is interested in computing, futurism and space; and Vinayak is thinking about projects ranging from automation to web development. They received their EV grant for a semantic text analysis system based on graph similarity scores. The system (currently called the Knowledge Engine) will be used for perfectly private contextual advertising and will soon be expanded for other uses like better search engines, research tools and improved video streaming experiences. They hope to launch it commercially by the end of 2022.
Shriya Shankar:
Shriya Shankar is a 20-year-old social entrepreneur and computer science engineer from Bangalore and the founder of Project Sitara Foundation, which provides accessible STEM education to children from underserved communities. She received her EV grant to develop an accessible ed-tech series focused on contextualizing mathematics in Kannada to make learning more relatable and inclusive for children.
Baishali Bomjan and Bhuvana Anand
Baishali and Bhuvana are the co-founders of Trayas Foundation, an independent research and policy advisory organization that champions constitutional, social, and market liberalism in India through data-informed public discourse. Their particular focus is on dismantling regulatory bottlenecks to individual opportunity, dignity and freedom. The EV grant will support Trayas’s work for reforms in state labor regulations that ease doing business and further prosperity, and help end legal restrictions placed on women’s employment under India’s labor protection framework to engender economic agency for millions of Indians.
Akash Bhatia and Puru Botla / Infinite Analytics
Infinite Analytics received their first grant for developing the Sherlock platform to help Indian state governments with mobility analysis to combat Covid spread. Their second EV grant is to scale their platform and analyze patterns to understand the spread of the Delta variant in the 2021 Covid wave in India. They will analyze religious congregations, election rallies, crematoria footfalls and regular daily/weekly bazaars, and create capabilities to understand the spread of the virus in every city/town in India.
PS Vishnuprasad
Vishnuprasad is a 21-year-old BS-MS student at IISER Tirupati. He is interested in the intersection of political polarization and network science and focused on the emergence and spread of disinformation and fake news. He is working on the spread of disinformation and propaganda in spaces Indians use to access information on the internet. He received his EV grant to build a tool that tracks cross-platform spread of disinformation and propaganda on social media. He is also interested in the science of cooking and is a stand-up comedian and writer.
Prem Panicker:
Prem Panicker is a journalist, cricket writer, and founding editor of peepli.org, a site dedicated to multimedia long form journalism focused on the environment, man/animal conflict, and development. He received an EV grant to explore India’s 7,400 km coastline, with an emphasis on coastal erosion, environmental degradation, and the consequent loss of lives and livelihoods.
Vaidehi Tandel
Vaidehi Tandel is an urban economist and Lecturer at the Henley Business School in University of Reading. She is interested in understanding the challenges and potential of India’s urban transformation and her EV grant will support her ongoing research on the political economy of urbanization in India. She was part of the team led by Malani that won the EV Covid India prize.
Abhinav Singh
Abhinav recently completed his Masters in the Behavioral and Computational Economics program at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute. His goal is to make political economy ideas accessible to young Indians, and support those interested in advancing critical thinking over policy questions. He received his EV grant to start Polekon, a platform that will host educational content and organize seminars on key political economy issues and build a community of young thinkers interested in political economy in India.
Bevin A./Contact
CONTACT was founded by two engineers Ann Joys and Bevin A. as a low-cost, voluntary, contact tracing solution. They used RFID tags and readers for consenting individuals to log their locations at various points like shops, hotels, educational institutions, etc. These data are anonymized and analyzed to track mobility and develop better Covid policies, while maintaining user anonymity.
Onkar Singh Batra
Onkar Singh is a 16-year-old developer/researcher and high school student in Jammu. He received his first EV grant for his Covid Care Jammu project. His goal is to develop India’s First Open-Source Satellite, and he is founder of Paradox Sonic Space Research Agency, a non-profit aerospace research organization developing inexpensive and open-source technologies. Onkar received his second EV grant to develop a high efficiency, low cost, nano satellite. Along with EV his project is also supported by an Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) grant. Onkar has a working engineering model and is developing the final flight model for launch in 2022.
StorySurf
Storysurf, founded by Omkar Sane and Chirag Anand, is based on the idea that stories are the simplest form of wisdom and that developing an ocean of stories is the antidote to social media polarization. They are developing both a network of writers, and a range of stories between 6-300 words in a user-friendly app to encourage people to read narratives. Through their stories, they hope to help more readers consume information and ideas through stories.
Naman Pushp/ Airbound
Airbound is cofounded by its CEO Naman Pushp, a 16 year old high-schooler from Mumbai passionate about engineering and robotics, and COO Faraaz Baig, a 20 year old self-taught programmer and robotics engineers from Bangalore. Airbound aims to make delivery accessible by developing a VTOL drone design that can use small businesses as takeoff/landing locations. They have also created the first blended wing body tail sitter (along with a whole host of other optimizations) to make this kind of drone delivery possible, safe and accessible.
Anup Malani / CMIE / Prabhat Jha
An joint grant to (1) Anup Malani, Professor at the University of Chicago, (2) The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), and (3) Prabhat Jha, Professor at University of Toronto and the Centre for Global Health Research, to determine the extent to which reported excess deaths in India are due to Covid. Recent studies show that that the pandemic in India may be associated with between 3 million to 4.9 million excess deaths, roughly 8-12 times officially reported number of COVID deaths. To determine how many of these deaths are statistically attributable to Covid, they will conduct verbal autopsies on roughly 20,000 deaths, with the results to be made publicly available.
And finally:
Aditya Dar/The Violence Archive
A joint grant to Aaditya Dar, an economist at Indian School of Business, Kiran Garimella, a computer scientist at Rutgers University and Vasundhara Sirnate, a political scientist and journalist for creating the India Violence Archive. They will use machine learning and natural language processing to develop an open-source historical record of collective public violence in India over 100 years. The goal is to create accessible and high-quality public data so civil society can pursue justice and governments can make better policy.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. EV India announcement here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort here. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
Note that EV India is led and run by Shruti Rajagopalan, I thank her for all of her excellent work on this!
Here is Shruti on Twitter, and here is her excellent Ideas of India podcast. Shruti is herself an earlier Emergent Ventures winner, and while she is very highly rated remains grossly underrated.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jon Elster, France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime. A useful historical introduction to the period, but most notable for taking canons of good social science explanation seriously throughout each step of the analysis. For one thing, it helps you realize how few people do that, but at the same time you wonder how much restating events in terms of social science mechanisms actually helps historical explanation. A smart book and very well-informed book in any case.
2. Paul Preston, A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain. A highly detailed but also analytical account of how Spanish political economy became so screwed up. Runs from the 1830s up through the financial crisis, and focuses why Spain was backward in nation-building. Maybe too detailed for some but I believe there is no other book like it.
3. Henry M. Cowles, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey. Argue that the true scientific method did not develop until the mid-to late 19th century. A good book, although perhaps more for historians of ideas than students of science per se.
John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History is both a good introduction and deep enough for those well-read in this area.
There is also Paul Matzko, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built and Modern Conservative Movement. I don’t listen to (non-satellite) radio, but some of you should find this interesting.