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It’s probably fair to say that Iggy Pop is the Keith Richards of punk. He’d probably hate the comparison, but given his superhuman survival skills in an arena that turns lesser mortals to mush, it seems apt. And now, at 66 years old, Pop and the remaining Stooges—James Williamson, Scott Asheton, and the great Mike Watt (replacing Ron Asheton)—have released a new album, their first since 2007’s The Weirdness.

Unlike the Stones, The Stooges don’t rest on their laurels. Listen to “Burn” above and tell me this isn’t as raw power as Raw Power. Pop’s voice has deepened considerably, his youthful machismo tempered into apocalyptic doomsaying. But he’s still got the cocked-hip gravitas and full-frontal grimace that carried him through well over three decades of boom-bust-boom rock swagger. Wanna hear more? Lucky for you, NPR streams the full album, Ready to Die, this week. Listen to it below and be awed.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Listen to Iggy & The Stooges’ New Album Ready to Die — Online For a Limited Time is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

In the past, we’ve brought you sound recordings from the 19th century — recordings that recapture the long lost voices of figures likes Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Gladstone, Tchaikovsky, and Thomas Edison. Now, thanks to the “dramatic application of digital technology,” the Smithsonian brings you (quite fittingly) the lost voice of the telephone’s inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. According to biographer Charlotte Gray, Bell recorded his voice onto discs while conducting sound experiments between 1880 and 1886. Although the discs remained in the Smithsonian’s possession for decades, researchers lacked the technical ability to play them back, and Bell’s voice went “mute” until Carl Haber, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, figured out how to take high resolutions scans of the discs and convert them into playable audio files. That’s what you can hear below. In the short recording dated April 15, 1885, the inventor declares: “Hear my voice — Alexander Graham Bell.”

H/T Malcolm; audio via The Atlantic

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Hear the Voice of Alexander Graham Bell for the First Time in a Century is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Like so many daily comestibles we completely take for granted—salt, sugar, and (far fewer of us) tobacco—coffee has a long and often brutal history. And like many of these substances, it tends to be addictive. But coffee has also inspired a longstanding social tradition that shows no signs of ever going out of fashion. It’s a drug that makes us thinky and chatty and sociable (I for one don’t speak a human language until I’ve had my first cup). It’s these contradictions of coffee history—its complicity in slave economies and the Enlightenment public square—that Mark Pendergrast takes on in his new book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. Pendergrast puts it this way:

One of the ironies about coffee is it makes people think. It sort of creates egalitarian places — coffeehouses where people can come together — and so the French Revolution and the American Revolution were planned in coffeehouses. On the other hand, that same coffee that was fueling the French Revolution was also being produced by African slaves who had been taken to Santo Domingo, which we now know as Haiti.

In the interview above with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Pendergrast explains his interest in coffee history as a way to look at the “relationship between the have-nots and the haves.” His investigation is another foray into the hundreds of years of European colonial history that gave us both massive global inequality and Starbucks on every corner. Listen to the short interview, read Pendergrast’s book, and the next time you get thinky over coffee, you may just think a lot about how coffee shaped the world.

H/T Kim L.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.