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Light On Light Through

You'll hear a little of this and lot of that on Light On Light Through - my reviews of great television series and movies, my interviews with authors and creative media people and their interviews of me, my media theory and political commentary, thoughts about my favorite cars and food and space travel, discussions of my music, and a few of my readings from my science fiction stories. In the first years, starting in 2006, I put up a new episode at least once a month.  More recently, it became more or less often than once a month, usually less often.  But in the Summer of 2020, I began getting more in the mood to podcast, and on 17 October 2023, I began publishing a new episode of the podcast every Tuesday at 12:01 pm -- a minute after Noon (New York time).  - Paul Levinson 

24 October 2021: Interview about Light On Light Through podcast

26 December 2023: Chuck Todd interviews Paul Levinson about Alternate Realities on The Chuck Toddcast  

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  2. Prester John's Speculum Becomes Real

Prester John's Speculum Becomes Real

Aug 15, 2007

People in the Middle Ages spoke of a Prester John - a prince of a far off kingdom in the East.  He was said to have magic powers and magical instruments.  Most magical of all was his "speculum," through which Prester John could see all the provinces in his kingdom.  A sort of television...

Scholars, inspired by this legend, began referring to their surveys and encyclopedias as "specula" - or speculum literature.  There was a speculum of history, of astronomy, of alchemy, of morals.  Someone even wrote a speculum on fools.

The speculum, in other words, had gone on in the popular and then scholarly imagination to encompass not only the physical world but the realm of ideas.   Maybe a little more like the Internet than television...

But it doesn't really matter what we call our wondrous devices today.  Whether television, or Internet, or iPhone, what counts is they are real.

For we have gone with our technology from the realm of myth to what we can keep on tables, or desks, in our very hands.

And that's progress - real, and maybe even more than what could have been imagined in the Middle Ages...

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