Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
uh directly behind my house i was just walking down my street one day when an ambulance rushed by and i saw this dopey yellow lab stiffen and howl i'd know that howl anywhere i rushed over and i was like hey i've got a question about your dog and his owner was very obliging his name is joe the dog's name davey and a while later i came by their house for an interview
I'm curious if you could tell me about... when you realized that you had a sort of eccentric dog. Oh.
It turns out Davey is starting a movement.
But he's always the first howler.
Their owners must be thrilled. Jen is a psychologist. Joe is a composer for film and television. So together, they're experts on mammalian behavior and sound. So I'm inclined to believe their analysis of Davey's views on the siren subject. He's not in distress, which means he's not going to be the poster child for my anti-siren campaign. But I hadn't given up yet.
Do you share this view of Davey's how origins or what's... So there's another theory.
Jen and Joe are very neighborly people. I'm glad to know them now. Even if their dog is a huge disappointment to my anti-siren crusade, seeing as he really loves sirens. But it makes sense. It goes back to that evolutionary theory Malcolm was talking about at the top of the episode. The idea of the spandrel, and the things in our bodies and our worlds that we think we're selected for.
but actually are just there and maybe not doing us a whole lot of good. Davey's howl isn't quite a spandrel, if we're being pedantic. It's more like a vestige. He thinks he's living with a pack of dogs in the wild, but he's not. He's a house dog who lives in Brooklyn. A block away from a busy grocery store. A playground. A frustrated podcaster. A New York City government employee.
so
Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Nadeff-Haffrey, Nina Byrd-Lawrence, and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Original scoring and theme by Luis Guerra. Additional scoring by Jake Gorski. Jacob Smith is our executive producer. Engineering by Marcelo de Oliveira.
I relied on quite a few studies in researching this, and I put a link to the bibliography in the show notes, should you want any references for starting your own local movement. Special thanks also to Douglas Kupas, whose work helped launch the field of siren reform studies, Mike Tagemann, Helen K. Rosenthal, Stephen Solomon, and Paul Bergman. I'm Ben Manifafri.
The really alarming music you're hearing right now was composed by Davies owner Joe Saba for the trailer of the Michael Bay film Ambulance.
Unlike Malcolm, I am a great lover of Christmas movies. Every year, as soon as Thanksgiving's over, I'm firing up The Bishop's Wife, Miracle on 34th Street, or It's a Wonderful Life. And then there's my favorite Christmas movie, a little less famous. The 1945 romantic comedy Christmas in Connecticut. I've watched it pretty much every year since I was little.
Barbara Stanwyck plays a magazine columnist who's famous for entertaining on her grand Connecticut farm. She's known as a great cook. It's the end of World War II, and her magazine's publisher has an idea for a great feature. She'll host a returning war hero for Christmas on her farm. There's just one problem. It's all a lie. She doesn't live in Connecticut.
She lives in a tiny apartment in New York, and she has no clue how to cook.
Chaos ensues. It's a classic screwball comedy and a total delight. But the thing I really want to tell you about in this episode is what happened after I discovered, quite by accident, that there was a remake of this favorite Christmas movie of mine. An action-packed, star-studded, joke-filled, really very different version of the original. Made for TV.
And directed by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. A kind of shocking twist, if you ask me. I mean, why would the Terminator take on Christmas in Connecticut? So I did what any good Christmas fiend would do. I talked to a dozen people about something that happened 30 years ago for way too many hours to get the real story.
And I discovered in the process what I have come to regard as the greatest Christmas tale of all time.
That's Stan Brooks. In the early 1990s, he was an independent made-for-TV movie producer.
TNT launched in 1988, at the start of the cable television revolution. Then as now, cable was expensive, but it was growing. The whole game was trying to raise awareness to get people to sign up. And with channels running 24-7, there was a lot of space to fill, which led to a boom in made-for-TV movies. Stan's first film on TNT was a big success, so he got another bite at the Apple.
Showing 241–260 of 333 · page 13 of 17
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