http://radio.cz/en/article/145562 An informal interview show, where you have the chance to meet some of the most interesting figures in Czech life today. en Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:08:58 +0100 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:08:58 +0100 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Radio Prague CMS 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Radio Broadcasting cr@radio.cz (Cesky Rozhlas) webmaster@radio.cz (CRo Webmaster) http://radio.cz/en/article/145562 The fortunes of journalist Jan Bednář were only beginning to unfold when he was kicked out of the School of Economics after signing the anti-communist Charter 77 and compelled to work as a night watchman for several years. The son of a dissident imprisoned for publishing samizdat literature, the regime was glad to be rid of him when he applied to leave the country in the early 80s. He went to England and was able to complete his studies in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University, from where he proceeded to join the Czechoslovak service of the BBC in 1985. Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:08:58 +0100 urn:uuid:e15a3200-c4af-5d83-a8b8-bfc25ad27487 http://radio.cz/en/article/145387 The Botanicus chain of stores offering herbal soaps, extracts and delicacies is a Czech, and growing international, success story. Most tourists will have probably bought something from one of their outlets in the country. The small business was founded in the early 1990’s after the restitution of a family farm around 40 kilometres north-east of Prague. That has become the centre for the business and a tourist attraction with more than 50,000 visitors a year. One of the firm’s co-founders Dana Hradecká explained the roots of the original inspiration for the business. Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:19:20 +0100 urn:uuid:792d0d0d-3aed-5d14-a645-3f2f1bf32745 http://radio.cz/en/article/145191 Martin Dušek, who often works with co-director Ondřej Provazník, is a two-time winner of the main prize at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, the Czech Republic’s most prestigious documentary award. His films “A Town Called Hermitage” and “Coal in the Soul” were both shot in the former Sudetenland in North Bohemia, a border region whose Sudeten German inhabitants were expelled from Czechoslovakia after the war. Martin Dušek ’s latest film deals with his own Sudeten German heritage – in a humorous and provocative way. I caught up the director to speak about why this part of country continues to inspire him and how he discovered his love for making documentaries. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:02:06 +0100 urn:uuid:5feb35e9-b974-5e13-98cf-0e5211c8bf7a http://radio.cz/en/article/145015 Oldřich Černý is executive director of the Forum 2000 Foundation, which every year invites some of the world’s leading thinkers to a conference in Prague. Forum 2000 was cofounded by Václav Havel, with whom Mr. Černý was closely involved for many years. Indeed, he organised what was to be the former president’s final public appearance, a meeting with the Dalai Lama, a week before his death last month. Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:49:39 +0100 urn:uuid:17516f71-8e19-5967-b6cd-93a4c413ac07 http://radio.cz/en/article/144831 It is rare to catch world-record holding extreme angler Jakub Vágner in the Czech Republic. After all, he spends most of his time on fishing expeditions to remote destinations like the Amazon, in search of what he calls freshwater giants. In his home country, the 30-year-old fisherman has become a star in his own right, and is currently on billboards all over the city as the face of a new advertising campaign for a well-known Czech bank. He also has his own TV show on National Geographic, Fish Warrior, and last year, he appeared on the famous American Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I spoke to Jakub Vágner about fish, the importance of going after your dreams and how he first discovered his love for angling. Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:10:12 +0100 urn:uuid:1bd23c4a-7121-5417-99d7-bb04c81060f4 http://radio.cz/en/article/144658 It’s pretty fair to say that anybody in the Czech Republic who knows anything about astronomy has learned at least some of it from Dr. Jiří Grygar. Something of a Czech Carl Sagan, Dr. Grygar has been a frequent personality of Czech and Slovak television screens since his popular programme “Windows Wide Open to Space” in the late 1970’s. He was the chairman of the Czech Astronomical Society and is one of the founding members of the Czech club of sceptics, Sisyfos, which battles pseudoscience and charlatanism in the Czech media. I met Dr. Grygar in his tiny office at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, and asked him to tell me about how he first became interested in his life’s passion. Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:33:39 +0100 urn:uuid:af5440f4-d686-5f5e-a9ea-89dae7f7cc9b http://radio.cz/en/article/144477 A group of Czech intellectuals including political analyst Jiří Pehe, sociologists Jan Keller and Tereza Stöckelová, and others, felt that ever since the fall of communism, political discourse in the country has been dominated by a right-wing agenda, articulated by a number of liberal and conservative institutes. To provide alternatives and to oppose these views from a left-wing wing perspective, these intellectuals established in January a new political think-tank called Cesta, or Path. In this edition of One on One, RP spoke to one of Cesta’s founders, political analyst Vít Klepárník. Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:43:33 +0100 urn:uuid:2b1c747b-a907-50aa-91b5-24f86dd38e6b http://radio.cz/en/article/144177 People in the Czech Republic and around the world hail the late ex-president Václav Havel as a great European, a humanist and a man who stood up to the communist regime, a decent and courageous man who led his country to democracy. In this special edition of One on One, we talk to political commentator Jiří Pehe who served as Václav Havel’s chief political advisor in the late 1990s. Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:06:26 +0100 urn:uuid:c573c8da-5270-53c0-b900-a7a0205330c6 http://radio.cz/en/article/143955 Back in the mid 1990s Tomáš Zilvar quickly moved from putting together DIY fanzines to publishing glossy titles like Tripmag and XMAG, magazines that were focused on electronic music at a time when that genre was really taking off among young Czechs. Today Zilvar, who is still in his early 30s, has two jobs: running the Prague office of the hip New York-based magazine and website Vice; and offering digitalisation services to Czech media outlets and authors keen to enter the age of e-readers. Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:49:20 +0100 urn:uuid:4aade025-16e7-5706-8ddd-a6b57529744a http://radio.cz/en/article/143781 The world-renowned jazz guitar player Rudy Linka was born in Prague but moved to Sweden at a young age. After half a decade there he left for the US, and has been living in New York for nearly a quarter of a century. In recent years, however, Rudy has been home in the Czech Republic every summer, organising the Bohemia Jazz Fest, a great free event which brings world class jazz musicians to a number of Czech towns and cities. We met at Café Slavia, one of the haunts of his teenage years. Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:41:42 +0100 urn:uuid:8ab59878-6312-59c5-b883-dfb573743785 http://radio.cz/en/article/143614 The Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek has been described as the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He criticizes global capitalism and warns of the dangers it presents for today’s democracy. Slavoj Žižek recently arrived in Prague to launch a Czech translation of his latest book, entitled First Tragedy Then Farce. Czech Radio’s Petr Dudek spoke to Slavoj Žižek during his Prague visit, and first asked him about his view of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:42:24 +0100 urn:uuid:c6f5dbab-f285-558e-a94a-e41c28977037 http://radio.cz/en/article/143431 More than 180 designs by secondary school and university students from around the Czech Republic competed in the 20th annual National Student Design Awards that were handed out in Prague last week. The main prize went to Anna Marešová, a post-graduate student at the UJEP university in Ústí nad Labem, for a set of vibrators called Whoop De Doo. The sleek, hypermodern sex toys, complete with chargers, charmed the jury which appreciated the author’s innovative and daring approach. In this edition of One on One, Anna Marešová talks about her award-wining Whoop De Doo vibrators, her inspiration and some of her other work. I first asked her whether the award came as a big surprise. Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:42:49 +0100 urn:uuid:a16fe727-48cd-5298-ac2f-c4cd45141ba5 http://radio.cz/en/article/143254 With dramas like Eeeny Meeny, Little Girl Blue and Mamas and Papas, Alice Nellis has become one of the best-known Czech filmmakers of her generation. The director and screenwriter, who is 40, is now back at the box office with Perfect Days, a comedy adapted from the stage. Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:53:25 +0100 urn:uuid:c1e092c9-ccd3-5f68-94cb-8440b63e6016 http://radio.cz/en/article/143087 The high-profile US reparations lawyer Edward Fagan is waging a battle with the Czech authorities over bonds issued in 1924 by the town Karlovy Vary. Mr Fagan made his name in the 1990s when he successfully sued Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust victims for more than a billion US dollars; he now says he is one of the owners of the Karlovy Vary bonds that were never fully paid off, and whose total value would now amount to some 500 million dollars. But Czech officials say these bonds expired a long time ago, and when the media-savvy lawyer showed up at Karlovy Vary town hall and at the Czech Finance Ministry, no one was willing to meet with him Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100 urn:uuid:8353b94f-558d-54c0-beab-446c7095bc4c http://radio.cz/en/article/142889 Paul Day was born and raised in Stafford, in the UK’s West Midlands, where he started working as a butcher, his first food industry job. After working in two Michelin-starred restaurants in London, the chef came to Prague and has recently opened a restaurant of his own, Sansho. In its first weeks of being open, the Asian fusion restaurant quickly became the one place everyone was talking about – and now, Sansho is fully booked most days – even at lunch. I met the chef at the restaurant, where he told me about the flavors that fascinate him, how Prague’s dining scene differs from London’s, and what first sparked his interest in food and cooking. Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:57:30 +0100 urn:uuid:09cc9821-4559-5864-b90a-0412b7e0b847 http://radio.cz/en/article/142702 Freddie Botur, who was born Vratislav Botur, fled Czechoslovakia in 1948, shortly after taking part in a student march to Prague Castle aimed at preventing the Communists from seizing power. The ambitious young émigré eventually ended up in New York, where he became a successful developer and owner of tennis clubs, including the well-known Tennisport on the banks of the East River. Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:24:53 +0200 urn:uuid:d85edf34-063f-50cc-a89d-0d398c88a07a http://radio.cz/en/article/142533 Rachel Kanarowski has the kind of job that must make her the absolute envy of her peers. At only 30, she is the editor-in-chief of the Czech version of InStyle, a major international women’s magazine. At the magazine’s offices, we discussed shopping in Prague and the Czech take on style. But first Kanarowski described the unlikely sounding way in which the opportunity to enter the business arose, and how she made the most of that chance. Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:44:07 +0200 urn:uuid:ec281558-2fe5-5133-805b-bafafd446c64 http://radio.cz/en/article/142350 Jakub Mareš is one of the operators of the Hub, Prague’s biggest co-working centre. They are a new kind of shared working environment where people whose main tool is their notebook computer can rent a desk for as many hours a week as they need. Located in a former printing factory in the Smíchov district, the Hub features a large open office space, meeting rooms, a bar and lounge area, and even a summer terrace. When we spoke there recently, I asked Mareš (30) why he and his colleagues had launched the project in Prague, and why now. Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:15:40 +0200 urn:uuid:4d94caf7-9bfe-556e-88b2-815341152095 http://radio.cz/en/article/142176 The Czech Republic recently saw an outbreak of tensions between the country’s Romany minority and parts of the majority population. People in the isolated northern Bohemian region of Šluknov began holding anti-Romany rallies to protest a growing crime rate in the region; the government reacted by sending in the police but also by adopting a plan to tackle the issue of Romany exclusion and impoverishment. To discuss these and other issues, Radio Prague spoke to Gwendolyn Albert who for the past 15 years has been working with the Romany advocacy group, Romea. Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:40:48 +0200 urn:uuid:b6def9f7-81f6-5c02-88ae-fdbd0b5edf77 http://radio.cz/en/article/142053 Christopher Harwood is a lecturer in Czech at Columbia University in New York. When I met him at his office on Columbia’s Upper West Side campus, we discussed Czech literature, the difficulties of learning Czech, and how Professor Harwood himself had become good enough at the language to teach it at one of the world’s leading universities. Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200 urn:uuid:3c5b51a8-3d56-5faf-90e2-874689ec6e5a