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Top Picks: Superorganism's album, the documentary 'Jane,' and more

The Podbean app can help podcast fans find new content to listen to, 'The Shape of Water,' this year’s Oscar winner for best picture, is available on DVD and Blu-ray, and more top picks.

  • By Staff

Quilt of music

A thoroughly modern, tongue-in-cheek pop masterpiece nearly impossible to describe, Superorganism is a lot like other things you may have heard, but never assembled quite like this. The band is an international crazy quilt of musicians who met online and wove together beats, samples, and chirpy harmonies from laptops in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and their new home, East London. Their eponymous first album will put a goofy grin on your face.

Podcast help

The Podbean app can help podcast fans find new content to listen to with suggestions based on what users have listened to in the past, and offers free audiobooks of classic works. The app can also seamlessly remove silent portions from an episode. Podbean is free for iOS and Android.

National Geographic Creative/Hugo Van Lawick

Story of Jane

The acclaimed documentary Jane, directed by Brett Morgen, tells the story of the life of primatologist Jane Goodall, including her career beginnings studying in Tanzania in the 1960s and new footage of her work with chimpanzees. The film is available on the National Geographic Channel’s On Demand platform and for streaming through www.natgeotv.com.

Rhapsodic ‘water’

The Shape of Water, this year’s Oscar winner for best picture, is available on DVD and Blu-ray. The movie follows Elisa Esposito (best actress Oscar nominee Sally Hawkins), who works at a government facility and forms a connection with a creature being studied there. Monitor film critic Peter Rainer writes, “The best parts of ‘The Shape of Water’ ... are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ without ever seeming slavish.” 

Ann Hermes/Staff/File

Looking into the future

The Wall Street Journal is looking ahead with the podcast The Future of Everything, which examines what’s coming up for subjects from music to quantum computing to bitcoin. A recent intriguing episode looked at artificial intelligence and what would affect decisions made by that technology. You can find it at http://bit.ly/thefutureofeverything. 

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