Go big or go home, as they say. And, FreshAir’s Terri Gross appearance on The Colbert Report definitely caught some air once they posted video of the interview:
Colbert Bump: Tumblr traffic yesterday compared to day before. (I don’t think this includes traffic-from-inside-our-Dashboard figures…)
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
![Thank goodness for Reuters:
A white rose is placed on barbed wire at the museum of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau marking the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz Birkenau January 27, 2012. [REUTERS/Kacper Pempel]
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/beingblog/16580295606/1/tumblr_lygrl17NKA1qmaoal)
Thank goodness for Reuters:
A white rose is placed on barbed wire at the museum of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau marking the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz Birkenau January 27, 2012. [REUTERS/Kacper Pempel]
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Your identity is not equivalent to your biography.
“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” -Franz Kafka (photo by DG Jones) (Taken with instagram)
Unearthing a Cherokee-Slave Narrative at a Plantation Home
by David McGuire, guest contributor
An exhibit detailing the construction of the historic house mentioned. (Photo courtesy of Chief Vann House Museum)
Some stories in our families, and in our culture, get passed down. Some lay hidden, or are actively forgotten. Public historian Tiya Miles has worked on the latter — unearthing the painful histories of African slave ownership by Cherokees in the 19th century.
In this short excerpt from our upcoming show, “Toward Living Memory,” Miles explains how one fragment of an archival document led to a meaningful change at the plantation home of Cherokee Chief Vann.
Detroit Becoming, Detroit Jesus
by Susan Leem, associate producer
Kids play at the Campus Martius Fountain in Detroit. (photo: Maia C./Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
After listening to this week’s show with Grace Lee Boggs (“Becoming Detroit”), Peter Putnam sent this inspired response:
“Time Inc. was here for a year — and this is the story they missed: Detroit becoming. Full disclosure: I’ve known Grace since 1993. In fact, I met my wife, Julia, through Detroit Summer, Grace and Jimmy’s (r)evolutionary idea to utilize the spirit of young people to revitalize, re-imagine, and re-spirit Detroit. Julia was actually Detroit Summer’s first volunteer and is now deep in the process of creating a place-based school in Detroit, the Boggs Educational Center, that will draw on many of the people and principles that came out in your show. Ending with Invincible’s hip-hop song was also right on.”
He then ended his note with this poem, which he composed for Grace Lee Boggs on her 96th birthday:
Detroit Jesus
Time, Inc., buys a house in Detroit
and tries to track him for a year.
But he’s invisible to those looking for a
blue-eyed dude in a white robe
or for a city gone completely to hell.He is the cinnamon of my son’s skin
with a green thumb and a Tigers cap
and my daughter’s dove-grey eyes.
He prays into Blair’s guitar,
hangs out on Field St.,
bakes bread at Avalon
and plants tomatoes on the East side.
He rides his old-school bike down the heart
of Grand River,
paints a mural in the Corridor,
shoots hoop in the Valley
with priests and pimps and lean young men
trying to jump their way to heaven.At night,
while the Border Patrol counts cars,
he walks across the water
to Windsor,
grabs a bite to eat,
walks back.
Like Grace,
born in Providence,
he lives so simply,
he could live anywhere:
Dublin, Palestine, Malibu.
But Detroit is his home.
It was here one Sunday
a boy invited him down
off the cross
and into his house
for a glass of Faygo red pop.That was centuries ago, it seems,
and how far he’s come,
reinventing himself more times than Malcolm.
He’s been to prison,
been to college,
has a tattoo of Mary Magdalene on one arm,
Judas on the other,
and knows every Stevie Wonder song by heart.He’s Jimmy, he’s Invincible, he’s Eminem.
He’s the girls at Catherine Ferguson
and their babies,
and he’s the deepest part of Kwame
still innocent as a baby.The incinerator is hell,
but he walks right in,
burns it up with love,
comes out the other side,
walks on.He can say Amen in twelve religions,
believes school is any place
where head and heart and hands
meet,
and wears a gold timepiece around his neck
with no numbers, just a question:
What time is it on the clock of the world?And every second of every day
he answers that question
with a smile wide as the Ambassador
and a heart as big as Belle Isle,
hugging this city in his arms
and whispering to each soul
words no one else dares to say:
You are Jesus,
this is your Beloved Community,
and the time
on the clock of the world
is Now.
If I did not see light in the story, I could not tell it.
—Tiya Miles
Our interview with the public historian who is unearthing the “complex interrelationships between African American and Cherokee people in pre-colonial America” is in the final stages of production. Look for our interview next week.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
With all the high-tech boards in our recording studios, we still do Beta. Nay, SuperBeta! (Taken with Instagram at Minnesota Public Radio - American Public Media)
Could this be super-symmetry scaled large (photo: Terry Mun)? (Taken with instagram)
Word Snapshots of States of the Union Past
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
This infographic from the National Post does an incredible job of illustrating what is politically important at the current moment and in moments of the SOTU past, at least since 2001. As a public media project that focuses on issues of meaning and the big questions at the center of human life, some of the “softer” words that get at the human condition this — ideas such as hope, future, peace, and family — take a back seat to grittier, more practical issues: jobs, energy, taxes, and house/home. For this observer, the expected word choices of these two U.S. presidents gets turned on its head.
