Jay Smooth TED Talk about Race and Pockets of Prejudice
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“We are not good despite our imperfections. It is the connection we maintain with our imperfections that allow us to be good.”
Don’t you just wanna stand up and shout Amen! when you read this? Or at least nod in solid agreement with this profound statement that cuts to the quick of the essence of being human?
Jay Smooth, the video blogger of Ill Doctrine and founder of New York’s longest-running hip-hop radio in New York, WBAI’s Underground Railroad, gave a refreshing talk at TEDx Hampshire College about the ways we can have better discussions about race and racism. He’s funny and this talk is truly enjoyable. More importantly, it’s his astute observations about the ways in which these discussions devolve that’s worth noting.
He points out that discussions about race often border on matters of being a “good person” or a “bad person” — a matter of “who you are” rather than “what you said.” He reminds us that talking about issues of race is like bodily hygiene: it’s something you have to do and keep up every day. And, he says, when we embrace our own imperfections we are on the path to becoming a good person, a better human being.
Hey, this photo triggered the fact that we may be traveling to Turkey this summer for a production trip. Now I’m excited all over again! Thansk, Condenast Traveler:
Istanbul’s Lush Life | Hagia Sophia
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
A Bittersweet Picture
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
This week we bid a fond farewell to our executive producer Kate Moos (house left, as they say, in the photo above). After more than eight years on the show, she is moving on to greener pastures. She’s not leaving us officially until the end of the calendar year, but as we cross 2012’s threshold, she’ll be starting a new project for American Public Media (our parent company) that will tap in to the organization’s Public Insight Network to deliver news stories on a variety of platforms, which are sourced from deep within the communities that surround us.
Big opportunity. Big project. Big ideas. And a big mind to handle it all. She’ll be missed, but she’ll still be just down the hall. Farewell, Kate Moos!
(Photo: Instagram by Trent Gilliss)
Q:how can I listen to On Being on my Kindle Fire??
Anonymous
Good morning, Anonymous—
I’m going to do a partial punt on this one because none of us on staff have a Kindle Fire, and thus do not have an intimate knowledge of the device that might offer you specific steps. That said, we do offer each weekly show and unedited interview via podcast or as individual downloads on each episode’s show page at the On Being website. I’ll defer to our readers and Tumblr dashboard audience to offer better advice on apps that might make this experience easier.
I am one of those cats who uses Amazon’s Cloud service. A lot. Perhaps I can offer a possible workaround in which you download the mp3 to your device and then sync it to your Amazon Cloud account. That way you can use the native music player to stream your favorite On Being episodes without having to hound-dog them on your device!
When you find a solution, please let me know what works best. We’re starting to receive a number of questions about Kindles and I’d like to be able to share your solutions with others.
Happy holidays,
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Our former web producer Andy Dayton is making his art dreams come true in the Big Apple! Very cool, Andy:
Hey, our project Station Identification was listed in the most recent issue of Forecast’s Public Art Review (under “Recent Projects”). I’ll take that!
Yay!
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Good call, timemagazine:
TIME’s 2011 Person of the Year is The Protester
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
—Chaim Potok, from The Gift of Asher Lev
Thanks for reminding me of this mind-enlivening piece of art.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
(via hummingsoftly)
“Vocal Fry” as a Social Link?
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Photo by Jeffrey Pott/Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0
Wouldn’t you know it. Britney Spears impact on our social culture extends beyond the worlds of music and fashion — and into the language of speech. A recent study in the Journal of Voice shows that more than two-thirds of Standard American-English speakers aged 18-25 are now incorporating what once used to be thought of as a speech impediment into their everyday speech patterns. And young, female adults living in the U.S. are more apt to use this guttural vibration in their normal speech than men.
Don’t know what it sounds like? Listen to the audio sample above. Or, pop in one of Spears more recent hits, and listen to how she sings her lower notes and how it kind of sounds like a series of dry, creaky staccato tones. Yep, that’s it.
But why? The co-author of the Long Island University study and a speech scientist, Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, speculates in ScienceNow, “Young students tend to use it when they get together. Maybe this is a social link between members of a group.”
The I know I’ll be listening to my young nieces and nephews’ speech patterns more acutely over the holiday break!
French Christians Protest Provocative Play about Jesus, Religion, and Consumer Culture
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
A woman holds a banner reading “Touche pas à Dieu!” (“Don’t touch God!”) during a demonstration in Paris, France this past Sunday. The Institut Civitas called on Christians to gather and denounce “Christianophobia” and Argentine-born author Rodrigo Garcia’s play Golgota Picnic, which the fundamentalist Christian group judges as “blasphemous.” Thousands of Catholics took part in the demonstration and stopped at the Théâtre de Rond-Point on the Champs Elysees which is running the play, which contains a stage littered with hamburger buns and scenes of Jesus’ crucifixion with biblical readings.
Golgota Picnic is a hard-hitting critique of consumer culture and religion in which, Garcia said to the BBC, “depicts the life of Christ through shocking images of contemporary consumer society.”
Photo by Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images.
It seems like the viability-of-life-on-Mars story resurfaces every few years with renewed enthusiasm. And how can it not be stimulating to think about foreign biological possibilities existing in other pockets of the universe?
From Discovery News:
Life Possible On ‘Large Regions’ of Mars
With higher pressures and warmer temperatures beneath the Martian surface, Earth-like microorganisms could thrive.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
