Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Chautauqua Chop When you say “old school,” I say “new playground.”

Midrashic Aporia Midrash is biblical exegesis by ancient Judaic authorities, using a mode of interpretation prominent in the Talmud. Midrash and rabbinic readings "discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces," writes the Reverend and Hebrew scholar Wilda C. Gafney. "They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions." Wikipedia Iris DeMent, Livin' in the Wasteland of the Free Krista Tippett, On Being 

On Beyond Second Thought There is for me an utterance bare and grand as the colossal chisel of Phideas, or trowel of the Egyptians, or pen of Moses or Dante. R. W. Emerson

Orthogonal The writer who has spent some time in the collection and subsequent analysis of material is liable to feel ready to start putting it all into a script. But the result can be disappointing if what is really needed is a story, a concept. The data may be at hand, the subject has been explored and represented, but what about the idea? It remains to be found... There is, of course, no practical system for assuring that a good idea will come next. Good ideas, feeble ideas, marvellous ideas - they all seem to have life of their own, arriving unannounced. In fact one way to discourage their visit is to be too impatient. It's not so much something you do, it's something that happens. Why then does it seem to happen more to brilliant men and women than to stupid ones? The answer may be because of the two earlier stages. Materials collected and then placed in a frame of reference are stored in memory, and the more that is accumulated the more likely the inspired short-cir...

Crafted Convo ...as network television has given way to the Internet, it has become easy for people to create their own idiosyncratic mix of sources. Henry Farrell

Synthe Tic Talk Time If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. Joseph Campbell

Torch/Torque the Noggin In what lies the significance of human life in which machine power has grown to be the destructive factor that it now is in the hands of the Money Power? There will come a universal margin of leisure, greater rational freedom for the individual than any known by previous civilizations - but that only if the creative artist is there in his true place, the machine in his hand as a tool. Money should have no power whatever in itself. Employment is not enough! What a man [sic] wants, if democracy works, is not so much employment as freedom to work at what he believes in, what he likes to do. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City , 1963 Recommended: On Being , with Krista Tippett, for great conversations.                           CBC's Tapestry , with Mary Hynes, same.