Episode 102: The Accelerated Audio Mentality

July 27, 2016

“Radio — like film, music, TV, theater, and dance — is a temporal art. It relies on the passage of time to play with anticipation, tension, and release. A good radio producer knows how long a thought will linger in a listener’s consciousness, and either grants her that time, or purposely denies it. A conversation between two hosts is riddled with pregnant pauses and interruptions designed to head off miscommunications. We’re used to these patterns, and a good podcast is paced to play into them. Why, then, should we mess with that balance in the name of efficiency?”

— John Lagomarsino, The Verge, February 17, 2015.

“No one has yet broken the four-minute ‘TED Radio Hour,’ but in Cambridge, Chris Kalafarski, a senior developer at the online platform PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, has trained himself to listen to podcasts at twice the speed of Ira Glass.
’My brain has adjusted to it,’ he said. His brother’s brain, he noted, has not, so even though Kalafarski uses an app that eliminates the high-pitched chipmunk problem that comes with a faster speed, his sibling hates being in the car when Kalafarski turbo-charges podcasts to twice the speed — or 2x, as the speed-listening crowd puts it.”

— Beth Teitell, The Boston Globe, November 6, 2015.

For those who listen to podcasts on any number of applications, software has paved the way to speed up content and consume it more quickly. Various listeners report enjoying shows at 1.5, 2 or even 3 times the recorded rate. While this may seem like a simple choice to some, what might be the long-term outcomes of such decisions? And in looking back, what aspects of our culture, our sense of patience and time and our personal interests might compel us to consume content more voraciously? Should content creators be more conscientious of listener needs and preferences?

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Episode 101: Purity Balls

July 20, 2016

“When I first heard about the purity balls I imagined angry American fathers terrified of anything that might hurt their daughters or their honour. But as I learnt more, I understood that the fathers, like all parents, simply wanted to protect the ones that they love – in the best way they know how. It was also often the girls themselves that had taken the initiative to attend the balls.”

— David Magnusson, The Independent, May 23, 2015.

“I wanted to create portraits so beautiful that the girls and their fathers could be proud of the pictures in the same way they are proud of their decisions –- while someone from a different background might see an entirely different story in the very same photographs.”

— David Magnusson, The Huffington Post, May 5, 2014

As the modern era has developed and expanded various ideas and definitions, notable stigma and presumptions surrounding sex and sexuality still remain. In particular, the sexual freedom of some is cast down as promiscuity, fecklessness and misdirection by others. This led Swedish photographer David Magnusson to pursue stories related to purity balls, emotionally prominent events in which young daughters vow to abstain from sex until marriage, and their fathers promise to protect their purity in return. Certainly, where the realms of sexuality and spirituality combine, people tend to develop very strong opinions. What do purity balls teach us about willpower and personal devotion? How do we negotiate freedom of choice with deeply-held doctrine? Can we navigate these realms with a critical lens without offering judgment and condemnation of one side or another?

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Episode 100: For the "Weird"

July 13, 2016

“There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”

— Alain de Botton

“I think what people call “weird” comes part and parcel with people who are brilliant in some way. So embrace your weird. Embrace your eccentricity.”

— Eileen Anglin

“There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don’t fit into their box are weird. But I’ll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.”

— C. Joybell C.

For our hundredth episode, I wanted to cover something I felt both universally significant and intimately connected to my personal experience. For as long as I can remember expressing myself and any multitude of thoughts and feelings I've had, others have labelled me as "weird". The term has always truck me as intentionally disparaging, a means by which we keep the herd homogeneous and deter social outliers. But what if our (rather common) use of the term stems from a place of fear of difference? This week I had the pleasure of speaking with Houda El Joundi about the word and its implications. How might those who cast judgment on others for being "weird" actually close doors and prohibit open-mindedness in themselves? How might the term promote a cycle of misunderstanding and a failure to empathize? Although I suspect many may not find the term nearly as hostile or polarizing, I hope all of our listeners will reflect on the profound power such a brief and ubiquitous word can have. - Kip

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Episode 99: The Era of Apathy

July 6, 2016

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

— Elie Wiesel

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”

— Noam Chomsky

“We’ve forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We’ve ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore.”

— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

In the constant whirlwind of tragedy, hardship and struggle in our modern news and throughout human history, some individuals have still managed to stir great emotion and change. Many, though, appear increasingly apathetic, offering only cursory or superficial sympathies in the face of mass atrocities and looming misfortune. Whether widespread or less prominent, what is to blame for this phenomenon of apathy? Have we become inundated with stories exposing failure in our reality? Are we afraid to risk our energy and emotion? Do we presume others might take up the mantle? We welcome Henry Burbank this week to explore this idea and the ways in which we might think about apathy in our world. We also discuss the ways in which our immediate communities and environments affect our relative interest and apathy. Does our human nature dictate whether we are inclined to care or give up?

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