Episode 56: Black Mirror, Part I

September 30, 2015

“You pull a face and poke it towards the stage and la-di-da we sing and dance and tumble around and all you see up here, it’s not people, you don’t see people up here, it’s all fodder. And the faker the fodder is the more you love it because fake fodder’s the only thing that works anymore, fake fodder is all that we can stomach — actually not quite all. Real pain, real viciousness, that we can take.”

— Bing to the judges, Episode 2, Fifteen Million Merits

As technology progresses in new, often fascinating and liberating ways, it is worth considering the role it has in our lives. Several works of science fiction have shown these advances and our reactions to them to be somewhat predictable. Black Mirror, a satire and dark comedy made by the BBC, offers many such conclusions in the form of troubling television episodes reminiscent of the Twilight Zone. In this conversation, we discuss the first season of the show. We will be examining the second season later in November. As a warning, we do cover various crucial plot points in our review. If you would like to watch the show, please do not listen to this first.

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Episode 55: Our First Anniversary

September 23, 2015

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

— C. S. Lewis

“The discipline you learn and character you build from setting and achieving a goal can be more valuable than the achievement of the goal itself.”

— Bo Bennett

It's been a year since we set out on this journey and started Stride and Saunter. We've learned a lot about podcasting, our world and our ever-growing audience. But we've also been fortunate to learn more about ourselves in the process - our ambitions, our capacities and new-found skills. We continue to thoroughly enjoy every aspect of this project and we hope the show continues to please and develop with time. We're very excited with upcoming plans and episodes and we can't wait to share them with you.

With sincere gratitude,

Kip Clark, Caroline Borders and Hector Marrero

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Episode 54: Female Body Image, Media and College

September 16, 2015

“Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.”

— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“‘That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.’ Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. ‘Real love, real friends, real body parts…’”

— Jess C. Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Beauty shouldn’t be about changing yourself to achieve an ideal or be more socially acceptable. Real beauty, the interesting, truly pleasing kind, is about honoring the beauty within you and without you. It’s about knowing that someone else’s definition of pretty has no hold over you.”

— Golda Poretsky

Although cultural and societal ideas of feminine beauty are far too large to tackle on their own, we wanted to take a stab at relevant issues this week. We welcome Logan Bialik to our conversation on personal experiences with female body image, its construction and the impact of college life and mass media on values of feminine appearance. It is of course a sensitive issue and one we intend to revisit and examine in the future. Our special thanks to Caroline and Logan for sharing personal anecdotes and feelings regarding the topic.

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Episode 53: Local Farming and Our Food

September 9, 2015

“When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

— Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

With various grocery stores, restaurants and even food delivery services in the world, it is worth considering our food sources and how they affect local agriculture. This week we welcome Charlotte Graham, who has worked as a local food coordinator at Peirce Dining Hall in Kenyon College, to explain the impact of these systems. Our discussion ventures through issues of health, science, civic responsibility and economic considerations.

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Episode 52: The Lasting Impact of Dreams

September 2, 2015

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”

— Gloria Steinem

“Dreams free us from normality. Daydreams, especially, take us somewhere between the real world and the dream world.”

— Fennel Hudson, A Waterside Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 2

“Reality worked its way into my dreams where it wasn’t welcome.”

— Emilyann Girdner, The Labyrinth Wall

When we go to sleep, we often pass through countless scenes, images and worlds themselves. Our dreams reveal our unspoken thoughts, our realities and our unbridled fantasies. We stand to learn much from what and how we dream in the privacy of our minds. This week we welcome Zac Caputo to share some personal experiences with dreams. We also discuss our reactions in the real world to thoughts and feelings conjured in dreams.

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