This Will Be on the Test

I almost ignored a recent New Yorker Out Loud interview when I saw it was about the Dreyfus Affair, a familiar dot on time-lines of high school history curricula. Snore.

Then I paused, feeling dim. I was losing mental Jeopardy. Other than recalling a fuzzy picture of Alfred Dreyfus, I was a vacuum of information. French, yes, but was he a politician? Was this before or after World War I? Did he get shot or was that another Affair?

I was taught that history education is twofold - You must learn the factual details of the event and you must consider the broad, sweeping thematic meanings. With the Dreyfus Affair, I failed to be imprinted with either, despite being exposed to the story numerous times.

So with that, I pressed "play".

The interview with Adam Gopnik about the Dreyfus Affair accompanies his article for the magazine. In the interview, he mines the event for insights about the different forms and definitions of national pride; talking about allegiances that are based on values and laws and allegiances which are based on spirit and national identity, all of which help to explain why the event is so historically important, why it shows up so much in history textbooks. Brief and memorable, the interview is a great way to get up to speed.

Three of a Kind

Sometimes I think the Moth is just around to encourage cathartic, inappropriate public weeping during our commutes. The three Moth stories I'm linking to here all touch on illness or injury and tragedy. The flip side of all the sadness is the courage and perspective the storytellers bring across. If you want to keep it together I suggest you store your heart in a remote, inaccessible place, safely out of reach.

This first story is especially good.

Ed Gavagan: Victim's Impact

Ophira Eisenberg: The Accident

Josh Swiller: What I Lost in Africa

PHOTO: timothy b. buckwalter in collaboration with George Korejko

Eww. Parasites. Radiolab.

If you can make it through the icky descriptions during the first part of Radiolab's latest episode, it's worth it. There's a lot of great stories about life-sucking creatures large and small, from bloodflukes to cats, and the way they keep coming back to hookworms is very satisfying.

The show also touches on why parasites are considered such low forms of life, and raises questions about why we consider certain methods of flourishing and reproducing to be cheating, and other methods, honest.

Link to their website, and the mp3.

Radiolab is also available through itunes.

PHOTO : JHAYNE HOLMES

Use Your Words

IMAGE:LOUISE LAZELL

Where do racial, ethnic and identity slurs come from, and how does a word become so offensive it needs to be bleeped?

NPR's Neda Ulaby put together a great story about the insult "retard" and how it relates to other insults.

The Seventh Man

"My fear was totally groundless, and totally real."

If you've ever been pulled underwater by a current or found yourself cowering at the sound of thunder, you know the power of oceans, forests, weather and storms to overwhelm us completely and stir up elemental anxiety about the intentions of natural forces.

I first listened to the short story, "The Seventh Man," by Haruki Murakami last summer, read aloud by John Shea on the PRI program Selected Shorts. The story reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, "Time of Wonder" by Robert McCloskey. In that story, children visiting Maine help prepare for a summer storm, wait it out indoors, then after it passes over they marvel at the the power of the storm to uproot trees and scatter debris. The story has hardly any plot at all, it's so peaceful and quiet it puts children to sleep.

"The Seventh Man" has a storm at its center too, hearing it roar through a remote place and hearing the quiet of its eye, but this story is dark and strange. In this relatively simple story, Murakami incorporates themes about nature, its misunderstood power and the way we imagine its will. He also touches on friendship, regret and guilt.

The story perfectly expresses the remembering and recounting of traumatic event, the way the details are scrutinized, the emphatic insistence on the realness of what occured, the way the teller colors the set-up to the event with their knowledge of what's to come, and the reverberations of the memory over time.

The reading is at times a little overwrought, but it's that energy that gives the story a careening feeling, like you're not sure where it's going, and you're not sure if you can believe the narrator.


Description of the episode on WNYC's website

Listen below (it's a little slow to start, but works)

Living Chronology

Two years ago Radiolab did a show all about time, (you can download mp3 and listen in your browser) and at about 19 minutes 30 seconds in there's a interview with Jay Griffiths, author of a book called A Sideways Look at Time. What she described stopped me in my tracks: spice clocks, natural bird clocks, a flower clock...

Since then, I've had my own fantasy of building my own natural clock, and I keep my ears open for stories and news about special clocks:

The living calender gathers together more than just hours and minutes into a giant, overpriced clock, Uniqlo has a flashy website called Uniqlock that seems to show the time in Paris and little else. You can buy a wooden knocking clock that knocks out time on your own vases, soil powered clocks, the perpetually self-winding mechanical clock, a cool three armed clock (video) and one of my favorites, the clock clock (video), which uses the hands of many clocks to spell out the time writ large.