Box of delight

When it comes to  mobile learning or learning on the go,  podcasts (and audiobooks) are a game changer. They enable users to access a wealth of knowledge that can be consumed virtually anywhere, and anytime. There are tons of podcasts out there which makes it super hard for an already busy teacher to sift through the piles to find the relevant ones. I did the legwork!

Every empire seems to think (as much as empires seem to think) that it will be the one to outlast them all. And all of them have ended up more or less the same way in the end. This isn’t just a gloomy fact of human history, it’s a fact of entropy, mortality, and the linear experience of time. If imperial rulers forget—begin to think themselves immortal—there have always been poets to remind them, though maybe not so directly. Epic poetry often legitimizes the founding of empires. Another form, the poetry of ruin, interprets their inevitable demise.

In late 2017, Ronan Farrow was on the verge of blowing open the story revealing the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. But then executives at NBC News killed the story, Farrow claims. Bewildered, he took his reporting to the New Yorker, which then vetted and published his reporting. Fast forward two years, Farrow has won a Pulitzer and Harvey Weinstein is now using a walker and getting ready to go on trial.

Some of my fondest memories are of hiking the Olympia National Forest in Washington State and the forests of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, seeking the kind of silence one can only find in busy ecosystems full of birds, insects, woodland creatures, rustling leaves, etc. This experience can be transformative, a full immersion in what acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton calls a “natural acoustic system,” the endless interplay of calls and responses that evolved to harmonize over millennia.