Think Again – a Big Think Podcast

If I had to choose one word to capture this moment in American (and maybe world) history, “patience” wouldn’t be it. From every direction, everything demands our urgent attention. Everything is a ticking time bomb, or one that’s just exploded, and we’re all the poorly-trained volunteer ambulance squad. I don’t mean to dismiss the challenges we face: climate change, families being ripped apart while seeking asylum, a school shooting every other week, just to name a few. These are very real. Very urgent indeed. But in fight-or-flight mode, we make drastic, either/or decisions. We forget, as my guest today would have it, how to count to two. He’s New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and he’s the author of the new book

Imagine yourself a German citizen the day after the end of World War II. Much of your city is bombed to ruins. A good part of the population is dead. The Nazi ideology that has dominated your nation for the past decade has been repudiated as definitively as Bambi in “Bambi Meets Godzilla”. Basically, it’s the end of the world. Now consider Berlin today. It’s the biggest economy in Europe. The center of the European Union. A progressive welfare state where the old racial and nationalist resentments have been reduced to fringe movements. Still disturbingly present, but by no means mainstream. How do you get here from there? And could the pendulum ever swing back again? This is the subject of

Among other things, music can be medicine. Like a vaccine, it sometimes works by giving your body a little taste of the disease. Other times, of course, you just wanna dance, and James Brown might be just what you need. But the medicine songs I’m talking about are the ones that break your heart open no matter many times you hear them. And you want them to—because that’s what it feels like to be alive. Nobody knows this better than my guest today, singer-songwriter

I remember visiting New York when I was 18 and thinking about coming here for college. How badly I wanted to be “from” New York. How cool, how real, how substantial that would be. What does it mean to be “from” any place? At what point do you own the culture like you own your native language? Your very own little shard of the broken mirror that adds up to New York. Or Irkutsk. Or Tehran? Actually, you can’t own a culture: it owns you. And you can’t immerse yourself in a different culture without turning into a different person. My guest today, investigative reporter

Well into her 90’s, my grandma Selma and I had this running conversation about the state of the world. She’d escaped Polish pogroms as a 5 year old, lived through the loss of half her relatives in World War II, and saw the founding of the UN in 1945 and NATO in 1949 as signs of a world sick of chaos and finally ready to be sensible and humane. Well, that’s not really how things turned out, is it. And I spent a lot of time trying and failing to reassure Selma that there was still hope in the world, just on a smaller, more localized scale. But what if the real problem isn’t the world but our obsessive tendency to systematize and sanitize it? My guest today, philosopher