The Wilmington Library is more of a temple than a building, a full city block wide with ornate designs ringing the upper parts of the structure. But I think it’s the words etched into the walls that made this space feel sacred: philosophy, religion, science on one side of the entry door; painting, architecture, sculpture on the other.
The greatest thing about [the line between land and ocean] is how flexible of a line it is. In our world of binaries (on or off; living or dead; wet or dry), land and ocean remind us of the spectrums that exist; there is no clear demarcation when it comes to the border between these two.
For those of us who came of age in the ‘90s, the home computer was a revolutionary thing. But within a few years, it became ubiquitous. And two of the biggest names and competitors in the computer industry served as a dividing line for consumers. Did you support Microsoft or Apple? Your answer told others as much about you as your response to “The Rolling Stones or The Beatles?” or “Star Wars or Star Trek?”.
We are, after all, social creatures. We are meant to be connected, to share space in communion. Losing that for an indefinite period of time fractures us.
I will not tell you what to think of that statement. But I will hold you here to think about it. We cannot look away.
Did they have planetary mnemonics in the 17th Century? Were people taught silly sentences like “My very excellent monarch journeys southward?” as an aid in remembering the order of the then-known six planets of the Milky Way galaxy?
There are not enough minutes in this show for me to share all of my thoughts about my brother James. It would take months for me to document all of the moments, conversations, and events which have shaped my life in ways large and small. Thankfully, Community Radio is not really about me. It’s a show we create together, and I have the benefit of relying on the rest of this community to assemble an episode about James.
That’s the cool thing about science, how nothing is discovered in isolation. The work builds upon prior work, and will generate additional ideas, hypotheses, experiments. Thus it was on February 27, 1940 that two scientists – working off others’ assumption that there existed a long-lived isotope of carbon – were able to synthesize it.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of human beings perform a choreographed dance that brings a little bit of paper – a wedding invitation, a letter of condolences, a birthday card – from one part of the country to another. And in a world where so much is fleeting, the focus on physical connection is an achievement worth celebrating.
This is Black History Month, and the stories we should tell are about the human beings who worked together in a variety of spaces and formats to resist dehumanization, subjugation, violence and evil. It is that collaboration I want us to focus on.