Thinking Aloud

In the year 1916, one hundred years ago this year, the U.S. National Park Service wasformed.  The culmination of decades of inspired and visionary legislation meant to preserve U.S. lands which had grown to seem particularly precious and beautiful, the Park Service's mandate was to protect and preserve the country's national parks for future generations of Americans.  An exhibition now at the BYU Museum of Art shows the crucial role that artists and photographers played in helping Americans think about the West as a place worth cherishing.

We’ll visit with Stanford scholar Shelley Fisher-Fishkin, to discuss the nexus between literature and literary sites, specifically in the United States.  Her new book Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee explores our appetite for visiting sites like Twain’s home town. What do we expect to find in such places? How does visiting them shape our understanding of specific works of American literature? Or of the United States itself? Our national destiny, identity, and character is often all wrapped up in these writings and the historic places associated with them. So cram the kids in the mini-van, tune the radio to Thinking Aloud, and off we go, on a trip in pursuit of just such questions. 

If you have studied literature, philosophy, or the arts in college, you probably came across the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Tonight's guest on Thinking Aloud is Michael Naas of DePaul University, a leading translator and critic of Derrida. He talks with producer Mark Burns about Derrida, deconstruction, and the challenges of translating Derrida's work.

Is Earth to be loved and desired as much as Heaven? “From Nature to Creation” is a new book by one of today’s leading proponents of agrarian thought and behavior, Norman Wirzba. Subtitled “A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World,” this philosophical treatise explores our human situation in the natural world and offers arguments for the practices of gratitude, love, and stewardship. Wirzba is a professor of theology, ecology, and agrarian studies at the Duke Divinity School at Duke University.

The press has been central to the story of the United States since its founding.  Today on Thinking Aloud, we talk to Jay Rosen, a journalism scholar from NYU, about how the press is changing as it continues to adapt to the new Internet world.  

Today’s guest on Thinking Aloud is Janice Nuckolls, a linguist who specializes in Quichua, a vast language group which extends throughout the Andes and western Amazon.  Each summer, Nuckolls takes a group of BYU students with her to the jungles of Ecuador to study one dialect of Quichua.  Today on Thinking Aloud, she’s here to share with us more about Quichua, the native people who speak it, and the students who go with her to learn about the fascinating Quichua culture. 

Arkady Ostrovsky is an award-winning journalist who covers all things Russian for The Economist. On today's Thinking Aloud, he talks with host Marcus Smith about Russia over the last 25 years from Gorbachev to Putin--the subject of his new book "Inventing Russia." Ostrovsky is less than optimistic about Russia's current and future state but still finds the nation to be a fascinating, enigmatic, and bewildering place.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Edward Humes has just published "Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation." In it, he details the fascinating, complex, mostly hidden network of ships and trucks that bring consumer goods from the other side of the world to your mall, market, and front door. Almost everything you touch on a daily basis traveled from far away to you via that system. Transportation has huge economic and environmental ramifications for all of us yet often goes unnoticed. If you want to know why your world was largely built via the ubiquitous metal shipping container, then tune into today's Thinking Aloud.

Joel Salatin has chosen to farm in progressive, sustainable ways that both produce phenomenal food and continually replenish his soil.  At the same time, he has written about and shared the agrarian philosophy at the foundation of his practice. Somewhere along the way, people noticed and he has become a widely-cited spokesperson for a new, better kind of relationship to the land.  

Marion Underwood and her colleagues have recently finished monitoring every single text, email, or Facebook message produced by a large group of youth from the time they were 9 until they were 20. They discovered from this massive database that texting and social media are far more sophisticated, ubiquitous, and even social than most adults realize. Underwood shares her insights gleaned from her years of listening in to smartphone-using kids on today’s Thinking Aloud.