“Kippers for breakfast, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithin’s Day already?”
The Meming of Life is taking a break from the Feast of Doubting Thomas to St. Swithin’s Day, and possibly a tad beyond. In the meantime, here’s the third in our video series on YouTube.
Coming video topics and very approximate schedule:
P.T. Barnum’s Birthday: Indoctrination vs. influence
John Paul Jones’ Death Day: “What if my child becomes religious?”
Constitution Day (Puerto Rico): The moment of the question
Francis Scott Key’s Birthday: Three myths about death
Feast of Santo Domingo: Teaching kids about evolution
iPod full of sunshine
The results of my informal podcast poll are in! I’ve listened to long excerpts from 35 podcasts recommended on this blog and by friends on Facebook and in TheRealWorld. That’s all it takes, really — within 3 minutes I have a strong inkling whether a podcast is for me. If I’m still listening at ten minutes — rarely the case — it’s decided.
Here then, in no particular order, are the eight podcasts that are, at this point in my life, for me:
Clever Little Pod (comedy)
Friday Night Comedy (BBC)
Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me (NPR)
The Bugle (topical comedy with John Oliver etc)
This American Life (narrative nonfiction)
The Moth (narrative nonfiction)
RadioLab (science and culture)
The Naked Scientists (science)
…and though those are in no particular order, one podcast — after hearing just half of a single episode — has risen waaaaaay above the rest: RadioLab — “where science meets culture and information sounds like music.”
Holy shite, that’s a great program.
I first heard about RadioLab about a year ago — in fact, I think it was from Joe, the designer of the PBB website. I checked it out, thought it looked good, then filed it away, since I wasn’t into podcasts at that point.
Then another friend mentioned it, and another. Finally I put out this call for recommendations, and several people screamed RADIOLAB.
Now I see why.
Titled “Stochasticity,” the episode I’m halfway through is about randomness. And even though I was already familiar with the principles they’re talking about, I’m still eating it up alive. I also played the first bit for the kiddos, who likewise feasted on its tasty innards.
After just half a listen, I’m so well convinced that I downloaded 62 past episodes — 62 hours of RadioLab. [Cue Homer Simpson’s gargle when thinking about bacon.]
As promised, a plenary indulgence is now winging its way to kcruz, barrettc, MCable, tarrkid, Jenny, and several others who wouldn’t know what to do with a plenary indulgence even if it did windows. And a retroactive one for Joe.
I’ll be doing a post about stochasticity shortly. Thanks ever so very seriously much to everyone for your suggestions. My earbuds are buzzing with gratitude.
Pod Almighty
Always a few years behind the curve, I’m finally getting into podcasts. Not many — in fact, very, very few.
I was interviewed by DJ Grothe for the Point of Inquiry podcast last month, a well-produced show from the Center for Inquiry that I listen to once in a while. But when I got an iPod Nano for Father’s Day (poetically so, since my previous one was destroyed by an actual offspring of mine), it wasn’t science and skepticism podcasts I thirstily reloaded. It was comedy.
My almost-fourteen-year-old has had it with my sense of humor. So have I, truthfully, though I’m nicer about it. When I recently made some pointless bit of wordplay, as I do every 45 seconds (see post title), he looked at me with unforgiving eyes and said, “You know what you should do? You should, like, save them up. When something pops into your head, just don’t say it. Save up a hundred, and maybe they’ll add up to one good one. Then you can let that one out.”
I know exactly what he means.
As I’m getting older, I notice that it’s harder to really make me laugh. I see the joke coming, which kills it, or it’s no good to begin with and deserves to die. My standards were lower once. I used to laugh at things just because they were funny. Now, to get a laugh out of me, it has to be (1) funny, (2) smart, and (3) unexpected.
I have tried over thirty new comedy podcasts since Father’s Day, mostly British, which has a much higher success rate with me. Precisely zero hits. I’m still down to just two unsurpassably brilliant weekly podcasts that I’ve listened to for a year, waiting breathlessly for new episodes like the slathering, smart-comedy-starved dog I am:
Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me (The NPR News Quiz)
The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 (Friday Night Comedy)
(Warning: This second one alternates, four on/four off, with a decent but much less funny BBC program called The Now Show).
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both are comedy quiz shows based on current events. Like The Daily Show, there’s nothing better when it’s done well, and I never, ever survive either of these shows without being snuck up on, a dozen times at least, by great comedy. And that, along with my wife, my kids, and coconut red curry beef, is just about all I ask of life anymore.
Alrighty then: What podcasts do y’all favor, whether comedy or otherwise? A free plenary indulgence to the first twenty people who turn me on to something ab fab.
Flow
One of the threads in Raising Freethinkers that I found most fascinating was the section on “flow” (in Chapter 5, “Ingredients of a Life Worth Living,” written by Molleen Matsumura).
We’ve all experienced the flow state—when we’re completely in the moment, so intensely focused on the activity at hand that we lose track of time. It’s one of the most deeply satisfying and meaningful states we can enter.
Creativity researcher and psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced “chick-sent-me-hi-ee,” just as it looks) spent years defining, describing, and studying different aspects of flow, which he called “our experience of optimal fulfillment and engagement…being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved.”
After I first read Molleen’s contribution on flow, I dug into the literature a bit. It began to occur to me that the descriptions of flow experiences (including the feeling of being at one with everything or experiencing total peace) paralleled the descriptions of transcendent spiritual experiences, including meditation.
Finding activities that put you into the flow experience, then, can provide a secular equivalent to “spirituality”—something that lifts you out of everyday experience. You might say I’m flowy, but not religious.
Some thoughts from Molleen in Raising Freethinkers about how parents can facilitate the flow experience in their kids—and how we often get in the way:
Since flow experiences are some of the most meaningful we can have, parents can help their children have a deeper experience of life by helping them find and engage in flow. And one of the most common enemies of flow is something over which parents have a good deal of control—schedules.
Just when an activity is getting really interesting and the flow experience begins to take hold, it’s time to set the table, leave for preschool, go to gymnastics. Your own time pressures can make it difficult to see that your child isn’t necessarily just being stubborn when they don’t want to be interrupted. It can also be challenging to set aside appropriate and adequate times for extended concentration to be possible…
Helping your child have flow experiences that are both inherently satisfying and enhance other aspects of life will depend on identifying his or her particular abilities. Practice is a good thing, but practicing hard at a particular activity, such as playing the piano or playing basketball, will be more worthwhile to some kids than others. It takes careful observation to know whether a child really needs to try a little harder, or needs to try something different.
Writing fiction is a flow experience for me. Nonfiction, no. And writing music, for me, is never a flow experience. More like forcing a marble through a Cheerio. Playing the piano, yes — playing clarinet, nein. Hiking, yes — sports, nyet.
I want to help my kids find their flow. While I’m at it, I need to find and engage more of my own.
What are your flow experiences?
Parenting Beyond Belief Channel on YouTube
It has taken me a year and a half to bring the Parenting Beyond Belief Seminar to 19 cities. I currently have requests from 106 more.
Time for a more efficient way of doing things.
In 2010, I hope to be training seminar leaders across the country through Foundation Beyond Belief. In the meantime, I’ve just learned of a new medium called the “Inter-nets” through which I can post “viddy-ohs” about nonreligious parenting. Thought I’d give it a go.
The first in a planned series of 8,403 short, informal videos on nonreligious parenting is now on YouTube (and embedded below). We’ll start with a brief history of PBB, then dive into content with an average of one 7-10 minute video per week. The tentative summer schedule:
June 15: The, uh… “Genesis” of Parenting Beyond Belief
June 20: Four reasons kids need to be religiously literate
June 25: How to teach kids about religion…and how not to
June 30: What indoctrination is…and what it isn’t
August 5: “What if my child becomes religious?”
August 26: Introducing kids to evolution
We’ll continue with understanding moral development, talking about death, reaching across worldview lines, relaxing family tension, teaching kids to interact well with religious peers, talking about the body and sexuality, the pledge of allegiance, the “mixed marriage,” Santa Claus, and more. I hope they’re occasionally useful.