Three Black Men, by Tami Simon
follows is the syndicated transcript of a SoundsTrue Insights at the Edge podcast, with Tami Simon, Resmaa Menakem, Bayo Akomalafe and Orland Bishop. You can listen to the audio version of the conversation here.  Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guests are Resmaa Menakem, he’s joining us from Minneapolis; Bayo Akomolafe, joining us from India; and Orland Bishop from Los Angeles. These are three Black men who have joined together, and we’re going to be hearing more abo... posted on Jul 3 2023 (2,199 reads)

David George Haskell: Songs of Trees, by Preeta Bansal
while back, Pavi and I had the privilege of hosting an Awakin Call with David George Haskell. I was recently reviewing this beautiful call, rich with insights and poetic wisdom, and wanted to draw out some of his excerpts from it. David George Haskell is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist whose work is located at the throbbing intersection between science and poetry. He integrates rigorous research with a deeply contemplative immersive approach. His subjects are unexpected and unexpectedly revelatory. His widely acclaimed book, the Pulitzer finalist The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Viking 2012), chronicles the story of the universe in one squ... posted on Jan 7 2024 (5,384 reads)

The Emerging Global Mind, by Tiffany Shlain
years ago I founded the Webby Awards. I was fascinated by how the Internet was connecting people all over the world in new and unexpected ways. I have also been struck by the many conversations about the problems of our day that view them as separate challenges—whether the environment, women’s rights, poverty, or social justice. It has become increasingly apparent to me that when you perceive everything as connected, it radically shapes your perspective. The concept of interdependence isn’t new; it’s been around since the dawn of humanity. For two-hundred-thousand years, we’ve been connecting through networks both natural and technological. Interde... posted on Oct 3 2011 (21,384 reads)

Technology is Not the Answer, by Kentaro Toyama
is not the answer. That's the conclusion I came to after five years in India trying to find ways to apply electronic technologies to international development. I was the co-founder and assistant director of Microsoft Research India, a Bangalore computer-science lab, where one of our objectives was to research ways in which information and communication technologies could support the socio-economic development of poor communities, both rural and urban. (By the way, I'm grateful to Jim Fallows for the opportunity to guest post! It was in Bangalore that I met Jim, thanks to an introduction through a good mutual friend, The Atlantic's deputy editor Scott Stossel.) In&... posted on Oct 15 2011 (17,050 reads)

The Power of Metaphors, by Michael Michalko
and metaphorical questions to spark your imagination. When Pablo Picasso, the Spanish artist, was a schoolboy, he was terrible at math because whenever the teacher had him write a number on the chalkboard, he saw something different. The number four looked like a nose to him and he kept doodling until he filled in the rest of the face. The number 1 looked like a tree, 9 looked like a person walking against the wind, and 8 resembled an angel. Everyone else in the classroom saw numbers on the chalkboard; Picasso perceived a variety of different images. The connection between perspective and creative thinking has to do with habituation and over-familiarization. Over-familia... posted on Mar 4 2012 (49,339 reads)

Awakening Our Collaborative Spirit, by Michael Michalko
physicist, David Bohm, while researching the lives of Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli and Bohr, made a remarkable observation. Bohm noticed that their incredible breakthroughs took place through simple, open and honest conversation. He observed, for instance, that Einstein and his colleagues spent years freely meeting and conversing with each other. During these interactions, they exchanged and dialogued about ideas which later became the foundations of modern physics. They exchanged ideas without trying to change the other's mind and without bitter argument. They felt free to propose whatever was on their mind. They always paid attention to each other's views and established an e... posted on Jul 17 2012 (22,809 reads)

Designing From Nature Could Solve Our Biggest Challenges, by Sven Eberlein
this assignment, says Bill McDonough in a recent TED talk: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, converts nitrogen into ammonia, distills water, stores solar energy as fuel, builds complex sugars, creates microclimates, changes color with the seasons, and self-replicates. Sound impossible? Well, nature’s already completed this one. It’s called 
a plant. And the fact that it does these things safely and efficiently is inspiring engineers and designers to reconceive the ways we manufacture such basics as soap bottles, raincoats, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The trio wrote two pivotal books—Benyus’ Biomimicry: ... posted on Feb 27 2013 (12,400 reads)

Julia Cameron on the Creative Life, by Tami Simon
Simon (on Insights at the Edge) Today, I speak with Julia Cameron. Julia Cameron is an award-winning writer and director. She has created feature films, movies of the week and episodic television, six full-length plays, and hundreds of articles and stories for national publications ranging from Rolling Stone to Vogue to the New York Times. She is the author of the national bestselling book The Artist's Way. With Sounds True, Julia has released Reflections on the Artist's Way, a teaching program on many of the key themes introduced in The Artist's Way, and also, along with writer Natalie Goldberg, a program called&nb... posted on May 7 2013 (26,840 reads)

The Power of Creative Constraints, by Pavithra Mehta & Suchitra Shenoy
almost incomprehensively ambitious vision unsupported by any sort of business plan may sound like a vision doomed to fail. Yet more than 35 years after the first Aravind Eye Clinic was set up in South India, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy’s (Dr. V) mission to eliminate curable blindness in the country is surpassing even the most optimistic expectations. This excerpt from Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion describes how a precisely defined set of creative constraints, including never refusing to provide care, never compromising on quality, and never relying on outside funding for patient services, became t... posted on Jun 10 2013 (48,592 reads)

The Man With 10,000 Tales, by Tim McDonnell
Scheub spent his career trekking across Africa and recording village storytellers of all stripes. Now, the octogenarian professor reveals how those foreign tales connect us, and why it's so vital to preserve them. Harold Scheub first went to South Africa on a safari of sorts. In 1967, at the height of apartheid, Scheub—an earnest Midwestern twenty-something with a stint in the Air Force under his belt and a freshly awarded Master’s degree in English—packed a rucksack and hopped a bus for the backcountry. But instead of guns and ammo, he was armed with a bulky tape recorder and D batteries. Scheub wasn't after big game trophies... posted on Jun 25 2013 (13,719 reads)

39 Ways to Live, and Not Merely Exist, by Leo Babauta
proper function of man is to live - not to exist." -- Jack London Too often we go through life on autopilot, going through the motions and having each day pass like the one before it. That's fine, and comfortable, until you have gone through another year without having done anything, without having really lived life. That's fine, until you have reached old age and look back on life with regrets. That's fine, until you see your kids go off to college and realize that you missed their childhoods. What follows is just a list of ideas, obvious ones mostly that you could have thought of yourself, but that I hope are useful reminders. We all need r... posted on Jul 28 2013 (300,193 reads)

Confessions of a Late Bloomer, by Scott Barry Kaufman
have fixed notions about the time course of success and the nature of talent that encourage us to write off the very people who are most likely to (eventually) change the world. "This is you," the elderly school psychologist said as he pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses and pointed to the left side of what looked like the outline of a camel's hump. I sat closer, trying to make sense of what I was being shown. "And this," he said, moving his finger toward the far right of the hump, "is gifted." Leaning forward, I patiently explained to him that maybe this was me, at age 11, but 6 years later, it was no longer me. "You see," I ex... posted on Sep 24 2013 (37,113 reads)

8 Ways to Overcome Your Leadership Blindspots, by Bruna Martinuzzi
be a successful leader or entrepreneur, we need to become intimate not only with our strengths but also with our blind spots, those aspects of our personality that can derail us. John C. Maxwell defines a blind spot as "an area in the lives of people in which they continually do not see themselves or their situation realistically." All of us have blind spots. A Hay Group study shows that the senior leaders in an organization are more likely to overrate themselves and to develop blind spots that can hinder their effectiveness as leaders. Another study by Development Dimensions International Inc. found that 89 percent of front-line leaders have at least one blind spot in th... posted on Sep 18 2013 (38,276 reads)

The Work of Local Culture, by Wendell Berry
year the Iowa Humanities Board offers a talk by a distinguished humanities scholar focusing on a theme important to the people of Iowa. Under the theme of the Exemplary Project, "A Sense of Place," the 1988 Iowa Humanities Lecture featured Wendell Berry. FOR MANY YEARS MY WALKS HAVE TAKEN ME down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hun... posted on Mar 4 2014 (21,966 reads)

From ego-system to eco-system economies, by Otto Scharmer
ego-system to eco-system economies Photo credit: Shutterstock.  We live in an age of profound disruptions. Global crises in finance, food, fuel, water, resource scarcity and poverty challenge every aspect of our societies. These disruptions also open up the possibilities for personal and societal renewal. To seize these possibilities we need to stop and ask ourselves some basic questions: why do our actions collectively create results that so few people want? What keeps us locked into old ways of operating? And what can we do to transform the root problems that keep us trapped in the patterns of the past? Here’s a clue to the answers to these questions: the r... posted on Nov 5 2013 (27,700 reads)

How Sleep Makes You Smart, by Jill Suttie
Americans are against sleep, equating it with laziness. But one of the world's leading experts on sleep says that's hurting our relationships and our ability to solve problems. We spend almost a third of our lives asleep, giving more time to sleep than any other activity. Some of us are blessed with easy sleep; others of us suffer from insomnia or sleep disturbance. Yet, until recently, scientists have known very little about the purpose of sleep or how it affects our brains and day-to-day functioning. Matt Walker is an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and Principal Investigator at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory. With the advent of functi... posted on Dec 24 2013 (70,862 reads)

Steve Karlin and Susie Bear, by Anne Veh
the past year Pavi Mehta, Chris Johnnidis and I have been visiting a wildlife sanctuary in Half Moon Bay to listen to and record the remarkable animal stories and personal journey of founder, Steve Karlin. Sitting on his back porch one day last spring, Steve casually alerted us to the piercing cries of a young red-tailed hawk above and motioned us, mid-sentence, to look beyond the fence at a bobcat moving stealthily in the tall grass. To be in Steve’s company is to be reminded that the vast play of nature is all around us, and visible if only we cultivate our ears to hear and our eyes to see it. Together over many months we experienced an expanded space of listening and learni... posted on Jan 6 2014 (53,481 reads)

18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently, by Carolyn Gregoire
works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process. Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fa... posted on Mar 24 2014 (179,720 reads)

Reflections On Journalism, by Richard Whittaker
Van Slambrouck is a distinguished journalist. He began working for the Christian Science Monitor in 1976. From 1989 to 1997 he was with the San Jose Mercury News. In 1997 he returned to the Monitor as San Francisco bureau chief. In 2001 he was made the editor-in-chief of the Monitor. He is currently an associate professor of Mass Communication at Principia College, a correspondent for the Monitor, a contributing editor for works & conversations and a volunteer with ServiceSpace. Paul entered my life in 2006 thanks to his offer to help me in my struggle as an independent publisher. It was a pivotal moment for me, and for the magazine I founded. Part of our connection involved a mu... posted on Apr 18 2014 (9,209 reads)

Ed Johnson: Beauty & Science, by Richard Whitaker
opportunity to interview Ed Johnson, a renowned molecular biologist, appeared almost by chance last year on the occasion of a family get together. To my delight, thanks to an invitation from my brother, John, Ed was there with his wife Becky. Ed and my brother go back over forty years. Both are passionate fly fishermen, and the friendship between fly fishermen is something like a family link. Ed I knew had been Nobel Laureate, Paul Greengard’s, first graduate student at Yale and had participated in research integral to Greengard’s prize. After receiving his Ph.D. at Yale, Johnson pursued postdoctoral studies at Rockefeller University. Currently he is at Eastern Virginia Medic... posted on May 26 2014 (11,194 reads)