Towers of Babel Alan Mairson

I’ve always wanted to ask Jon Stewart these questions.
David Remnick finally did.

Please listen to the audio, above.
(The full interview is here.)


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Dr. Carrie Brown is the director of the master’s program in Social Journalism at The City University of New York. I called her up recently to discuss a Medium essay that quoted one of Carrie’s students, Mekdela Maskal: “Journalism doesn’t have to be a story.”
It doesn’t? The transformation of (many) journalists into storytellers is one of my obsessions here at Towers of Babel, so I asked Carrie to help explain how and why social journalism strives to place less emphasis on Story.
(Thanks to Carrie for her insights and good humor… and for taking the time to talk with me.)


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Two audio clips from Neil Postman beautifully capture some of the ideas that animate this Towers of Babel project. (Please listen to the AUDIO, above.)
One of the key passages:
… But there are schools that have been animated by a transcendent spiritual idea which may be called a god with small ‘g’. Now I know it’s risky for me to use this word even with a small ‘g’, because the word has an aura of sacredness and is not to be used lightly. And also because it calls to mind a fixed figure or image. But it is the purpose of such figures or images to direct one’s mind to an idea, and more to the point, to a story. Not any kind of story but one that tells of origins and envisions a future; a story that constructs ideals, proscribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority and gives a sense of continuity and purpose. A god in the sense I’m using the word is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power so that it’s possible to organize one’s life and one's learning around it. Without such a transcendent narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without purpose, schools become houses of detention, not attention. 
Schools and journalism have a lot in common.
For more details, please listen to the AUDIO, above.
Links to three (of many) books by Neil Postman:
* Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
* Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
* The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School


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Harry Rieckelman is a psychotherapist who lives and works in Bethesda, Maryland. He’s also the founder of the Institute for Narrative Therapy. 
I wanted to talk with Harry for three reasons:
* I’m fascinated by narrative therapy, which is an attempt to understand human personality and human identity as narrative, as a story. That essentially we are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
* Harry once told me that “a good story is better than a bad story, but no story is better than a good story.” Which is certainly a counter-intuitive thing for a narrative therapist to say.
* If narrative is useful for the construction of personality and identity, then is it also useful — necessary, even — for the health and cohesion of a community, a society, a nation? (I’d argue that one reason the European Union is currently imploding might be the fact that the EU never came up with a coherent narrative for itself.)
Thanks very much to Harry for taking time to chat with me — and for his endless patience and good humor.




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“Narrative flow.” It almost sounds like an illegal narcotic.
(Listen to the AUDIO, above.)
The Ezra Klein interview with Noah Feldman is HERE.
The Rabbi Bernie video is HERE.


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I’m delighted to share a conversation I recently had with Elizabeth Kolbert. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999, Elizabeth is also the author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
I contacted Elizabeth to follow up on her interview with Evan Ratliff on the Longform podcast last year. The question that especially caught my ear: When she sits down to write, does she think her work will have an impact? Does she think it will change anything? And she said:
“I still nurse the idea in my heart of hearts that something you write, that there’s some key to this all. We’re all looking for the skeleton key that’s going to unlock it [climate change], and people will go, ‘Oh, that’s why we have to do something!’ I don’t want to say that I completely dispensed with that. I think that’s what motivates most journalists—this information is going to somehow make a difference. On the other hand, I have dispensed with a lot of that…”
Which made me wonder: Why has she “dispensed with a lot of that”?
So I called her up.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit towers.substack.com