Studs Terkel Archive Podcast Ben Welsh

I hope the updates keep coming. There’s some great architecture ones out there.

Thank you for doing this.

This podcast is a time machine that can take you across many decades to a convention of brilliant minds whose voices we should have listened to. Whether it’s John Wicklein warning us about the loss of privacy discussing his book “The Electronic Nightmare” in the early 80s, James Baldwin in 1970 telling us how so little has changed yet, even still today, or Shel Silverstein, in 1962, talking about how overly sensitive society had become and encourages us not to clap for bad art,It will only encourage more bad art There is always some nugget of wisdom that might have made the world a better place had any of us just listened. There’s also things that were best left ignored. Like Arthur C. Clark’s 1959 prediction that humans will and should soon herd whales like cattle and farm them for food to feed the growing world overpopulation

One of the other things I find really interesting is how in each decade multiple people make use of the old curse, “May you live in interesting times” as they describe a very familiar feeling of a world coming apart. I’m not sure if it should be comforting knowing there’s nothing new under the sun and people always feel like this or if because we didn’t listen to their warnings and advise that feeling is made worse by the understanding that this time the end of the world is not a drill.

Either way, we have here a second chance to save the world or some really interesting intellectual stimulation to entertain us as it finally does burn