Wordy Birds

Our Hero: Superman on Earth

Original airdate: March 19, 2010

“As with athletes and artists, there has always been a selfish, even a self-serving quality to Superman, to Superman’s ego. He doesn’t require love from the multitudes; Lois Lane will do. Basically, what he needs, and all he needs, is the freedom to act in ways that are satisfying to him.

That’s why he’ll ‘never stop doing good.’

It makes him feel good, dammit.”

-from Our Hero by Tom De Haven

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Abigail Adams

Original airdate: December 11, 2009

“For generations, Abigail Adams’s words — in particular her famous “Remember the Ladies” letter of March 31, 1776 — have inspired women seeking equity in the workplace, before the law, and within their own families. Yet they have always been mere words, and skeptics have emphasized that the only place she ever dared to utter them was in confidential letters to her husband. But the skeptics are wrong.”

- from Abigail Adams

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No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Original airdate: September 11, 2009

“The world watched in horror in April 2007 when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho went on a killing rampage that resulted in the deaths of thirty-two students and faculty members before he ended his own life.

Former Virginia Tech English department chair and distinguished professor Lucinda Roy saw the tragedy unfold on the TV screen in her home and had a terrible realization. Cho was the student she had struggled to get to know–the loner who found speech torturous. After he had been formally asked to leave a poetry class in which he had shared incendiary work that seemed directed at his classmates and teacher, Roy began the difficult task of working one-on-one with him in a poetry tutorial. During those months, a year and a half before the massacre, Roy came to realize that Cho was more than just a disgruntled young adult experimenting with poetic license; he was, in her opinion, seriously depressed and in urgent need of intervention.” – randomhouse.com

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A Question of Freedom

Original airdate: August 21, 2009

“I was getting ready to learn what it meant to lock your thoughts inside of yourself and survive in a place governed by violence, a place where violence was a cloud of smoke you learned to breathe in or choked on.

Sometimes there’s a story that’s been written again and again, sometimes a person finds himself with a story he thinks will be in vogue forever. The story is about redemption, about overcoming. A person finds that story and starts to write it, thinking it will do him some good to tell the world how it really was. That’s not this story.

This is about silence, and how in an eight-year period I met over a dozen people named Juvenile or Youngin or Shorty, all nicknames to tell the world that they were in prison as young boys, as children. We wore the names like badges of honor, because in a way, for some of us, it was all we had to guard us against the fear. And we were guilty and I was just like everyone else: I thought about the edge of a knife.” – from “A Question of Freedom”

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In the Graveyard of Empires

Original airdate: July 31, 2009

“To paraphrase Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the longtime Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, all politics in Afghanistan are local. Past empires that have dared to enter Afghanistan — from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and the Soviet Union — have found initial entry possible, even easy, only to find themselves mired in local resistance. Aware of this history, the United States had the resources, manpower, and strategic know-how to create a new order. And it was on the right track, at least initially. But the moment was fleeting. Despite the impressive gains in security, infrastructure, and democracy, the United States shifted resources and attention to Iraq and allowed the Taliban, al Qa’ida, and other insurgent groups to rebuild in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The lessons from past empires provide a stark lesson.”

-from In the Graveyard of Empires by Seth G. Jones

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