A Hindu chaplain was invited to say the opening prayer in the Senate and some christians slipped in to protest, disrupting the prayer, and generally making fools of themselves and presenting the face of their faith which causes those who feel religious belief is something everyone ought to get over…
There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.TANSTAAFL.
Anybody recognize that? Where it comes from? What it refers to?
This past weekend was the 100th birthday of Robert A. Heinlein. I was not there, though I’d wanted to be. You see, Robert A. Heinlein was one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world, and when I was a child, his books informed my apprehension of just about everything. It might be questioned whether one man deserves the kind of press Heinlein gets. Even when he was alive (he passed away in 1988) he was controversial but there were still many places you could walk into where not a soul would know who he was. I think he’s important because, in a way, he made modern America.
What? A science fiction writer? Made America?
Such a statement demands clarification.
A biography is soon to be out by a gentleman named Bill Patterson. You can read it, read about the man who once wore the title “The Dean of Space Age Fiction”, and judge for yourself. I won’t go into huge detail about his life or work here. I want to make a smaller, more pointed observation.
In 33 novels and a significant number of short stories, Robert A. Heinlein established a didactic approach to science fiction that has been copied, improved, debated, revered, and hated since he began his career in 1938. Heinlein was born in Missouri. He graduated from Annapolis. He received a medical discharge from …
Last Friday, Governor Blunt signed a bill that mandates that sex ed teachers provide political affiliations and charitable contribution disclosures to the state in order to prevent any teachers possibly affiliated with any reproductive rights centers or groups from teaching about reproduction. It also prohibits schools from obtaining materials from…
Is it just me, or are the interviews you see on television getting worse and worse? There are exceptionally good interviewers, of course (such as Bill Moyers). Bad interviews are the norm, however. This is a shame, because most bad interviews could be cured if only the interviewers would follow a few basic rules
Before I go further, I should make it clear that my frustration is with interviews that are serious attempts to discuss a topic with a guest in order to inform or entertain the audience. I am excluding from this critique interviews on comedy shows (such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert), where the interviewer is expected to interject his or her personality with more gusto or even to toy with the guest.
Without further ado, here are 10 basic rules for conducting effective interviews:
1. The interviewer needs to shut up and let the guest talk. How often is it that an interviewer just can’t hold back and ends up dominating the interview, failing to allow the guest a fair chance to talk? I’ve often watched interviews by Charlie Rose that remind me of this point. Although Charlie books some terrific guests and does some excellent work, he is one of those interviewers who is often incapable of staying out of the way. Many interviews end up being “about Charlie.” In the legal field, the trick to effective direct examination of a witness is to ask brief questions that allow the witness to “bloom” in front …
In her review of Douglas Hofstadter's new book (I Am a Strange Loop) in the May 3 edition of Nature, Susan Blackmore has this to say: At the age of 12 or so, it dawned on [Hofstadter] that consciousness is a peculiar kind of barrage that perceives itself and yet…