Monetization is not the only profit you can get from podcasting! Here's why I think you should put P.R.O.F.I.T. first in every aspect of your podcast.

The post Why You Should Put Podcasting P.R.O.F.I.T. First first appeared on The Audacity to Podcast.

Inside jokes can offer fun potential for your podcast, but also some potential costs. Here are some brief things for you to consider as you engage with your podcast audience.

The post Should Your Podcast Have Inside Jokes? first appeared on The Audacity to Podcast.

AI has rapidly advanced for content creation. But should you actually trust it? With this potential comes some crucial warnings for using AI in podcasting.

The post 11 Warnings about Using AI in Content-Creation (including podcasting) first appeared on The Audacity to Podcast.

There comes a point in every podcast when it's necessary to say a URL. If for nothing else, at least your podcast's own home on the Internet. (And you should have a domain for your podcast!)

The post 11 Tips for Sharing URLs in Your Podcast first appeared on The Audacity to Podcast.

Redirects come in multiple types. When misused, they can cause some major problems, as even happened to me recently. Here are some warnings to watch for whenever you use redirects.

The post 6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices) first appeared on The Audacity to Podcast.

On Tuesday, November 12, streaming industry consultant Nadine Krefetz will moderate the panel "Cloudsplitting: Tackling Common Cloud Live Broadcast Workflow Challenges." Some elements of streaming workflows and architecture may always stay on-prem. However, the cloud affords streaming pros opportunities for scaling and cost-cutting that make the lure of cloud workflows too powerful to resist for most live streamers intent on managing large and unpredictable audiences, improving QoE, increasing ROI, and satisfying brands. The panel of experts from AWS, TV 2 Danmark, Alibaba Cloud, and Console Connect will discuss actionable insights on refining and streamlining your scalable cloud live-streaming workflows and jump and dodge the hurdles that threaten to break your stride.

On Thursday, November 14, industry thought leader Erin Firneno will moderate the panel "Measurement Matters: Delivering Better Audience Data to Streaming Advertisers." The promise of streaming as a boon to advertisers has always been its potential to help them target audiences more precisely by delivering more substantive audience data than broadcast can offer. But even as streaming's audience share has grown to justify substantial migration of CTV ad dollars from broadcast to digital, when it comes to quantifying audiences and measuring engagement, the lack of consistent and easily translatable measurement standards?not to mention the sheer number of measurement options?continues to frustrate ad buyers. How can streaming move toward the proposed "single source of truth," or is that even the answer? Confirmed panelists include experts from Vevo, Warner Bros Discovery, and Revry.

Do you have a plan to purchase electronics and other gear in 2025? You may want to accelerate those purchases to the end of 2024 because President-Elect Trump demonstrated in his first term that he had no issue with dramatically increasing the cost of appliances for Americans with previous tariffs, so there's no reason to expect him not to do it again.

President-elect Donald Trump has gone against media expectations by tapping Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem and a number of other Capitol Hill veterans to fill posts in his second administration.

Texas lawmakers began filing bills for next year’s legislative session on Tuesday, submitting a record-breaking 1,500 in the first filing period.

I have 75 glass jars, each 3 ounces. I need them laser etched because the image I have is not suitable for a stencil and glass etch cream. Time line is tight, need to have them etched, filled, and handed off no later than sept 20.

This is very speculative. I am assisting a faculty member where I work with the idea of establishing a Mastodon server (hosted by the university) to support a specialized intersection of a particular equity-seeking group and an area of study. The work would be to help run the server, and possibly promote it -- a combination moderator and marketer, both making sure the community is running smoothly and also reaching to people to encourage them to join. If this seems interesting to you, and in full knowledge that this might go nowhere, I'd love to hear about your moderation experience, how many hours a week you think you'd be able to put into the project, and your pay per hour expectations (in USD).

Want to work at one of the Federal Government's "Best Places to Work" and protect the retirement security of millions of workers and retirees? The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's (PBGC) Office of Policy and External Affairs (OPEA) is looking for a DC-area Administrative Support Specialist. The GS-11 position will: Provide administrative support for PBGC' s Advisory Committee, comprised of Presidentially appointed members, including travel, budget, payroll, speaker presentation coordination (including audio/visual support) and meeting preparation. Manage Congressional Correspondence tracking system in a confidential capacity and handling sensitive Congressional correspondence. Work closely with leadership to coordinate a variety of essential services through various PBGC organizations, e.g., budget, procurement, human resources, information technology, etc. Perform research assignments, special projects, and a broad range of administrative functions, including matters of a sensitive nature, for leadership as necessary in executing the missions of the office. The candidate is required to be on-site at least one day per week and may be asked to be onsite to support in-office staff for special meetings and events as needed.

Classical music has an unparalleled ability to transcend time, moving listeners with its emotional depth, technical brilliance, and universal beauty. From the grand symphonies of Beethoven to the delicate piano pieces of Chopin, classical music has shaped the cultural landscape for centuries, inspiring countless generations. But which pieces stand out as the most iconic, the […]

The post 15 Best Classical Music Pieces of All Time first appeared on Singersroom.com.

Marquee Arts executive director Russ Collins has returned from his vacation, and he's ready to chat about all things cinema! Russ joins WEMU's David Fair to discuss the newest films coming to the big screen and a whole lot of special Halloween screenings happening at the Michigan and State Theatres!

What's your favorite scary movie? WEMU's David Fair and Marquee Arts executive director Russ Collins meet up to inform you of tonight's special screenings for your Halloween viewing pleasure! Plus, you'll get details on some new films opening downtown and at the multiplex, too!

...in the Shadow of the Berlin Wall. [BBC] "Named 'Operation Trap', the Stasi's attempted to crush a group fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the right to speak out. The secret police's tactics ranged from interrogations and jail to bizarre mind games. In one incident, informants who managed to infiltrate the environmental movement covertly took coffee from a shared pantry without putting money into the coffee kitty. That plan did not work out. On the contrary: Operation Trap became one of the very rare cases in history in which the Stasi was forced to back down."

"I find it reassuring that in a game that is in some ways a libertarian power fantasy (you and your spaceship, go anywhere do whatever you want), and a PvP universe, one of the first things people did was create a volunteer ambulance service." Over on Mastodon, Dave Anderson walks us through the story of the Fuel Rats, the emergency refueling service of Elite:Dangerous.

So I read a children's book as a kid in the 1980s that used the title quote as a running gag. Can anybody identify it? It may or may not have been a guide to surviving school. It was almost certainly a paperback from a Scholastic book order. (I had thought it was by Jovial Bob Stine, but no book of his that the Internet knows of seems to fit. It might have been bundled with one of his books, though?)

God out of His saving grace and love offers you a salvation that you do not deserve and cannot possibly earn; and you, in response, love Him back “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30, NKJV), a love that is made manifest by obedience to His law: “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments” (1 John 5:3, NKJV).

With hospitals facing a surge of coronavirus patients, Gov. Brian Kemp on Friday said the Georgia World Congress Center would again be utilized as an alternate hospital as more people in the state become sick with COVID-19.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is set to roll back the city's reopening plan back to phase one as COVID-19 continues to spread across the state, a spokesman said Friday. The first phase guidelines include encouraging residents to stay home except for essential trips, wearing a face covering in public and avoid in-person dining at restaurants.

Monday on Political Rewind , the relationship between Gov. Brian Kemp and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has frayed, as both officials take opposing views on how to govern during the pandemic. A once productive and collegial relationship is now soured by open fighting. What brought us here? Listen here:

According to Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law is rooted in medieval times and is an “outmoded concept” in this age of “increased police forces.” Porter made those remarks at a Georgia House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee hearing on Monday.

Tuesday on Political Rewind, conventional wisdom states that we are living through an unprecedented era of crisis in America today. As the country looks to recover and heal through these tough times, does our history have any answers or lessons? We discussed this topic with several top historians. Listen below:

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is taking up New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on his offer to send a team to conduct testing and contact tracing of people exposed to the coronavirus. Cuomo announced Monday that New York State will deploy coronavirus assistance to the capital of Georgia as the state continues to experience an increase in COVID-19 cases.

Were you really that frozen with fear? Doubtful

There's nothing I can say to this dismissive nonsense that won't get me thrown off Metafilter.

I keep returning to two things.

1) building on the idea of community, trying to spread as much love as I can in the world. The time for action will be soon but right now is the time to love each other as much as we possibly can.

2) we aren't the only country to have elected a far-right or fascist leader recently. I'm looking to the people I know who live in other countries with leaders like Trump. There is still joy and possibility in their lives, even though their fight is hard, just like ours will be.

Love and joy are exactly what the far right wants to take away from us so let's stick it to them and not let them.

Let me tell you a story about a woman I know who votes conservative. She isn't the type of person I would self-select to be a friend, or even a friendly acquaintance — perhaps to my detriment! — because she's well-to-do, right-leaning, and very Christian. But I see her every week and have talked to her quite a bit because she's one of my medical providers.

Because I'm disabled, she charges me half of what she'd normally charge; every time I thank her, she says it's no big deal, and that, "Disabled people deserve every break they can get!" This saves me something like $3,000 dollars a year: that's an extra $3,000 a year she could be making, and actually now can't be making, because she's using her hours to treat me instead of other patients. She does a lot of volunteering. Donates a lot of money. She talks about how she's disappointed that certain social services, like disabled transit, fail disabled people, and has a fairly robust understanding of how that plays out because she listens carefully to her disabled patients. In her church, she's taken a stand for welcoming gay members of the community into the congregation, and into leadership positions, and was heartbroken and felt powerless and bewildered when the higher-up leadership blocked several of these things.

Whenever I've talked about the difficulties my trans friends are facing, she is genuinely sympathetic to the individual friend, interested in their life, and sad about their suffering, but sometimes expresses the concern-trolling talking points of the right-wing media — I read this as her being very responsive and caring to any unique individual she knows, but not recognizing the perils of the wider systemic discrimination going on.

Last time there was an election, I was talking about how conservative funding cuts impact the disabled community, and she expressed a lot of opinions along the lines of, "Of course I think everyone who needs disability income should have it! But don't you realize that the left-wing government will get us further into debt, whereas the conservatives will improve the economy so that we have more government funds to give social programs?" This coming from a person whose personality is very caring, motherly, and friendly, not at all a combative or hostile "debater:" normal people genuinely believe these things because the right-wing media repeats them over and over again.

I think that you really are right when you say, I truly believe they are good, kind, thoughtful people. Most of them probably are. But they are being lied to and duped by right-wing politicians, and not realizing the extent to which they're being lied to, because they believe we still live in a reasonable society in which no one would actually lie that much ... so some of the things they're saying must be true, right?

They don't realize the extent to which BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrant, etc. minority groups are in very real danger, and think it must be exaggerated, because they don't really know that many, or the few that they know appear to be doing just fine. And so they vote with their worry and their fear, and their vote does not truly carry through their intentions about the kind of world they wish to live in.

This is not, of course, all people. Some people really are deep into right-wing ideology and have entire groups that they do not see as real people. But I find that most of the people I meet are like her: I could have several conversations with them not knowing they are right-wing, and get along with them just fine, because their day-to-day values of how to treat other human beings really are quite similar to mine. But because of their political/cultural education, their sociological and media literacy, and the demographics of people that make up their workplace, friends, and family, they are being fed a different set of facts, a different "reality."

This all makes me incredibly sad but also gives me bit of hope, and I hope it will bring some peace to you.

I live in Canada, so it's not the same, but I do live in one of the most right-leaning provinces. I really feel what you're going through. I am also surrounded by people I care about — who appear to care about me — who vote in one awful conservative government after another. Stay strong: sending love and sympathy.

Two things:

1. Narrow your focus to your sphere of influence, just for now, because in this moment of helplessness and defeat, when we are feeling powerless, it behooves us to remember we do have immense power. Kamala Harris was never going to bring a casserole to your neighbor when their spouse was in the hospital, that's you. Donald Trump cannot steal the laughter from your friends' lips when you tell them a joke, that laughter is entirely in your power. You have the power to choose connection, fellowship, mutual aid, joy, hard work, love, passion, devotion, faith. To me, remembering that I have power is cause for hope.

2. When you're out there using your power to connect with your fellow human beings, look for the helpers. Take heart in their existence, their perseverance. Do everything you can to become one of them.

I don't disagree with the advice already provided, but I think you're using the word "boundary" in an odd way. You don't get to set boundaries on other people's behaviour, even when you're married to them. You can set a boundary around your own behaviour, then other people decide how they'll respond.

In this case, you might say: if you continue a friendship with B, our relationship will be at an end. Then, the ball is in R's court - he can decide what to do next.

I'm sorry you've been through so much lately, but I think you are definitely catastrophizing. I'd say the likelihood you'll be a target of political violence is pretty close to zero. I would suggest you stop reading the news/Reddit for a bit if it's causing you to feel this way - go for walks in your new neighborhood, make plans to see your friends in the city, etc.

This does sound very much like your anxiety latching on to a potential future and you getting stuck in that.

Others can give you advice about dealing with this particular scenario.

But here are some things to remember:

Seeking reassurance from others usually results in your anxiety getting worse, as their advice makes the imaginary danger seem more real.

No amount of rehearsing and imagining and ruminating will make you any safer. In fact, trying to prepare for this scenario means you're staying in the anxiety space for longer.

Don't try to fight your scary thoughts, don't argue with yourself. Just note the thought and briefly describe what you're doing to yourself in a non judgemental way.

"I'm arguing with an imaginary person right now"

"I'm trying to predict the future"

"I'm ruminating right now."

"I'm seeking reassurance"

You have the power to reassure yourself, and THAT kind of reassurance really works.

Change catastrophising thoughts into compassionate realism.

"I don't know what might happen in the future, but I'm going to cope with it when it dies"

"It's possible that this frightening thing might happen, and it might be unpleasant, but I will deal with it if it does and then it will just be another memory."

Find ways to distract yourself from your spiralling thoughts. I like explaining a topic I'm really interested in out loud to myself as a way to drown out stuck thoughts.

Trying to prepare for something that *might* happen just means you're making yourself be in that horrible scary worry space for much longer than it would take for the scary thing to happen. You can't control wether or not this thing you fear will happen, but you can control how much you focus on it.

Distraction is good! Be with people you enjoy, watch a comfort show, dance to music you love, do something to make yourself feel good.

My marriage is only monogamish, so I'm saying this with some bias towards polyamory:

If your spouse want to prioritize this friendship over your stated boundary, then your spouse is prioritizing the friendship over your marriage.

In this case, you really don't have to explain why. In fact, I'd stop explaining why. It's not a comprehension problem. It's that your partner doesn't want to do what you are asking.

Here's the words I would use: I do not want you to continue this friendship. If you do, I am going to have to take steps towards ending our marriage. We should discuss this in counselling.

In other words even in marriages where there's less emphasis on monogamy, the main thing is that you have to respect your partner's limits, or else you aren't partners. I'm sorry your partner is putting you through this.

White people are very invested in treating racism as extreme and exceptional when it is in fact commonplace and pervasive. White people are not credible judges of what non-white people describe as experiences of racism. Racism is the Occam's Razor explanation. These so-called academic framings describe patterns that white people would prefer remain undescribed.

I work in a women's health clinic that does first-term abortions as one of its services.

We have a comment form on our web site where people who want to volunteer as patient escorts can reach out. Typically, we get about one or two inquiries a week.

Yesterday alone, we got twenty-five.

My situation is not exactly the same as yours but it is a story of how to get along with friends and family who are on the total opposite side of the aisle, so perhaps you can find something to help you in my strategies.

My parents are extremely right wing - in India. It is mortifying and horrifying enough that they are this way but to make things worse my mother is also deep into conspiracy theories on a similar scale and off-the-charts-insane like QAnon in the US. At the same time I am also still engaged in a decade-long effort to build a decent relationship with my parents. So even though this is a self-imposed form of hell, the fact remains I am trying to actively love (as in verb-love) these people whose political opinions horrify me and who ruined their relationship with me in the past by throwing me out of their home as a teenager, abusing me as a child, etc.

Step 0 in accomplishing this task is to actually be clear, honest, and fully committed with yourself that you do want to keep and build these relationships.

For many years I was on the fence about it and I made no effort at all to build a relationship with my parents. That was fine! If you are here, you are not doing anything wrong! And neither will you be doing anything wrong if you do choose to walk away properly from people who trigger you too much. Many years after not working and fence-sitting, I intellectually realized I wanted to fix things but emotionally I remained uncommitted, angry, resentful, and blisteringly mad about how unfair it was that *I* was the one doing this fixing and building. This was also a valid stage to go through, and I suspect you're somewhere around here, feeling angry and hurt and torn within yourself that these are your fucking choices: to learn how to get along with assholes or else to lose all your family and friends. The unfairness REALLY RANKLES. This is extremely valid and extremely real, and there is no way out of this stage but through it. But sadly, no forward movement will happen FOR YOU EMOTIONALLY in this phase, as far as making your peace with your situation goes. (Also no forward movement will happen in fixing the relationship but that is not necessarily a bad thing, if you're in this stage.)

Accomplishing Step 0 - becoming fully and truly committed to building and maintaining these relationships - is a hue, huge task in itself. I would strongly encourage you to work with a psychodynamic therapist or some other modality that pays attention to childhood issues, in order to get to Step 0. You will know you have reached Step 0 when you can "radically accept" that your friends and family voted against your life, your rights, and your wellbeing. That is who they are, this is what you are dealing with, and you no longer have any wish to wrestle with this reality (try to convince them, try to lead by example, try to explain yourself, try to talk to them, try to get them to acknowledge your pain or at least be forced to see it, etc) because you. just. fully. accept their political position is their political position - you accept their total separateness from you and you accept their right to be separate from you - and even though you may be angry, even though you may be hurt, even though you still hate their politics, you want to just get on with building the relationship. If you're there, then you can move on to

Stratagem 1: find things you enjoy about this person, and trying to do things you mutually enjoy with them. Even the smallest movement towards identifying and then amplifying the good (by having small good interactions) will help. Repeated good interactions are what finally defeated my insecurity about "giving my parents an inch" - it felt so threatening to me to have anything nice with these people against whom I was nursing so much anger, and I TREASURED my anger, I didn't want to lose it! Having repeated nice experiences made me feel like, okay, I still haven't lost my right to anger or my anger even though I am having fun with them. Both my anger and my love can coexist. This has been a HUGE relief.

Stratagem 2: stop talking politics with them entirely. These are not your politics buddies. FIND OTHER POLITICS BUDDIES YOU CAN RELIABLY GET SUPPORT FROM for the political side of you. This type of compartmentalization is a healthy practice because nobody can be everything to us. Nobody in our personal life can check all the boxes and be everything we need from the world. People's failings are sometimes located near the very things we consider "basic shit". They are human, and this is okay, and we can find others to fill this basic need for us.

Stratagem 3: This may seem like the opposite of Stratagem 2 but it is not - don't stay silent when your friends and family say horrible political things to you or around you. You don't bring up politics but you don't stay quiet when unacceptable things are spoken in your vicinity. You MUST say something, you MUST speak your mind. Make it short but make it honest. Otherwise you build up an incredible amount of resentment and anger that will poison the relationship and run counter to your Step 0 goals.

Stratagem 4: After you say it, move on without belaboring your point or trying to get them to agree with you. Say it, and then completely let it go. Saying it is the point. The goal is NOT to change them, move them, make them think like you, make them acknowledge you, make them apologize, etc. The goal is unburdening yourself by speaking your truth, protecting the relationship by not allowing thoughts to fester in secret. If what they have said is horrible, say, "Wow, that's pretty horrible," and then move on immediately - warmly, affectionately, taking the sting out of it with your manner, without holding a grudge. You get your satisfaction by speaking up, not by making them bend. This strikes a great balance between being authentic and yet sidestepping useless conflict.

Stratagem 5: If they want to argue with you, you have to learn how to bow out smoothly without engaging in that. Say things like, "Oh, dad, that's fine, we can let it go. Tell me about Auntie's health..." Again it is important to remain non-retaliatory, don't punish them for wanting to hash this out by being angry. Be calm and warm and affectionate, but do not be moved into engaging in the political discussion. Walk out and take a short break if you need to. But come back on your own as soon as possible, and be loving. These are your people. You have boundaries with them, not walls.

I'm usually allergic to a lot of the way "find the bright side" kind of things are framed, but this extended quotation from Great Tide Rising by Kathleen Dean Moore came across my Mastodon feed and really resonated with me.

Over the years, college students have often come to my office distraught, unable to think of what they might be able to do to stop the terrible losses caused by an industrial growth economy run amok. So much dying, so much destruction. I tell them about Mount Saint Helens, the volcano that blasted a hole in the Earth in 1980, only a decade before they were born.

Those scientists were so wrong back in 1980, I tell my students. When they first climbed from the helicopters, holding handkerchiefs over their faces to filter ash from the Mount Saint Helens eruption, they did not think they would live long enough to see life restored to the blast zone. Every tree was stripped gray, every ridgeline buried in cinders, every stream clogged with toppled trees and ash. If anything would grow here again, they thought, its spore and seed would have to drift in from the edges of the devastation, long dry miles across a plain of cinders and ash. The scientists could imagine that– spiders on silk parachutes drifting over rubble and plain, a single samara spinning into the shade of a pumice stone. It was harder to imagine the time required for flourishing to return to the mountains – all the dusty centuries.

But here they are today: On the mountain, only thirty-five years later, these same scientists are on their knees, running their hands over beds of moss below lupine in lavish purple bloom. Tracks of mice and fox wander along a stream, and here, beside a ten-foot silver fir, a coyote's twisted scat grows mushrooms. What the scientists know now, but didn't understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation passed over some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer fern under a rotting log. There under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole's musty nest. Between stones in a buried stream, a slick of algae and clustered dragonfly larvae. Refugia, they call them: places of safety where life endures. From the refugia, mice and toads emerged blinking onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, forests and meadows returned to the mountain.

I have seen this happen. I have wandered the edge of Mount Saint Helens vernal pools with ecologists brought to unscientific tears by the song of meadowlarks in this place.

My students have been taught, as they deserve to be, that the fossil-fueled industrial growth culture has brought the world to the edge of catastrophe. They don't have to "believe in" climate change to accept this claim. They understand the decimation of plant and animal species, the poisons, the growing deserts and spreading famine, the rising oceans and melting ice. If it's true that we can't destroy our habitats without destroying our lives, as Rachel Carson said, and if it's true that we are in the process of laying waste to the planet, then our ways of living will come to an end – some way or another, sooner or later, gradually or catastrophically – and some new way of life will begin. What are we supposed to do? What is there to hope for at the end of this time? Why brother trying to patch up the world while so many others seem intent on wrecking it?

These are terrifying questions for an old professor; thank god for the volcano's lesson. I tell them about the rotted stump that sheltered spider eggs, about a cupped cliff that saved a fern, about all the other refugia that brought life back so quickly to the mountain. If destructive forces are building under our lives, then our work in this time and place, I tell them, is to create refugia of the imagination. Refugia, places where ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow.

Even now, we can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect life so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world. Doesn't matter what it is, I tell my students; if it's generous to life, imagine it into existence. Create a bicycle cooperative, a seed-sharing community, a wildlife sanctuary on the hill below the church. Raise butterflies with children. Sing duets to the dying. Tear out the irrigation system and plant native grass. Imagine water pumps. Imagine a community garden in the Kmart parking lot. Study ancient corn. Teach someone to sew. Learn to cook with the full power of the sun at noon.

We don't have to start from scratch. We can restore pockets of flourishing life ways that have been damaged over time. Breach a dam. Plant a riverbank. Vote for schools. Introduce the neighbors to one another's children. Celebrate the solstice. Slow a river course with a fallen log. Tell stories of how indigenous people live on the land. Clear the grocery carts out of the stream.

Maybe most effective of all, we can protect refugia that already exist. They are all around us. Protect the marshy ditch behind the mall. Work to ban poisons from the edges of the road. Save the hedges in your neighborhood. Boycott what you don't believe in. Refuse to participate in what is wrong. There is hope in this: An attention that notices and celebrates thriving where it occurs; a conscience that refuses to destroy it.

From these sheltered pockets of moral imagining, and from the protected pockets of flourishing, new ways of living will spread across the land, across the salt plains and beetle killed forests. Here is how life will start anew. Not from the edges over centuries of invasion; rather from small pockets of good work, shaped by an understanding that all life is interdependent, and driven by the one gift humans have that belongs to no other: practical imagination – the ability to imagine that things can be different from what they are now.

I actually got paid to do this.

For three years (from 1996 to 1999) I worked as a Public Information and Consultation Advisor for the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office in British Columbia. It was essentially my job to talk to angry and racist non-native people about the land claims settlements we, the federal government, were negotiating with First Nations.

One thing that helped me do this job was a story I heard Utah Phillips tell at the 1997 Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Seems one day he was told of an old cowboy in New Mexico who was dying. This old cowboy had ridden on some of the last cattle drives on the Great Plains in the 1800s and had scores of songs in his head about that time. Utah made an effort to go visit him on his death bed way out in the desert. When he got to the cowboy's cabin, a nurse answered the door, said he was expected and asked him to wait in the sitting room while she got the cowboy ready for the visitor.

The cowboy was an avid reader and had many hundreds of books. As he was waiting Utah scanned the shelves and saw what was what. He was surprised and shocked to see tract after tract from the John Birch Society, a virulent right wing political movement that clashed deeply with Utah's own hard left politics. Utah reflected on the predicament he was in. Here was this cowboy full of all of these songs, and there was this irresolvable political gap between them.

But thinking on it more, Utah realized that the REASON the cowboy had so many political books is that he didn't actually KNOW much about politics. In fact if he were to ask the old man about politics, he knew the old man would only give him lies, stuff that he didn't believe but that was recited out of the books. Utah Phillips noted that there was not one book on cowboys or cowboy music on the book shelves, and that's what Utah was there for. He entered the bedroom of the dying cowboy and passed a lovely day trading songs and stories of the cattle drives of the 19th century.

In conclusion Utah said "You know, if you talk to people about what they know, they will always tell you the truth."

That line stayed with me as I ventured in cowboy country shortly afterwards. I was meeting with a group of loggers and ranchers in Williams Lake, in the interior of British Columbia and they were a hard crew. Every month we met and every month they told me that they didn't want any land claims settlements with the "goddamn Indians" in their area. One guy, a man I'll call Bob used to go on and on about "you can't make deals with Indians, they can't be trusted, they're no good with their word..." That sort of thing.

Now I am Aboriginal myself, and this rankled after a while. But keeping Utah's words in mind I challenged Bob one day and said, "Bob, you know, I'm Indian and I'm trustworthy and you can make deals with me. I know for a fact that what you're saying is bullshit. It's lies. So I'm not going to ask you about Indians anymore. Instead I'm going to talk to you about something you do know about, and that is logging. Why don't you take me out to see your operation?"

Bob agreed and the next day I met him at 5:00am with a thermos of coffee and a box of Tim Hortons and we climbed into his F350 and headed out into the Cariboo Mountains. We drove for two hours and the whole time we talked about logging and what it's like being in the business, what kind of markest he was trying to develop, and how much he loved his new machinery He talked about his new feller-buncher like he was a dad with a newborn. Gone was the intransigent racist and here beside me was an interesting man, telling me the truth about what he loved.

When we got out to the cut block where his crew was working, he radioed them in and they came down to get coffee and donuts. Of the 12 guys he had working for him, six were First Nations. I laughed when I met them and asked them if they knew Bob's opinions on the trustworthiness of Indians. "Oh yeah," One of them laughed. "He's an old blowhard!"

But Bob countered by saying that THESE guys were great, that they had been with him for coming on 20 years. THEY were different.

We laughed. Really hard. We talked for a while about what THESE guys felt about land claims and they all had different opinions. Respect arose in the space of nuance and reflection.

So many people parrot opinions. In fact opinions are so often just a front for something else, the yawning abyss of ignorance. Very few people hold fixed opinions about things that matter deeply to them. Instead the hold nuanced and thoughtful interests. That's not to say that I wouldn't claw your eyes out if you hurt my child, but that's different from having an opinion on Tiger Woods or abortion or whether or not Obama is doing a good job. Most of us aren't Tiger, a pregnant woman facing a choice or the President. Most opinions are shallow, and the holder of them guards their superficiality with outrage and emotion to prevent you from getting close and discovering nuance. People hold opinons out of fear or loyalty. But when it comes to something you really care about, it's less about an opinion and more about the nuanced, many layered, complex fabric of knowledge, practical, theoretical, aspirational and emotional

From that day on, I never again talked to Bob about First Nations people, but he became a very involved person in our advisory committee because he had a piece of his heart staked in the process. I came to respect him very much, even though he continued to blow hard against my rookie colleagues and say stupid racist things that somewhere he must have believed. He did it just to put them off guard, to protect his own vulnerabilities and mask his fear. I came to respect what lay beneath the opinion, which was a real fear that land claims would ruin his logging operation. I dismissed the racism but respected Bob and what was really at stake for him. And I think he came to respect me too.

It was the best job I ever had.

Since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd on Memorial Day, NPR has faced ethical challenges every hour of every day, including how to describe the killing, how to use the audio of Floyd's last words, how to document Floyd's life and how to describe the mass demonstrations. The best answer to every one of these questions is: embrace precision, be descriptive, use more words. The more this happens, the better the journalism. When news organizations, including NPR, sometimes fall short, it's usually because of an attempt to economize words. This week we received questions and complaints from a number of listeners about a variety of topics. I have summarized them across four general questions that I put to two senior editors and one host. Here's a breakdown of the most frequent questions and the answers I received: Why do hosts and reporters say, "George Floyd died in police custody?" It seems like an understatement. That phrase does feel incomplete, even weak, given that

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On Mar. 11, 1985, Harold and Thelma Swain were shot in the vestibule of a Baptist church in rural southeast Georgia during evening Bible study. Witnesses from the black congregation described a white man with shoulder-length hair who fled the scene. Despite years of investigation by both the local sheriff’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the case had gone cold by the end of the decade; even the leads generated by a 1988 episode of Unsolved Mysteries about the case proved false.

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America’s mayors have taken center stage in 2020. Big city mayors feuded with state and federal officials over COVID-19 protections and resources, and have been praised — and condemned — for their handling of protests sparked by the death of George Floyd. These crises may be unfolding on a national scale, but affect lives in every American city and town. With Atlanta officials already in the national spotlight, On Second Thought turned to local leaders in Savannah — Georgia’s first city and the state’s largest coastal municipality — to see how they are responding. We begin with Savannah Mayor Van Johnson , who took office in January of this tumultuous year. He shed light on his decision-making processes and vision for the city’s future.

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Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Pediatricians across the country have spoken out in favor of bringing students back to school this fall even as coronavirus infection rates increase in most states, including among younger people. Dr. Sara Bode is a pediatrician and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health. She joins us now from Columbus, Ohio. Thanks very much for being with us. SARA BODE: Thank you, Scott. SIMON: Infection rates are rising. Officials all over the country are raising alarms. Why do you believe it's important to reopen schools? BODE: So what we know is that for kids, school is not just an optional activity. It's really an essential service for them not only for their academics, but also for their social-emotional health, also for safety, nutrition, so many other things that they get through the school system. And so it's critical for us to find a way to support and get kids back. SIMON: We've heard concerns about