Fuzzy Signals

Hope Springs Eternal

Yes, I have been extremely busy of late. Mea culpa. But here is one highlight in the midst of my rushing around. On the Easter, April 16, I was interviewed on America's National Public Radio programme, "To The Best of Our Knowledge". Somehow somewhere in the frenzied flow of cyberspace, they found and liked my essay below, Tracking Global Violence: Are things really getting better? (January 6, 2006), and decided to create a programme around the theme of positive thinking. I'm featured in Segment 1 for about ten minutes after a really hilarious guy, Danny Wallace, who tried a rather bizarre experiment of not saying "no" to any request, some attempt I think to lead a more affirmative life

Apart from a brief mention in The Wall Street Journal in 2000, this was my mainstream media debut (if you can call NPR mainstream.) It was fun, albeit a tad nerve-wracking, going to the Radio France studio in Paris where they interviewed me from the U.S. studio. Here I was translating for the French technicians to the American ones to get the sound levels and machinations working right. Thank you dear friends, Elisabeth and Pamela, for the coaching. It's comforting to know you have in one's corner some top-notch journalists who know the tricks. Another unexpected by-product of this wee airing: people are looking me up as they have passed through Paris. Paul and son, merci for the kir at Arts & Métiers! Great conversation.

Having now trolled through the programme's archives extensively, I have to plug "To the Best of Our Knowledge." Produced with evident love and care by Wisconsin Public Radio, this gem of an audio show features brainy, well-framed topics that never bleed into intellectual pretension thanks to their spirit of whimsy and playfulness. Okay, I'm clearly biased now since they had the good graces to interview me (bless their midwestern socks). But I think you'll agree with me, even so. With everything accessible online in their digital archives, this is a gold-mine for good audio.

It's quite amazing, almost mysterious, how the new media landscape works — you just put something you've thought about and worked hard on "out there" in the blogsphere, without any expectations of what will emerge, and then something like this happens. It's hard to image this occurring (as easily) within the traditional top-down media structure which vets and filters content within a much narrower band of sources, if only because a pre-Web world made it impossible to have any alternatives.

Posted by nicole at May 21, 2006 12:56 AM