Retired judge LaDoris Cordell is known for her groundbreaking career as a judge in Northern California and then her stint as Independent Police Auditor for the City of San Jose. Join us in a wide-ranging conversation, from a segregated childhood, an unusual education, and an unlikely acceptance to Stanford Law School, to retired judge, community activist, musician, artist, and grandmother.
Early in the 20th century, in which has been named the Great Migration, millions of Black southerners moved North, looking for opportunity and an escape from Jim Crow. The vibrant….
Sometimes all it takes is one question to spur a revelation that inspires a movement. The African American Composer Initiative started with a question and has become a thriving nonprofit, discovering, performing, and recording underappreciated concert music by Black composers.
What is creativity, how can we nurture it, and what can it do for us? In this conversation we speak about creativity from two directions: Dr. Joanne Foster researches and writes about creativity in education, and Patrice Vecchione teaches and practices creativity in her writing and visual art. Interviewed separately, Joanne and Patrice speak on the same topics through the lens each has developed in her own life and work.
Some thoughts from Babblery host Suki Wessling about how we should read and act upon dystopian literature. It seems that reasonable people take these novels as warnings, many people seem to take them as blueprints for how we should mold our future.
In this mini-episode, we focus on a change that has both energized and confused writers: the push for representation and the elimination of cultural appropriation. Author Carol Fisher Saller speaks with refreshing candor about the difficulties she faces as a white writer who genuinely wants to write representative, inclusive kidlit. She talks about the myths and misperceptions, as well as the challenges, as she tries to make her way in a changed industry.
Making music together = keeping time together
We often talk about “spending” time with friends, but how about keeping time? When we make music together, we literally interact with the time that we’re “spending,” keeping it, beat by beat, as a shared resource. There’s really no other [public] activity that we can do with other humans that allows us to interact in this way: when we play music, our bodies move in sync, our mouths say words together or in response, we are literally joined together in time.
An ode to humanity’s first instrument In which host Suki Wessling reflects on a life of singing. Singing as therapy, singing as memory, singing as body, singing as meditation, singing….
“It’s really kind of transcendental, this way that a group can come together to bring meaning to sound through our bodies.” Composer Anne Hege practices a rarefied profession. Not only….
Near the end of my recent interview with Brenda Laurel, she talks about the responsibility of content creators in our current world. “What we can do, what I hope we….
