If you have never heard of a man named Hector Black, from Cookeville, Tennessee, I hope you will continue to read this. Hector died on August 20, 2020, at age 95. Born in New York City, he served in the Army in World War II. After the war he studied at Harvard, and began to attend Quaker meetings, being attracted by their non-violent creed. He and his wife became involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and moved to Atlanta in 1965 with their three daughters, where they protested for racial justice alongside Martin Luther King Jr. While in Atlanta, they also adopted two more daughters, making a family with five children, all girls.
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Lawyers and Leadership
I am pleased to announce the release of my latest audiobook, Dangerous Leaders: How and Why Lawyers Must be Taught to Lead, by Anthony C. Thompson.
What do the collapse of Enron (2001), the “Bridgegate” scandal (2013), and the Flint water crisis (2016) have in common? Each incident occurred as a result of multiple failures of leadership. In particular, there were failures of leadership by decision-makers with legal training.
Continue reading “Lawyers and Leadership”For the love of wisdom (and a free audiobook)
All of us have probably spoken and written the word “philosophy” at various times in our lives. It might have been when we were teenagers or young adults, at a time when we strove to more clearly define our individual identities by expounding on “our philosophy”, possibly to receive an adult eye-roll in response. It might have been in college, when we took “Introduction to Philosophy” as an undergraduate. (I did, and I got the worst grade of my entire college career, but that is another story. I think I was too young to get it.) Or it might have been when we encountered the term in studying the foundations of a formalized belief system.
Continue reading “For the love of wisdom (and a free audiobook)”Creating a Language
One of the greatest mysteries about the development of Homo sapiens concerns the acquisition of what is arguably our most important skill: language. It is regarded by many scientists as the single most critical faculty separating us from the other animals. It is the attribute that allowed knowledge of discoveries such as tool-making to spread between peoples and across generations, to audiences far larger than those who might have seen something with their own eyes. But how did our ancestors learn it? Many questions in science can be answered, or at least investigated, by means of controlled experiments. Answering the question of how a language is created on that basis would seem to be nearly impossible.
Continue reading “Creating a Language”Travelogue of a 17th Century Survivor
In the summer of 1627, corsairs from the Barbary Coast sailed about 3,000 miles to Iceland, killed or captured nearly 400 people, and took their captives back to North Africa to sell as slaves. Ólafur Egilsson, a 65-year old Icelandic Lutheran pastor, was taken in the raid, along with his wife and children. The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson is his first-person account of how he survived the raid and its aftermath, written after his return to Iceland in 1628.
Looking for a Good Book?
The New York Antiquarian Book Fair is underway at the Park Avenue Armory this weekend. Among the offerings is a first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), printed in Nuremberg in 1543, the year of the author’s death.
According to The New York Times, the book, which is one of about a dozen copies that are in private hands, is being offered at a price of $2 million. If that happens to be out of your price range, it can also be found in the usual places, and even in free pdf downloads. But the alternatives won’t look as good, or feel as good in your hands. Continue reading “Looking for a Good Book?”
Not an Acting Lesson
I had an experience recently that got me thinking about how voice actors can use their senses when they read a story, script or pitch to “find the author’s truth”, in the words of Johnny Heller.
Music in Storytelling
I know I am far from the only voice actor who was once a professional opera singer, but the frequency with which musical concepts appear in voiceover makes me think that the perspective of a musician might be useful to some of my fellow voice actors. Continue reading “Music in Storytelling”
Statues without Controversy
The New York Talking Statues Project is now live, in all five boroughs, and all you need to enjoy it is a cell phone and a few minutes. Go to one of the 35 statues on the website’s map, scan the QR code you will find next to the statue, and the statue will call you and tell you his/her story.
You can hear famous Americans such as Washington, Lincoln, Tubman and Douglass; Continue reading “Statues without Controversy”
e pluribus unum
You may have never seen a silver dollar like the one in the picture above. They are no longer in circulation, and exist in the domain of coin collectors and dealers. But that coin bears a Latin phrase that was the unofficial motto of the United States from 1795 to 1956: “e pluribus unum”, which translates as “out of many, one”. Adopted at the beginning of the republic, the motto has both symbolic and literal meaning. Continue reading “e pluribus unum”