Category: OPW
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OPW: “Our Actions Create Our World”
I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve been thinking about bringing it back. OPW stands for “Other People’s Words,” and since I moth-balled Link Banana I’ve been sharing most things I would have previously put there on Twitter. But this mini graduation/commencement/life speech from Hank Green, in the form of a YouTube video, […]
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OPW: “Testimony” by Rebecca Baggett
I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful. I tell you that despite children raped on city streets, shot down in school rooms, despite the slow poisons seeping from old and hidden sins into our air, soil, water, despite the thinning film that encloses our aching world. Despite my own terror and […]
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OPW: Charter for Compassion
I’ve recently decided that I’m gonna play it a little looser around here, which means I can bring back an old feature: Other People’s Words. The document doesn’t list an author, but it’s pretty deeply related to everything I’ve been trying to say when I’ve used the Life category in the last year. Built from […]
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OPW: Anthony Bourdain on Sunsets
I meant to post this last week, but better late then never. In response to my last post and eric’s comment, I had to share this short snippet from a 2006 interview of Anthony Bourdain: …you’re standing alone in the desert, and you see the most incredible sunset you’ve ever seen and your first instinct […]
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OPW: “The Summer Day”
This poem by Mary Oliver has a few lines I quite like: Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving […]
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OPW: “Man Writes Poem”
I like this one by Jay Leeming, not least of all because it reminds me of something I wrote. This just in a man has begun writing a poem in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now to our man Harry on the scene, what’s the […]
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OPW: Stephen Colbert’s Knox Commencement
Since it’s that time of year, and I wanted to avoid another day like this, some word’s from Stephen Colbert’s 2006 Address to the graduates of Knox College. But you seem nice enough, so I’ll try to give you some advice. First of all, when you go to apply for your first job, don’t wear […]
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OPW: Harry Chapin on Tiredness
I recently stumbled upon a spoken track by the folk singer Harry Chapin called “My Grandfather,” and was pleasantly surprised by how much it resonated. My grandfather was a painter. He died at age 88. He illustrated Robert Frost’s first two books of poetry. And he was looking at me and he said, “Harry, there’s […]
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OPW: Assignment #1
Today’s Other People’s Words was selected mostly because I’m a sucker for clever titles. It’s not that I don’t like Philip Burnham’s poem, it’s that I wouldn’t have payed attention if not for that title. Assignment #1: Write a poem about Baseball and God And on the ninth day, God In His infinite playfulness Grass […]
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OPW: Reallocating Social Surplus
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, has some very interesting ideas about how the internet’s changing society and why. So on today’s “Other People’s Words,” a selection from a recent speech he gave on the topic. Video of the speech is available, as is the full transcript. He begins by describing the role gin […]