If you are interested in ideas, radio is way more pure than television. You're not distracted by somebody's nose or hair or posture. You can really see how someone thinks and penetrate to the essence of who that person is.
Interpretation
Radio allows for a deeper understanding of ideas without the distraction of visual elements.
In this quote, Terry Gross emphasizes that radio, as a medium, fosters a more focused engagement with ideas compared to television. By removing visual distractions such as appearances, listeners can concentrate on the substance of a person's thoughts and the essence of their identity.
In practice
During a podcast discussion about media consumption, this quote illustrates the value of auditory learning.
Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private. But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.
I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have. Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them.
I've always been really curious about things and slightly confused by the world, and I think someone who feels that way is in a good position to be the one asking questions.
Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.
Death in itself is nothing; but we fear to be we know not what, we know not where.
I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts.
You can have an interesting story about a person living an interesting life. And if it's done well, that is just as engaging as the end of the world. A million people dying - we can't process. One person, we can process.
In such a performance you may lay the foundation of national happiness only in religion, not by leaving it doubtful "whether morals can exist without it," but by asserting that without religion morals are the effects of causes as purely physical as pleasant breezes and fruitful seasons.
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