An excerpt from the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Religion and Philosophy
Imagine the loneliest place you can think of. For Robert Kull, that place was an island off the coast of Patagonia. A place where the barometer dipped and the wind howled off the ocean. Kull spent a year there, exploring complete solitude and seeking the answers to spiritual questions that had...
Standing on 8 feet of ice in Antarctica you can actually feel the call of the Weddell seal below through your boots. The Carthusian monks say you can feel the vow of silence in your soul. In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, touching the sound of a monk's silence and a seal's call. And...
Every good story comes to an end, but in some stories the End is just the beginning. It takes a special kind of writer to create a believable Apocalypse in the pages of a novel, and right now there are a lot of them. In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, Apocalyptic Fiction – new stories...
How far would you go for what you believe? If you're a practicing Jew or Christian, does it matter to you to do everything the Bible tells you to? If you follow a guru, how much of your life are you willing to change? In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, the strange things that...
Patti DiVita is a waitress in Elkorn, Wisconsin, and what's wrong with that? She tells Jim Fleming how she was inspired to make a movie about people in the food service industry.
Daniel Tammet has an amazing mind. He can recite from memory 22 thousand digits in the number pi. He can learn a foreign language in a week. But he also has trouble with simple directions, like telling the difference between left and right, and he's had to teach himself to laugh at jokes. Tammet...
Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist who studies the Eveny — also known as the "Reindeer People of Siberia." He tells Steve Paulson they keep herds of reindeer for meat, but also have personal, consecrated reindeer animal doubles, which they believe will die for them.
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