When time becomes history, different dynamics come into focus than the ones that are at any moment screaming for attention. The title of Gal Beckerman’s book intrigues and compels: The Quiet Before. He’s a journalist with a special interest in history and words and ideas — how ideas are passed and debated and become defining in generational time; how conversation becomes culture-shifting relationship. He attends to dynamics we don’t often take seriously enough: that every idea and discovery that changes the world begins with seeds planted over long stretches, and that this is always marked by passages that look like abject failure. Gal’s conversation with Krista offers fantastically useful insights into how our generation’s media that can scale things more rapidly than ever before can also inhibit the very ingredients that make for lasting transformation. At the same time, this lens on our world refreshes with its perspective on the way change happens, as opposed to mere disruption — the reality that our lives and actions below the radar hold the possibility of being more generative than we can measure.
Gal Beckerman is the senior editor for books at The Atlantic. He has been a writer and editor for The New York Times Book Review, the Forward, and Columbia Journalism Review. In The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, he tells stories from the last five centuries that have not come down in bold in history, but that incubated developments we later experience as defining — from France to Rome, from Moscow to Ghana to Tahrir Square.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Gal Beckerman — How Newness Enters the World." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.
[Unedited] Rachel Naomi Remen with Krista Tippett
David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough
"Everything is Waiting for You" by David Whyte
"Working Together" by David Whyte
"Sweet Darkness" by David Whyte
[Unedited] David Whyte with Krista Tippett
BONUS: A Defining Moment from Krista — Celebrating Our First 20 Years
Kimberley Wilson — Whole Body Mental Health
[Unedited] Kimberley Wilson with Krista Tippett
Robin Wall Kimmerer — The Intelligence of Plants
[Unedited] Robin Wall Kimmerer with Krista Tippett
Sylvia Boorstein – What We Nurture
A Lovingkindness Meditation with Sylvia Boorstein
[Unedited] Sylvia Boorstein with Krista Tippett
Pádraig Ó Tuama — “This fantastic argument of being alive”
[Unedited] Pádraig Ó Tuama with Krista Tippett
Ai-jen Poo and Tarana Burke — The Future of Hope 5
Avivah Zornberg — Human Becoming, Between Biblical Lines
[Unedited] Avivah Zornberg with Krista Tippett
Eugene Peterson — Answering God
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Modern West
Baseball Tonight with Buster Olney
Selected Shorts
This American Life
Sunday Supplement - Sky Sports
The Frank Skinner Show