Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 41 minutes ago
A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a light on what is going wrong — what is dangerous and dysfunctional, catastrophic or corrupt — will mobilize and lead us to correct it. But this emphasis on the terrible and the extreme, from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit, has helped fuel a paralyzing, dehumanizing fear and the collapse of trust in institutions and in each other. Many of us are turning away from the news altogether. Is that the answer? How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency? And what are we not seeing and hearing that we can orient towards? There is no one wiser on these questions than David Bornstein.
Krista spoke with David Bornstein before a small group of citizens of Minneapolis in November, 2024.
Find an excellent transcript of this show below, edited by humans.
Special thanks to Dana Mortenson, who created the event that brought Krista and David together. She is founder of World Savvy, an organization that seeks to reimagine education to build the global competence necessary to navigate a complex and ever-changing world.
Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista’s monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.
A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a light on what is going wrong — what is dangerous and dysfunctional, catastrophic or corrupt — will mobilize and lead us to correct it. But this emphasis on the terrible and the extreme, from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit, has helped fuel a paralyzing, dehumanizing fear and the collapse of trust in institutions and in each other. Many of us are turning away from the news altogether. Is that the answer? How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency? And what are we not seeing and hearing that we can orient towards? There is no one wiser on these questions than David Bornstein.
Krista spoke with David Bornstein before a small group of citizens of Minneapolis in November, 2024.
Find an excellent transcript of this show below, edited by humans.
Special thanks to Dana Mortenson, who created the event that brought Krista and David together. She is founder of World Savvy, an organization that seeks to reimagine education to build the global competence necessary to navigate a complex and ever-changing world.
Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista’s monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.
![[Unedited] Latanya Sweeney with Krista Tippett](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Y9exAbF0wVY/mqdefault.jpg "[Unedited] Latanya Sweeney with Krista Tippett
You may not know Latanya Sweeneys name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives.
In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far weve come — and not — since the advent of the internet, and setting that in the context of history both industrial and digital. She insists that we dont have to accept the harms of digital technology in order to reap its benefits — and she sees very clearly the work that will take. From where she sits, the new generative AI is in equal measure an exciting and alarming evolution. And she shares with us the questions she is asking, and how she and her students and the emerging field of Public Interest Technology might help us all make sense.
This is the second in what will be an ongoing occasional On Being episode to delve into and accompany our lives with this new technological revolution — training clear eyes on downsides and dangers while cultivating an attention to how we might elevate the new frontier of AI — and how, in fact, it might invite us more deeply into our humanity.
This interview is unedited and uses autogenerated closed captioning. You can find the edited and produced interview with music and full closed captioning in the On Being episode Latanya Sweeney — On Shaping Technology to Human Purpose. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2W96Pt7OXc
Animation by: Neon Zoo, @weareneonzoo
ABOUT THE ON BEING PROJECT
An adventure in the mystery and the art of living
A home for shaping your presence in a tender, tumultuous world
A companion to the pleasure in thinking deeply with others
A calling to be part of the generative story of our time
THE PODCAST
Twenty years of culture-shifting classics: Mary Oliver, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many many more. We can be found in ears, and in conversations that matter, around the world.
On Being with Krista Tippett: https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/
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![[Extended] Clint Smith with Krista Tippett](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z7cZhPLk09k/mqdefault.jpg "[Extended] Clint Smith with Krista Tippett
This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smiths writing: in the marrow of our bones. It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.
Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed (@LittlebrownandCo) but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body — and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history — on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood.
Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level — in the marrow, you might say, of our bones.
This interview is extended and uses autogenerated closed captioning. You can find the edited and produced interview with music and full closed captioning in the On Being episode Clint Smith — What We Know in the Marrow of Our Bones. Listen here: https://youtu.be/PmD9Stf2EY8
Animation by: Neon Zoo, @weareneonzoo
ABOUT THE ON BEING PROJECT
An adventure in the mystery and the art of living
A home for shaping your presence in a tender, tumultuous world
A companion to the pleasure in thinking deeply with others
A calling to be part of the generative story of our time
THE PODCAST
Twenty years of culture-shifting classics: Mary Oliver, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many many more. We can be found in ears, and in conversations that matter, around the world.
On Being with Krista Tippett: https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/
STAY CONNECTED
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onbeing/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onbeing
The Pause Saturday email newsletter: https://onbeing.org/newsletter/")
