RadCasts

Why do we connect emotionally with some places and not others? And why does that matter? Author and speaker Peter Kageyama loves cities. Big cities, small cities, villages and small towns. Our special podcast guest is Peter Kageyama on his extraordinary book. Wherever you live, this program is for you. In fact, wherever you live, we think you ought to begin a love affair with your city.

So what does loving the city you live in have to do with healing the partisan divide? Turns out the answer is “almost everything.” Tune in to find out why.

Whatever you do, watch the Grand Rapids Lip Dub when you get to that place in the podcast. Really, you’re going to thank us. And while Peter doesn’t mention the Levi’s Strauss Go Forth Campaign in this talk, we learned about it from him in an earlier talk. The video inspires us to see the plight of cities in the Rust Belt like Braddock, Pennsylvania as a frontier.

Like us, you’re never going to forget meeting Peter Kageyama.

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Funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Village Square is a proud member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.

“For the Love of Cities,” in a throwback event offered in partnership with Leon County Government, City of Tallahassee and KCCI Tallahassee.

When most people think about war, they think about senseless killing, brutality, violence and horror. But when journalist Sebastian Junger thinks about war — even though he has witnessed firsthand how war is all of those things — he also thinks about meaning, purpose, brotherhood and community. It's why, he posits, so many veterans actually miss war when they return home. As Junger argues, war gives people all of the things that religion aspires to impart to people and often fails. War, he says, delivers.

Junger was a war correspondent for many decades. His reporting on the front lines of Afghanistan was captured in his best-selling book, War, and was made into an Academy Award winning documentary, Restrepo, which follows a platoon of U.S. soldiers in one of the bleakest, most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. Through his raw, unfiltered, on the ground reporting, perhaps no one has done more to illuminate the full picture and reality of war.

One of those realities is that men seek and need danger. They have a deep desire to prove their valor. They find community and meaning in crisis. And yet, much of the Western world lives without any kind of high-stakes, high-risk danger at all. It is, of course, a great blessing we don't live in constant crisis. But our comfort, safety and affluence, he argues, come with unexamined costs.

So for today, a conversation with Sebastian Junger about reporting from the most dangerous regions of the world, his new book Freedom, what it means to be human, and how danger is inextricably tied to living a meaningful life.

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