TOK Topics

1. Radiolab Podcast: Outside Westgate: Originally Broadcast 11/29/2014
   This is a phenomenally well reported and well put together podcast that examines the eyewitness testimony and memory of a terrorist attack in Kenya. It is one thing to describe the academic idea that people are often mistaken about what they see and what they experience but in this podcast we here from multiple people who are absolutely certain about what they saw but more “objective” evidence does not corroborate their stories.

   “In the wake of public tragedy there is a space between the official narrative and the stories of the people who experienced it. Today, we crawl inside that space and question the role of journalists in helping us move on from a traumatic event.

   “NPR’s East Africa correspondent Gregory Warner takes us back to the 2013 terrorist attacks on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Warner reported on the attack as it happened, listening to eyewitness accounts, sorting out the facts, establishing the truth. But he’s been been wrestling with it ever since as his friends and neighbors try not only to put their lives back together, but also try to piece together what really happened that day.”

2. Radiolab Podcast: Memory and Forgetting: Originally Broadcast August 9th, 2010

“Remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process–it’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated, and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7-second memory.”