Thailand, Forgiveness, Dickens and Christmas

Guest: Shane Strate, PhD, Professor Southeast Asian history at Kent State University and Author of “The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation”  Thailand has been under military control since a coup in May 2014. That coup – just the latest in a series over the decades – was prompted, in part, by violent protests against government corruption. The generals have cracked down on publish gatherings and criticism of the Thai king, who is so ill he was unable to give his traditional birthday speech when he turned 88 this week. The combination of an unpopular military government, an impending royal succession and a strengthening movement for democracy make this an important moment for Thailand. A crossroads, even.

Guest: Alexis Hiniker, Software Engineer and PhD Candidate at the University of Washington  Pick a park on a sunny afternoon and look around. You’ll see a fair number of adults on the perimeter of the playground, absorbed in their phones. But here’s a twist: most of those adults feel guilty about being on their phones instead of paying attention to their kids.

Guest: Ryan Fehr, PhD, Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business  We often use physical metaphors when talking about state of mind or emotions. We say that our worries are a burden – even though we’re not literally carrying them around in a backpack. We think about a kind word as having the ability to “lighten our load.” Again, not our literal load.  And yet, some emotional or mental states actually can translate to our physical bodies in remarkable ways.

Guest: Grant Madsen, PhD, History Professor at BYU  Today, we dive into postmodernism and its rejection of the traditions and philosophies that preceded it.

Guests: Dane Allred, Actor, High School Drama Teacher, Adjunct Faculty Member of the Theater and Media Arts Department at BYU; and Jamie Horrocks, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at BYU Back in time now to the year 1843 and the publication of new novel that would change the way the Western world thought about Christmas. Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is a book that’s still in print and which is performed every year around the world.  We look at some early editions of Dickens’ Christmas books in this month’s installment of “From the Vaults,” where we dive into the holdings we have here on our BYU campus over in Special Collections at the Harold B Lee Library and today we also pay a visit to a rare book in the New York Public Library.