Free Thinking Essay: Doing Nothing

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2018

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alastair Fraser talks about teenagers, street life and filling time. Doing nothing has become the mantra of twenty-first century life. In an accelerated world, we yearn for a space where minds are emptied, iPhones left at the door. But doing nothing is not always a choice. For young people, bored on the streets, it’s all there is. And for them doing nothing is always doing something. New Generation Thinker Alastair Fraser, from the University of Glasgow, has written books including Gangs and Crime: Critical Alternatives and Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City, which was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize.

Recorded with an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Recorded at the 2018 Free Thinking Festival and includes questions and answers from the audience at Sage Gateshead.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
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0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.0	Hello, I'm Shah Hadabari.
0:33.6	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas podcast.
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0:39.5	It'll help other people find us too.
0:41.5	This is the BBC.
0:48.3	Alistair Fraser from the University of Glasgow, doing nothing.
0:53.8	Doing nothing. Doing nothing.
0:57.0	Doing nothing.
1:00.0	Roll it around your mouth.
1:02.0	Delicious, isn't it?
1:05.0	Doing nothing.
1:08.0	It tastes of stolen afternoons and illicit cigarettes, of salad days and electric nights, doing nothing.
1:18.1	A long soak in the bathtub.
1:21.9	A day in bed with a book or a box set.
1:27.1	Bunking off for the afternoon and heading to the cinema, that's me,
1:31.2	grinning guiltily like a kid with his fingers in the biscuit tin.
1:36.3	Doing nothing is the El Dorado of the 21st century.
1:40.2	A precious dream.
1:42.1	We're all so busy, the days bustled by, everything is accelerated.
	...

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