Stories of How We Cope With Chaos (2021)

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You've been looking at screens for what feels like forever. Now it's time to sit back, close your eyes, and come with us to worlds you've never seen, and histories you've never imagined. This is the first episode of our summer series "Movies for Your Mind."

What happens when teenagers are shipwrecked on a deserted island? Can you find the fingerprint of God in warzones? Why was the concept of zero so revolutionary for humanity? More than a year into a pandemic that has completely upended the lives of people around the world, we look at how we cope with chaos, how we're primed to make order out of randomness, and why the stories we're taught to believe about our propensities for self-destruction may not actually be true.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone. It's Ron here and Ramteen.
0:02.5	Okay, so here at Thru Line, as you probably know, what we're constantly trying our best to do is tell
0:07.9	stories from the past that feel present and alive today, hence our tagline. We design every episode
0:13.8	with the goal of immersing you, the listener, as much as informing you. We want to recreate that
0:19.5	feeling of being in a cool dark movie theater in the middle of the summer when you lose yourself
0:25.2	in the epicness of a great film. So for the rest of this month, we're presenting a series of
0:30.4	through-line episodes we're calling movies for your mind. The episodes are some of our most
0:36.4	cinematic and immersive. They've been carefully selected by the people that work with us to make
0:41.4	the show every week, the through-line team. And we're going to kick it off with one of my favorite
0:47.2	episodes, Chaos. It's one of our most experimental filled with scenes and stories that will hopefully
0:53.6	help you make sense of the chaotic, seemingly random world we live in. It's something that many of us
0:59.1	have struggled to cope with over the course of the last few years. So if you have ever wondered what
1:04.8	Chaos might sound like, this episode is for you. With that, let's get into it. The first installment
1:11.3	in our series, Movies for Your Mind, Chaos. Chaos is an unpredictable force we all collide with.
1:37.3	When I think about the word Chaos, I usually think of external forces that are imposing chaos.
1:48.9	Explosions or what happened last March when the coronavirus really took off.
1:59.0	Bargain hunters at this Georgia Walmart wrestling over pots and pants, the commotion
2:04.0	veering out of control. There are some systems which are unpredictable. If you try to
2:24.0	predict the future mathematically, you find that the system just behaves wildly.
2:34.8	I imagine running late to something and you run to a car and you fumble for your
2:39.8	ease, you get your keys in the car and something is going off and maybe the stereo is playing super,
2:44.8	super loud and it hurts. And you're just trying to turn the stereo off and get the car going.
	...

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