The Most Underrated, Underused Website

Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" ought to be mandatory – required reading for anyone over 15. What-It-Takes is about immersion into a high quality universe, and that's exactly where I feel I am whenever I read or listen to Keillor's fresh, insightful takes on historical events and the lives of writers.

Pretty much every day, there will be a sentence or paragraph that startles me with its profoundness. A thought that makes me think:

– "Jane Austen said, 'A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.' "

Really? Jane Austin?!

– "She (Margaret Mead) said that Samoan girls did not go through the same tortured teenaged years as girls in the United States did, and she suggested that relaxed sexual attitudes might be responsible."

Far Right, what do you think?

– "In 2007, on his 90th birthday, Arthur Charles Clarke (2001, A SPACE ODYESSY) recorded a video in which he says goodbye to his friends and fans. In it, he said: 'I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we've learnt something from the most barbaric century in history — the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization.' He died of respiratory failure three months later."

Wow.

And that was just today.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/