Welcome to the new season of the Yale Office of Career Strategy’s podcast. In this expanded series of “Craft & Career” talks, we will be featuring conversations with professional creatives from the arts, entertainment, and media industries, inviting our guests to discuss the nuances of their craft, the reality of their career, and how, in often surprising ways, these two concerns can actually work together.
Welcome to the new season of the Yale Office of Career Strategy’s podcast. In this expanded series of “Craft & Career” talks, we will be featuring conversations with professional creatives from the arts, entertainment, and media industries, inviting our guests to discuss the nuances of their craft, the reality of their career, and how, in often surprising ways, these two concerns can actually work together.
Our first guest is writer and Yale Lecturer Derek Green: derekgreenbooks.com/. Stay tuned for Part 2 on Monday, October 11.
Contemporary Novel Writing with Elyssa Friedland ’03
Author and sailor David Barrie voyaged around the globe and through scientific literature to learn about the awe-inducing and still mysterious navigational powers of animals. Barrie writes of mysteries such as how birds employ “map and compass” type navigation, how Box jellyfish use some of their twenty-four eyes to keep track of trees and other above-water landmarks, how sweat bees can detect and find their ways home using single photons of light, and how Sahara desert ants measure their turns and count their steps in a process humans call “dead reckoning” — in addition to relying on visual landmarks, patterns of light invisible to the human eye, wind micro-vibrations, scent, optic flow, and the earth’s magnetic field. Animals’ navigational feats reveal an extraordinary awareness of the environment around them — a form of perception that is often far different from our own. In his new book, Supernavigators, Barrie describes the navigational intelligences of other species, which often exceed our wildest imaginations, and issues a call for humans, too often “blinded by vision,” to better respect and celebrate these animals’ abilities in an era when human behavior is increasingly impeding them.