J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

http://webonly.harvardmagazine.com/159-Rowling.mp3 
(Right Click, Save Target As) 32MB

Text of speech here:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Excerpt:

“Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.  I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me… So rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.”

This is a must-hear podcast.

http://wordforword.publicradio.org/programs/2008/05/30/  or
download MP3 (Right Click, Save Target As)

Link to Newsweek article if you want to read rather than listen.

I haven’t read the book yet but it is definitely on my list. It was reviewed in the New York Times:

The New New World
By Josef Joffe
May 11, 2008
In this examination of power, Fareed Zakaria focuses not so much on the decline of America, but on the rise of China and India.

Excerpt:
“We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. The second shift (19th century) was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations.  The third great power shift of the modern age— This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else.

A series of positive trends over the last 20 years have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

I know. That's not the world that people perceive. We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse.

Looking at the evidence, [scholars claim] that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."

Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding... Today any bomb that goes off, any rocket that is fired, any death that results, is documented by someone, somewhere and ricochets instantly across the world. "That could have been me," you think. Actually, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are tiny—for an American, smaller than drowning in your bathtub. But it doesn't feel like that.”