https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw

> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

A few months back I read "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion", by Jonathan Haidt. I'd highly suggest reading it for anyone seeking to improve their understanding of the ideological landscape in modern America. From the publisher's summary: In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

The biggest problem I'm seeing with many online communities is the unwillingness to engage with others. There's no discussions, they just tell you that you're wrong and evil, and then they ban or block you. That's no way to change people's mind; it just makes people more likely to dig in their heels. If you want to change people's views you need to engage them calmly and with respect. One of the greatest example of this that I can think of is Daryl Davis, a black man who converted ~200 people from the KKK just by befriending them.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMx2MA5bEtk

It would be really cool to create "music mappers"/life sounds tracks like what you can do with pictures & art styles (e.g. https://medium.com/tensorflow/neural-style-transfer-creating...)

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance (act 1, What You Don't Know)

The first, most obvious, and probably cheapest, way to get contact info is to use LinkedIn. Find people that work for those companies. If you have shared connections, ask your connection for an introduction. If not, send them an InMail (note: I think you'll have to have a paid LI account for this, at least if you need to send more than a handful of messages). Beyond that, you can also try to find those people on Twitter, etc., so you can send messages their way.

You can also buy contact information from Hoovers and similar services.

And while it's low percentage, you can still do the old thing of cold-calling the main office number for the firm and ask for them by name. Get ready to read up on how to deal with "gate keepers" and the like. And expect a low rate of actually getting through, especially as you target people higher up the organizational hierarchy.

Once you get to that point, contact people and just be straightforward with them. Say "Hey, I'm looking at (building a product | delivering a service | whatever) that I think would pertain to a firm like yours. If you'd be so kind, I'd love to have a short meeting or phone call with you to get your feedback on my idea(s) and see if there might be a way we could help you". Or something roughly like that. Don't necessarily use that exact language (I'm not really a sales-person!) but that general approach seems to work reasonably well. The percentages will still be pretty low, but it's likely that some people will be willing to talk to you.

A couple of books that contain some additional details on all this, that you might find useful, would be The Four Steps To The Epiphany by Steve Blank, Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross, and/or Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler.

In terms of understanding what to do once you get conversations started, I recommend the series of books by Jeff Thull that includes Mastering The Complex Sale, Exceptional Selling and The Prime Solution. There's also some really good stuff in The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes and The Challenger Sale by by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.

  - The Wreck of Time - Annie Dillard
  - Death of a Moth - Virginia Woolf
  - A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
  - The Study of the Negro Problems - W.E.B. DuBois
  - On Going Home - Joan Didion
  - In History - Jamaica Kincaid
  - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey
  - How It Feels to be Colored Me - Zora Neale Hurston
  - Memory and Imagination - Patricia Hampl
  - Anger and Tenderness - Adrienne Rich
  - In Plato's Cave - Susan Sontag
  - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
  - The Laugh of the Medusa - Hélène Cixous

- The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps [1]

Manages to truly live up to its name while remaining very approachable to someone not very familiar with philosophy.

- In Our Time [2]

Technically a long running BBC radio program with a massive back catalog, but many episodes would certainly interest HN users with very insightful discussions.

These aren't the sorts podcasts I can follow along easily while doing other things though.

[1] https://historyofphilosophy.net/

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player

But yes, Street View for the past would be amazing. Maybe a few photogenic cities like London or Paris could organize enough period photos to build a pretty good approximation. Would make a nice History thesis project to organize all the available findable photos for a neighborhood at a particular time.

The book is called _In_The_Footsteps_Of_John_Wesley_Powell_ by Stephens, Shoemaker, and Powell. It appears to be out of print but good libraries should have it and there are used copies online. [0]

[0] http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=&an=steph...

It has “problematic” works like Huckleberry Finn, Satanic Diaries and To Kill a Mockingbird.

It has works written by known racists such as HP Lovecraft, TS Elliot, Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss and Kingsley Amis.

It has hard copies of dangerous films that have been memoyholed by Prime and Netflix like Gone With The Wind and The Jazz Singer. It may also have DVDs that have been produced, directed and acted in by vile, cancelled individuals like Kevin Spacey, Louise CK, Harvey Weinstein, or Mel Gibson.

Good God, it might even have a copy of the Jenna in blackface episode from the third season of 30 Rock. I am clutching my pearls and getting the vapors just thinking about it.

https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next/2020/06/protests-blm-mo... - "Violence Has Been An Important Tool For Protests"

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/riots-ar... - "The Double Standard of the American Riot"

https://time.com/5849679/history-protest-debate/ - "History Shows the Problem With Focusing on Whether a Protest Is Nonviolent"

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/blm-looting-prote... - "In Defense of Destroying Property"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/30/if-vio... - "If Violence Isn't the Way To End Racism In America, Then What Is?"

https://qz.com/1863651/violence-and-extreme-actions-shouldnt... - "Why Extreme Actions Shouldn’t Delegitimize A Protest"

Here's the now VP-elect fundraising for the rioters' bail fund: https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1267555018128965643

While true in theory, this may not be true in practice. There are several loopholes, one main one being that failure to pay fees and penalties assessed by the justice system itself can be a criminal offense. In some states a significant percentage (as high as 20%) of current prisoners are being held for failing to pay these LFO's (Legal Financial Obligations).

Here are a couple ACLU reports about the practice:

  In for a Penny: 
  The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons

  Modern Day Debtors Prisons: 
  The Ways Court-Imposed Debts Punish
  People for Being Poor

* The Mortified Podcast http://getmortified.com/

* Serial http://serialpodcast.org/

* True Story http://truestorytime.org/

* The Tobolowsky Files http://www.slashfilm.com/category/features/slashfilmcast/the...

* StoryCorps http://storycorps.org/podcast/

* The Moth http://feeds.themoth.org/themothpodcast

* The Story Collider http://storycollider.org/podcast

* NPR Sunday Puzzle http://www.npr.org/series/4473090/sunday-puzzle

Podcasts I think of as education:

* Invisibilia http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia

* This American Life http://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast

* Radiolab http://www.radiolab.org/

* StartUp http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/

* Freakonomics http://freakonomics.com/radio/

* Planet Money http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/

* A History of the World in 100 Objects http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow

* In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v59gz

Specifically about design:

* 99 Percent Invisibile http://99percentinvisible.org/category/episode/