General Knowledgespeaking topic
Why has Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' been staged continuously for four hundred years? Let's talk about the universality of the hesitation in 'To be, or not to be.'
— Shakespeare, Hamlet
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582, ten days were 'deleted'; people went to bed on October 4 and woke up on October 15. What happened to the rent, the birthdays, the debts that fell on those days? If time is an agreement, can ten days really be voted out of existence?
- The Amondawa people of the Amazon have no abstract word for 'time'; nobody wonders how old they are, because they do not even have a calendar of counted years. So if you stopped measuring time, would it actually slow down, or did we invent it and handcuff ourselves to it?
- Multilingual people's personalities can shift depending on which language they are thinking in; the same person may be bolder in one language and shyer in another. So is there not a single 'me' inside us, but different selves that wake up with the language we speak?
- In some Pacific cultures distance is measured not in kilometers but in 'how many days by canoe'; space is really measured in time. Distance is not a meter, it is a journey. While we measure maps with straight lines, is thinking of a place as 'how long it takes' the more human way?
- The orange is not actually natural; it is a fruit created by human hands through crossbreeding citrus varieties, so what we call 'natural' is a design. The color orange is named after the fruit, not the other way around. If so much of what we take for nature is the product of centuries of our own meddling, what does 'natural' even mean?