Here’s the idea. Can you imagine living in a world without the iPod? Using a computer without Google? Sorting out your social life without Facebook? Or your news without Twitter?
Or imagine a world where you didn’t have to hear about them all the time?

Well it’s not long ago that none of us had heard these names. Today marks a number of BIRTHDAYS – ten years since the iPod was unveiled, thirteen years since the launch of Google. And it seems every day brings us a new product launch – Amazon’s Kindlefire? – or a social media makeover – like the new look Facebook.

SO I’m using the moment to ask how this whirl of invention has changed YOUR life. What does it make you think about the way we communicate, the way we share, how our behaviour has changed

Are you excited about living in a world where it seems every day brings us a new product launch or a social media makeover?
Is it a lifestyle you aspire to?
Or is the world of Apple and Google and Amazon unreal and irrelevant – or one that makes you excluded and frustrated?

You can comment here – or tweet to @PhilippaNews or @BBC_WHYS – I’ll try to get as many of your thoughts as we can into our hour on air.

As the families gathered, they added their tributes to the flowers already laid there. Some offerings were formal like the spray of white lilies from Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the firms which lost so many staff at the World Trade Center.  Others were more basic but heartfelt – a single rose in a plastic water bottle, sitting on an envelope marked “To the People of America”.

The families sat in rows of white chairs. They shared prayers, poetry, music and memories.  Wreaths were laid by the US Ambassador, the Prime Minister, and Prince Charles – who spoke of the “continuing, awful agony” suffered by those bereaved.

What did it mean for the families?  Rob Halligan, who lost his father Bob Halligan on the 99th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, told me how much quiet time he has spent in this garden over the years.

But he also said this. “After ten years, many of the families want to be able to move forward. They’re not forgetting. They’ll never forget. But they don’t want to be defined by 9/11 for ever.”

So, here are seven tips from a thoughtful man about a life worth living… as recounted by author Gyles Brandreth at the end of my latest read, his biography of Prince Philip.

“Number one: cultivate a passion. It is important in my model of happiness to have something that you enjoy doing. The challenge for a school is to find every child some kind of passion — something that will see them through the troughs. That’s why I’m in favour of the broadest curriculum you can get.

“Number two, be a leaf on a tree. You have to be both an individual — to have a sense that you are unique and you matter — and you need to be connected to a bigger organism — a family, a community, a hospital, a company. You need to be part of something bigger than yourself. A leaf off a tree has the advantage that it floats about a bit, but it’s disconnected and it dies.

“The people who are best protected against certain physical diseases — cancer, heart disease, for example — in addition to doing all the other things they should do, seem to be much more likely to be part of a community, socially involved. If you ask them to enumerate the people that they feel close to and would connect and communicate with, those with the most seem the happiest and those with least, the unhappiest.

“Of course, there may be a circular argument here. If you are a rather complicated person, people may avoid you. If, on the other hand, you are a centre of good feeling, people will come to you. I see the tragedy here in this room where some people sit in that chair and say they don’t have many friends and they’re quite isolated and unhappy, and the truth is they are so introspective they’ve become difficult to make friends with. Put them in a social group and they tend to talk about themselves. It puts other people off.

“So that’s my third rule: avoid introspection.

“Number four, don’t resist change. Change is important. People who are fearful of change are rarely happy. I don’t mean catastrophic change, but enough to keep your life stimulated. People are wary of change, particularly when things are going reasonably well, because they don’t want to rock the boat, but a little rocking can be good for you. It’s the salt in the soup. Uniformity is a tremendous threat to happiness, as are too much predictability, control and order. You need variety, flexibility, the unexpected, because they’ll challenge you.

“Five, live for the moment. Look at the things that you want to do and you keep postponing. Postpone less of what you want to do, or what you think is worthwhile. Don’t be hide-bound by the day-to-day demands. Spend less time working on the family finances and more time working out what makes you happy. If going to the cinema is a pleasure, then do it. If going to the opera is a pain, then don’t do it.

“Six, audit your happiness. How much of each day are you spending doing something that doesn’t make you happy? Check it out and if more than half of what you’re doing makes you unhappy, then change it. Go on. Don’t come in here and complain. People do, you know. They come and sit in that chair and tell me nothing is right. They say they don’t like their family, they don’t like their work, they don’t like anything. I say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

And, finally, if you want to be happy, Be Happy. Act it, play the part, put on a happy face. Start thinking differently. If you are feeling negative, say, ‘I am going to be positive,’ and that, in itself, can trigger a change in how you feel.”

The professor slaps his hands on his desk and laughs. “That’s it.”

“And it works?”

“Well, it’s something for the fridge door. Try it and see”.

It’s a great read about America’s 20th century “great migration”, the outflow of around six million black southerners over six decades.  It’s a vast “macro” book that’s anchored in three “micro” stories about Ida Mae, George and Pershing – ordinary characters who did the extraordinary thing of leaving everything they knew, risking punishment or worse, and heading north.

The heart of the book is the story of Ida Mae, the sharecropper’s daughter from Chickasaw County Mississippi, who was frankly no good at picking cotton, but did have the guts to get out.  Half a century later, in her final years, she tells her story to Wilkerson, looking out from her Chicago South Side apartment over a drug and gang-riddled street that seems like a scene from “The Wire”. The drug-runners call her “grandma”, give her some respect and leave her be. They know this is a woman who’s been through a lot already.

The title is a quotation from Richard Wright, who went north to Chicago back in 1927. 

“I was leaving the south
To fling myself into the unknown…
I was taking a part of the south
To transplant into alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds, 
Respond to the warmth of other suns, 
And, perhaps, to bloom.”.

When Wilkersen came to speak to us at the Nieman Foundation in Harvard this spring, she talked about the years she spent gathering material, around twelve hundred interviews. She told us why it was personal – about her mother’s journey from Georgia north to Washington DC.  

She wanted to record the inside stories of the great migration before the survivors died. She said many never told their own children what they came from, and what they went through, setting the scene for a significant cultural gap between the migrant elders and the new generation of northern-born urban youth. 

It surprises me that it took so long for a book like this to appear. It helped me understand why the white southern establishment clung to its “Jim Crow” caste system for so long – a lot of it, in that phrase from the Clinton campaign, because “it’s the economy stupid”.  

But I like the way Wilkerson states the facts without preaching about racism. She leaves it to us to think about how white America could remain unaware or indifferent for so long. One of the many big historic questions about man’s inhumanity to man. 

They both exist in my imagination today in a way they didn’t a week ago – thanks to two women writers I met at the Oslo Freedom Forum – and their books, “In the Valley of Mist” and “Nothing to Envy”.

“In the Valley of Mist” (2009) by British journalist Justine Hardy is subtitled “Kashmir’s long war: a family story”.  It starts simply and lyrically, introducing us to Mohammad Dar, houseboat owner, carpet seller, family patriarch.   Then it deepens.  

Hardy has known Kashmir for most of her life.   She unfolds its culture for us gradually – beginning with the story of the “pheran”, the heavy wide-sleeved woollen winter garment.  She paints gentle pictures – the way children used to paddle small boats across the lake to school, when schools were safe to go to.  But then she peels back the surface, to show  how the peace of the valley vanished in 1989, when the mujaheddin of Afghanistan swept in with their guns and their anger. 

As we get to know the Dar family, we get the inside story of  Mohammad’s struggle to keep the militants from destroying his family. We learn the tactics of those who recruit teenage boys for jihad.  We read about training camps known to the Pakistani government. We also read about brutal crackdowns by Indian security forces – including the author’s story of smuggling herself into the village of Kunan Poshpura twenty years ago, the day after it’s alleged every woman in the village was raped.

     “A fact finding group was sent. A 300 page report was produced from the visit that concluded that all the women in the village had lied.”

When I talked to Justine this week, she told me she’s not “political” and doesn’t use political language. She does show vividly how men and women in Kashmir are traumatised by their decades at the heart of a conflict zone – a fact of life I also found described in this piece on the BBC website.That’s why she came to Oslo, to talk about her work on mental health.  Her book is one you feel you “should” read, but it’s rewarding –  a moving experience. 

Barbara Demick’s North Korean epic made me angry.  A foreign correspondent for the L.A. Times, her 2010 book “Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea” weaves together the stories of refugees to describe the life of one blighted city, Chongjin,  in this most blighted country, the state that outdoes George Orwell. 

We’ve all heard news stories about repression, about famine – the way  North Koreans are entirely cut off from the outside world, entirely unaware their appalling lives are the choice of their leaders. 

But Demick’s book goes into such raw detail, that you see the picture of these everyday lives swimming in front of your eyes, whether you want it there or not. Small boys drowning a dog to barbecue its meat.  Parents rummaging through animal shit to look for undigested kernels of corn.  A kindergarten class visibly starving in front of the teacher who leads them through the required daily songs of praise for the Dear Leader.  Hospital patients using beer bottles to fashion IV drips.  Bodies being carted away in barrows from the ranks of the homeless at the railway station.

There is no alternative – except escape.  Physically, the country is a prison camp. Socially, each of its inmates is ranked within fifty-one categories – with families of South Korean descent at the bottom, publicly shamed for three generations for their “tainted blood”.

When one North Korean, a young female doctor, staggers across the river and into a Chinese farmyard, she realises the Big Lie she has lived in one awful moment. 

     “On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer – it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr Kim couldn’t remember the time she had last seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing out there, just sitting on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.”

There’s an astonishing wealth of detail. It’s not lyrically told; it doesn’t flow like Justine Hardy’s book. But it’s a very fine piece of reporting. Barbara Demick’s revelations are hard to believe, appalling to think about, impossible to shake off. You can read more from her here.  

I read most of the book in a day. During  ten hours flying home from Oslo to Boston, the lives in North Korea seemed more real than my own, and my own seemed impossibly privileged. 

As Smith puts it, there were “few more unlikely candidates” than the tight-lipped Crowley to become a free speech martyr. I doubt Mr Crowley cares what I say here – but he’s clearly a very decent man who chose his moment to talk frankly about a matter where he believed (still believes) this administration is doing itself harm.

I found this via @openculture and @kirstinbutler on Twitter – thank you.