Using podcasts to find college essay ideas

TThe idea-driven podcast may be the closest modern equivalent to the Enlightenment salon, the drawing room where people gathered to argue about big ideas, and it is a surprisingly good teacher for a student about to write college admissions essays. Students who listen tend to treat an episode as a source of interesting facts and nothing more.

A good episode does offer topics. It can also teach something much harder to learn from a textbook, if the student knows what to listen for, and the clearest example comes from one of the best-known shows in the genre.