David Foster Wallace

Kenyon College, 2005, "This Is Water" David Foster Wallace opens with two young fish who have no idea what water is, and spends the rest of the speech making the obvious visible. His argument is that a good education teaches you to choose what you pay attention to, because self-centeredness is "our default setting." The example everyone remembers is a miserable after-work trip to the supermarket, traffic and checkout lines included, recast as a test of how you decide to see other people. "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." It is the speech most worth rereading every few years.