All posts tagged: Kintsugi

Trevor Noah Explains How Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Pottery, Helped Him Overcome Life’s Tragedies

Trevor Noah Explains How Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Pottery, Helped Him Overcome Life’s Tragedies

Trevor Noah end­ed his stint as the host of The Dai­ly Show a lit­tle over three years ago, but he’s made him­self into anoth­er kind of pop-cul­tur­al pres­ence since then. In evi­dence, we have his appear­ance above on the pop­u­lar pod­cast and YouTube show Diary of a CEO. For more than two and a half hours, Noah dis­cuss­es with host Steven Bartlett (who, like Noah, also hap­pens to be African-born with mixed parent­age) his rea­sons for quit­ting that polit­i­cal-news-com­e­dy TV insti­tu­tion, his strug­gles with depres­sion, and the time his step­fa­ther shot his moth­er in the head. She lived, owing to the mirac­u­lous­ly unlike­ly tra­jec­to­ry of the bul­let, but that did­n’t stop the expe­ri­ence from becom­ing what Noah describes as the worst of his life. Dis­cussing all this brings to his mind the Japan­ese art of kintsu­gi (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). “It’s a prac­tice of repair­ing pot­tery and ceram­ics that have bro­ken,” Noah explains. “What hap­pens is, you break a plate, or you break a vase or some­thing,” and “they put it back togeth­er, these arti­sans who do …