Why Mark Twain Still Matters

On the Centennial of his death, read at NPR Why Mark Twain Still Matters and about a memoir Clemens wrote after the heartbreaking loss of his oldest daughter to meningitis in 1896. The handwritten 64 page manuscript goes up for auction at Sotherby's in New York.

I think this cartoon about the importance of NPR (even during pledge drive) hits the nail on the head

PoliticalCartoons.com Cartoon

Something Positive To End a Meh Week

I remember hearing this StoryCorps story when it aired March 28, 2008 on NPRs Morning Edition. Click here to listen to it. Enjoy and be inspired.

A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

“ Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

"The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi," Diaz says. "The kid was like, 'You know everybody here. Do you own this place?'"

"No, I just eat here a lot," Diaz says he told the teen. "He says, 'But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"

Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"

"Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says.

The teen couldn't answer Diaz — or he didn't want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."

The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen's knife — "and he gave it to me."

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, "You're the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch."

"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world." ”

Diane Rehm: 30 Years Of The Unexpected

From an interview with Scott Simon on the September 12, 2009 Weekend Edition Saturday. A wonderful interview of a National treasure, Diane Rehm. It's also good news that she's returning to her show on Monday.

The Origins of Rumors

Hey, what if we were governed by a sinister foreigner masquerading as a native born American, a real life Manchurian Candidate advancing a perverse plan to cull the population of the elderly? That’s either a plot for a bad Hollywood thriller, or this week in the wingnut o sphere.

This is a podcast from last week, but is still Zeitgeist worthy.
8 min, 49  sec.

NPRs On The Media

This Bit of Bizarre History Blew My Mind

So I wish to blow yours as well.

I was listening to the Diane Rehm Show on NPR this morning. Sometimes I do, mostly I don't. I'm glad I caught this show.

She had Martha Sandweiss, professor of history at Princeton  University on talking about her new book "Passing Strange" (Penguin). Here's the blurb about it.

Clarence King was a famed explorer, scientist, and hero of late nineteenth century history. But the blue-eyed and fair-skinned King also led a secret double life passing as a black man. A historian examines the secret King only revealed on his deathbed to his black wife of thirteen years.

You can listen to the hour long interview, here. There was a great story and interview in the Book of the Times section of The New York Times, here.

Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation - A Review

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
recommended for: NPR fans, casual history buffs, Robert Todd Lincoln Haters, Presidential Necrophiliacs

I have a huge crush on Sarah Vowell, just sayin'. She's funny, she's eloquent, she's fascinating, etc. Oh and she played Violet in The Incredibles as well as doing amazing radio essays for This American Life.

I'm a fan of her PRI essays but not so much of her books, I was very happily surprised to find I liked Assassination Vacation much more than her others. It's an investigation of the tourism around the sites of presidential assassinations and odd facts and trivia surrounding them and their assassins. She intersperses the book with anecdotes of her adventures she had on her self-proclaimed pilgrimage of presidential assassination. Quick tip: If you find a way to time-travel to the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, never let Robert Todd Lincoln attend your party... dude ... seriously, never!!

I have a few nits to pick with some of her information, especially with Pres. Garfield, but she mostly gets the history right, so that's cool. It's hard not to grin at her infectious and obvious love of history as well as her idiosyncratic asides such as wishing she could go back in time and kill her relative who rode with Quantrails' Raiders; or how cute she finds John Wilkes Booth; or how the Maryland State song (adopted in 1939) contains references critical of Lincoln, The Union and favorable to the Confederacy.

I also found she shares a passion of mine, historical plaques and signs. If I see one, even on a bridge, I have to stop read and take a picture. As you'll find out if you read Assassination Vacation, they are impossibly and improbably compelling. Really!

This is not great literature or great history but it is fun and interesting. I enjoyed her dry-humored, pop-informational tour of our more necrotic presidents and the assassins who hated them. If your a Sarah Vowell or history fan, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

PS: Get the Audio book if you can, it features the voices of - Conan O’Brien, Seth Green, Stephen Colbert, David Cross, Paul Begala, Michael Chabon, Norman Lear, and music by They Might Be Giants. Conan is hilarious as the voice of Sad-sack son of Lincoln, Robert Todd.

published
January 31st 2006 by Simon & Schuster

binding
Paperback

isbn - 074326004X (isbn13: 9780743260046)

ebook
Read a preview on Google Books

pages - 272

How Could It End Like This? NPR Cancels The BPP

Photo: by Miss Loisy, CC License

Sadly it's true. NPR gave my favorite show The Bryant Park Project the boot! News leaked yesterday in the NYT and was "officially" broken to the fourteen staffers of BPP this morning.

The BPP's Producer Tricia McKinney left this message on their website today:

We are still absorbing the news of our untimely demise. We will still produce new shows for the next two weeks, and we'll keep on blogging and twittering. We may also dip into the Best of the BPP, stuff we're really proud of.

Though the number of listeners were small, especially compared to the traditional NPR standbys, the BPP website did accrue millions of page views monthly. Anemic station carriage and a flagging economy likely conspired to doom the show and it's not surprising that NPR claims they spent $2 million over nine months with nothing to show for it. But was nine months really long enough? Given another year, I suspect that the BPP would have brought more non-NPR listeners into the fold; it’s too bad we won’t get to see that happen.

Various postmortems in the blogosphere also cite internal politics, staff turnover and flawed execution. I enjoyed the show. I loved their goofs. Such as the time they tried to cue a soundbite and ended up playing their entire library of Sound FX. It was endearing. They blogged, they twittered, they broadcast themselves just being goofy. It was different. It was fun, It was interesting and I became "friends" with the people on the show and even behind the scenes. Those who listened generally felt the same, judging from the comment thread.

As of this afternoon, there were 343 comments posted, 99% are positive and sharing their shock and disbelief with the cancellation of the BPP. Here is my comment on the thread:

I don't have much I can add that the others have not already said. Sad. Silly. Awful. Regretful.

What can I say? It's a mistake. NPR's wonderful, I've listened daily since the day of the Stock Market Crash in 1987 and The BPP was the future.

Radio as we know it is dying. You can stream stations on your iPhone!! With the BPP's informal (though substantive style) use of micro-blogging (twitter), blogging and ear to the NET Generation, it could have been the launch pad for NPR's revival.

I'm afraid that this "expensive experiment" canceled before it was given a chance, is the radio version of NPR's jumping the shark. Not the BPP itself, but the act of canceling it and not allowing it to grow or gain an audience and mature.

Sorry BPP gang, you were all great! I'll especially miss Laura's Tweets.

Sent by David M. | 12:41 PM ET | 07-14-2008

• If you want to leave a comment here's the thread.
  
• Contact NPR's Customer Service here.
  
• If you want to contact the NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard and her staff to leave your two cents, the address is here.
  
• Listen to host Mike Pesca verbally flipping off NPR in the opening of today's first hour. (Click 'Listen Now' and it will open in a Media Player pop-up window) Food Grain Collection & Monitoring Committees FTW!
  
• Read my past post (say that fast!) about my love of this show here.

pandas just make me smile

via: NPR

The Bryant Park Project, One Of The Best Radio Shows Your Probably NOT Listening To

National Public Radio's, The Bryant Park Project, is one of the best radio shows that your probably not listening to.

Admittedly, I probably skew the demographic of this program. I'm a Forty-Something, frequent NPR listener who gets most of my news from Print, NPR, PBS, then the Internet.

What is the Bryant Park Project (BPP)? The BPP, which takes its title from new studios overlooking the park, is the latest NPR News series debuting as a two-hour live weekday show Oct. 1, 2007. As they describe themselves on their blog, they are a; "blog, radio show, podcast and ongoing discussion of the news".

From an October article at Current.org:

The producers of Bryant Park want to discover how to engage Gen-X listeners and others whose cultural reference points and news diets differ from those of core listeners to NPR’s flagship Morning Edition.

“We want this show to be about our lives,” said 31-year-old co-host Luke Burbank.

BPP, as co-hosted mixes big doses of levity with a news sensibility favoring alternate takes on the day’s top stories. The show is meant to appeal to a younger, less-traditional NPR audience. Reoccurring segments include a Monday morning sports wrap-up featuring Bill Wolff, a Tuesday section on new music releases, and frequent interviews with various musicians and performers including Tegan and Sara, Peter Bjorn and John, Jill Sobule, and Death Cab For Cutie. “The Most” lists the top e-mailed articles on the Web.

The show features an occasional segment called "Make Me Care" in which guests have 60 seconds to argue why a subject should matter to listeners. On Thursday's "Make Me Care" Alexis Madrigal of Wired.com, attempted to describe why we should care about NASA's recent discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years.

The tone is often informal compared to the more conventional content found in other NPR news magazines. This is what makes it truly unique. It's web site features the typical NPR story-by-story rundown, but it also has a frequently updated blog (which today featured the BBQ and beer lunch they had ordered)

I've added RSS podcast feed for it's podcasts into my netvibes page. The podcasts can also be subscribed to for free at iTunes. I've also added BPP to my Twitter list. They typically send breezy, chatty, gossipy twitters that are fun to read. The other day they were complaining how bad the sound was on the Death Cab For Cutie in-studio performance.

It's not your father's NPR (i.e. mine) but it's fun, often informative and I believe, a glimpse into the way most main-stream radio, TV or magazines will broadcast themselves. Utilizing the full range of WEB 2.0 technology and spreading their RSS seed blog to blog, social network to social network.

It's only on a very few NPR stations and Sirius Satellite Radio. It's blog is here. Their podcast is here. Their radio show is here. You can read and follow their Twitter feed here. Feel free, while on Twitter to add my feed if you like. I'm here.