Long Pauses

Tag: NPR

  • Get Mortified

    The most recent episode of This American Life (which is worth listening to in its entirety) ends with an eight-minute reading by Sascha Rothchild. And by “reading” I mean “really funny, really frightening performance of several pages from her teenage diary.” Sascha originally read the piece at Mortified:

    a showcase of people like you sharing their most embarrassing, pathetic and private teenage diary entries, poems, love letters, lyrics and locker notes… in front of total strangers.

    According to their site, a Mortified TV Pilot is in development at Comedy Central. I’d love to see it, especially the Mo Collins bit. Also, be sure to visit their Hall of Lame. The thought of even acknowledging one’s teenage years, let alone airing them in public, is too horrifying to imagine.

  • Friedman on Fresh Air

    In case you missed it yesterday, Terry Gross’s interview with Thomas Friedman is well worth a listen. The first twenty minutes features a discussion of globalization, in general, and outsourcing to India, specifically. In the second half of the show, he explains his nuanced position on Iraq and defends his recent change of heart regarding Bush/Cheney. (He would justifiably object to that characterization.)

  • My Famous Wife

    NPR: Visiting Tennessee’s ‘Body Farm’

  • Changing How You See the World

    Listen to Joe Wright’s commentary from tonight’s edition of All Things Considered. Joe’s a medical student at Harvard — 23 or 24 years old, I’d guess — and he already gets it.

    Addendum: With a quick search I found Joe’s Website. He’s a bit older than I’d imagined, and much more interesting.

  • Cringe

    So, today at lunch a co-worker was getting us all up to speed on the latest episode of Average Joe, and our conversation turned — inevitably, perhaps — to the sick pleasure we humans seem to take from experiencing others’ discomfort. “The Cringe Factor,” you might call it. I shared a story from my undergrad days, when I found myself trapped in my dorm room as my socially-awkward roommate repeatedly asked out one of his classmates.

    “So, I was wondering if you might want to go get something to eat on Friday . . . Oh, really? Okay, well, how ’bout Saturday? . . . Studying, huh. Well, are you busy next weekend? Maybe we could catch a movie Friday night. . . . . Saturday? . . . Oh, okay. . . .”

    And on and on it went until he finally hung up, looked over at me (I was trying desperately to hide behind a book), and said, “It’s okay, though. I know she likes me because she smiled at me once.” Had there been a hole deep enough up there on the second floor of Cawthon Hall, I would have leapt in head first. Anything to make myself disappear.

    Someone else told a story he had heard on the radio once — a story involving misplaced eyeglasses and a horrible case of mistaken identity. It sounded like an episode of This American Life to me, so I Googled the title of the show and the word “cringe,” and just look at what I found. Bingo. The opening story is classic, but the one that made me want to take off my headphones and run far, far away is Ira Glass’s tale of visiting the set of M*A*S*H as an NPR intern in 1979. Talk about cringe-inducing. Listening to the earnest, 20-year-old Glass ask Harry Morgan why he didn’t take more leading roles reminded me instantly of every stupid word that has ever come out of my stupid mouth. Which is probably the very source of cringe pleasure to begin with.

    Ira Glass, by the way, was also interviewed by the Onion A.V. Club last week, where, among many other interesting comments, he admits to being a fan of Gilmore Girls. So you know it’s worth a read.

  • Speaking of Writing

    Morning Edition had a fun feature this morning. In conjunction with the publication of The Writing Life, a collection of essays originally published in The Washington Post’s Book World, NPR gathered three of the book’s contributors — Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, and John Edgar Wideman — to discuss their craft. I always enjoy listening to experts talk about their particular areas of expertise, regardless of the subject, but I have a special fondness for writers, especially those as charismatic and infectious as Smiley and Chabon. (I don’t know a thing about Wideman.)

    This is when I pull on my “This proves I was there, that I heard of them first” T-shirt. Six years ago when I was writing my Master’s thesis — an embarassing mess titled, “The Laugh’s on Us: Ambivalence of Identity in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction” — I contacted Chabon via his Website, and he was gracious enough to answer my questions (and my follow ups) over the course of a week or two. My favorite of his responses was to an awkward question about the “Jewishness” of his identity (ah, the enthusiasm of the novice pedant). His response:

    This is a question that I can only answer, I think, through my work. Which as you will eventually see, if I can just get this novel done, is taking on more overt Jewish content than it has heretofore.

    I was so pleased when he did get that novel done — The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — not only because it won the Pulitzer (and deserved it), but because it brought him a larger, much-deserved readership. He seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and he writes some of the best sentences I’ve ever read.

  • This American Irony

    Knowing that I’m a fan, a friend just sent me this link to an interview with Ira Glass. I’ve always been struck by Glass’s even-handed treatment of Christianity, which is somewhat surprising for two reasons: 1) he broadcasts on National Public Radio (I’m an NPR-o-holic, but I know evangelicals who refuse to listen to it on principle – sigh) and 2) he is outspoken about his own atheism. The interview is conducted by re:generation, a Christian publication that I’ve only just discovered. Looks interesting.

    There’s much to admire in Glass’s attitudes toward religion, ideas, stories, and people. He’s done much to encourage a dialogue between the sacred and secular and has approached that divide with a rare and open-minded curiosity. A few choice snippets:

    Irony is just boring, and it’s also played out; it’s done elsewhere and it doesn’t shed light. I feel like it’s dull. And I feel like it also prevents one from seeing, and it prevents the kind of empathy that I feel like makes for a more engaging movie, story—anything! We view our work as more of a ministry of love. (Laughs.) We feel like the thing that we’re about is empathy, and in fact, the few stories that I regret us ever doing (and there aren’t many) are ones where the writer wasn’t achieving an appropriate level of empathy with the characters in the story. . . .

    As soon as you are in that territory, you have left the realm of mainstream reporting, and you have entered a realm that only Christian journalists report on. But I would meet people and they would tell me their stories, and I would talk to their friends and families, and the stories would check out. Their relationship with God had completely changed their lives in a completely undeniable and positive way.

    It’s my job to report that. And to report it in a non-dismissive way: this is their experience, so take it or leave it, but this is it. Doing that made me awake to how bad most reporting on religion is. Both in the news and in the fiction we create as a culture, Christians are always portrayed as these intolerant right-wing nuts, as people who are not awake to others. That is so different from any of the Christian friends I have or the people who work here at the office that are Christians. It’s exactly the opposite. Of all the people I know, they’re the most awake, the most interested in the world. It was so crazy to me, it was exactly the opposite, and it seemed so inaccurate. So I found myself always wanting to do variations on that story again and again.