In January 1989, U.S. President Ronald Reagan issued his “Farewell Address to the Nation” from the Oval Office. And that's about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
“John Cotton is forty-six years old. He is the most respected, famous, and beloved Puritan minister in England. Getting him to bless the send-off of these relatively unimportant castaways would be like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid's eighth-grade graduation. In fact, once the colonists arrive in Massachusetts they will name their settlement Boston, in honor of Cotton's hometown.”
In November 2008, Virginia Heffernan wrote “Mayflower Power” for The New York Times. Sarah Vowell is a problem. She’s a problem like Sarah Palin, Cyndi Lauper and Kathy Griffin. She’s annoying. Or, really, she’s double-annoying, because she styles herself as annoying — provocative-annoying — and if you become annoyed by her you seem to be conceding the point. She’s gotten to you. Vowell, who constantly emphasizes how nerdy (meaning impressive) she finds her own interest in the Puritans, introduces figures like John Winthrop and Roger Williams as if no one’s ever heard of them. She delivers a farrago of free-floating pedantry — “the kind of smart-alecky diatribe for which I’ve gotten paid for 20 years” — having evidently made it her job to enlighten slacker Gen-Xers with a remedial history of our own nation. It’s not right. Vowell’s whole alt-everything vibe is just dated enough to be cringey. And then there’s her Great Plains accent: can something so wholesome-soundin’ be real? And her politics. Perfectly early-millennium coastal (green, be good, Obama, etc.). Can she really take pleasure in plumping for an autofill ideology that’s so widely shared?
The story of Marie and Pierre Curie is one of love, scientific partnership and one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century. Artist and author Lauren Redniss discusses her new book, Radioactive, an illustrated biography of the pair and a look at their complicated legacy. Listen to podcast.
The story of Marie and Pierre Curie is one of love, scientific partnership and one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century. Artist and author Lauren Redniss discusses her new book, Radioactive, an illustrated biography of the pair and a look at their complicated legacy. Listen to the podcast of this show, here.
In his new book, vaccine researcher Paul Offit contends that some parents' decisions not to vaccinate their kids are harming others. Offit discusses the anti-vaccine movement, and weighs in on a new report calling a 1998 study linking autism and vaccines an "elaborate fraud." Listen to the podcast.
From bloggers of Myanmar's 2007 Saffron Revolution to tweeters of the protests that followed Iran's 2009 election, the Internet has proven itself to be a tool in promoting change and democracy in the world. But Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, argues that it will mostly do the opposite. Download the podcast here.
Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn. Bayoumi completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2002), editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israeli/Palestine Conflict (Haymarket Books, 2010) and has published academic essays in publications including Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.
His writings have also appeared in The Nation, London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay "Disco Inferno", originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection "Best Music Writing 2006". From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. Bayoumi's work, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, traces the experiences of seven young Arab-Americans navigating life in a post-September 11 environment, where complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to new brands of stereotypes, fueling widespread discrimination. It is the story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. His title is a reference to the W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America was awarded a 2008 American Book Award and the 2009 Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.
The author was recently a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. On the program, he said this: Feisal Abdul Rauf, yes. I think the idea of - behind the project from the very beginning was precisely to model a place like the 92nd Street Y to have some place where we can see - Islam, see American Muslims and the rest of American society come together and create a culture together. And, in fact, they did everything, as they should have, according to plan. They bought the building. They went to the community board and such things. And the project was announced in December of last year to little ado. But then, somehow, in the early summer, it started to generate a lot of hostility. And by the end of the summer, you saw huge crowds around that site in New York to the point where, around the anniversary of September 11th this year, there was a significant demonstration in opposition to it, where - and I went, actually, to see that demonstration, and I've never really seen anything like that in New York City before. I mean, there were thousands of people on the street just yelling, no mosque, no mosque, no mosque, and - a kind of blatant in-your-face anti-Muslim sentiment that really left me quite depressed. On the other hand, there was another demonstration just two blocks away that was a pro - you could call it a pro-Park51 demonstration that was very typical of New York City. It was loud. It was rambunctious. It was very diverse. And that one, to me, seemed much more representative of what New York City was all about. And that one didn't leave me depressed. That one left me quite optimistic. Below is the podcast of that show, in full.
In December of 2010, The Jewish Week wrote this, in mentioning and invoking the author: Howard Wohl, president of Tanger Hillel and a 1964 graduate of Brooklyn College, attributes much of the atmosphere to an episode that took place this summer, when the college instructed all its incoming students to read a controversial book edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at the school. The book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” — is a collection of personal stories by and about seven Arabs from Brooklyn. Critics objected to the assignment, saying that Bayoumi takes up the Palestinian cause in his final chapter and provides a decidedly slanted view. Recalling the episode earlier this month, Wohl said his greatest concern is that Brooklyn College doesn’t start to resemble “too many other campuses in North America,” where, in his view, anti-Israel rhetoric has morphed into anti-Semitism, and hate speech has blossomed under the guise of academic freedom.
Fen Montaigne is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal. A former Moscow bureau chief of The Philadelphia Inquirer, he is the author of Reeling in Russia and has co-authored two other books. For his work on Fraser's Penguins, Montaigne was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He now works as senior editor of the online magazine Yale Environment 360. From: Macmillan Publishing. In December, 2010, the author and his latest book, Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica., was a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. The podcast of that show is embedded just below.
Also in December of 2010, The New York Times wrote this about the book and author: In the austral summer of 2005-6, the veteran magazine journalist Fen Montaigne traveled to Palmer Station in Antarctica to work with the highly regarded polar ecologist Bill Fraser. For nearly five months, Montaigne gamely weighed and banded Adélie penguins and their predators, attached radio tags to feathers, dodged shooting streams of gack (giant-petrel vomit), sifted through guano in search of silverfish otoliths and reveled in the sensory delights of “the most alien and beautiful place on the planet.” But this is no straightforward work of natural history with Fraser as heroic guide. It’s a morality tale, in which Fraser plays an unsociable Cassandra who’s entrusted his tidings to a sympathetic messenger. Luckily for readers, Montaigne has wrapped his portrait of a place on the brink of oblivion inside a penguin love fest.
Celebrity culture can be mystifying -- if you're not a Britney Spears fan, you might wonder why she's famous at all. And if you do, you're in good company: Homer, Plato and Horace all wondered where the true heroes had gone. Tom Payne, author of Fame, explains why we need celebrities. Download the podcast here.
The Boston Globe recently wrote about the book: “Virtual Words,” by Jonathon Keats, who writes the Jargon Watch column in WIRED magazine. We might even be able to argue that his book is from at least a few minutes in the future — these are the jargon words that might become consumer-grade English. “Virtual Words” isn’t really a dictionary, but a collection of essays on new terms, and Keats makes no claim to be a lexicographer (although his author photo includes a very lexicographical bow tie). Instead, he refreshingly divides his book into six categories: Discovery, Innovation, Commentary, Promotion, Slang, and Neologism.Find that Boston Globe article here. From NPR's Talk of the Nation, Science Friday; "How Science and Technology Influence Language:" FLATOW: How do certain words catch on when other words don't? Mr. KEATS: It seems to me that the words that catch on are those that are probably least clever, that call least attention to themselves and that really kind of percolate from general usage, whereas the words that are particularly fun or funny, they may come into existence, and they may go viral, but they tend to die out almost as quickly as they came about. FLATOW: Do you have some favorite new words from this year? Mr. KEATS: Yes, I've been watching, as a result of my work in Wired, and one word that I really like right now is hygroelectricity, which is not hydroelectricity, it's spelled H-Y-G-R-O, and what it refers to is electricity that is taken from the humidity in the air, much as lightning is a lightening is a manifestation of this. And what I like about it is that it makes concrete in a word an idea that is very new and really right now is in the earliest prototyping stage in a laboratory. And it has, I think, great potential as an alternative energy source, and because there is a word, there is something that we can call it, we can start talking about it and promoting it, tweeting it, if you will, and I think that that can really be as important as the technology itself in terms of whether it catches on.Find that NPR webpage here.
Ads urge men of a certain age to get screened for prostate cancer. But is "test early, test often" the best approach? Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and Mark Scholz, author of Invasion Of The Prostate Snatchers, discuss other approaches.
In "There Will Be Blood Pricks: Diabetes has forced me to become a self-tracker, and I can't stand it", Hanna Rosin at the Slate.com writes about the book:
I gravitate toward medical stories such as the one told by Mark Scholz in his recent book Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. The screening test for prostate cancer, by quantifying a certain cancer indicator in the blood, has caused thousands of men—my father among them—to have operations they probably did not need. The test was effective at detecting cancer, but it could not distinguish between the lethal kind and the benign kind that grows slowly over time and never does any harm. The test, it turns out, was answering only half the question. In the face of a frightening disease, numbers can be very soothing. But they sometimes obscure what you really need to know. Something like this is also happening with diabetes.
And at that, there comes to mind a pairing. The other day, we blogged about "Wrong." The book and author's main thesis is that you can't trust in these studies and metrics blindly; you have to move forward with skepticism. And of course, there's The Emperor of All Maladies, which fashions itself as "biography" of cancer.
In Kingdom Under Glass, author Jay Kirk tells the life story of Carl Akeley, the pioneering taxidermist and adventurer who once killed a leopard with his bare hands. Taxidermist David Schwendeman runs his family's 90-year-old studio and describes the techniques and hazards of modern taxidermy.
From "passed away" to "Chilean sea bass," euphemisms are a way to avoid unpleasant terms or phrases. But in Euphemania, Ralph Keyes argues that using them isn't necessarily lazy or evasive; it can actually be harder to not say what we mean and still get our point across. "Euphemisms can be incredibly playful and a lot of fun — very creative," Keyes tells NPR's Neal Conan. Take, for example, the euphemisms we use for death. Keyes notes that the French talk about "eating dandelions by the root," their version of "pushing up daisies." He also recalls an old high school classmate who once told him how the life insurance industry avoids the word: "When one of their policy holders became eligible for his benefits to go to his heirs, they said he was 'post-retirement.'" And one of the author's favorite modern expressions is "going offline."
[...] assures us that his book "is not meant to be a compilation of euphemisms." And yet that is mostly what it is. Alas, while piling up examples, Mr. Keyes seems to exhibit a glib indifference to whether the euphemisms he cites were ever in real circulation. Consider one of the first examples he offers of military circumlocution: "Bombadiers no longer 'drop bombs,' " he writes; "they unleash vertically deployed antipersonnel devices." Really? Goodness knows the military is rife with jargon, some of it euphemistic. But just try to find an instance of "vertically deployed antipersonnel device" actually being used by the military. The source for this claim appears to be one of several books on euphemisms published over the past couple of decades. And those books seem to have based the claim on a brief item 20 years ago in the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, a newsletter once compiled by William Lutz, a Rutgers University professor.
The HeLa cell line — one of the most revolutionary tools of biomedical research — has played a part in some of the world's most important medical advances, from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization. The cell's power lies in its immortality, or ability to be kept alive and grown indefinitely. But few people know that the cells originally belonged to a poor Southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks who was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University when her doctor reserved samples of her body tissue for his research. Lacks died of cancer 60 years ago, but her cells — taken without her knowledge or consent — are still alive today. Writer Rebecca Skloot spent years researching Lacks and tells her story in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.
In her book Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed, former Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak documents the toxic legacy of uranium mining in the Navajo lands of northeastern Arizona, where radioactive dust wound up in Navajo homes and drinking water.
In 2006, the L.A. Times ran an exposé by reporter Judy Pasternak on the effects of uranium mining in the Navajo homeland. The articles had a remarkable impact, inspiring congressional hearings and Superfund cleanups. But Pasternak wasn't finished. Since then, she has crisscrossed the Navajo Reservation collecting miners' stories, dined with uranium industry bigwigs, and dug patiently through federal archives. The result is Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed, the first comprehensive telling of an ongoing tragedy.
Despite ongoing research and theorizing, the educational achievement of black boys and young black men continues to lag behind their white peers, nationwide. James Earl Davis of Temple University's College of Education and Pedro Noguera, author of The Trouble With Black Boys discuss.
When British chef Jamie Oliver took a road trip in search of quintessential American food, his biggest discovery was that there was no such thing. He visited American families to gather a diverse and delicious group of recipes that make up his new book, Jamie's America.
At first, comedian Lewis Black didn't believe it when the USO asked him to join a Christmas tour to entertain U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in his new book, I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas, he writes that it changed his life -- if not his views of Christmas.
In his new book Eels, writer James Prosek describes the life history and cultural significance of this slimy, snake-like and often misunderstood fish, introducing the reader to an eel fisherman on the Delaware River and to the myths of the Maori of New Zealand along the way.
What grows best in Martian soil? How do you get oxygen out of thin air? Pat Duggins, author of Trailblazing Mars: NASA’s Next Giant Leap, talks about the questions NASA will face if it sends astronauts to the Red Planet and how to choose the right people for the job.
, was a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. The podcast of that show is embedded just below.
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. The author was a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation in October, 2010. That show is embedded below. 
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In "To Put It Another Way: True, we often try to avoid plain words, but we should be careful about what we call a euphemism," Eric Felten out of the Wall Street Journal writes that the author:
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