Families Living with Autism from WHYY's Voices in the Family

A new theatrical performance in Delaware sheds light on the impact of autism on the family. It tells the story of a mother's journey from resistance to acceptance of her autistic daughter and of herself, a woman with her own complexities. Families are sometime hard-pressed to find energy and compassion to address the unique stressors of raising an autistic child. Some fall apart while others thrive, despite struggles and hardship. This week on Voices in the Family, Dan Gottlieb and his guests explore ways families can improve how they function with their autistic children. We'll hear from playwright Damien Atkins, whose play Lucy opens later this month at The Delaware Theatre Company. He'll be joined by director David Stradley and psychologist/author Dr. Robert Naseef, Ph.D., who specializes in families with autistic children; his son Tariq has autism. We'll also hear from two mothers of autistic children. Download the podcast here.

After Death, Protecting Your 'Digital Afterlife' from NPR Fresh Air

Chances are good that you have hundreds, maybe thousands of e-mails stored on remote servers or in your computer. You might have a Facebook page, or a Tumblr or Twitter account. And you might have countless photos in a Flickr album. All that information amounts to a digital profile of sorts, which raises an interesting question: What happens to that online material when we die? That depends on how you prepare beforehand, says John Romano. Romano and a colleague, Evan Carroll, edit The Digital Beyond, a website that helps users plan what happens to their online content after their death. Romano and Carroll both join Dave Davies for a discussion about online digital legacies. Download the podcast here.

Reflecting and Reconnecting from WHYY's Voices in the Family

Every year we make promises to ourselves about losing weight, organizing our closets, or organizing our lives. Sometimes we keep the promise for a couple of weeks but rarely that long. On the next Voices in the Family, Dan Gottlieb and his guests explore a different kind of New Year's ritual...taking time for quiet reflection in order to listen to our deepest truths about who we are and what we want our lives to be about. Dan will be joined by Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, The Reverend Chaz Howard, and Sylvia Boorstein. Nancy Fuchs Kreimer is the Director of the Department of Multi-faith Studies and Initiatives at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College where she is Associate Professor of Religious Studies. Chaz Howard is chaplin at the University of Pennsylvania. And Sylvia Boorstein is a psychologist, author, and a founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Download the podcast here.

Jennifer Homans: Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

The book and author were recently the subject of a WHYY Radio program-episode of Fresh Air. On the webpage for the show, this was said about the book and subject:

In her new book Apollo's Angels, historian Jennifer Homans — a former professional ballet dancer herself — traces ballet's evolution over the past 400 years, and examines how changes in ballet parallel changing ideas about class structure, gender, costume, the ideal body and what the body can physically do. The book chronicles ballet's transition from the aristocratic courtier world in Europe through its place as a professional discipline in the Imperial Court of Russia, and finally as a technique performed on stages throughout the world. Ballet's origins, Homans explains, grew out of the Renaissance court cultures of Italy and France. Dancers would perform at the royal courts — and then invite the audience members to participate.

Read that full Fresh Air transcript here. Read an excerpt from the book, here. Listen to the podcast of the show, down below.



The Guardian recently said this about the author and book: Jennifer Homans's history of the art, culture and political context of ballet is like a beautiful painting in a slightly askew frame. She is a former dancer who trained at the School of American Ballet in New York, and was the wife of the historian Tony Judt, who died in August. She exchanged the stage for academia two decades ago but one can still tell from her prose the kind of dancer that she was: meticulous, devoted and, au fond, profoundly romantic. Read that Guardian review, here.

"Teddy Roosevelt And The 'Burn' That Saved Forests" from WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air with Terry Gross [original posting, broadcast: Oct, 2009]

Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" was just released on paperback, and so, WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air rebroadcast last year's interview with the author.

In his new book The Big Burn, author Timothy Egan takes us back to 1910, to the scene of the largest forest fire in American history. Three million acres — an area the size of Connecticut — burned down in Idaho and Montana over the course of a single weekend. More than 70 people died. The Idaho Statesman has since remembered it as "a conflagration of biblical proportions," and Egan says the fire was of a singular kind, "a monster that takes on a life of its own." But in The Big Burn — subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and The Fire That Saved America — Egan argues that the fire actually saved the nation's forests, even as its flames charred the trees. The disaster served to strengthen the fledgling U.S. Forest Service, and rally public opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt's plan to protect national lands. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of five books. He won the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed Dust Bowl chronicle The Worst Hard Time.

Download the NPR WHYY Fresh Air podcast here. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and journalist. He maintains the New York Times blog, "The Opinionator," and recently wrote about two personalities, a "junkie" and an "atheist," Keith Richards and Christopher Hitchens respectively. His column, blog, whatever you want to call it, is usually enlightening in the sense that it doesn't get caught up in over opinions about current affairs, but rather sheds true opinions, unique and enlightening ideas, and in his recent posting, relationships; the relationship between a junkie and an atheist. In his latest post, Hitchens' bout cancer is evoked. It cuts to the materialism of our ideals, and it's the ideas in posts like this, that make a subscription to The New York Times on the Kindle worth it (even if you can get it at the desk or on the laptop for free). Check that latest entry out, here. See also: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures), Breaking Blue, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

Mosley's 'Last Days' Restores Memory, But At A Cost from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Walter Mosley is the author of more than three dozen novels, including many mysteries featuring the L.A. detective Easy Rawlins. His latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is about a 91-year-old black man entering the early stages of dementia and the last years of his life. But Grey's life changes after he meets a 17-year-old teenager named Robyn, without a family of her own. Robyn cares for Ptolemy and introduces him to a local doctor, who invites him to join an experimental drug study that will help bring back his memory — but will simultaneously also shorten his life span. And Ptolemy must decide what to do.

Read the full NPR feature story here. Download the Fresh Air podcast here. Also, the LA Times had this to say about the novel:

In "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey," Mosley returns to contemporary Los Angeles with a daring, beautifully wrought story that incorporates elements of allegory, meditative reflection and the lilt of lyric tragedy. For obvious reasons, we can never know the confusion and loss of intellectual faculties that so often attend old age, but in this novel Mosley gives as convincing an evocation as you're likely to encounter in literature. The result is an unexpectedly profound novel of the subtle links between memory and identity, of the difference between forgetting and having the past stripped from you, of what it may mean to be lost, first to those around you, then to yourself. Mosley's unlikely protagonist is Ptolemy Grey, a 91-year-old African American living as a near-recluse in a filthy, rented apartment in one of South L.A.'s meaner neighborhoods. His flat is cluttered with trash and the material fragments of a life dissolving in dementia. Ptolemy's beloved second wife, Sensia, is decades dead; roaches patrol his kitchen counters; his bathroom hasn't worked for years and he sleeps under a table in the living room, perhaps because his bedroom is stuffed with a pack rat's junk, perhaps for darker reasons. Even he is no longer quite sure. His real companions are a classical music radio station and an all-news television channel that he keeps on simultaneously, day and night.

See also: Known to Evil (A Leonid McGill Mystery), The Long Fall, The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

"Keith Richards' 'Life': Sex, Drugs And Brown Sugar" from NPR's Arts & Life by MICHAEL SCHAUB

Rock and roll, by its nature, doesn't have many rules; if it did it wouldn't be rock and roll. It does have, however, an unwritten code, and this is part of it: real rockers never quit. Retirement isn't hardcore, which explains why the Rolling Stones haven't called it quits after nearly 50 years as, arguably, the world's second most famous band. Keith Richards, the legendary founding guitarist of the Stones, is 66, but don't mistake his new memoir for a valedictory. It's more like a statement of purpose; a lead-off track, not a final cut. "I can't retire until I croak," he writes — more than once — in Life. It seems like as safe a bet as you're ever going to find in rock. Rock and roll, after all, is his first love. Early in Life, Richards describes his first guitar, "a gut-string job," given to him by his mother when he was 15: "I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it." It's the kind of honest, guileless moment that makes this book so charming, so unexpectedly moving. Richards might epitomize the popular idea of the rock lifestyle more than any other living artist — and he doesn't shy away from admitting his deep affections for women and drugs — but he's at his best, unsurprisingly, when he's rhapsodizing about rock. "[W]hen it works, baby, you've got wings," he writes. "It's flying without a license."

Read an excerpt of the book here. There was also this NPR WHYY Fresh Air show, with Richards. See also: What Would Keith Richards Do?: Daily Affirmations from a Rock and Roll Survivor, Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards, Keith Richards: The Biography, Keith Richards: Satisfaction

Jon Stewart: The Most Trusted Name In Fake News from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Story: In an interview with Terry Gross, taped in front of a live audience in New York City, the Daily Show host deconstructs his upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the National Mall and explains how The Daily Show comes up with material.

Listen to Gross and Stewart here.

Reich Blames Economy's Woes On Income Disparity from NPR Topics: Books

Economist Robert Reich argues that the economy isn't going to get moving again until we address a fundamental problem: the growing concentration of wealth and income among the richest Americans. He explains his fears for America's economic recovery in Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future.

Read the full NPR Books post, listen to the podcast here.

Colbert Builds 'Report' with Viewers, Readers from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Story: Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!). Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal and the Hollywood blacklist.

Read the full Fresh Air transcript here, and listen to the podcast.

Robert Reich Looks Askance at 'Supercapitalism' from NPR Programs: Fresh Air from WHYY

We love low prices, sure, but we frown at the things companies do to get us good deals -- like paying low wages. In his book Supercapitalism, economist Robert Reich looks at the divided mind of the consumer and citizen. Reich subtitles his book "The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life," and in it he asks tough questions about American priorities: "Why has capitalism become so triumphant and democracy so enfeebled? Are these two trends connected? What, if anything, can be done to strengthen democracy?"

Listen to the full Fresh Air podcast here. See also: The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism