King's New York Connection: MLK Jr's Friendship With Stanley Levison from News from WNYC New York Public Radio by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC Radio)

One of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most important political advisors, Stanley Levison, has remained largely hidden from public view — even 40 years after King’s death. A white Jewish lawyer from New York, Levison probably would have wanted it that way: his interest in the civil rights movement was largely selfless, and associations from his past meant that it was in the best interest of the civil rights movement to pretend that he wasn’t involved. King and Levison met sometime in 1956. King was just coming off of the successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, an episode that made him a sudden star in some circles. One of King’s biographers, David Garrow, said the civil rights leader would come to New York frequently to raise money — and likely stopped in at some fundraisers where Levison was present. It was during the run-up to the 1963 March on Washington that a piece of Levison’s past resurfaced and complicated his involvement. Jones, who has just published a book about the march, “Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed the Nation,” recalled that King and other civil rights leaders gathered at the White House in the summer of that year.

Author Sees Parallel In Giffords Shooting And JFK Assassination from NPR Blog Shots

In an email to NPR, regarding Friday’s Morning Edition piece on the possible motives of the Giffords shooting in Arizona, author James Reston Jr. drew a parallel between that incident and the JFK assassination. I was fascinated by your report on assassinations this morning for a personal reason. In my 1988 biography of John Connally of Texas [The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally] I had three chapters on the Dallas assassination. There I developed a theory, based upon intensive research in the back volumes of the Warren Commission, that Lee Harvey Oswald's principal target was not Kennedy, but Connally. It would take too much time to lay the theory out in detail here. But essentially, the idea is that Oswald, schleppy little guy that he was, had an intense personal grudge against Connally, because he (Oswald) believed that Connally as Secretary of the Navy (before becoming governor) was complicit in changing his discharge from the Marine Corps from honorable to dishonorable, or at least, not redressing the outrage of that change. Oswald's letters to Connally are deep in the background volumes of the Warren Commission. In those back volumes, Oswald's wife, Marina, testified to the Warren Commission that Connally was her husband's target. It's always interested me that the Warren Commission ultimately argued that Oswald's motive was grand and epic: to decapitate the U.S. government. But little people, with 9th grade educations, rarely have such cerebral thoughts.The Commission felt, I think, that it had to have a motive that was as grand as the crime itself. If my theory is right, President Kennedy was an accidental victim in Dallas.

Sarah Vowell: The Wordy Shipmates

U.S. President Ronald Reagan

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.

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“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.”

- Sarah Vowell, author of the book: The Wordy Shipmates

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?

David Rakoff: Half Empty

Half empty or half full?

“Is the glass half empty or half full?” is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full) or pessimism (half empty); or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble. This idiom is used to explain how people perceive events and objects. Perception is unique to every individual and is simply one's interpretation of reality. The phrase "Is the glass half empty or half full" can be referred to as a philosophical question.

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“I do tend to be an anxious fellow and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news. I appreciate honesty. I appreciate confronting something head on and being given all the details first — and then responding to them in whatever way I might. At best, it simply confirmed who I am to myself. It helps me. For me, it works.”

- David Rakoff, author of the book: Half Empty

In September 2010, Bill Scheft wrote “Nabob of Negativism” for The New York Times. The book jacket of “Half Empty,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.

“Writer Melissa Bank said it best: 'The only proper answer to 'Why me?' is 'Why not you?' The universe is anarchic and doesn't care about us and unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask. And in so many other ways, I'm so far ahead of the game. I have access to great medical care. My general baseline health, aside from the general unpleasantness of the cancer, is great. And it's great because I'm privileged to have great health. And I live in a country where I'm not making sneakers for a living and I don't live near a toxic waste dump. You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.”

- David Rakoff, author of the book: Half Empty

Sound Medicine 01-16-11 from Sound Medicine

This week: advice for exercising while sick; Dartmouth research on end-of-life care; why self-diagnosis on the Internet is a bad idea; and an interview with the co-author of the book Breakthrough, the history of the discovery of medical insulin. Also, why you should research health concerns when preparing to travel overseas. Listen to the podcast.

Visual Biography Explores Love And Radium from NPR: Science Friday 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 podcast.

Bob Woodward: Obama's Wars

Lyndon B. Johnson, 

South Vietnam, 1966

In December 2009, Michael Lindenberger wrote “Obama's Afghanistan decision evokes LBJ's 1965 order on Vietnam buildup” for The Dallas Morning News. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson took ownership of a war he, like Obama, had inherited. Gen. William Westmoreland wanted more troops in Vietnam, and after a protracted debate within the White House, Johnson sent them. Over the next three years, he would send hundreds of thousands more and launch a carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Johnson's presidency – and many argue, Johnson himself – were destroyed long before America could finally, 10 years later, quit Vietnam. Obama's decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan has reawakened those memories of Vietnam's early days, and brought unsettling comparisons from an array of historians who have spent their careers studying Johnson. "I'll tell you, the more that I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, the more I think of it, I don't know – it looks like to me we're getting into another Korea," Johnson said in 1964 during a tape-recorded conversation with national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. "It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of it, once we're committed." McGovern, who campaigned hard for Johnson, said he had expected Johnson to pull back after gaining the presidency in his own right in 1964.

“I think this is a dreadful mistake on President Obama's part. It makes me sad. I am for him. I worked for him, and I still think he is a brilliant man. But it looks to me like Vietnam all over again.”

- Senator George McGovern, 2009

In September 2010, Peter Baker wrote “Woodward Book Says Afghanistan Divided White House” for The New York Times. Some of the critical players in President Obama’s national security team doubt his strategy in Afghanistan will succeed and have spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf, according to the new Bob Woodward book. The book, “Obama's Wars,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.

“I have to say that. I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”

- President Barack Obama to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, when asked about whether or not his deadline to withdraw was “firm”

“This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan. Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”

- Barack Obama, telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation

In September 2010, Steve Luxenberg wrote “Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war” for the Washington Post. President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday. According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

“It got to the point in the spring, after a top-secret update to the president in the Situation Room at the White House, the president left the meeting and told his aides: What makes us think that given the description of the problem, that we're going to design a solution to this?”

- Bob Woodward, author of Obama's Wars

#243: The Frankenstein Mortgage from NPR: Planet Money Podcast

The 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage -- the bedrock of American home ownership -- is a weird loan. In an ordinary market, you'd have to pay a really high interest rate to get a 30-year fixed, if you could get it at all. Only the intervention of the government -- and the creation of Fannie Mae -- turned the loan into America's plain-vanilla mortgage. On today's Planet Money, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (authors of All the Devils Are Here, a book on the financial crisis) walk us through the 30-year-fixed and the history of Fannie and Freddie. And they talk about where we go from here. Listen to the podcast.

New America Now - Jan. 14, 2011 from New America Now Radio Podcast

Welcome our new host! Shirin Sadeghi! This week: Haiti, one year later; Yves Point du Jour on what's happening now + Isabel Allende's new book, "Island Beneath the Sea" takes place in Haiti + Mahnaz Badihian on the suicide of the Shaw of Iran's youngest son, Ali Reza Pahlavi + In Monique Truong's "Bitter in the Mouth," her protagonist has a tasty problem + Richard Rodriguez and Sandip Roy consider the shooting in Arizona. Listen to the podcast.

Dan Charnas: The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

In December 2010, an NPR Staff writer wrote, “How Hip0Hop Became a Cash Machine” for the show, All Things Considered. Thirty years ago, hip-hop was background noise at small house parties in Harlem and the South Bronx. Now, it's a multibillion-dollar empire. A new book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, tells the story of the genre's humble beginnings — from one person behind a few turntables and a microphone — and how it morphed into a way of life, with designer clothing lines, political movements and vast wealth. But in the early days of rap, a lot of the money stayed with the label owners, not with the musicians. Charnas notes that some hip-hop dignitaries railed against "how onerous recording contracts were and how tilted the relationship was between artists and record companies."

“Sometime in the middle to the end of the last decade, BusinessWeek estimated that the hip-hop business had grown to, on the music side, about $1 billion a year, and on the fashion side, $2 billion a year.”

- Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

“For the first time, black artists were really not only embracing but insisting on their own self-worth.”

- Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

In December 2010, Jim Farber wrote “'The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop' by Dan Charnas follows the money” for the New York Daily News. The story of hip hop has been told from many points of view, but never from those who've had the strongest power over its destiny. That would be the corporate backers and entrepreneurial enablers, those market forces that finessed a street trend from New York's most embattled neighborhoods into a global phenomenon. Dan Charnas has done a real service to pop history by following the money -- a pursuit which ultimately tells a far larger tale: In hip hop, it seems, cash isn't just a matter of bling. It's the currency that gave this once outsider art -- and by extension, a marginalized race -- a louder, clearer and more important voice all over the world.

“I think Sugar Hill saw themselves as riding out a fad. I don't think they had any particular belief that this was a powerful culture that had staying power. We'd just come off of the disco era, which turned out to be very, very short-lived, and I'm sure that a lot of people, including Sylvia and Joe Robinson, thought that the same would happen to this rap stuff. The difference was that Russell Simmons did not like the records that Sugar Hill was turning out because they didn't sound to him like the hip-hop that lived in the streets and the parks and the clubs, which was very raw, very beat-oriented, and didn't sound like disco at all. And so Russell Simmons' key innovation, when he made Run-D.M.C.'s first record, was to basically order his producer-partner Larry Smith to take out all the music. 'I just want to hear a beat,' he said.”

- Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop