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.

Jay-Z: Decoded

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and businessperson. He is one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America having had a net worth of over $450 million in 2010. He has sold approximately 50 million albums worldwide, while receiving ten Grammy Awards for his musical work, and numerous additional nominations. Jay-Z co-owns The 40/40 Club, is part owner of the NBA's New Jersey Nets and is the creator of the clothing line Rocawear. He is the former CEO of Def Jam Recordings, one of the three founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, and the founder of Roc Nation. As an artist, he holds the record for most number one albums by a solo artist on the Billboard 200. Jay-Z also has had four number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, one as lead artist. Along with his financial and musical success, Jay-Z is known for quarreling with other artists in the rap industry, the most famous feud being between him and fellow New York rapper Nas, which was eventually settled in 2005. He married American R&B superstar Beyoncé Knowles on April 4, 2008. On December 11, 2009, Jay-Z was ranked as the 10th most successful artist of the 2000–2009 decade by Billboard Magazine and ranking as the 5th top solo male artist and as the 4th top rapper behind Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent. Source: Wikipedia.



Excerpt (Jay-Z on Bono): The writer had asked me about the U2 record that was about to be released and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under just to meet their own standard. Bono told me that my quote had really gotten to him. In fact, he said it got him a little anxious. He decided to go back to the studio even though the album was already done and keep reworking it till he thought it was as good as it could possibly be.



Excerpt (Jay-Z on assault charges): People kept giving me the same name as the source of the bootlegging. It was someone I knew, someone I never would have suspected. One night I went to Q-Tip's solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone's been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, 'No the f--- this n---a did not ... " I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.

NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured the author and book on its program in November, 2010. This is what was said on the feature story's webpage:

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike." Now 40, Jay-Z hasn't forgotten his past — or the lyrics he's written over the years about his childhood in the projects. In his new book, Decoded, he unpacks the detailed riffs and lyrics that make up 36 of his songs — while examining both his own life and the growth of hip-hop over the last two decades.

Richard McGowan: State Lotteries and Legalized Gambling: Painless Revenue or Painful Mirage

Richard McGowan was recently quoted in The New York Times feature story, "States Look for Winning Formulas to Spur Lottery Sales:" With state budgets in crisis and lottery-financed programs like prekindergarten being considered for cuts, the pressure is on to make lottery tickets more attractive to casual scratchers and people who may have never dropped a dollar on a chance before. [...] The key to success is catching a customer’s eye, said Richard McGowan, a management professor at Boston College who studies state gambling. “It’s an impulse buy when you walk into a store,” he said. “It all depends on how aggressive a lottery commissioner wants to be with advertising.” Read that full NYT story here. NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross recently had Richard McGowan on their show as a guest. Listen to the podcast, "States Gamble On Casinos To Generate Revenue," below.

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

"A History Of The 'Big' Business Of Hip-Hop" from NPR Fresh Air

In 1979, producer Sylvia Robinson heard hip-hop music at a birthday party in Harlem and had a hunch that it would be commercially successful. She called her son, Joey Robinson Jr., and asked him to gather a group of musicians who could perform like the rappers she saw in Harlem. She then held makeshift auditions for a rap group outside a pizza parlor in Englewood, N.J. "She put these three guys together who had never met each other before, had the backing track all ready and created a record in a matter of minutes," says Dan Charnas, a former rap industry executive who chronicles the history of hip-hop in a new book, The Big Payback. The group that Robinson put together, Charnas says, would become the Sugarhill Gang, and the track they recorded was "Rapper's Delight," the first hip-hop single to break into the Top 40 charts.

Download the podcast here. Read the full feature here. In the "'The Big Payback': How hip-hop went from penniless outlaw to penthouse mogul", Greg Kot blogged this, for the Chicago Tribune:

About 40 years ago, hip-hop started as a penniless outcast in some of America’s poorest neighborhoods. "Hip-hop is innovation out of necessity, the necessity of being broke," the rapper/producer El-P once said. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry that transcends cultures and generations and permeates not just the pop music charts, but television, movies, comedy, fashion and product lines ranging from toys to liquor. It’s a classic American story of cultural innovation intertwined with capitalist opportunity, a tale of music creating a community which in turn attracted maverick investors who then were swallowed by corporations. The transformation bred multi-media stars, moguls and celebrities such as Jay-Z and Eminem. Author Dan Charnas tenaciously follows the money trail in “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-hop” (New American Librarian), which celebrates hip-hop even as it details the backroom deals and marketing strategies that contributed to its explosive growth.

Read that blog post and article here. See also: Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture, Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA (Music Culture)The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Music Culture), Hip Hop Business Advisor, Rap Rich - How to Make Money in Hip Hop Business

An Oncologist Writes 'A Biography Of Cancer' from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee was treating one of his patients, a woman with advanced abdominal cancer who had relapsed multiple times, when she asked him what seemed like a simple question. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on, but before I go on, I need to know what it is I'm battling,' " Mukherjee tells NPR's Terry Gross. But, as Mukherjee explains, describing his patient's illness wasn't so simple. Defining cancer, he says, is something doctors and scientists have been struggling to do since the disease's first documented appearance thousands of years ago

Download the podcast here. As usual, the NPR Fresh Air website and webpage for this story, is full featured, and definitely worth the thorough read-through. See also: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Anticancer, A New Way of Life, New Edition, Cancer: 50 Essential Things to Do: Third Edition, Beating Cancer with Nutrition, book with CD

How Gay Soldiers Serve Openly Around The World from NPR Podcast Fresh

December 7, 2010 A study of five U.S. allies who ended bans on gays openly serving in their militaries showed that the wide-scale disruptions feared by opponents had never materialized, says historian and study author Nathaniel Frank. He discusses his findings and what they suggest for efforts to end the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Download the podcast here. See also: Gays in the Military Military Dark T-Shirt by CafePress, Gays In The Military, A Civilian's Guide to the U.S. Military: A comprehensive reference to the customs, language and structure of the Armed Forces

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)

The 'Splintering' Of America's Black Population from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

"You can no longer talk about what black America thinks or feels," writes Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist, in a new book about the increasing disconnect between America's African-American communities. In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, Robinson argues that America's African-American population can now be divided into four distinct groups: the abandoned poor; immigrants and people of mixed race; the mainstream middle class; and the small but powerful elite. He describes how each group has a different 'black experience' and largely remains detached from the others.

Download the podcast here. Check the webpage for the show out, here. See also: Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking, Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race

The 'Unbroken' Spirit Of An Ordinary Hero from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Laura Hillenbrand is shaping up to be the Woody Guthrie of contemporary narrative historians. It's not just that she has an affinity for singing the ballads of dark horses, who through tenacity, luck and a lot of heart turn themselves into folk legends. It's also that Hillenbrand has a gift for recovering the spirit of mid-20th century America — its despair, sure, but also its humor and its graceful refusal to put on airs. Seabiscuit, of course, was an almost impossible act to follow, but as Hillenbrand says in the acknowledgements to her new book, Unbroken, she knew she had found her next subject when she spoke to a then-octogenarian Louis Zamperini on the phone and the wisecracking spirit of that bygone age came through loud and clear: "I'll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit," Zamperini said, "because I can talk."

Download the podcast here. Check the NPR Fresh Air full story out here. See also: Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Seabiscuit: The True Story of Three Men and a Racehorse, Cleopatra: A Life

'Love And Other Drugs': A Worthy Prescription from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Love and Other Drugs is brash and manic and sexy, then grim and weepy and self-consciously inspirational. It's madly uneven. But it's also one of the few romantic movies in the past few years with strong and insightful satirical undertones. It's set in 1996, which wasn't quite the dawn of our psychopharmacological era — though it was certainly the morning — and Big Pharma sales-dude Jamie Randall, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is an early riser. He's a supple, smooth-faced, blue-eyed cutie whom women fall for even when they know that his ingenuousness is an act: It's more winning than other men's genuine ingenuousness.

Note that the movie is based on the nonfiction book, Hard Sell. Check the full NPR Fresh Air feature out here. Download the podcast here. See also: Hard Sell: Now a Major Motion Picture LOVE & OTHER DRUGS

Helping Your 'Good Old Dog' Navigate Aging from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

As dogs age, taking care of them becomes more difficult. Owners of aging dogs often struggle with their pets' dementia and incontinence — as well as navigating through the maze of end-of-life care decisions. Veterinary behaviorist Nicholas Dodman is the head of the Animal Behavior department at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has worked with aging dogs for decades. He says that old age isn't a disease, but a stage of life for pets and owners to navigate. Dodman recently collaborated with other vets from Tufts University as well as writer Lawrence Linder on a reference guide for owners of older dogs, called Good Old Dog: Expert Advice for Keeping Your Aging Dog Healthy, Happy and Comfortable.

Download the podcast here. Check the Fresh Air webpage out, on this particular episode and show, here. See also: The Well-Adjusted Dog: Dr. Dodman's Seven Steps to Lifelong Health and Happiness for Your BestFriend, Dogs Behaving Badly: An A-Z Guide to Understanding and Curing Behavorial Problems in Dogs, The Cat Who Cried for Help: Attitudes, Emotions, and the Psychology of Cats

Carlos Eire: A Cuban-American Searches For Roots from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

In 1962, 11-year-old Carlos Eire was one of thousands of children airlifted out of Cuba and sent to Florida to escape Fidel Castro's regime. His parents thought he would be back as soon as Castro was deposed. But Eire never returned home. Shortly after he arrived in the United States, the Cuban missile crisis shut down Cuba's borders, and his parents were unable to leave the country. For the next several years, Eire would be shuffled between foster families around the country before joining his aunt and uncle in Chicago. Eire's memoir, Learning to Die in Miami, chronicles the years he spent away from his family acclimating to a completely new country — as well as his eventual reunion with his mother. (His father died in Cuba.)

Read the full NPR Fresh Air feature here. Download the podcast here. See also: A Very Brief History of Eternity, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, Miami y Mis Mil Muertes: Confesiones de un cubanito desterrado, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin

Beatles' Photographer Astrid Kirchherr Opens Up from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

This interview was originally broadcast on January 15, 2008. The book 'Astrid Kirchherr: A Retrospective' was published this week and examines Kirchherr's photographs she took both before and after working with The Beatles. Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met The Beatles in 1960, before they were famous, when they came to perform in Germany. An art student in Hamburg, she took some of the earliest photographs of the group — now-classic shots that capture the foursome back before Ringo joined the band, back when Stuart Sutcliffe was playing bass. And Kirchherr has often been credited with convincing the band to adopt those iconic mop-tops.

Download the related podcast here. Check the full feature out, from the NPR Fresh Air website, here. See also: Yesterday: The Beatles Once Upon a Time, When We Was Fab, Hamburg Days

'Franklin And Eleanor': A Marriage Ahead Of Its Time from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

One of the most amazing anecdotes in Hazel Rowley's crackling new biography of the Roosevelt marriage called, simply, Franklin and Eleanor, has, on the surface, nothing to do with their personal relationship; yet, it speaks volumes about the trust the first couple placed in each other: In November 1939, as the Red Scare was gathering force, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed members of a college student group called the American Youth Congress to testify about their organization's ties to the Communist Party. Getting wind of this event, Eleanor asked Franklin's permission "to turn up unannounced" at the hearing. He gave it, and the first lady took off. At the noontime break, the students still hadn't been called to testify, so Eleanor invited them back to lunch at the White House. When she found out the students had nowhere to sleep that night, she invited all 10 of them to move into the White House — the People's House, after all — for the duration. That evening, the students — some of them poor, first-generation Americans — dined with the president and discussed the HUAC, as well as other breaking news, including the Soviet invasion of Finland.

Download the podcast here. Check this webpage out, from the program's official site. See also: Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wright: The Life and Times

Was Jane Austen Edited? Does It Matter? from NPR Podcast Fresh Airfrom NPR Podcast Fresh Air

"A storm in a teacup" is the British version of the idiom, and it's hard to imagine a more apt example than the squall that blew up recently over the claim by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland that Jane Austen was actually a sloppy writer. Sutherland was publicizing a new website that has put 1000 pages of Austen's manuscripts online. According to her, the manuscripts are full of faulty spelling, break every rule of English grammar, and give no sign of the polished punctuation we see in the novels. She concluded that Austen's prose must have been heavily edited for publication, quite possibly by the querulous critic William Gifford.

Check the full NPR Fresh Air feature out here. Download the podcast here. See also: The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (Special Editions), Jane Austen Collection (Sense & Sensibility / Emma / Persuasion / Mansfield Park / Pride & Prejudice / Northanger Abbey), Northanger Abbey

The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z 'Decoded' from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike."

Download the podcast here. See the full NPR Fresh Air feature here. See also: The Hits Collection, Vol. 1, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office

"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

More From Jon Stewart's 'Fresh Air' Interview from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Story: The interview with the Daily Show host that was originally broadcast Oct. 4 has been re-edited for Friday's Fresh Air; it features material cut from the original broadcast because of time constraints.

Listen to the full interview here, or download the mp3 podcast here.