This spring, This American Life and its creator and host, Ira Glass, became the latest flashpoints in a long-simmering public radio civil war.
Glass had recently signed a deal to distribute the hour-long show through streaming audio service Pandora, a potentially lucrative partnership that promised to bring in millions of new listeners to what is already one of the most visible and well-loved audio programs in the English-speaking world.
Executives at struggling stations, however, were not exactly thrilled. After the news broke, Mike Savage, a member of NPR’s 23-person board of directors and the station manager of WBAA, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., wrote a short post on LinkedIn explaining why he planned to drop TAL from his station, and why he thought other stations should, too.
A living history museum usually conjures up images of butter churns and anvils. At Den Gamle By (The Old Town) Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, you'll find all that. But tucked away in one corner of this museum, there's also something different — an entire apartment straight out of the 1950s.
The "House of Memories" is not usually open to the public, and it's not aimed at schoolchildren sent to learn about a distant and exotic past.
Rather, this exhibit is intended for visitors living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. And the history they've come to experience is their own.
“Time Travel,” like all of Gleick’s work, is a fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. It’s witty (“Regret is the time traveler’s energy bar”), pithy (“What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track”) and regularly manages to twist its reader’s mind into those Gordian knots I so loved as a boy.
As a boy in Manhattan in the early 1970s Andrew Solomon confesses himself to have been “afraid of the world”. He had nightmares about a Soviet bomb; he had fears that he might be kidnapped, and alternative fears that he had already been kidnapped without his knowing. His comfort lay in an idea of England that he discovered in fiction. This anglophilia began when his father read him AA Milne at two, and advanced through Narnia and Wonderland. He “developed a taste for marmalade and for the longer sweep of history”. He adopted, as he recalls, certain Chelsea airs: “My parents’ usual reprimand was to remind me that I was not the Prince of Wales.” It was with these kind of fantasies in mind that he travelled abroad for the first time aged 11, on a family trip that took in England, France and Switzerland. And after that he never really looked back.