BY AARON STELLA Amidst the revelry of the Mr. Gay Philadelphia pageant, I was able to finagle a future interview out of Michael Musto, famed gay-celeb columnist for the Village Voice in NYC. So a couple of weeks later, I hopped on the Chinatown bus headed for Village Voice’s headquarters in NYC. Musto, dressed in a crisp black and white vertical-striped shirt and baggy black slacks, (and of course, wearing his trademark Sally Jesse Raphaels) explained to me that the Voice was moving. Most everything was packed in boxes and hardly anyone was in the newsroom. We found a quiet […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Conventional wisdom has it you can tell a lot about a person by the company he or she keeps. But, what if posterity makes a big mistake in judging a famous somebody’s friends; wouldn’t that blunder then trigger a huge misreading of the chief person of interest? There you have the reasoning underlying Brenda Wineapple‘s fascinating new book, White Heat, that explores the relationship between Emily Dickinson and one of her closest confidants, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. For decades, Higginson has been derided by Dickinson scholars and fans as a kindly oaf; a Victorian man of minor letters damned […]
RECONSIDER THIS: Don DeLillo’s Underworld
BY DAVE ALLEN Not long after Don DeLillo’s Underworld was published in 1997, it was canonized by critics and readers alike as the Next Great American Novel, and a 2006 survey in the New York Times cemented its cornerstone status among modern American letters. The praise, whether long-passed or more recent, is justified: DeLillo unseals nearly 50 years of American history from the stifling amber of nostalgia, while the narrative spans both coasts and the vast spaces between them without leeching the intimacies that connect them. In short, it contains multitudes. Many of the characters, after dissipating their energies through […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Though John McCain and Barack Obama agree that America’s health care system needs reform, the candidates differ markedly in their vision of the remedy. Political scientist Jonathan Oberlander offers an in-depth comparison of the Obama and McCain health proposals. Oberlander compared the candidates in his report, “The Partisan Divide — The McCain and Obama Plans for U.S. Health Care Reform,” which was published Aug. 21, 2008 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Oberlander is an associate professor of social medicine and health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. RADIO TIMES Lowering […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: With God On Our Side
FRESH AIR Both John McCain and Barack Obama are courting the religious vote, but whose campaign will be more effective? Journalist Dan Gilgoff, the politics editor for Beliefnet.com, discusses the candidates’ tactics. Gilgoff is a former political correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and the author of The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War. His blog, the God-O-Meter, measures the rate of God-talk among the candidates. ALSO, Journalist Ryan Lizza says it’s no accident that the Democrats picked Denver as the site of their National Convention. Lizza discusses […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR After he won the presidency, Abraham Lincoln brought three of his rivals for the Republican nomination into his cabinet. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s book, Team of Rivals, recounts the life and work of our 16th president — and the principal characters of his administration. Goodwin won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, No Ordinary Time, about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She has also written books about Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: When Lyndon B. Johnson took office as president, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he began making daily recordings of his private conversations. Historian […]
FIRE IN THE HOLE: You Sunk My Swiftboat!
BOOK ‘EM, OBAMO: Obama plunges into a murky sea of lies to fight Swiftboat assholes with disinfecting sunshine and reality-based facts. [Not pictured, knife clenched between teeth and can of whup-ass in back pocket] HUFFINGTON POST: As promised, Barack Obama’s campaign is hitting back hard against smear author Jerome Corsi’s New York Times best-selling book The Obama Nation. In an exhaustive 41-page PDF document entitled Unfit for Publication — a riff on Corsi’s 2004 Unfit for Command, which targeted John Kerry — the campaign documents every false claim they have been able to find in Corsi’s current tome. MORE FIGHT […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
DOG DAYS: Dr. Dog, Rittenhouse Square, Last Night [Photo by TIFFANY YOON] THE WORLD CAFE Dr. Dog David Dye welcomes Dr. Dog for a special session mixed by the celebrated producer, Steve Lillywhite, at Avatar Studios in New York. Fate, the fifth album from this Philadelphia based five-piece is already drawing stellar reviews. As the band’s national recognition continues to grow, they’ve remained true to their bouncy rock style, mixing intricate harmonies with ’60s pop beats driving each song forward. They also aren’t afraid to come back with another concept album, manifesting the theme of fate creatively throughout the record. […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Hostile womanizer, award-winning editor, crack addict, bad parent, coke dealer, New York Times columnist — David Carr has been all of those, sometimes simultaneously. But he doesn’t know all the details — or isn’t sure, after years of telling and retelling colorful anecdotes about himself, that he remembers them right. So for his memoir The Night of the Gun, Carr put on his investigative-reporter hat to reconstruct his various sordid lives. He interviewed friends, ex-friends, family members and colleagues, all in the effort to document the man he has been, rather than the myth he’s in the habit […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Award-winning soul singer Isaac Hayes, who rose to the top of the charts in the 1970’s on the soul-record label Stax, died August 10. He was 65. He released his first solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, in 1968. His next album, Hot Buttered Soul, went gold in the 1970s, and is credited with helping pave the way for the rise of disco; his 1972 soundtrack to the movie Shaft went platinum, and the single “Theme From Shaft” won both an Oscar and a Grammy Award. Hayes also worked as an actor, with roles in movies as diverse as […]
RIP: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dead At 89
NEW YORK TIMES: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow. His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment. Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile. Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR While his Office character may take himself seriously, actor Rainn Wilson seems to be all about the laughs. Wilson plays beet-farming, archery-loving middle-management kook Dwight Schrute on the NBC hit television series. Now, Wilson is trading his crossbow for a guitar in the new film The Rocker. In The Rocker, Wilson plays a failed hair metal musician. After he’s kicked out of his band, the group goes on to achieve great success. But when he joins his nephew’s garage band, he gets a second chance at fame. Wilson made his breakthrough as an actor playing an eccentric mortician […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR We humans have long wondered what separates us from the other animals — but neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga may have given the topic more consideration than most. Gazzaniga, a pioneer in what’s called split-brain research, has just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. He talks to Terry Gross about his work, which involves investigating the varying functions of the left and right sides of our brains, and about how that research informs our understanding of the brain and human consciousness. Gazzaniga has spent the past 45 years studying the functions of the left and right brain. […]