Advice For The Golden Years: ‘Don’t Ever Retire Mentally’

Retirement can be an endless golf game or constant trips to the doctor, depending on a whole host of factors, including luck. But either way, it’s a stage of life that’s usually more difficult and expensive than people expect. Tell Me More’s series on end-of-life issues continues today, with a roundtable discussion at a retirement [...]

A Coconut Cake From Emily Dickinson: Reclusive Poet, Passionate Baker

Nelly Lambert is a PhD student in English at Catholic University. She’s writing her dissertation on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Poet Emily Dickinson withdrew from society for most of her adult life. And yet, she was known to lower a basket full of cakes from the window of the home she rarely left to crowds of [...]

Dance Your Ph.D.: When Science People Shake A Tail Feather, Everybody Wins

UPDATE: The grand prize winner is Joel Miller, for his “Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story.” See that and the other winners here. Every now and then, you learn about something so amazing that you’re instantly (1) cheered that you know about it now, and (2) sad for [...]

Is Herman Cain In Trouble With Social Conservatives?

Part of Herman Cain’s appeal to GOP presidential primary voters was that he seemed to have more street cred with social conservatives than the putative front runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Doubts about Romney have helped fuel Cain’s recent rise in the polls, putting him in a virtual dead-heat with Romney. But in an [...]

What If We Paid Off The Debt? The Secret Government Report

Planet Money has obtained a secret government report outlining what once looked like a potential crisis: The possibility that the U.S. government might pay off its entire debt. It sounds ridiculous today. But not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the [...]

Obama Laps GOP Field In Finance-Sector Cash But Shows Weakness Too

President Obama is either raising money from the financial sector like a man with many friends and supporters in that field despite his attempts to regulate it. Or, he is losing the money race to Mitt Romney, that veteran of the private-equity world, because of his administration’s efforts to clamp down on Wall Street with [...]

How To ‘Thrive’: Short Commutes, More Happy Hours

Many people believe that happiness comes from money, or youth or beauty, but Dan Buettner would respectfully disagree. Buettner visited some of the happiest places on Earth and argues the real keys to happiness lie in fundamental, permanent changes to the way we live. During a five-year study, the National Geographic Fellow located the world’s [...]

Poet Marie Howe On ‘What The Living Do’ After Loss

A few years after her younger brother John died from AIDS-related complications in 1989, poet Marie Howe wrote him a poem in the form of a letter. Called “What the Living Do,” the poem is an elegiac description of loss, and of living beyond loss. “When he died, it was a terrible loss to all [...]

Read ‘Graveyard’ With Our New Back-Seat Book Club

We are starting a special project at NPR aimed at our younger listeners. We’re talking about all those young people who listen to NPR programs while riding in the car or sitting at the kitchen table. We’d like you to lend us your ears and your curiosity. Beginning this October, All Things Considered is rolling [...]

William Shatner Covers ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ And Yes, It’s Very Weird

I really don’t know what to say. I really don’t. Except for this, I guess: Spacemouth. And this: WHAT? Shatner talked about this record on All Things Considered, but … I still was not ready for this video. (Hat-tip: Metafilter.) [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]