Snow-Wash: North Korea Doctored Photos Of Kim’s Funeral

The funeral procession of Kim Jong Il brought back memories of an era when images of Communist propaganda were ubiquitous. The visual backbone of the images or illustrations were usually order and symmetry, enacted on a grand scale. Wednesday’s event was no exception. An overall view of the snowy procession had it all: the framed [...]

Perry Asks Federal Court To Halt Virginia Primary Ballot

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday asked a federal court in Virginia to halt the printing of ballots for the state’s March 6 Republican primary unless his name is added. Perry, who filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against the Virginia State Board of Elections and the state’s [...]

The 10 Best Video Games Of 2011

I’m no great fan of placing the best games of the year in any sort of numeric order (though I can tell you that my own great passion of the year was Batman: Arkham City). What I can say is that these are 10 games that called out to me like Sirens. They lifted me [...]

A Good Daughter, But A ‘Pariah’ Among Her Own

From its opening scenes, Pariah, a vital first feature worked up from a short film by director Dee Rees, draws you into a world largely untapped in American black cinema. The setting is a nightclub where AG’s — “Aggressive Lesbians,” members of a subculture marginalized within their own black community, let alone the rest of [...]

Chefs Roll Out Hearty, Homey Meatballs On The Cheap

When I’m considering a gourmet lunch, meatballs don’t exactly spring to mind. So I was more than a little surprised to hear that haute cuisine chef Michel Richard was opening a meatball joint just down the street from NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. It turns out that gourmet meatballs are one example of “dressed up [...]

My New Year’s Is 62 Million Times Bigger Than Yours, Said The Man From Beijing

The New Year comes, of course, at midnight. But because we have different time zones, we have many different midnights and some are much more crowded than others. This morning I asked myself: who’s got the biggest New Year’s Eve on earth? By which I mean: which time zone has the most people in it. [...]

When The Food Isn’t Alright On The Night Shift

Working the night shift is bad for your health. But what if that’s because the food is so lousy? That’s the provocative question raised this week by the editors of PLoS Medicine, an online medical journal. Scientists have been making the case that shift work increases a person’s risk of obesity, cancer, and sleep disorders. [...]

Romney Rolling In Iowa, With Large Crowds And Growing Optimism

Before the sun was even up here in Iowa this morning, the Mitt Romney campaign bus was rolling on its way to a stop at J’s Homestyle Cooking in Cedar Falls. No matter which direction he goes in Iowa today, the former Massachusetts governor will seem to have the wind at his back. A new [...]

Truth And Beauty: 2011′s Best American Poetry

One of the few things almost everyone can agree on about contemporary American poetry is that no one can agree on much. At present, poetry is a jumbled landscape, with no single, dominant style and few living figures whose importance is accepted in more than one or two of the art form’s tiny fiefdoms. Although [...]

Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death And Children’s Lit

This week on Fresh Air, we’re marking the year’s end by revisiting some of the most memorable conversations we’ve had in 2011. This interview was originally broadcast on September 20, 2011. Bumble-ardy, the latest from author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, is dark and deeply imaginative, much like his classic works Where the Wild Things Are [...]