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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 [...]

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]

‘Damned’ Teens In Hell: A Condemned Coming Of Age

Madison Spencer wants you to forget everything you’ve learned about hell. To be fair, she’s something of an expert. The snarky 13-year-old narrator of the new novel Damned was sent to the underworld after dying of what she thinks was a marijuana overdose. It’s not like she’s having a blast, of course, but she doesn’t [...]

Real ‘Sybil’ Admits Multiple Personalities Were Fake

When Sybil first came out in 1973, not only did it shoot to the top of the best-seller lists — it manufactured a psychiatric phenomenon. The book was billed as the true story of woman who suffered from multiple personality disorder. Within a few years of its publication, reported cases of multiple personality disorder — [...]

Amy Poehler: Playing Politics, But Only On Television

Amy Poehler joined Saturday Night Live in 2001 — a time, she says, when no one was really sure comedy was going to ever be okay again. She left in 2008 after playing Hillary Clinton during the show’s coverage of an election cycle when, she tells Ari Shapiro on Thursday’s Morning Edition, “the country was [...]

Behind the Scenes With Amy Poehler: From Pawnee to The White House

On NBC’s Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler plays a deputy parks director who dreams of one day working her way up the political ladder all the way to The White House. When NPR’s Ari Shapiro interviewed Poehler for Thursday’s Morning Edition, The White House is exactly where he was. Shapiro is NPR’s White House Correspondent [...]