David Alan Grier’s ‘Sporting Life’ On Broadway: The stand-up comedian and star of In Living Color was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Sporting Life in the opera Porgy and Bess. “I think the character of Sporting Life is a salesman so he has to be flamboyant, the life of the party,” he says.

Sacha Baron Cohen: The Fresh Air Interview: Actor and writer Sacha Baron Cohen is famous for taking his characters — Ali G., Borat, Bruno — into the real world, interacting with people who have no idea that they’re dealing with a fictional character. But his new movie, The Dictator, is a scripted comedy about a tyrant on the loose in New York.

You can hear the original broadcasts here:

David Alan Grier’s ‘Sporting Life’ On Broadway

Sacha Baron Cohen: The Fresh Air Interview

[Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Oldham sings mostly sad songs, with a truly tragic song thrown in every now and again for good measure. And we were thinking: Who’s the singer he’s least like? We settled on Doris Day. We’ll ask Oldham three questions about the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced singer of the ’50s and ’60s. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Well, a whole bunch of supporters of the rule are chiming in now to say that argument has no legal merit.

The dozen new suits, representing some 43 Catholic dioceses, universities and charities “have made a splash by virtue of their number, but when you take a moment to actually look at them, there’s nothing to see,” Sarah Lipton-Lubet, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a blog post. “The rule is constitutional, it violates no federal law, and it’s incredibly important for women.”

Lipton-Lubet is talking about the rules issued in January (and amended in February to address the religious backlash) that require prescription contraception and sterilization services to be available without additional copays as part of most health insurance packages.

While those filing the lawsuits charge that offering the coverage (or even being forced to facilitate it) in violation of their religious belief runs afoul of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion, Lipton-Lubet points out that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on the question.

“The Free Exercise Clause does not require any exemptions from a neutral law of general applicability. As the Supreme Court held two decades ago, in an opinion authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, to do otherwise would be to create a system “in which each conscience is a law unto itself.” Translation? If it applies equally and doesn’t target any faith, it’s not a First Amendment violation.”

(Backers of the church challenges, however, point to a more recent case, a unanimous ruling this past January, where the justices said religious organizations should have broader hiring and firing power than other businesses.)

But even setting the Supreme Court aside, pointed out Ian Milhiser of the Center for American Progress, more than half the states already require contraceptive coverage. And the issue has already been litigated at that level by the Catholic church — and the challengers lost.

In 1999, in California, Milhiser wrote, “five of the court’s six Republican justices held that, even if the law were examined under the strictest level of constitutional scrutiny, California’s contraceptive access law is constitutional.”

And even if the issues hadn’t been litigated before, the current cases are premature, says Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights. That’s because the work on the regulations remains ongoing.

“This is the most cynical kind of political theater and nothing more,” she said in a statement. “Rather than working constructively with the Administration and allowing the rulemaking process to reach a resolution, these groups have chosen to grab headlines with a political stunt that will only burden the courts with untimely claims.”

But even though most religious-based organizations will have an additional year – until August 1, 2013 – to come into compliance with the new requirements, some are already taking action.

The 2,800 student Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, for example, announced earlier this month that it would stop offering health insurance coverage for students this fall rather than comply with the mandate. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Take those small, brightly colored single-use packs of laundry detergent that are becoming popular. To a curious toddler or small child, they look like candy.

But once inside childrens’ mouths, the tempting packs can burst, releasing a concentrated blast of irriitating detergent. Already this year there have been at least 250 cases of illness from the packs reported to poison control centers across the country.

And the particulars of the illnesses are worrisome. Children vomit. More than you would expect, says Dr. Michael Beuhler, medical director of the Carolinas Poison Center in Charlotte, N.C. And the kids often get much sicker in a hurry. “Children grow excessively tired and lethargic,” he tells Shots. Some then develop so much trouble breathing they need help from a ventilator.

“We don’t have a good handle on exactly what’s going on,” he says. But the symptoms are worse than with other types of detergent that kids ingest. One hypothesis, he says, is that something in these detergent packs is acting like a strong, short-acting sedative.

Within a few hours those symptoms usually pass. The prognosis for kids is very good overall, he says, assuming they get prompt medical care. “It’s really just a matter of supporting their breathing for that short period of time,” he says.

There haven’t been any reports of deaths, but an analysis of the data from poison control centers continues. The specific hazards posed by the detergent packs were only recognized this month.

Buehler says parents need to treat the detergent packs with respect. “They can’t be left where a child can find them,” he says.

For its part, Procter & Gamble, maker of Tide Pods, said Friday it would add a double-latch to the containers of pods as a safeguard. Those will show up in stores starting in July.

For what it’s worth, injuries to kids from household cleaning products dropped by almost half to about 12,000 in 2006 from around 22,000 in 1990. Kids between 1 and 3 years old remain the most vulnerable, accounting for almost three-quarters of the cases. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Health care has become one of the starkest contrasts between President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. And that’s surprising, given that once upon a time they both came up with similar plans to fix the system.

Stuart Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University, says the two men once occupied the same political space on health care.

“I would define Obama as a moderate liberal and Romney as a moderate conservative. … Both of them came to the same conclusion,” he says. They decided what was needed was a system “built as much as possible on the existing health insurance system.”

Both men embraced what was considered to be mainstream health care policy thinking: maintain the employer-provided system but get everyone covered through an individual mandate — a requirement to buy insurance.

From Victory To Problem

Romney went first. In 2006, as Massachusetts’ governor, he talked about the state’s mandate in decidedly nonideological terms: “We’re going to say, folks, if you can afford health care, then gosh, you’d better go get it; otherwise, you’re just passing on your expenses to someone else. That’s not Republican; that’s not Democratic; that’s not libertarian; that’s just wrong.”

Getting rid of free riders was a moral issue for Romney and many Republicans back then, says Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped the Romney and Obama administrations design the individual mandate. Gruber says he could tell that health care overhaul had a particular appeal for Romney — a businessman who specialized in turning around troubled companies.

“Mitt Romney was a management consultant. And what management consultants are is they’re sort of like engineers. They go in, they see a problem, they solve it,” he says. “I saw a lot of excitement, this passion, to say, ‘Wow, we can move this piece around, add the mandate, rededicate the money, put it together and we can solve this important problem. Isn’t that really neat?’ “

Just as passing a national health care law was supposed to be the legacy achievement for Obama, Gruber says that back in 2006, as Romney got ready to run for president, the Massachusetts law also looked like a surefire political winner.

“You can understand his thinking, right? He thought, ‘Look, I can run for president by saying I solved this intractable problem by bringing conservative principles to bear — individual responsibility, the health insurance exchange.’ I mean, there was a guy from the freaking Heritage Institute on the stage with Romney at the bill-signing,” Gruber says. “This was a victory for Republican ideals, a victory for using market forces to solve an intractable problem, and I think that Romney probably thought, ‘Isn’t this a great thing I can run on as a Republican?’ … I would have thought so, too.”

Changing Positions

Over time, Obama and Romney have had a mirror-image relationship with the linchpin of their health care laws: Romney was for the mandate before he was against it. Obama was against the mandate before he was for it.

“The irony is even worse than that,” says Altman, the Brandeis professor. “I worked for Obama during the election and he was adamantly opposed to the individual mandate. … I was on his advisory group, and we said, ‘But you know, you really do need an individual mandate to make this all work together.’ He said, ‘I won’t support that because you’re asking, you know, not wealthy people to buy expensive insurance. We’ve got to get the cost down.’ “

During the 2008 Democratic primary, the mandate was the single biggest policy divide between Obama and opponent Hillary Clinton.

In a debate, candidate Obama blasted Clinton’s plan for an individual mandate by citing the experience in Massachusetts.

“Now, Massachusetts has a mandate right now,” he said. “They have exempted 20 percent of the uninsured — because they’ve concluded that that 20 percent can’t afford it. In some cases, there are people who are paying fines and still can’t afford it, so now they’re worse off than they were. They don’t have health insurance and they’re paying a fine.”

A Shifting Middle

And Romney and Obama have something else in common, Altman says. They were both victims of the same political sea change: The Republican Party got a lot more conservative.

“Obama campaigned that he was going to be a different kind of a president. He was going to get things done; he was going to compromise,” Altman says. “And when he got to Washington, he realized that the Washington that he thought was there wasn’t there anymore. So the movement of the Republicans to the right … hurt Obama and really put Romney in a bind.”

Romney’s bind was apparent in the GOP primaries, when conservatives questioned his ability to attack the president on a plan so similar to his own. But now, with the nomination virtually in hand, Romney is making health care the heart of his argument against the president.

“The president’s plan assumes an endless expansion of government, with rising costs and, of course, with the spread of Obamacare,” Romney says. “I will halt the expansion of government, and I will repeal Obamacare.”

What was once a common bond is now a deep divide.

“I will not go back to the days when insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, or deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men,” Obama says. “We’re not going back there. We’re going forward.”

There is no overlap at all in the two men’s current approaches to health care. If Romney is elected, he’ll work to get rid of the law that was based on his own plan. If the president wins a second term, he will fight to keep what he can. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The show, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, has just been released in its entirety as a DVD box set, which presents the entire run on 24 discs. George Maharis, who starred on Route 66 with Martin Milner, talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about all that travel.

“We never saw the schedule,” Maharis says. “It was week-to-week. We didn’t know where we were going and sometimes we wouldn’t know what the script was until two days before shooting.” In fact, sometimes, it might take a little longer than that to actually get the scripts, since they were sometimes in a city where they wanted to shoot more than one episode, but not all the scripts were done yet. “I remember we were in Cleveland doing the one with Nehemiah Persoff about the Russian Hill, and we were standing on the bridge, and we had no pages — we didn’t know where to go yet. Luckily, they had to raise and lower the bridge, and in the meantime, the plane landed in Cleveland, and a car took the script and brought it to us, because we didn’t know what clothes we were supposed to be in.”

Getting to visit all those places was very much in line, Siegel points out, with the fact that at the time, the drive around the country was a common aspiration; something a lot of people wanted to try. “I can’t tell you how many people wrote to me and told me that’s what they wanted to do after seeing the show,” Maharis agrees. “And they wanted to buy a car and toot around.”

It wasn’t just a show that tooted around, though. It was also one that featured a startling number of people who later became serious movie or TV stars, including Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Suzanne Pleshette, William Shatner, Tuesday Weld, Leslie Nielsen, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Ed Asner and Alan Alda.

Oh, and Lee Marvin, about whom Maharis says, “I remember. I went and pushed him off the fence.” In fact, you’ll find that Maharis can still identify just about any Route 66 clip you want to lay on him, including the one where Robert Duvall plays a drug addict. It’s called “Birdcage On My Foot,” and if you want to see it, it’s right there on the box set. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

This is where impeccably dressed young people hold up handmade signs for hours on end, asking or bartering for screening tickets. Sample trades offered include hugs, made-to-order poetry and back flips — though no one has been more convincing than the girl seeking tickets for Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love by cooing the Ella Fitzgerald standard of the same name.

I was skeptical about this ticket-seeking approach — I have enough trouble getting into screenings as accredited press — but the seekers I spoke to said it’s more effective than you’d expect. People in the movie business get plenty of free tickets, but being in the movie business often makes them too busy to watch movies.

And sure, there are ulterior motives involved in this waiting game — it’s impossible not to be surrounded by tall drinks of water in Dior while ticket-hunting, and someone has to comfort them when they miss out on that new Cronenberg movie. But who cares? It’s the promise, if not the practice, of movie-watching that’s bringing people together — and isn’t that what film festivals are all about?

I’ll refrain from joining in the annual Cannes tradition where critics confidently set odds on awards winners and are proven completely wrong; the random nature of the Cannes jury (sample members this year include Ewan McGregor and fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) makes guessing Cannes awards way more of a crapshoot than your average awards predictions.

But here, to recap the fest, are a few distinctions of my own creation:

Weirdest Movie-To-Movie Conversation: There were giggles in the theater when a doomed Wall Streeter (Robert Pattinson) in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis asked his driver, “Where do these limos go at night?” That question had been memorably answered a few days before, in a scene in Holy Motors where a set of anthropomorphic limos do a kind of Waltons routine and wish each other good night.

The films are unlikely companion pieces in other ways, as well: Both are absurdity-tinged limo journeys into the night toward madness. Cronenberg’s film follows a finance whiz kid who’s confined to his limo by New York traffic and an Occupy-flavored protest movement with a fondness for pelting the wealthy with dead rats.

It’s an odd cinematic construction consisting mostly of recited monologues from Don DeLillo’s source novel, reflecting on capitalism at its most dystopian. You’re as flooded with ideas and data as these currency traders at their blinking touch screens, but Cronenberg amps up the tension with shocking imagery and smart staging; a final 20-minute confrontation between Robert Pattinson’s lead and a downtrodden wannabe assassin (Paul Giamatti) is a particular barnstormer.

And it helps that the film contains the festival’s Most Unexpected Great Performance from Pattinson. He’s appropriately icy and reptilian, but he’s not without an odd persuasive charm; when I say that the character functions like Gordon Gekko crossed with a more literal kind of bloodsucker, I mean it as praise.

Best Between-Screening Meal: It might sound awful to have to eat food-cart hot dogs and crepes all the time while dashing between festival screenings — a decent sit-down meal starts at around 15 euros, assuming you can find a table anywhere. But when even the lowliest-seeming stands offer spicy merguez sausages in freshly baked baguettes, alongside crepes spiked with a bit of Grand Marnier, it becomes very hard to complain.

Scene That Best Represents The Experience Of Watching The Movie Around It: the part in Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy where Nicole Kidman attempts to save Zac Efron from a jellyfish-sting reaction by urinating on his face. The less said about this one, the better.

Most Surprising Use Of Surprise Tactics: I won’t spoil how Abbas Kiarostami gets the audience to jump in his new film Like Someone in Love, but the fact that the famously cerebral, meditative Iranian director (behind films like Certified Copy) even tries is an event.

The movie opens with a girl (Rin Takanashi) on the phone in a Tokyo bar, attempting to convince her boyfriend she’s somewhere she isn’t. It’s the first of many deceptions and mistaken identities in this fascinating puzzle-box of a film.

She’s a college student with a sideline as a call girl, hired for the night by an elderly man (Tadashi Okuno), although he doesn’t seem to have any interest in sex once she gets there. He drives her home the next day, and they run into her boyfriend (Ryo Kase), who assumes the man is her grandfather; no one corrects him. The result is an alternately funny and bizarre story about generation gaps, the survival of the fittest, and the kinds of performances that are a part of love — that “like” in the title is key.

It’s almost impossible to figure out where this gorgeously shot film is going from scene to scene, and though the pace is stately, the result is still exhilarating. You come out of the theater flush with the joy of having seen something that’s not quite like anything you’ve found before. It’s the kind of feeling you always hope for when you come to a place like Cannes. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Growing up, I had pretty much the same interests as any other early 80′s kid: I loved the Muppets and Schoolhouse Rock and I was obsessed with mutually assured nuclear destruction.

In those Cold War days, apocalypse was in the air, from Sting crooning that he hoped the Russians loved their children too, to a made-for-TV spectacle called The Day After, which branded the image of a mushroom cloud into my 12-year-old brain, and inspired me to craft my own survival plan. When the time came, and war seemed imminent, I would hop a plane with my family and head to Australia. There, on that isolated island continent far-removed from the U.S. and the USSR, I would live happily ever after.

Then, one day while browsing the shelves of my middle school library, I picked up On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. A title like that could have inferred young love or a summer idyll.

This was not that book.

Carried by taut, no-nonsense prose, I entered a post-WWIII world, in which nuclear blasts have already eradicated life from the earth’s northern hemisphere. The planet’s only remaining habitable places are parts of Africa, South America, New Zealand and … you guessed it, Australia.

Being old enough to know what catastrophe was, but still young enough to think that it made exceptions, I had that almost inborn childhood instinct that the larger rules of the world — death, war, sickness — applied to everyone but myself. Now, my survival plan had been vindicated in print, and everything I had ever thought about my own exceptionalism had been proven true!

Then I got to page 10.

As it turns out, most of On the Beach is taken up by the people of Australia waiting to die. The radioactive fall-out clouds are drifting ever southward and there’s nothing anyone can do but track their inexorable progress. Peter Holmes, a newlywed with a young wife and baby daughter, is assigned to one of the world’s last remaining submarines, which travels north to investigate the source of a faint radio signal in the hopes of making contact with whoever is sending it.

There is no happy ending. The submarine mission only confirms the thoroughness of the devastation, leaving everyone in Australia — including Peter and his young family — with no option but to try to find small ways to enjoy their remaining time together before succumbing to agonizing radiation sickness or opting out quickly and painlessly with free suicide pills supplied by the government. The only small solace the book offers is that it is possible to face the end with our humanity intact.

By the end of On the Beach, I had come to the sobering realization that nuclear war makes no exceptions, not even for young girls.

I’m grateful to have read On the Beach when I did. At some point, we’re all forced to confront how complicated and heartbreaking life can be, and how often it defies the best-made plans. I can think of no gentler way to have been introduced to that lesson.

PG-13 is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

As The New York Times reports, this is far beyond what the government was expecting when it took over Bankia and “its portfolio of delinquent real estate loans.”

There are conflicting reports as to whether Spain has already agreed to hand over the bailout. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number “Bankia presented Friday have already been agreed with the government…” The Financial Times reports the same thing, but El País, Spain’s biggest paper, says at this moment it is a request, still pending approval from economy ministry and the Bank of Spain.

The New York Times reports:

“Bankia’s announcement came as Standard & Poor’s, the credit ratings agency, downgraded Bankia and two other banks, Banco Popular and Bankinter, to ‘junk’ status and lowered the ratings of two other Spanish banks also staggered by mounting bad loans. A junk rating could make it even harder for Bankia to borrow its way out of trouble.

“The rising fear now is that the recent steady trickle of deposits from Spain’s banks, which are suffering from the bursting of Spain’s real estate bubble, to institutions outside the country could eventually turn into the sort of bank run that almost brought the financial world to its knees after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.”

Providing background, The Guardian reports that Bankia was partly nationalized two-weeks ago, when the country provided a 4.5 billion euro injection of cash. But the estimates of how much more money the bank, which holds 10 percent of Spanish deposits, needed to survive have “been spiralling at an alarming rate.”

The big question here, the Times adds, is where this bailout will come from. Will Spain be able to afford it? Or will the European Union have to step in?

“Analysts increasingly see Spain’s banks needing a bailout from the European Stability Mechanism,” The Guardian reports. “French president François Hollande also believes that will be necessary, though the Spanish government continues to deny it.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

And, last night, during an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seem to give little hope for a resolution.

Amanpour pressed Ban, saying the U.N. keeps stating that the situation in the country is unacceptable, but “what is the plan B?” she asked. “What will be the absolute solution to stopping this carnage?”

“At this time, we don’t have any plan B,” Ban said. “The joint special envoy Kofi Annan has proposed six peace proposals, among which the complete cessation of violence is number one. Unfortunately, this has not been implemented while with the deployment of monitoring missions, we have seen some dampening effect.”

The interview came the same day that the U.N. issued a report that found both sides of the conflict were guilty of committing “gross human rights violations.” The report, however, found that the majority of violations were committed by the regime of President Bashar Assad. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]