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Much Ado About Dickens: Why The Bicentennial Hype Matters

If you are a book lover with an unquenchable taste for kitschy Victoriana, good news: this week, the world has finally caught up with your interests. The occasion: the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’s birth on February 7, 2012. In the United Kingdom, the United States, and in countries around the globe, the event is being [...]

Foreclosure Deal May Mean More Foreclosures This Year

That big, $25 billion mortgage settlement that we’ve been hearing about forever is finally done. The deal involves five big banks and grew out of the robo-signing scandal, where bank employees signed off on thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them. The biggest chunk of the settlement will go toward reducing what underwater borrowers owe [...]

Global Trends Expected To Dominate Fashion Week

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week kicks off Thursday in New York City, where designers will be showing off their fall collections. Robin Givhan, special correspondent for style and culture at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, is in New York to cover the shows. She tells NPR’s Michel Martin that she goes into each Fashion Week with an [...]

Call It ‘Gulf Of America,’ Not Gulf Of Mexico, Mississippi Lawmaker Says

A Democratic member of Mississippi’s state House has introduced legislation that would “for all official purposes within the State of Mississippi,” change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Rep. Stephen Holland’s bill has already drawn criticism from Cafe Con Leche Republicans (its motto: “Republicans who want America and the GOP [...]

Trans Fats Are Leaving The Food Supply And The Body, Study Finds

Remember trans fats? And the big campaigns to get them out of burgers, fries and all kinds of baked goods? Well, those campaigns seem to have worked. A study out this week has found that the amount of trans-fatty acids in some Americans decreased significantly — 58 percent among white adults between 2000 and 2009. [...]

Ban On Insider Trading By Lawmakers Passes House, Heads To Obama’s Desk

By a nearly unanimous vote this morning the House passed the STOCK Act, which as NPR’s Tamara Keith has reported, “would, among other things, explicitly ban insider trading for members of Congress and their staffs.” The vote was 417-2, with 14 members absent. The two nay votes were from Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., and Rep. [...]

Scrappy ‘Girlchild’ Forms A Girl Scout Troop Of One

You’d think that, by now, the news that Americans are spoiling their children would be as attention-getting as the fabled headline, “dog bites man,” but, apparently, we never weary of hearing about how bad we’re doing as parents. Last year, it was the Tiger Mom; this year, a hot new book called Bringing Up Bebe, [...]

Thirty-Eight Cliches In ‘The Vow’ Trailer, Other Than Romantic Amnesia

This weekend marks the release of The Vow, which is not based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, despite having all the gauzy, drowsy look of a Sparks creation. Based on the real-life story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, The Vow tells the tale of a woman (Rachel McAdams) who loses part of her memory after [...]

Time Travel And Photos Of Earth’s ‘Oldest’ Animals

Photographer Piotr Naskrecki presented a hypothetical: “If someone said, ‘We have a dinosaur in Central Africa!’ — would you consider that worthy of conservation? If so, why?” That was his way of putting me in place for asking why anyone would care about a creepy grasshopper in South Africa. Apples and oranges, in a way, [...]

House Passes Bill That Would Ban Insider Trading By Lawmakers

The House on Thursday passed a bill that would ban congressional insider trading. The STOCK Act passed overwhelmingly, 417-2, despite some partisan disagreements over its scope. With congressional approval at all-time lows, the bill was widely seen by lawmakers as a small step in restoring public confidence. But differences remain to be worked out with [...]