by NPR STAFF December 8, 2011 npr.com The Civil War ended slavery in America. So why, asks author Ta-Nehisi Coates, do African-Americans, who benefited most from the conflict, take so little interest in it? Coates, a confessed Civil War obsessive, wrote about that question in his recent article, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the [...]
November 8, 2011 npr.com Dogs have aided humans for thousands of years. Man’s best friend has provided protection, companionship and hunting assistance since the days of the earliest human settlements. But how and when dogs evolved from wolves is a matter of debate. Naturalist Mark Derr says there are two main schools of thought: Some [...]
by JOE PALCA November 8, 2011 npr.com It doesn’t happen often, but there are times when a single book turns the world on its head. Isaac Newton’s Principia unraveled the mystery of gravity. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species explained how evolution worked. But before either of these, there was On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus. [...]
by NPR STAFF October 2, 2011 In September 1957, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that outlawed racially segregated schools, the governor of Arkansas posted the National Guard at the front door of Little Rock Central High School. Despite the local school board’s agreement to integrate classes, he was determined to prevent black [...]
By DAVID KAUFMAN Wednesday, August 31, 2011 time.com Even with an African American couple in the White House, the fate of the black family in America has never been so precarious. That’s the message behind Is Marriage for White People?, a new book by Stanford Law professor Ralph Richard Banks. Researched and written over the past [...]
By JOEL BROUWER Published: August 26, 2011 nytimes.com I won’t blame you for not believing this: The photograph on the cover of Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars” is the same one I see every day on my computer desktop. It’s a dramatic and vivid picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, with colors I imagine [...]
By STEPHEN KING Published: August 25, 2011 nytimes.com Given the subject of his new novel, “The Leftovers,” probably no one followed the story of the noted evangelical (and former Internet hottie) Harold Camping more closely than Tom Perrotta, a novelist who is to the suburban enclaves of America what Sherwood Anderson was to Ohio. I’m betting [...]
August 25, 2011 Earlier this year, California-based preacher Harold Camping announced that the beginning of the end of the world would take place on May 21, 2011. The date passed by with no apparent rapture, and Camping became the butt of many late-night talk show jokes. But what if the rapture did actually occur? That’s [...]
July 16, 2011 npr.com Though generations of schoolchildren have cursed arithmetic, the world was a much more inconvenient place without it. Before the advent of modern arithmetic in the 13th century, basic calculations required a physical abacus. But then came a young Italian mathematician named Leonardo da Pisa — no relation to da Vinci — [...]
Listen to the story… Third In A Three-Part Series July 13, 2011 Much of America as we know it evolved in the 19th century, as we’ll explore in a series of three conversations this week with writers who seek out new ways to understand old events. In 1979, 19th-century activist Susan B. Anthony became the [...]
By BILL KELLER Published: July 7, 2011 nytimes.com Click to play audio interview (MP3) … John Julius Norwich makes a point of saying in the introduction to his history of the popes that he is “no scholar” and that he is “an agnostic Protestant.” The first point means that while he will be scrupulous with [...]
by ROBERT KRULWICH npr.com Here are seven random numbers. Sort of like a telephone number, but arranged vertically. Take a glance — just a glance — then pause, take out a piece of paper and see how many you can recall. Done? According to the French neurologist and mathematician Stanislas Dehaene, about 50 percent of [...]
July 6, 2011 npr.com In the summer of 1893, President Grover Cleveland disappeared for four days to have secret surgery on a yacht. It was the beginning of his second term as president and the country was entering a depression, a delicate time in which a president’s health was inextricably linked to that of the [...]
by NPR STAFF June 24, 2011 npr.com A lonely young New Yorker finds a puppy while jogging. A middle class couple tries navigating the treacherous waters of admission to a sought-after preschool. A new mother grows jealous of the chic and thin mom living across the hall. It’s all stuff you may have seen before [...]
npr.com June 26, 2011 Yotam Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian, but recently, his name has become known for the preparation of vegetables — both in the London shops that bear his name and in his column, “The New Vegetarian,” that has run for the last five years in the British newspaper The Guardian. Those columns were collected [...]
Your brain doesn’t like to keep secrets. Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, have shown that writing down secrets in a journal or telling a doctor your secrets actually decreases the level of stress hormones in your body. Keeping a secret, meanwhile, does the opposite. Your brain also doesn’t like stress hormones. So when [...]
By TOM VANDERBILT Published: June 3, 2011 nytimes.com Evangelizing cyclists will often pronounce, in a moment of populist zeal, something like: “It doesn’t matter what you ride, as long as you ride.” This is a rather oleaginous half-truth spread across a larger reality. It may not matter what you ride, but it matters deeply what I [...]
by NPR STAFF May 17, 2011 npr.com Traffic. Mosquitoes. People who snap their gum. People who crack their knuckles. There are so many things in the world that are just downright annoying. But what makes them annoying? It’s the question that NPR Science Correspondent Joe Palca and Science Friday’s Flora Lichtman set out to answer in their [...]
by NPR STAFF npr.com Listen to the story… British author Robert Penn has ridden a bicycle almost every day for the past 36 years. He owns six bikes — for summer riding, winter riding, everyday commuting and everything in between. But not one was exactly right. Penn needed the perfect bike. He writes about his quest [...]
If you want to learn about success, talk to a successful person. If you want to learn about failure, talk to a very successful person. In his new book Fail Up, TV and radio host Tavis Smiley offers lessons on how to turn life’s setbacks into success. 2011 marks Smiley’s 20th year in broadcast — and that [...]
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