As a dedicated NPR listener (I can't really manage to get any other channel on my shower radio), I appreciate that the station balances hard and sometimes depressing news coverage with lighter pieces on pop culture. But the more vocal listeners of public radio hate it, leaving some to wonder if they're just a bunch of complaining snobs. In a piece for Slate, noninsufferable NPR listener Farhad Read more

If teens have sex in real life, why can't they on television? The question has already been asked, and the answer is usually "because ad revenues say so." But today Robert Thompson, a professor of culture at Syracuse University, pinned TV and film up against books by asking how is Skins different than explicit sex and adult plot lines in literature. Well, we could end the argument by saying more Read more

Dear Diary...lots of girls keep their thoughts under lock and key. It's said that many girls grow up believing they can do anything and then become tweens and lose that confidence. The Hidden World of Girls Project gives parents some insight into the minds of their daughters. NPR's initiative asks women to take a picture of a diary page of their youth and upload it to Flickr in an effort to Read more

I love this story! The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting Robert Frank's photographs from his landmark 1959 work The Americans, widely viewed as the photographic analogue to Jack Kerouac's beat classic On the Road. Frank and Kerouac both had similar sensibilities, wanting to show the sprawling, diverse, and melancholy side of postwar America. Kerouac, in fact, wrote the Read more

I've had a love/hate relationship with Ayelet Waldman for some time, but the more I read her work and listen to her speak, the more I realize that my ambivalence is with the subjects she discusses more than it is with her: motherhood, work, feminism, and the idea of "having it all." Waldman, whose husband is writer Michael Chabon, caused a bit of controversy a few years ago when she declared (in Read more