NPR’s Mobile Home Series

A two-part report on conditions at mobile home parks in the U.S. Read parts one and two here.

Source: NPR
Published: Dec 26, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,500 words)

Carrie Fisher’s ‘Fresh Air’ Interview

“Oh, I think I do overshare, and I sometime marvel that I do it. But it’s sort of – in a way, it’s my way of trying to understand myself. I don’t know. I get it out of my head. It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don’t know – I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too.”

Source: NPR
Published: Nov 28, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)

A Father Vows To Save His Daughter From A Plight He Got Her Into

Six years ago a father in a village in Northern India married his 15-year-old daughter to a man who was in his 40s and had a reputation as a heavy drinker. He vowed to fix his mistake.

Source: NPR
Published: Aug 15, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,700 words)

People Keep Talking About ‘The Establishment.’ What Is It, Anyway?

A look at the rise of the term “the establishment,” and what it means—especially in the context of the 2016 election.

Source: NPR
Published: Feb 11, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,600 words)

Berkeley Breathed on the Return of ‘Bloom County’ After 25 Years

An NPR Fresh Air interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist on reviving his comic strip on Facebook, and how social media has changed his relationship with fans.

Author: Sam Briger
Source: NPR
Published: Oct 14, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,386 words)

How to Be Alone

Musicians confront solitude.

Author: Ann Powers
Source: NPR
Published: Apr 1, 2015
Length: 11 minutes (2,823 words)

A Girl, A Shoe, A Prince

Cinderella contains multitudes, and her evolutions are myriad. A brief cultural history.

Source: NPR
Published: Mar 13, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,860 words)

Fresh Air Interview: Joaquin Phoenix

Awkward, wonderful interview with an actor who hates to be interviewed:

PHOENIX: If I was driving and I heard this, I’d be – I’d change the channel.

GROSS: I wouldn’t.

PHOENIX: I’d be like, why – can you shut up?

GROSS: Really? Does it bother you like that?

PHOENIX: No. I mean, I don’t know, sometimes I just, you know, I just think, who cares?

GROSS: We, who love movies, care. Does that help answer the question?

PHOENIX: OK.

Source: NPR
Published: Jan 25, 2014
Length: 36 minutes (9,222 words)

Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt

A multimedia report on how the global economy works, from the perspective of the people making a T-shirt for NPR:

In the case of the Planet Money T-shirt, the buyer is Jockey. The company told us that the pattern of pulling out when wages rise may be coming to an end for now, because there’s no country that’s ready to replace Bangladesh as the cheapest place in the world to make clothes.

Wages in Bangladesh are going to rise, Marion Smith, a senior vice president at Jockey, told us. “That’s good news from a humanitarian point of view.”

Author: Editors
Source: NPR
Published: Dec 1, 2013

The Whitest Historically Black College In America

How Bluefield State, a historically black college, became a school where 90 percent of the students are now white:

“In 1966, the state picked Wendell G. Hardway to lead the college — the school’s first white president. Deirdre Guyton, who runs the college’s alumni affairs department, said that Hardway was the first president to live off campus rather than at Hatter Hall, the house in the center of campus named for the school’s black founder. By 1968, according to the book Bluefield State College Centennial History, Hardway had hired 23 new faculty members — all of whom were white. The book goes on to say that the college’s dedicated faculty, which had been all-black as recently as 1954, was only 30 percent black by 1967. If there was a tug of war over what the college was going to be, many of the black alumni and students felt they were losing. Bluefield State was quickly becoming unrecognizable.

“That tug of war looked a lot like battles being waged across the country, like the growing divide between black folks who believed in nonviolence as an avenue to black progress and those who felt that method was taking too long and yielding too little. During halftime at homecoming in 1967, black students staged a demonstration on the football field to protest what they saw as Hardway’s discrimination against black faculty and students. Things got rowdy. The police were called. Students were suspended.”

Source: NPR
Published: Oct 18, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,665 words)