When Our Kids Own America
The U.S. is experiencing significant demographic changes. In 2011, people of color made up more than half of all the country’s births. A look at the cultural shift that’s occurring as young people begin to inherit the country:
“Demographic changes — even seismic changes like those the U.S. is going through — happen over decades. It will be a long time before this young, much more plural America starts to fully reveal patterns of employment, migration, housing and wealth. But these young folks are already starting to create culture, and it bears taking a close look at what they’re making to see what it might augur about the world they’re going to inherit.”
David Rakoff’s ‘Half Empty’ Worldview Is Full Of Wit
An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer:
“GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you’re in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you did in your 20s?
“Mr. RAKOFF: Yes, I think I am. I think – well, first of all, the cancer that I had in my 20s was, I even referred to it as the dilettante cancer. You know, it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, eminently curable and just a whole different ballgame from what I’ve got now.
“And I was a little less interested in knowing about the cancer back then in my 20s. I was sort of like, well, do whatever you need to do. I’m just going to sit here and lie back and think of England.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
[Fiction] Excerpt from What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award: A father tells his son the truth about a man who beat him during wartime:
“Not long into the fighting, an Israeli platoon came to rest at a captured Egyptian camp to the east of Bir Gafgafa, in the Sinai Desert. There Private Shimmy Gezer (formerly Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland) sat down to eat at a makeshift outdoor mess. Four armed commandos sat down with him. He grunted. They grunted. Shimmy dug into his lunch.
“A squad mate of Shimmy came over to join them. Professor Tendler (who was then only Private Tendler, not yet a pro- fessor, and not yet even in possession of a high school degree) placed the tin cup that he was carrying on the edge of the table, taking care not to spill his tea. Then he took up his gun and shot each of the commandos in the head.”
The Fresh Air Interview: ‘South Park’s’ Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Mr. PARKER: So let’s make it look like it was “Family Guy” and not us. So then that gave us the whole idea for the show, that we would put “Family Guy” in the show and only have Muhammad appear in the “Family Guy” part. So if they ever saw a still of it on the Internet, or they ever saw anything, they’d know it was “Family Guy” and not us. And then they would get bombed and not us.
The MP3: A History Of Innovation And Betrayal
“I don’t like the title ‘The Father of MP3,'” says Karlheinz Brandenburg. But he kinda is. “Certainly I was involved all the time from basic research [to] getting it into the market.” Brandenburg was part of the group that gave the MP3 its name. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) lent its name to the process of digital encoding by which audio and video is compressed into a file small enough to be transferred easily. That process — MPEG Audio Layer III — and the resulting file — the MP3 — is ubiquitous today. But the development wasn’t simple, and its outcome wasn’t inevitable.
The Fresh Air Interview: Church of Scientology, Fact-Checked
Interview with The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright on his Paul Haggis vs. Scientology story. “GROSS: There was a meeting that you refer to in your article about Scientology, where people from the New Yorker staff met with representatives from Scientology. What was this meeting about? Mr. WRIGHT: That was one of the most amazing days of my life. I had been out to Los Angeles to interview Tommy Davis over the Memorial Day weekend. And when he finally did come to meet with me, he said that he had decided not to talk to me. But I asked him if he would agree at least to, you know, to respond to our fact-checking queries about the church. And he agreed to that. And over a period of time, we sent them 971 fact-checking queries, which alarmed them.”
The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers
“Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that when you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who gets the call? Huh? And I’ll tell you how you deal with that. You go through it, and you make jokes about it, and you continue with it, and you move forward. That’s how you do it, or that’s how I do it. Everyone handles things differently. How do you make jokes about how to deal with bankruptcy? How do you deal with your fired from Fox when your numbers were still good, and you can’t get a job for a year and a half? You do it. And I do it by making jokes.”
The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z
GROSS: You know how a lot of hip-hop artists, when they’re on stage they kind of like grab their crotch?
JAY-Z: Yeah. I have a great explanation for that. … When you get up there [on stage] you feel naked, right? So when you feel naked what’s the first thing you do? You cover yourself. So that bravado is an act of I am so nervous right now and I’m scared to death. I’m going to act so tough that I’m going to hide it. And I have to grab, you know, my crotch. That’s just what happens.
Tracy Morgan On Being ‘The New Black’
Book excerpt. “I’m not going to lie: I know I’ve got a natural talent that has seen me through my trials and tribulations. Being funny has been my bulletproof vest. This mouth of mine and my goofy face have kept me from getting shot many times, particularly that one time when I stole a drug dealer’s girl. Being funny wasn’t a career choice growing up, it was my way out of situations, a way to survive another day. In the end, it also freed me from my environment.”