Tag: NPR

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Rock Hudson photographed by Werner Stoy, c. early 1950s

‘All That Heaven Allows’ Examines Rock Hudson’s Life As A Closeted Leading Man

Rock Hudson lived a double life as a Hollywood heartthrob and a closeted gay man. He was a leading man in the 50’s and 60s, known as “The Beefcake.” Off screen, in his public life, he had to play the part of a heterosexual—or else his career would have been ruined. Biographer Mark Griffin says Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985 was a turning point in public awareness of the epidemic. “Ironically, he was suddenly the hero of thousands of gay men,” Griffin says. 

nprbooks:

WHOOOO IT’S COMING TOMORROW!!! The NPR Book Concierge goes live at 5am, so get ready to nerd out about more than 300 great books, hand-picked for you by our staffers and critics! (You can find it at npr.org/bestbooks, though that won’t point to this year’s edition until 5am on Tuesday the 27th.) Happy reading!

– Petra

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Queen guitarist Brian May, speaking with Terry Gross in 2010 

TERRY GROSS: Have you heard the Muppets version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?

BRIAN MAY: Yes, of course, of course!

GROSS: It’s really fun. Can I play that for our listeners?

MAY: Yeah, you can. Well, we’d had to have heard it because it’s us on the record. You know, they asked us if they could do it. And they said, “Look; we can sing this, and we can perform it. But we can’t really play it. So can we use your actual track?” So…

GROSS: Oh, I see. I see.

MAY: Generally we don’t let anybody do that. But in this case, because it’s the venerable Muppets, we said, yes, we’ll do that with you. 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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Crackling Heist Thriller ‘Widows’ Takes On Issues Of Race, Class And Gender

Steve McQueen’s new film centers on four women who come together to pull off a $5 million robbery. Critic Justin Chang says:

“What do you do after you’ve made three studiously grim art films about an Irish prison revolt, an out-of-control sex addict and the horrors of slavery? If you’re Steve McQueen, the British director of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, you cut loose with a crackling heist thriller featuring a juicy cast of A-list actors at the top of their game. But McQueen being McQueen, he can’t help doing this grand-scale Hollywood entertainment his way. As tense and sinuous and gripping as much of it is, Widows never feels like escapism. It has as much to say about how race, class, gender and politics intersect in American life as any movie I’ve seen this year.”

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tcm:

See Jane Russell in THE OUTLAW (‘43) tomorrow at 2:30PM ET/11:30AM PT

‘Sex, Lies And Stardom’: Exploitation In Howard Hughes’ Hollywood

Billionaire filmmaker Howard Hughes has long been regarded as one of Hollywood’s most eccentric and prolific playboys. A few years back, writer and film critic Karina Longworth stumbled onto an online message board, listing women Hughes had had sexual relationships with – just a list of names, no other information.

“In each of these names there’s a whole life and a whole story,” says Longworth, who hosts the film podcast You Must Remember This.

Longworth’s new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, tells a story of big-screen exploitation by focusing on 10 women who had relationships with Hughes.

In some instances, Longworth says, Hughes “was getting studio contracts for women based on a sexual relationship they had already had or the promise of a sexual relationship to come.”

Longworth sees a direct link between Hughes’ behavior and the issues raised by the #MeToo movement.

“The thing that I’ve come to understand from studying the 20th century of Hollywood is that these things have always happened and they were never talked about publicly,” she says. “Just the fact that we’re having a conversation is completely revolutionary.”

The census is basically the DNA for our democracy. It is the baseline for which so many things are done. The census determines how $675 billion is distributed to states and localities. The census determines how legislative districts are drawn. The census determines the composition of the Electoral College. So if this question about citizenship is added to the census, places like California and New York and Texas — which actually, funnily enough, is a red state — they could receive fewer members of Congress, they could have less influence in the Electoral College, they could have less money going to their states. And then places like Kansas, where there are fewer immigrants, where it’s a lot whiter and more Republican, they’re going to have more political power if this question about citizenship is added to the census like Kris Kobach wants.

Ari Berman on why the census matters (Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state, is an advocate for a question citizenship on the census)

‘Let the People See’ is a timely book about the fragility of collective memory and about the courage and persistence of journalists — particularly black journalists — some of whom risked their lives in 1955 to get the facts of the Emmett Till story before the public. Most of all though, ‘Let the People See’ is a vivid reminder of just how easy it is for people not to see things they’d rather not see.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan, reviewing Let The People See, about Emmett Till’s murder and legacy (via nprfreshair)

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‘Hey, Kiddo’ Aims To Help Kids With Addicted Parents Feel Less Alone

When author and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka was in the fourth grade, his grandparents called him into the living room. “I remember thinking: Oh maybe we’re going to go on another family vacation,” he says. (The last time they called a family meeting he learned they were going to Disney World.)

But this wasn’t that kind of family meeting. Krosoczka’s grandparents had insisted on taking legal custody of him as a toddler — and they were about to tell him why.

“My grandfather sat me down on the couch,” Krosoczka recalls. “And he said: ‘It’s time we tell you the truth about your mother. She’s in jail and she’s a drug addict and that’s why she’s been gone all this time.’ ”

Krosoczka had seen his mother only sporadically since age 2. He had never met his father.

Throughout his childhood, Krosoczka kept this painful information hidden. “I didn’t tell anybody for the longest time …” he says. “When you have these addictions in your families, you sort of live this duality. You have this thing that you hold back from people and you put your best face forward.”

Krosoczka wasn’t an athletic or social kid. Drawing was his refuge, his way of making friends, and his way of dealing with life. “Maybe that’s [where] my storytelling skills began,” he says. “By my making up excuses for where my biological parents were.”

As an adult, Krosoczka became a graphic novelist — publishing books for young readers such as the “Lunch Lady” and the “Platypus Police Squad” series. He considered writing about his own life, but worried his story was too dark.

It wasn’t until he began meeting young fans with similar life stories that he changed his mind. Krosoczka’s new book Hey, Kiddo, tells the story of his mother’s addiction and incarceration from the point of view of his 17-year-old self.

“It took a long time for me to gain that courage to make this book …” he says. “I feel like I owe it to these readers to put myself out there.”

nprbooks:

“It’s hard to make time for history books when there is so much history crashing down on us every single day — and especially when that history is divisive, aggressive and seemingly never-ending,” says NPR’s Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow.

Case in point: This book review was due a week ago. Rather than finish this assignment, I spent the week in Senate hallways and hearing rooms, watching in real time as the most contentious Supreme Court confirmation in a generation turned into a national flashpoint on sexual assault and gender politics.

Luckily, he says, three of America’s most prominent and accessible historians are here to help us put everything in context – check out his full roundup here.

– Petra

Rape culture… is a term that really tries to connect the dots between an American society that turns this blind eye to sexual assault and the true experience of girls, which is that they are experiencing a lot of sexual assault. So this rape culture is a culture where there are rape myths – that a woman’s outfit or her alcohol consumption has caused her rape – and nobody questions these attitudes that box in the victim. It doesn’t matter that you were dressed a certain way, or it doesn’t matter how much you drank. … So what we really see among this young generation is this refusal to participate in that culture, and also very differently than the ‘90s, when I was in college, back then … what we were taught is carry mace, go to a self-defense class, protect yourself because ‘boys will be boys,’ and the best you can do is make sure that you’re safe on your own. These girls are saying, ‘No! It’s not our problem, it’s YOUR problem. It’s boys that have to change. It’s the institutions that have to change.’ This is about institutional accountability.

Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of Blurred Lines, on campus assault (via nprfreshair)

Jails are accelerants of human misery, and what they often do… is take very difficult, complicated life circumstances and exacerbate challenges that individuals and families and communities are facing. The idea that the default system should be money bail or jail for a broad range of offenses is not normatively defensible, or does it necessarily promote public safety.

Julian Adler, co-author of Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (via nprfreshair)

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Sleep Scientist Warns Against Walking Through Life ‘In An Underslept State’

The National Sleep Foundation recommends an average of eight hours of sleep per night for adults, but sleep scientist Matthew Walker says that too many people are falling short of the mark.

“Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain,” Walker says. “Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.”

Walker is the director the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He points out that lack of sleep — defined as six hours or fewer — can have serious consequences. Sleep deficiency is associated with problems in concentration, memory and the immune system, and may even shorten lifespan.

“Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep,” he says. “So that classic maxim that you may [have] heard that you can sleep when you’re dead, it’s actually mortally unwise advice from a very serious standpoint.”

Walker discusses the importance of sleep — and offers strategies for getting the recommended eight hours — in his new book, Why We Sleep.

We’re rebroadcasting this interview today. Sleep tight!

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Opinion: U.S. And U.K. Remain United, Not Divided, By Their Common Language

“Great Britain and the United States are two nations separated by a common language.”

That’s the stock witticism, but if you ask me, it gets things backwards. Great Britain and the U.S. are more like two nations united by a divided language — or more precisely, by their mutual obsession with their linguistic differences. For 200 years now, writers from each nation have been tirelessly picking over the language of the other, with a mix of amusement, condescension, derision and horror.

Christophe Lehenaff/Getty Images/Photononstop RF

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Behind Bars, Mentally Ill Inmates Are Often Punished For Their Symptoms

By some accounts, nearly half of America’s incarcerated population is mentally ill — and journalist Alisa Roth argues that most aren’t getting the treatment they need.

Roth has visited jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta and a rural women’s prison in Oklahoma to assess the condition of mentally ill prisoners. She says correctional officers are on the “front lines” of mental health treatment — despite the fact that they lack clinical training.

“Most of [the correctional officers] will talk about how this is not what they signed up,” Roth says. “Most of them have not had much training in dealing with mental illness — or they’ve had none at all.”

Roth witnessed high-risk prisoners in solitary confinement or chained up or wearing restrictive jumpsuits — which tended to exacerbate the prisoners’ distress.

Therapy, when available, was often conducted under stressful conditions. Roth describes one session in the Los Angeles County jail that took place through the slots of a cell door — forcing the prisoner and therapist to yell to be heard.

“The entire [jail] tier can hear everything that you’re saying,” Roth says. “Especially in a place where showing any weakness can be really dangerous … people are particularly unlikely to disclose anything personal or her that would make them vulnerable.”

Roth chronicles her findings in the book, Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness.

Photo: Roy Scott/Getty Images/Ikon Images

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‘Art Of The Wasted Day’ Makes A Case For Letting The Mind Wander

Book critic Maureen Corringan says:

Patricia Hampl, you had me at your title: The Art of the Wasted Day.

Imagine a book that celebrates daydreaming, that sees it not as a moral failing, but as an activity to be valued as an end in itself. To be clear, this is not a self-help book; nor is Hampl talking about meditation, yogic breathing or mindfulness — those worthy New Age practices that, well, have to be practiced.

Instead, Hampl’s intrigued by the kind of instinctual, floaty, aimless daydreaming that many of us, if we were lucky, indulged in for hours and hours as children. As adults, of course, we feel like we need to have something to show for our time: achievements, chores, to-do list items crossed off.

nprbooks:

You can argue about the numbering – yes, Superman #1000 is out this week, but there have been so many reboots, special issues, deaths and rebirths that it’s impossible to know for sure what issue number this really is. But our critic Glen Weldon says it’s not about the numbers. No, “It’s the belt, kids. The yellow belt. It’s always been about the yellow belt.“

The tale of a super-accessory, here.

– Petra

nprbooks:

Ronan Farrow just won the Pulitzer Prize for stories he wrote for The New Yorker, but before uncovering sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein for the magazine, he worked at the State Department as a special adviser in the Obama administration.

In War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Farrow writes about his time at the State Department and what he sees as a dangerous whittling away of the agency’s influence through mass firings and efforts to cut its budget.

Hear his conversation with NPR’s Rachel Martin here.

– Petra

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First-Ever Evictions Database Shows: ‘We’re In the Middle Of A Housing Crisis’

For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that approximately 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 — a rate of four every minute.

“Eviction isn’t just a condition of poverty; it’s a cause of poverty,” Desmond says. “Eviction is a direct cause of homelessness, but it also is a cause of residential instability, school instability [and] community instability.”

Desmond won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. His latest project is The Eviction Lab, a team of researchers and students at Princeton University dedicated to amassing the nation’s first-ever database of eviction. To date, the Lab had collected 83 million records from 48 states and the District of Columbia.

“We’re in the middle of a housing crisis and that means more and more people are giving more and more of their income to rent and utilities,” Desmond says. “Our hope is that we can take this problem that’s been in the dark and bring it into the light.”