When Marc Maron started his podcast "WTF with Marc Maron" out of his garage in September 2009, he was in a dark place: He was going through a divorce, his comedy career had hit a wall and — in his mid-40s — he didn't have a Plan B.
"I was at a place in my life where I had gotten very cynical," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had lost a lot of hope for my comedy and everything else, and I really feel that I was no longer able to really appreciate other people's stories. I had lost my ability to really kind of listen and enjoy the company of other people."
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Celeste Headlee. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, the story of one of the world's biggest and most destructive industries, tourism. Author Elizabeth Becker talks about the explosion in travel since the Cold War.
Tell Me More is celebrating National Poetry Month by hearing poetic tweets from listeners for the 'Muses and Metaphor' series. Today's poems cover Texas, Tennessee and tacos.
Iron Man 3 doesn't open in North America until this Friday (May 3), but this weekend, it's already up and whomping The Avengers at the international box office. The new adventures of Tony Stark, directed and co-written by Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black, brought in $195.3 million. That beat a mere $185.1 million when The Avengers opened internationally to make it the biggest opening weekend ever in a bunch of countries, including Argentina and Indonesia.
Monica Youn, who joined NPR as a NewsPoet last year, works as a lawyer. She says that poetry appears in law more often than you might think — but nobody calls it poetry.
Credit Courtesy Katherine Larson
Katherine Larson was a recent winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. She is also a research scientist — specifically, a molecular biologist.
Originally published on Mon April 29, 2013 12:00 pm
"No man but a blockhead," Samuel Johnson famously observed, "ever wrote, except for money." This is tough news for poets, since the writing they do is often less immediately profitable than a second-grader's math homework (the kid gets a cookie or a hug; the poet gets a rejection letter from The Kenyon Review). Poetry itself is tremendously valuable, of course, but that value is often realized many years after a poem's composition, and sometimes long after the end of its author's life.
Brother and sister Rod Dreher and Ruthie Leming grew up in a small town in rural Louisiana. Dreher left the tightknit community to pursue a journalism career but returned home after Leming died of lung cancer in 2010.
Credit Debbie Elliot / NPR
"People waited for hours for her wake to come in and pay their respects," Dreher says of the United Methodist Church where his sister was buried. "It was a moment of intense grace."
Credit Debbie Elliott / NPR
Ruthie Leming's friends and Rod Dreher (right) gather for a crawfish boil at Ronnie Morgan's camp by the Starhill Riviera. "When I'm gone," Morgan says, "the only thing that's going to show up to say I was here is the people I left behind."
Credit Debbie Elliott / NPR
The Drehers — Lucas (from left), Rod, Matthew, Julie and Nora — sit on the side stoop at their new home in St. Francisville, La.
When he was a teenager, journalist Rod Dreher couldn't wait to escape Louisiana. Now he has found his way home again in grief — after his sister's death from lung cancer. It was "in light" of that tragedy, Dreher says, that he discovered the value of community. It's the subject of his new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life.
Credit Michael Freeman / National Buildling Museum
The elaborately tiled City Hall subway station in New York City — still extant but now closed to the public, alas — used the Guastavino touch to convince wary city dwellers to head underground for a train trip.
Credit Michael Freeman / National Building Museum
A closeup of the bar in New York City's Vanderbilt Hotel shows the intricate detail of the Guastavino Co.'s elegant ceiling work.
Credit Michael Freeman / National Building Museum
A Guastavino ceiling in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Credit Michael Freeman / National Building Museum
The Guastavino touch also extened to palaces of a more private sort. Pictured here is the entrance hall of the famous Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C.
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
"War" by Touka Neyestani: Neyestani received a degree in architecture from Tehran's Science and Industry University, and has been a cartoonist for more than 30 years.
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
"Censorship" by Touka Neyestani.
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
"House Arrest" by Nikahang Kowsar: Mir Hossein Mousavi, a presidential candidate in the disputed 2009 presidential election, and his wife have been under house arrest with no charge brought against them, since early 2011.
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
This Touka Neyestani cartoon, "Media and Power," appears in Sketches of Iran alongside an essay by Iranian journalist Nooshabeh Amiri. Amiri writes about the perils of reporting under Ayatollah Khomeini in the late '70s.
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
"Mostafa Tajzadeh" by Nikahang Kowsar: After Iran's 2009 elections, Tajzadeh was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison. His charges included "propaganda against the regime."
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
"Nasrin Sotoudeh" by Afshin Sabouki: Sotoudeh is an Iranian human rights lawyer and an advocate for women, children and prisoners of conscience. She is serving a six-year sentence for charges including "membership in the Defenders of Human Rights Center."
Credit International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
"House Arrest" by Nikahang Kowsar: Mir Hossein Mousavi, a presidential candidate in the disputed 2009 presidential election, and his wife have been under house arrest with no charge brought against them, since early 2011.
Credit Courtesy Omid Memarian
Omid Memarian is an Iranian journalist who moved to the U.S. in 2005.
April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, Weekend Edition is talking with younger poets about why they chose to write poetry and why it's still important in our everyday lives. This week, we spoke to Bangladeshi-American poet Dilruba Ahmed.
Foodie fiction has become a veritable genre, devoted to deliciousness, to making your mouth water, to making you feel suddenly, irrevocably starved — and to making everything, sprouts and bologna included, an aphrodisiac. But what happens when enough is enough? Or when, perhaps, you're on a diet, or a deserted island, or attempting celibacy, or learning to live without gluten? What happens when you're hungry for the kind of fiction that concerns food but isn't in love with food — and thereby won't make you hungry, or lustful, or both?
On-air challenge: For each given category, name something in the category where the first letter is also the first letter of the category. For example, given "Military Ranks," you would say "Major."
Last week's challenge: Name a geographical location in two words — nine letters altogether — that, when spoken aloud, sounds roughly like four letters of the alphabet. What is it?
9(MDAxODM1NzQ4MDEyMTY5MTAwMDcyNjIyOQ004))
