Jet-Lagged By Your Social Calendar? Better Check Your Waistline : The Salt : NPR →

“Unfortunately, we have caveman’s hard-core wiring,” Emsellem says, “and insufficient sleep in primitive times was read by the body: Danger, store fat,” she says.

this is what I'm listening to while writing reports →

TGIF y’all. Santigold is really doing it for me.

Jeremy Hobson

Jeremy signed off the Market Report by saying, “looking for my donut serving unicorn.” This after he read the funniest letter ever written by a student to a meteorologist who visited his classroom. As soon as I get that letter, I will blog it.

this transcription has made me late for work

but it’s worth it. YOU’RE WELCOME! 

Dr. Mr. Ramone,

Thank you for coming to our school and teaching us about the weather. Someday when I become supreme ultra lord of the universe you will live in my 200 story castle where unicorn servants will feed you donuts off their horns.

You are more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon riding a cyborg unicorn.

if you need to listen for yourself, you can do so here. it’s at the end.

View high resolution

NPR is streaming First Aid Kit’s new album. 

I Love NPR/I Hate NPR « The What →

2. Peter Overby, Correspondent, Power, Money and Influence, Washington Desk
Sounds like he has two sets of braces and a tennis ball in his mouth

i finally googled ‘peter overby lisp’ and this is what i found. hahahahaha. the comments are pretty funny too. 

'Times' Advice Guru Answers Your Social Q's : NPR →

this interview is great! i make it a point to read the social q’s column every week. 

Drowned Gods: A Holy Holiday Leaves A Huge Mess

Ganesh is a Hindu festival that takes place at the end of each summer, particularly in Mumbai. Traditionally, clay statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of beginnings and remover of obstacles, are placed in homes and worshiped for the duration of the 10-day festival. At the end, the statues are immersed in water (such as a river) and left to float away.

while i was on vacation i read empire of the summer moon: quanah parker and the rise and fall of the comanches, the most powerful indian tribe in american history by s.c. gwynne.

it was utterly fascinating and incredibly violent. i found myself very curious about native american history and how it relates to violence and wars we see in modern times.

terry gross interviewed the author on fresh air. she describes the comanche raids as, “gruesome.” the author, s.c. gwynne, describes what happens on a typical raid.

“This is what Indians did to Indians and this just happened to be Indians meeting whites. But the automatic thing in battle is that all the adult males would be killed. That was automatic. That was one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. The white men were astonished by it but they were assumed that they would be killed. Small children were killed. Very small children were killed. A lot of the children in say, the 3-10 range were often taken as captives. The women were often raped and often killed. And all of the people in those settlements back in those years knew what a Comanche raid was — knew what a Comanche raid meant. … And it’s an interesting kind of moral question as a historian about Plains Indians or American Indians in general. You have to come to terms with this — with torture, which they practiced all across the West — and these kind of grisly practices that scared white people to death.”

Kurt Vonnegut: Still Speaking To The War Weary : NPR →

The central theme in Vonnegut’s fiction from the 1960s is the irrationality of governments and the senseless destruction of war. In a 1987 interview, Vonnegut said he was determined to write about war without romanticizing it.

“My own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we’re still trying to recover from that,” he said. “Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.”

i read this article on NPR’s website back in may. 3 months later, it’s still on my mind. currently listening to breakfast of champions read by stanley tucci and i am very much enjoying it. kurt vonnegut does it for me. to be clear, i am anti-war.

"You know, I speak from just being older than you, rather more experience maybe than what you might have. It’s not a mutually exclusive process, I mean just because somebody breaks your heart doesn’t mean you don’t break theirs and you’re never beyond getting your heart broken."

Scott Simon

"You’re never beyond getting your heart broken."

Scott Simon