Arts

Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) and Miss Shepherd (Maggie Smith) are both forceful personalities, but The Lady in the Van excels at brining out undercurrents of frailty.

Arts

Movie Review: 'The Lady In The Van'

4:07pm December 03, 2015

by Bob Mondello

The Lady in the Van is the true story of a homeless woman who moved into a playwright's driveway for three weeks and stayed for 15 years. NPR film critic Bob Mondello says it's both funny and frail.

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German nudist August Engelhardt sits in front of his thatched tent-like hut on the island of Kabakon (in what is now Papua New Guinea) with the books that he brought with him from Germany. In 1902, he moved to the South Pacific to start a utopian cult tha

Books
Arts

Death By Coconut: A Story Of Food Obsession Gone Too Far

3:51pm December 03, 2015

by Nina Martyris

August Engelhardt believed coconuts were a nutritional and spiritual panacea. So in 1902, he sailed to the South Pacific to start a utopian cult that survived only on the fruit. It ended calamitously.

Top CIA 'Spymasters' Agree: We Can't Kill Our Way Out Of Terrorism

1:42pm December 03, 2015

Filmmakers Chris Whipple and Jules Naudet discuss their Showtime documentary, Spymasters, which features 12 former CIA directors discussing the tough choices they've had to make in fighting terrorism.

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I Second That Emotion

11:40am December 03, 2015

Invisibilia hosts Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel talk about science, story, and self-help.

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Arts

National Public Roundup

10:53am December 03, 2015

We put the "fun" in "funding credits" in this game where we tweak NPR's classic on-air acknowledgements.

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Arts

Fictional Full Names

10:53am December 03, 2015

We quiz contestants on some famous characters known only by their nickname.

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Arts

Living On My Hair

10:53am December 03, 2015

From Questlove to Jennifer Aniston, it's really the hair that makes the icon. We rewrote the Bon Jovi song "Livin' on a Prayer" to be about famous people with famous hair.

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Arts

In A Class By Itself

10:53am December 03, 2015

Contestants tell us whether classes are made up, or a real course that students are amassing thousands of dollars of debt to enroll in.

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Arts

It's A Numbers Game

10:53am December 03, 2015

Order the following famous families from most amount of brothers to the fewest brothers: Jonas Brothers, Marx Brothers, Ringling Brothers. That would be Ringling (7), Marx (5) and Jonas (4).

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Arts

Blank Of Blank

10:53am December 03, 2015

One of Pittsburgh's nicknames is "City of Bridges," referring to its many river-spanning structures. All of the answers in this final round are three-word phrases with the word "of" in the middle.

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