Arts & Life

Arts

What Elevated Kale From Vegetable To Cultural Identifier?

5:21pm September 10, 2013

by Dan Bobkoff

Of all the healthy foods you could eat, what inspires some people to wear kale T-shirts and sport kale stickers? Why do some people see kale as a part of their identities?

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A couple takes to the floor in Harmon, W.Va., in 2012. West Virginia is trying to revitalize its square-dance tradition.

Swing Your Partner: W.Va. Circles Back To Square Dancing

5:21pm September 10, 2013

by Jessie Wright-Mendoza

Communities are coming together to keep the square-dancing tradition alive, hoping to pass the heritage on to future generations. A statewide project aims to bring back what was once a pillar of small-town life.

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Food blogger Deb Perelman was initially a kale skeptic — until this Kale Salad With Pecorino And Walnuts changed her mind.

Arts

'Smitten Kitchen' Author On Learning To Love Kale

5:21pm September 10, 2013

by NPR Staff

Food blogger Deb Perelman did not jump on the kale bandwagon. "I've often thought the world would be a better place if we could stop pretending that kale tastes good," she says. But one salad changed her mind.

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Sunny Anderson came up with the recipe when trying to find new flavor combinations for chicken wings.

Arts

This Football Season, Grab Some PB&J And Spread Your Wings

5:20pm September 10, 2013

by NPR Staff

It's a flavor combination that blends the familiar with the caveman and is a favorite of the patrons at Sunny Anderson's local bar in Brooklyn.

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Books
Arts

Woodrow Wilson Brought New Executive Style To The White House

4:41pm September 10, 2013

No. 28 was the first president to team up with America's legislative branch, and he used a groundbreaking moral argument to get the U.S. involved in World War I. A. Scott Berg's new book, Wilson, fills in missing pieces of the president's life.

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Sheri Fink's first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, followed medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

During Katrina, 'Memorial' Doctors Chose Who Lived, Who Died

7:08am September 10, 2013

With waters rising and their hospital on the verge of losing power, Memorial Medical Center staff were faced with an ethical question: Who to save first? Sheri Fink reconstructs their decisions — from hastening patients' deaths to evacuating the sickest last — in Five Days at Memorial.

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Jonathan Lethem's other books include The Ecstasy of Influence, Chronic City and Girl in Landscape.

Books
Arts

For Novelist Jonathan Lethem, Radicalism Runs In The Family

3:01pm September 09, 2013

His new book, Dissident Gardens, follows three generations of an activist family, from Rose, a secular Jew and communist, to Sergius, her commune-raised grandson. The book is fiction, but its characters were inspired by Lethem's own family story.

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An aerial view of Memorial Medical Center surrounded by floodwaters on Sept. 9, 2005.

Books
Arts

'Five Days' Of Ambiguous Morality At Katrina-Hit Hospital

6:26pm September 08, 2013

by Susan Jane Gilman

Sheri Fink's Five Days At Memorial, describes the horrific conditions at a New Orleans hospital shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Facing floodwaters and corporate mismanagement, some staffers euthanized sick patients. Fink's judgment of those actions is admirably — and frustratingly — nuanced.

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Members of S. A. Andrée's 1897 journey survey their downed vessel. This photo was recovered from a camera when their remains were found 33 years later.

From The Fall Of Failure, Success Can Take Flight

6:26pm September 08, 2013

by NPR Staff

Risking and embracing failure is part of the job for explorers and adventurers like aeronaut Salomon August Andrée. His fatal attempt at reaching the North Pole motivated others to push their own limits. The September issue of National Geographic investigates "famous failures" and why they mattered.

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Books
Arts

'Be Mine': Love And Identity Tangled In Tehran

5:33pm September 07, 2013

by NPR Staff

In her debut novel, Iranian-American Sara Farizan tells the story of two teenage girls, secretly in love. Sahar faces a crisis when she discovers Nasrin is engaged, and considers gender-reassignment surgery as a way for them to stay together. Farizan speaks with NPR's Jacki Lyden about the book and her own struggle with her sexual orientation.

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