Why Black Men Tend To Be Fashion Kings

Hide caption Tell Me More intern Azmi Abusam is dressed in designs by Guess, Aldo and H&M. He got his handmade leather bag from a street dealer in Khartoum, Sudan. Abusam says his style changes every six months, but it's usually based on comfort, quality and personal taste. Hide caption NPR Washington Desk Assistant Editor Brakkton Booker. Hide caption NPR Digital Media's Matt Thompson shows off a plum-colored Express shirt with a lavender DKNY silk tie, charcoal wool vest by Indochino and wool pants by Calvin Klein. He says he keeps things simple for the most part, usually wearing muted colors with one bold accent. Hide caption Tell Me More's Barbershop guy Jimi Izrael wears a Kenneth Cole shirt, Inc jacket and Ray Ban glasses. He says he mostly has his wife's taste in clothes, but also likes unconventional takes on conventional clothing items. Hide caption Kevin Langley of NPR's Operations team dresses in a navy blue pin-striped Calvin Klein suit. Made of cashmere, wool and polyester, the suit has an athletic fit. Langley says his overall style is "business attire," and he's drawn to ties that look expensive and professional, but are cheap and accentuate his shirt or suit. Hide caption Republican strategist Ron Christie wears a tailored three-piece suit from Lord Willy's in New York City. He says the style is bespoke British with irreverent flair. And when Christie isn't dressed for business, he turns to casual Lucky Brand jeans and a sweater. Hide caption Victor Holliday, associate producer of NPR's on-air fundraising, wears a light gray wool suit (DKNY Essentials) under a black vintage overcoat with fine English stitching (Regis Rex). He considers his style "easy elegance." Hide caption NPR Senior Producer Walter Watson pairs his blue Banana Republic sweater with golden brown Lands' End slacks. He calls his style "nothing too fancy office casual wear." Hide caption Tell Me More's Barbershop and political chat contributor Corey Ealons is outfitted in a Joseph Abboud black velvet jacket with a ticket pocket and pink silk handkerchief. Ealons says real men can wear pink with confidence, and that his style is classic and clean with a little edge. Hide caption Maxwell Ealons, 4, enjoys dressing like his father, Corey. His dressy clothes usually come from Children's Place, H&M, Target and Zara. He actually dresses himself for school with Spider-Man, Batman and Redskins shirts, plus jeans or sweat pants.

For many, style is much deeper than articles of clothing; it's a statement of identity. Black men have a unique relationship with fashion, one that can be traced all the way back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

Monica L. Miller, the author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, spoke with Tell Me More's Michel Martin about the past, present and future of black men's fashion.

Miller, an associate professor of English at Barnard College, explains that African-American men have used style as a way to challenge stereotypes about who they are. "Sometimes the well-dressed black man coming down the street is asking you to look and think."

Victor Holliday, associate producer of on-air fundraising at NPR and one of the resident kings of style, tells Martin that he learned about the importance of fashion at an early age. "When I was 5 years old, I knew exactly how I was going to look," he says. "And that was the year I got my first trench coat and my top hat."

Holliday's style icon is his father, who taught him that the main object of dressing up is winning respect. "Because as you present yourself seriously, people tend to take you seriously."

Holliday is one of the men featured in Tell Me More's Kings of Style slideshow.

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Diana Vreeland's Rise To 'Empress Of Fashion'

Diana Vreeland had a troubled childhood; her mother often told her she was ugly. But she later became editor-in-chief of American Vogue and one of the country's most revered fashion icons. Her life is captured in the new biography, Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland. Host Michel Martin talks with author Amanda Mackenzie Stuart.

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A Dangerous World Of Hackers And Ninjas

Nick Harkaway is the author of Angelmaker.

The moment I opened the book, I was snared by the now-iconic first line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." I knew that color; the U.K. had only four TV channels and they didn't broadcast through the night. When nothing was on, the cathode ray screen was a kind of numinous anthracite, the closest thing it could manage to black. If you want to be clever about it — at the time it was a comparison way beyond me — you could call it "darkness visible." Neuromancer lives in that space: It is contradiction, bifurcation, penumbra.

The protagonist, Case, is a burnout. He was a hacker, but he crossed the wrong people, and they crippled his nervous system so that he could no longer work with cyberspace (Gibson made up the word; this book heavily influenced how people imagine data online). Case is living on his luck, and that luck is running out; he's been to the best doctors and they can't fix him, so he's a middleman now, brokering deals for drugs and illegal software.

Until Molly comes along, and her boss, Armitage, offering a deal: Make a run in cyberspace, a really major hack. He'll get cured, get paid. Sweet deal. But in the grand tradition of crime thrillers, the job is more complicated than it seems, and Case is going to be crossing some dangerous people and some very thick red lines.

Despite the breakneck urgency of the action, the hard-boiled story drips with laconic cool. I had never met that before: Hammett, Chandler and Elmore Leonard came later for me. Neuromancer introduced a demimonde of back alleys, sodium streetlamps and the kind of club where you can buy firearms with your whiskey. It whispered of transgression, of sex and booze, and license.

Nick Harkaway is also the author of The Gone-Away World.

Courtesy of Rory Lindsay

The other fictions that framed my world were basically benign. I'd seen Tron and loved it. I was a Star Wars fan. I liked hobbits and the Three Musketeers. But Han Solo wouldn't last 10 minutes in Night City; Frodo would be hooked on a drug with a seven-syllable name inside of an hour. This was a world between the primary color fictions I'd seen and the dangerous nuclear age reality I lived in: In the 1980s it was pretty much established that Britain would burn in the first exchanges of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Inevitably, I fell for Molly, the street samurai with mirrors over her eyes and razors in her fingers. In my mind she had a husky, Lauren Bacall voice made from coffee and cigarettes — and I was right. If Bacall's character from To Have and Have Not taught English to Michelle Yeoh's martial artist from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you'd get someone like Molly.

Even now, she's a rarity. More often than not, Molly is what's missing from contemporary stories of any sort: a woman who is complete unto herself. She didn't need a male senior partner. In fact, she was more connected and streetwise than Case, and more alert to the danger they were both in. Wherever she went, Molly was in charge. In 1985, you could look a long time without finding that anywhere else.

And in a middle-class British school, you could go even longer without hearing the name Marcus Garvey, the Pan-African and black nationalist political leader who influenced Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie and Malcolm X — and the orbit-dwelling Rastafari nation Case and the others encounter in their search for answers. A decade before Google, I had to look Garvey up in the encyclopedia.

Add that to ninjas, amphetamines, extreme body modification, catsuits, gangs, governmental misdeeds, high decadence, Strangelove-esque soldiers and psychotic computers: Neuromancer was and is a treasure house of dangerous ideas.

And yet at the same time, it is secretly a very gentle book. Amid all the grime and grim, it's not hard to know where to put your sympathy or your trust. The bad are bad, the good are good. So despite all this, it's not an unsuitable book for a kid, just a challenging and eye-opening one. And unlike so many improving and notionally educational books, it's stylish, adult, exciting and fun. It's a door to a greater world.

PG-13 is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

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Green Grapes And Red Underwear: A Spanish New Year's Eve

Ringing in the New Year in Spain requires eating a dozen grapes and wearing a very specific kind of undergarment.

Jeff Koehler Ringing in the New Year in Spain requires eating a dozen grapes and wearing a very specific kind of undergarment.

Jeff Koehler

If the thought of watching the ball drop in Times Square again is already making you yawn, consider perking your New Year's Eve celebration with this tradition from Spain: As midnight nears on Nochevieja, or "old night," the last day of the year, the entire country gathers in front of television screens or in town squares, clutching a small bowl of green grapes and wearing red underwear. More on the underwear later.

The camera of the main national TV channel focuses on the clock tower of the 18th-century Real Casa de Correos in Madrid's Puerta del Sol while a pair of announcers in formal wear, high above the thousands of revelers packed into the chilly plaza below, quickly repeat instructions one last time. After the bells ring out four times in quick succession — "Wait, wait, ignore those!" — there is a slight pause and then begins a series of 12 chimes — one for each month.

At that first dong, Spaniards from Barcelona to Bilbao to Cadiz pop a grape into their mouths. There is little time to chew and swallow, much less savor, because about two seconds later there is a second dong and a second grape gets popped into the mouth. And on through 12 dongs and las doce uvas de la suerte ("the 12 lucky grapes").

If you eat all 12 by the end of the final bell's toll — and that doesn't mean finishing with a half-chewed mouthful — then you will have good luck in el año nuevo (the new year).

This popular tradition is a century or so old, though its exact origins remain debatable. One oft-repeated story says that growers in Alicante had a bumper 1909 harvest and found a creative way to sell off their surplus.

The traditional variety of grape consumed at the start of the new year is called Aledo. The grapes mature late are not harvested until November and December.

Jeff Koehler The traditional variety of grape consumed at the start of the new year is called Aledo. The grapes mature late are not harvested until November and December.

Jeff Koehler

Recently, though, old newspaper articles have been republished that show the tradition began decades earlier, in the 1880s. These stories tell of bourgeoisie in Madrid copying the French tradition of having grapes and champagne on the last day of the year. Before long this custom had been adopted by certain madrileños who went to Puerta del Sol to see the bells chime at the turning of the year and, most likely in an ironic or mocking manner, to eat grapes like the upper class.

About 80 percent of the "lucky grapes" come from the valley of Vinalopó in central Alicante, on Spain's Mediterranean coast. Fleshy, deliciously sweet, and pale, almost whitish-green in color, they are a traditional Spanish variety called Aledo that, maturing late, are not harvested until November and December.

But these are no ordinary grapes. Protected by Denominación de Origen (designation of origin, or D.O.) status, budding clusters are wrapped in paper bags in June and July and kept covered as they ripen. This was first done in the late 19th century to protect them from a plague of cochylis vine moths. Growers found it also conserved the flavor, aroma and color of the grapes, and slowed their maturation.

According to the regulatory office for D.O., Uva de Mesa Embolsada Vinalopó, bagging the grapes also means that "they form a peel that's much finer by not having to fend off the aggressions of the rain, the sun or the wind."

When I went to Barcelona's iconic La Boqueria market to buy my grapes for this year's festivities, Maria, the seasoned stall owner of Frutas y Verduras E. Lafuente, told me that "having such a fine skin also makes them quicker to eat. There's less to swallow."

Supermarkets sell small tins of 12 seeded and peeled grapes.

Jeff Koehler Supermarkets sell small tins of 12 seeded and peeled grapes.

Jeff Koehler

And, with the bells impatiently tolling, that small detail makes a difference. It is no easy task eating grapes so quickly, especially when each has three or four seeds. (Seedless grapes are a rarity here, though some painstakingly remove the seeds beforehand. Ever more extreme — or modern — are the small tins of 12 seeded and peeled grapes now sold in supermarkets.) The only way to finish all 12 is to not chew, just take a solid bite and then swallow, pips and all.

Such a strategy is easier to plan than to execute, especially by grape number six or seven when, in my experience, the giggles kick in. After 15 years living in Spain, I have learned that the only way to finish all 12 is by concentrating on the chimes and ignoring the rest of the surrounding commotion.

If scoffing grapes at midnight isn't strange enough, convention says you must do so while wearing red ropa interior, or underwear — a bra, a sock, a garter, whatever. And — stranger yet — the undergarment should be given to you by someone else.

Maria, the stall owner, reminded me not to forget a third traditional lucky charm to accompany red underwear and grapes: drop a gold ring into my celebratory glass of cava (local champagne-style bubbly from Catalunya). "Just don't swallow it!" That would, no doubt, be a harbinger of bad luck.

When the 12 dongs finish and the last of the grapes has been swallowed, there are cheek kisses, toasts with glasses of cava, and pieces of turrón (almond and honey nougat from Alicante) passed around as the most expensive commercials of the year play on TV and phone lines jam with the crush of well-wishing calls.

In this year of acute economic hardship in Spain, many will hope that eating the grapes brings better luck in 2013, and try particularly hard to finish them all before the last chime fades to silence and the new year begins.

Jeff Koehler is the author of Morocco: A Culinary Journey With Recipes. His next cookbook, on Spain, will be published in 2013. Visit www.jeff-koehler.com or follow @koehlercooks.

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Death Of The (Predatory) Salesman: These Days, It's A Buyer's Market

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Hardcover, 260 pages | purchase

close To Sell Is HumanThe Surprising Truth About Moving OthersDaniel H. Pink

The familiar image of the salesman in American culture hasn't always been a flattering one. Just think of Alec Baldwin as the verbally abusive "motivator" of two real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book To Sell is Human, says that this relentless, predator-style approach to selling has become outdated. He believes that the art of sales has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the previous century.

Pink joins NPR's David Greene to talk about the effect the Internet has had on selling and why he believes almost all American white-collar workers are now in sales.

On why the brutal, Glengarry Glen Ross style of selling has become outdated

"Well, most of what we know about sales was built for a world of information asymmetry — the seller always had more information than the buyer. Twenty years ago, when [David] Mamet wrote that play that [was] made into a movie, when you walked into a Chevy dealer, the Chevy dealer knew a heck of a lot more about cars than you ever could ... you didn't have the adequate information. And so this is why we have the principle of caveat emptor, buyer beware. You gotta beware when the other guy knows a lot more than you.

"Well, something curious has happened in the last 10 years in that you can walk into a car dealership with the invoice price of the car, something that even the salesmen/women at car dealers didn't know too long ago. And so in a world of information parity, or at least something close to it, we've moved — caveat emptor is still good advice, but equally good advice for the sellers is caveat venditor, seller beware."

On why he thinks "we're all in sales"

"There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts. In 2000 ... about 1 in 9 American workers worked in sales. That is, their job was to convince someone else to buy something. So then, what's happened over the last 12 years? Explosion of new technologies. Today, 1 in 9 American workers works in sales. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at that other 8 in 9, they're in sales, too. That is, a huge percentage of what white-collar workers do on the job is what I call nonsales selling — persuading, influencing, convincing other people to part with resources. Pitching ideas in meetings, asking the boss for a raise, trying to raise money from investors. And so, at some level, we're all in sales now."

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five books about the changing world of work, including A Whole New Mind and Drive.

Rebecca Drobis/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover Daniel H. Pink is the author of five books about the changing world of work, including A Whole New Mind and Drive.

Rebecca Drobis/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover

On why the best salespeople are "ambiverts," not extroverts

"We have this myth that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance — that is, how many times the cash register actually rings — the correlation's almost zero. It's really quite remarkable.

"Let's think about a spectrum, and say, on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is extremely introverted, 7 is extremely extroverted: The 6s and 7s — the people who get hired, the gregarious, backslapping types of the stereotype — they're not very good. OK, now, why? ... They're just spending too much time talking. ... They don't know when to shut up. They don't listen very well; they're not attuned to the other person; they sometimes can overwhelm people.

"Now ... does that mean that introverts are better? No. The 1s and 2s, they're not very good either. They often are not assertive enough. They're skittish about striking up conversations. What this new research — and it's very exciting, it's accepted for publication but actually not published yet — [says] is the people who do the best are what social psychologists call ambiverts. ... Not totally extroverted, not totally introverted. The 3s, 4s, and 5s. They know when to shut up; they know when to speak up. They know when to push; they know when to hold back. And so the best people at convincing, persuading others, whether in a traditional sales environment or in these other kinds of environments, are these ambiverts."

On the link between improvisational theater skills and selling

"One of the abilities that matters most is this ability of improvisation — that is, if your perfectly attuned, superclear pitch goes awry, as it will, how do you respond? And the principles of improvisational theater help us out on that, things like saying 'Yes, and' instead of 'Yes, but,' ... It's constructive rather than deconstructive.

"[In one improvisational exercise] I had to sit face-to-face with this actually pretty senior executive at a television network, and he had to tell me something that was bothering him, and I had to look him in the eye when he told me that, but I couldn't respond to him for 15 seconds. ... The idea ... is that we tend to move too quickly, and what the best salespeople of any kind know is that it's really about listening; it's really about understanding the other person's perspective, hearing what they're really saying, and one really profound way to do that is to slow down."

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Author Ben Fountain's Book Picks For 2013

Thorne Anderson

Last spring, weekends on All Things Considered spoke with author Ben Fountain just as he released his widely acclaimed first novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Later in the year, it was nominated for the National Book Award.

We asked Fountain to share with us what he's looking forward to in the book world next year. He says he's read about 25 books for release in 2013 and tells host Jacki Lyden, "The state of American fiction is really strong, at least from where I'm standing."

"First and foremost it's a mother-and-son story. It's the story of a single mother whose son goes to the naval academy and ends up becoming a Navy Seal. It moves from a mother and son story to a war story ... A really wrenching, and unflinching, I would say, war story."

"It has a lot of the things that I am interested in - politics, power. The big external forces in our lives that play such a big role in our interior lives, and that intersection between the individual and the larger forces in the world. [The main character] Jacqueline, she's a refugee from the Liberian Civil War ... and she has lost literally everything except the clothes on her back — her family, her home. Basically what she has is her memories and her wits, and these memories, especially of her family, they sustain and torment her as she tries to survive ... So, you know, this book, the writing is extraordinary. When I say extraordinary, I don't mean it's pretty or gorgeous for gorgeousness sake. Maksik, he is really getting down deep into, you know, the nature of human experience and the nature of love, and the nature of loss. And line by line, the power accumulates in this book is kind of like a stealth tsunami."

"We are talking about the guy who invented Ripley's Believe It or Not! I would say Robert Ripley is a true American original. He invented himself, and along the way invented huge chunks of American culture. He was right there at the beginning of cartooning, tabloid news ... So much of what we recognize as, you know, just the background of our lives and American culture — you know, sensationalism and celebrity news — Ripley was right there at the beginning of it. He built an entire entertainment conglomerate around himself. At one time he was, you know, an extremely wealthy man. He went all over the world in search of the exotic and the strange, and the weird, and he also had a pretty racy personal life. He had a harem long before Hugh Hefner ever thought of the Playboy Mansion."

"Linda Bamber is a professor of English at Tufts University in Boston, and most of the stories in the collection take off from various Shakespeare plays — Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, Henry IV, As You Like It. And she takes them in these amazing directions. In one story, the heroine of As You Like It leaves her play and ends up dating all the three principle men of Henry IV. In another, the entire cast of Othello is now a college English department, and Desdemona is the chairman, and Othello is the only minority member, and Iago is in there as well, you know, making trouble as always ... I mean, I have never read anything quite like these stories. They have attitude, and they shake things up. They are playful, and inventive, and funny, and Bamber gets the entire world into each one of her stories."

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Cheap Bubbly Or Expensive Sparkling Wine? Look To The Bubbles For Clues

The bubbles in champagne tickle the tongue and transfer wonderful aromas to the nose.

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There's nothing like the distinctive "pop" of the uncorking of a bottle of bubbly to create a sense of celebration. Whether it's Dom Perignon or a $10 sparkling wine, bubbles add pizazz.

Sparkling-wine lovers sometimes point to the glittering streams of tiny bubbles as an important attribute. Why? Well, tiny bubbles are a sign of age, explains French chemist Gerard Liger-Belair, author of Uncorked: The Science of Champagne.

"Old champagnes always show tiny bubbles, mainly because they have aged several years and lost a significant amount of dissolved CO2, the gas that produces the bubbles," Liger-Belair told us in an email.

And what else can the bubbles tell you? Well, if the streams of bubbles remain down to the last sip, this can be a clue as to how it was produced.

If you listen to my story, you'll hear a tour with Fred Frank, third-generation winemaker at Chateau Frank, part of Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in the Finger Lakes region of New York state. Frank uses the traditional Champagne method to produce his sparkling wines. It's a labor- and time-intensive process whereby each bottle goes through a second fermentation in the bottle. "The benefit of this method is higher-quality sparkling wine," Frank says.

And one way that the sparkling wine produced in this method can distinguish itself in the flute is that the train of bubbles keeps streaming and streaming, down to the last sip.

So what's the science behind this? Liger-Belair said that by using the Champagne method, "the [bubble-producing] CO2 produced by yeast cannot escape into the atmosphere, and is kept mainly dissolved into [the] Champagne."

On the left a 2005 Chateau Frank and on the right a midpriced bottle of California bubbly. The Chateau Frank bubbles were noticeably tinier.

This is a sharp contrast to some cheap sparkling wines, where the CO2 is sometimes injected into the wine, similar to the process used to create carbonated soft drinks. "This produces big bubbles that dissipate quickly in the glass," he says.

In full disclosure, we compared the bubble streams of a bottle of 2005 Chateau Frank and a midpriced bottle of California bubbly. While the Chateau Frank bubbles were noticeably tinier, both produced multiple streams of bubbles that lasted a long while.

But here's one tip if you want to preserve the effervescence in every flute of bubbly: Pay attention to how you pour.

The traditional way is to pour Champagne straight down into the flute. But Liger-Belair says you may be losing thousands of bubbles this way.

In a study published in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Liger-Belair and some colleagues found that pouring champagne down the side of a tilted glass, similar to the way beer is poured, preserved about 25 percent more carbon dioxide.

This technique has not taken off in France, where Liger-Belair says no one wants to liken Champagne to beer. But scientifically, it's clear. If you want more bubbles — to tickle the tongue and transfer those wonderful aromas to your nose — try the tilted pour.

And while we're on the subject of French traditions, I should point out that if you listen to my story you'll hear about the kerfuffle over the use of the term Champagne.

The French are keen to point out that the term Champagne should only be used on the bottles of sparkling wines produced in the Champagne region of France. Champagne producers have launched a campaign in the U.S. to raise awareness of this issue.

In deference to this, Frank, a few years back, took the word Champagne off his label. Instead he references the Champagne method. And he says he's proud to promote his bottles of bubbly as sparkling wine from the Finger Lakes.

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Listen Up! Audiobooks For Every Taste

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If you're feeling overwhelmed by the holiday rush — too swamped, even, to spend an afternoon reading those books you got for Christmas, we have some recommendations for you — but these are audiobooks, so you can listen while you multitask.

Robin Whitten is the editor and founder of AudioFile magazine. Her list of the year's best audiobooks begins with a selection that might while away the hours on a long family road trip. "Toothiana is one of William Joyce's books that's in the Guardians of Childhood series," she tells NPR's David Greene. "He has the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and St. Nicholas, who all become superheroes through these various books."

"It is so inventive and imaginative, and it's great for storytelling," she adds. And that storytelling quality is part of what makes a good audiobook. "Oftentimes, episodic stories and mysteries ... in fiction, it's easier to see how audiobooks and the audio medium work."

There is a nonfiction selection on Whitten's list: Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, which chronicles the third president's life in an immersive style reminiscent of good fiction. Whitten adds that the book also benefits from the voice of a good reader. "You can be that involved [with the book] as you see the words on the page, but in audio, the narrator helps place you there."

Some audiobooks have celebrity narrators — for example, Colin Firth can be heard reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. "For a lot of people who've never really considered or been interested in an audiobook, they think, 'Oh, I love Colin Firth, I love his voice' ... and so they may try something," Whitten says. "And they also may not really know who Graham Greene is ... but they're attracted to it, so they're going to give it a try." Firth's voice is beautiful, she adds, "and he has a really special way of being inside the story, which is actually a personal, I think, a personal favorite of his ... it's in your head, as if he's telling just you."

Fiction

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Read by Holter Graham

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Read by Edoardo Ballerini

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Read by Simon Vance

Biography and History

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Read by Alex Jennings

Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley
Read by George Guidall

Nonfiction and Culture

Abundance by Steve Kotler and Peter Diamandis
Read by Arthur Morey

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens
Read by Simon Prebble

Mystery and Suspense

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
Read by David Pittu

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny
Read by Ralph Cosham

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Sir Peter Westmacott Plays Not My Job

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

This segment was originally broadcast on Aug. 24, 2012.

We do what damage we can on this show, but it's not often we get the chance to cause a real international incident. So we're very excited that Sir Peter Westmacott, Great Britain's ambassador to the U.S., has agreed to play our game called "No homework, extended naps and eight hours of recess!"

A lot of big-time politicians got their start as little politicians, running for the student council. We'll ask Westmacott three questions about strange doings in the school halls of power.

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If You Didn't Know, Now You Know

On-air challenge: This week is the annual "new names in the news" quiz. You're given some names that you probably never heard of before 2012, but who made news during the past 12 months. You say who they are. These names were compiled with the help of Kathie Baker and Tim Goodman, who were players on previous year-end quizzes.

Last week's challenge: Take the last name of a famous actor. Drop the first letter, and you'll get the last name of a famous artist. Drop the first letter again, and you'll get the name of a god in classical mythology. What names are these?

Answer: [Charles] Grodin, [Auguste] Rodin, Odin

Winner: George Bastuba of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Next week's challenge from listener Ben Bass of Chicago: First, name a U.S. state capital. Rearrange its letters to spell the name of another American city. Remove one letter and read the result backward to spell a third American city. Finally, move the first letter of that to the end to spell a fourth American city. The cities are in four different states. What are they?

Submit Your Answer

If you know the answer to next week's challenge, submit it here. Listeners who submit correct answers win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: Include a phone number where we can reach you Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern.

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Close The Year Out With Some Best-Selling Last Words

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People often make lists of the greatest opening lines in fiction, but closing lines really appeal to me. They're your final moments with a book and can help you remember and treasure it forever.

The last weekend of the year seems an appropriate time to consider the final words of our favorite novels and short stories. Here are some that I'm especially fond of:

NPR librarian Kee Malesky has been dubbed "the source of all human knowledge" by NPR's Scott Simon. The author of the books All Facts Considered and Learn Something New Every Day: 365 Facts to Fulfill Your Life, she shares her adventures from the reference desk in this series called Kee Facts.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Middlemarch
George Eliot
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs."

Still Life With Woodpecker
Tom Robbins
"But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: (1) Everything is part of it. (2) It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

The Good Earth
Pearl Buck
""Rest assured, our father, rest assured. The land is not to be sold.' But over the old man's head they looked at each other and smiled."

The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac
"Then I added 'Blah,' with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world."

Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
"I stand on the deck with the Wireless Officer looking at the lights of America twinkling. He says, 'My God, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn't this a great country altogether?' 'Tis.'"

The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
"Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

The Dead
James Joyce
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
"But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs."

The World According to Garp
John Irving
"In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." (Note: John Irving has told interviewers that he always writes the last lines of his novels first.)

What last lines would you share from your favorite books? Please add yours to the comments section below.

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On Your Plate In 2013, Expect Kimchi And Good-For-You Greens

Commentator Bonny Wolf expects Asian cuisine like kimchi fried rice to become even more popular in 2013.

iStockphoto.com Commentator Bonny Wolf expects Asian cuisine like kimchi fried rice to become even more popular in 2013.

iStockphoto.com

Weekend Edition food commentator Bonny Wolf offers her predictions of what we'll eat in the new year.

Asia is the new Europe. It's been gradual: from pan-Asian, Asian fusion and Asian-inspired to just deciding among Vietnamese, Korean, Tibetan and Burmese for dinner.

Should we have the simple food of the Thai plateau or the hot, salty, sour foods of southern Thailand?

The new flavors of the year won't come from the kitchens of chefs trained at Le Cordon Bleu. More likely, they'll trickle up from Asian street foods. Chipotle has opened ShopHouse, with a menu inspired by street food from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hanoi.

Even comfort foods are becoming Asian: Vietnamese pho, Korean kimchi fried rice and Chinese hot pots.

Speaking of kimchi, we'll see a lot more fermented food. Last year, we canned. This year, we ferment. Think sauerkraut. Or if you're under 30, kombucha, which — for you old folks — is fermented tea. Fermented foods produce probiotics — good bacteria.

Good-for-you foods remain big. Vegetables are now entrees — as well as ice creams. I'm going to go out on a limb, though, and say Brussels sprouts may have peaked. Where do they have left to go? They've been paired with every ingredient known to modern cooks. They've gone from "Eww ... Brussels sprouts" to being the most popular kid in vegetable school. They've been baked, breaded, roasted and shredded.

We'll see more dark, leafy greens, beet tops, collards and probably even more varieties of kale. And expect more seaweed. It, too, contributes to long life. As a member of the baby boom, I can say this: We really want to hang on.

Veganism is getting even bigger, but so is nose-to-tail.

Farm-to-table now includes farm-to-bar. Mixologists (a.k.a. bartenders) have their own gardens or shop at farmers markets for produce to add to cocktails. Also watch for more smoked drinks — with smoked ice cubes, of course — and barrel-aged cocktails. Like everything else, they'll be more savory than sweet.

And if you want just to be left alone to eat whatever unhip food you want, consider adding a little soy sauce.

Bonny Wolf is managing editor of American Food Roots.

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Courage And Curiosity: The Best Heroines Of 2012

Nishant Choksi

The most dangerous trait a woman can possess is curiosity. That's what myths and religion would have us believe, anyway. Inquisitive Pandora unleashed sorrow upon the world. Eve got us kicked out of paradise. Blight on civilization it may be, but female curiosity is a gift to narrative and the quality my five favorite heroines of the year possess in spades.

These women come to us from history, from a novel, from the pages of a diary and from an ancient poem. They're women who want to know things, who want to devour the world. Refreshingly, they aren't primarily defined by their desire to love or be loved — or even to be especially lovable — these are sublimely stubborn women, frequently at odds with themselves and always at odds with their times. They're on quests. Which isn't to say that these quests are necessarily successful (the heroines of one particular book were flamboyant failures). The outcome is immaterial; the wanting is all.

In 1983, the French artist Sophie Calle found a lost address book on a street in Paris. She rang up the people listed and asked about the owner of the book, whom she calls Pierre D. ("I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.") She published her findings in a newspaper — to the outrage of the real Pierre, who threatened to sue. Calle agreed to hold off republishing the pieces until after his death.

Pierre died in 2005, and this book is now available in English. I'd foolishly worried that there would be something self-consciously whimsical, something Amelie about the project. But from the outset, Calle's inquiry is too serious and strange and plain difficult. A few people refuse to speak to her. Others agree to meet Calle, but can't recall Pierre. The testimonies add up; our quarry comes into focus then blurs again: He lives alone. His hair went white the week his mother died. He has conventional sexual fantasies. He wears ill-fitting clothes, like a clown. Assembling a personality from these shards is intoxicating, a bit like solving a mystery, a bit like falling in love. But whom are we falling in love with? Is it Pierre? Or is it our guide? The book includes photographs of the people, paintings and places dear to Pierre. The most arresting portrait is of a young woman — could it be Calle? — in profile, hiding her face behind long dark hair, inscrutable to the last.

The second volume of Susan Sontag's posthumously published journals picks up in New York in the '60s with the writer's reputation established and romantic life in shambles. It's a book in fragments: the "hot exhalations of the mind," images that gave her pleasure (the "pale pinkish brown color of stone houses" in Corsica), and some scabrous self-criticism. We see Sontag lie to herself ("I've constructed a life in which I can't be profoundly distressed or upset by anyone") and arrive at painful personal realizations.

Most of all, these journals are a portrait of a woman who was the custodian of her intellect. "I've got this thing — my mind. It gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable," she writes, and these pages — rife with lists of books to read, films she's seen, and words to learn — record how she fed it. The critic Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that Sontag burst on to the literary scene, "a cultural-critical Athena, armored with a vast erudition, bristling with epigrams". This book reminds us of the daily diligence this display required. "Buy a dictionary the size of an elephant," she ordered herself. "A writer, like an athlete, must 'train' every day. What did I do today to keep in 'form'?"

Lisa Cohen gives us three stylish, independent heroines for the price of one in her triptych of women, once famous, now forgotten: Esther Murphy, a spellbinding conversationalist who never managed to produce the books her public so eagerly awaited; Madge Garland, a gifted editor at British Vogue; and Mercedes de Acosta, the "first celebrity stalker" who became the lover of the most glamorous women of her time, including Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan and Greta Garbo. The three women, who were intimates, moved in the lively and quarrelsome lesbian circles of early 20th-century New York, Paris and London, and Cohen vividly brings this world to life. She also makes an original and persuasive case for her subjects' métiers, the fleeting, trivialized forms of cultural production: conversation, collecting and fashion.

It's a gossipy, gorgeous, near-perfect biography that turns the form inside out. "I have wanted to make these three women visible again," Cohen writes. "But none of them thought herself in need of rescue. Each memorialized herself and colluded in her own invisibility."

Carol Anshaw's taut novel of how a horrific accident propels three siblings on very different courses has many qualities to recommend it. It's sharp and wise and manages the impossible: to write about sex in a genuinely sexy way. But most of all, it has Alice.

Alice is the rumpled, heroic soul of the book — and possibly the year's most purely sympathetic character. An artist desperately in love with her elusive model girlfriend, jittering with need and trauma, she and her sister Carmen are struggling to save their brother from tumbling further into addiction. (Anshaw, whose own brother struggled with addiction, unsparingly depicts what it means to lose a family member to drug dependency.) Hers is a journey of learning to live productively with great guilt, of the solace of work and art and sisterhood (Alice "pitied everyone who didn't have a sister.") Our siblings do much more than merely support us, they hone us, like steel sharpening steel.

In her new book, the poet and classicist Anne Carson remixes Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone, with Hegel, Virginia Woolf and strains from her own life. The book is hand lettered, and Bianca Stone's surreal illustrations tell a story of their own: beautiful girls with cinderblock heads, tottering furniture, a shovel, a ladder, red thread pinioning a horse's hooves, red thread twining around spoons, red thread unspooling over the pages like a long trail of blood.

Antigone, our heroine, is "a person in love with the impossible." She is the daughter of Oidipus and sister to Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson's own spellings) who have slain each other in battle. She defies her uncle Kreon's order to leave Polyneikes' body unburied, risking death by being buried alive. The book speaks to us in our own language — and cheekily references other interpretations of the play: ("Remember how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back" the chorus asks Antigone) — while matching the horror and heartbreak of the original. Realizing death is near, Antigone says:

"You ask would I have done it for a husband or a child my answer is no I would not. A husband or a child can be replaced but who can grow me a new brother. Is this a weird argument, Kreon thought so but I don't know. The words go wrong they call my piety impiety, I'm alone on my insides I died long ago."

Parul Sehgal is an editor at The New York Times Book Review and a frequent contributor to NPR.

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Graphic Novels That Flew Under The Radar In 2012

As 2012 winds to a close, Glenn Weldon shares a couple of graphic novels that caught his eye this year: Drama by Raina Telgemeier and The Crackle of the Frost by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jorge Zentner. (This piece initially aired Nov. 20, 2012, on All Things Considered).

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'Tabu': Virtuoso Style Heightens Romance

An old man recalls a love affair from his youth in Tabu.

Adopt Films

Tabu

Director: Miguel GomesGenre: DramaRunning time: 118 minutes

Not rated

In Portuguese with subtitles

With: Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira

(Recommended)

Revolution can spring from the most personal acts. In Tabu, Portuguese writer-director Miguel Gomes spins a two-part tale examining love, loneliness and the power of memory. It starts in the present day but culminates at the start of the Portuguese Colonial War in 1961. The personal and the political are so hopelessly entangled that even the midcentury colonizers who populate the film's dazzling metafictional second half can't avoid influencing events — even when they are very much disengaged from colonial politics.

Before Gomes gets to the early '60s story that takes place at the foot of the fictional African mountain that gives the movie its name, he frames that story with a tale of present-day Lisbon. It concentrates on the middle-aged, unmarried Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and her relationship with her increasingly unhinged neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral) and Aurora's maid, Santa (Isabel Munoz Cardoso). Aurora regularly gambles away her allowance from her absent daughter, and in the days surrounding New Year's, she claims Santa is holding her prisoner and practicing witchcraft, and in the end begins babbling about crocodiles on her deathbed.

Pilar is spending the holidays alone, as a Czech exchange student she was to house bailed on her during a deadpan scene of deception in the airport that's as sad as it is darkly funny. Pilar spends time with an artist friend, cries as he snores next to her in a movie theater, and is eventually drawn into Aurora's unfolding drama, as Santa sends her on Aurora's deathbed errand to find an old friend. That friend is a man named Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), who ends up relating to Pilar the romantic story of his past connection to Aurora.

Tabu is in black and white and presented in the boxy old academy aspect ratio of early cinema (the film shares a title with F.W. Murnau's final film, from 1931). And when the timeline shifts back 50 years for Ventura to tell his story, Gomes delves further into antiquated filmmaking techniques, making it into a semi-silent movie. Background noise remains but dialogue is inaudible, and the only words spoken aloud are Ventura's poetic remembrances of the affair he carried on with Aurora while she was pregnant with her husband's child.

Santa (Isabel Cardoso) cares for an elderly woman as she slips into delusions, seeing her as a hunter, among other things.

Adopt Films Santa (Isabel Cardoso) cares for an elderly woman as she slips into delusions, seeing her as a hunter, among other things.

Adopt Films

This romanticism matches up with the passions of their affair, but Gomes is also interested in increasing the self-consciousness of the filmmaking and throws multiple devices at the viewer to highlight the artificiality of the storytelling as a means to truth. There are absurdist touches like a hunt for a mysterious beast, which when caught appears to be invisible in its cage. As the young Aurora and Ventura (Ana Moreira and Caroloto Cotta) imagine animal shapes in the clouds, Gomes superimposes drawings of the animals over their clouds. When Ventura's band plays the songs that give them a ticket out of Africa, the audio is old Phil Spector songs played by other bands — The Ramones in one scene, Malagasy vocal group Les Surfs in another.

Despite the distancing techniques, Tabu never feels academic or theoretical. Though we don't hear the young Aurora and Ventura speak, it's difficult not to get caught up in their romance. Even more impressively, Gomes sets their story against the backdrop of the colonial setting; the interchangeability of the black characters, who work mainly as servants and guides, is a statement itself on the way in which European colonizers took their territories and the indigenous people who lived in these places entirely for granted. The tensions simmering in the background eventually come together in an intersection that's both tragic and necessary, for both the impending revolution and the future of the two lovers. Few films are this smart about subtly couching their allegorical aspirations within more straightforward narratives; fewer still are able to do so with such energetically inventive virtuoso style. (Recommended)

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In Rapid-Fire 2012, Memes' Half-Life Fell To A Quarter

A screengrab from the "Kony 2012" online video about the Central African warlord Joseph Kony, which skyrocketed in popularity after its release in March. It was criticized, then forgotten, just as quickly.

via YouTube A screengrab from the "Kony 2012" online video about the Central African warlord Joseph Kony, which skyrocketed in popularity after its release in March. It was criticized, then forgotten, just as quickly.

via YouTube

Last June, a young woman in Texas uploaded a Justin Bieber fan video. She seemed a little .... unhinged.

"I just made a list [of] all our future kids names: Bartholemew, Clarence, Steven, Bryce," she sings, eyes wide.

The video was posted to Reddit in a thread called "Overly Attached Girlfriend." In 48 hours, it picked up over 1 million views. Within days, the media was running stories about it.

"JB Fan Video" got more than 1 million views in 48 hours. Within weeks, it was largely forgotten.

via YouTube "JB Fan Video" got more than 1 million views in 48 hours. Within weeks, it was largely forgotten.

via YouTube

And in a few weeks, everyone forgot about it.

Online sensations like "JB Fan Video" used to have longer legs. But in the past year, the speed with which we cycle through online videos, games and memes has increased enormously.

Wildly Popular ... Briefly

Back in 2008, "Charlie Bit My Finger," a video of a tiny British boy sticking his fingers in his baby brother's mouth, first uploaded to YouTube in 2007, was passed around for months and months ... and months ... and months.

YouTube's trends manager, Kevin Allocca, says it's hard to imagine its popularity lasting so long today.

"That stuff definitely still exists," Allocca says, "but a lot of the most popular things that we're seeing now [are] from professionals at producing entertainment."

And this year, videos dropped in and out of our consciousness faster. Even Allocca — whose job it is to watch trends on YouTube — says, "the speed with which these things happen doesn't cease to amaze me."

It wasn't just lighthearted stuff capturing our momentary attention this year. A video about the central African warlord Joseph Kony started showing up on Facebook and Twitter in March. It took only a few days for "Kony 2012" to obliterate previous YouTube records, with 30 million views a day.

But the backlash came faster, too. Between criticism and controversy, Kony 2012 basically vanished from the cultural conversation within a month.

HDCYT/YouTube

Then: First uploaded in 2007, "Charlie Bit My Finger" was a worldwide sensation for months on end.

invisiblechildreninc/YouTube

Now: In contrast, "Kony 2012" quickly smashed YouTube viewing records — but soon vanished from the cultural conversation.

"It really made me think about the velocity with which we're operating right now," Allocca says. "And the pace of popularity for some of these videos."

Flying By At Warp Speed

And it's not just videos that became online flashes in the pan in 2012, either. Just a couple of years ago, there were 32 million people playing Farmville on Facebook. They happily sent each other online cabbages and watered each other's crops.

It took two years for the vast majority of players to lose interest. When this year's version of Farmville came out, it took only three months for the number of players to fall from a high of 7 million to around 2 million.

Accelerating the pace of linking and "poking" might actually be an efficient way to "be a more social person in today's world," says sociologist Marco Gonzales. We are intensely social animals, he says, hardwired to get pleasure from connecting online.

"We're actually looking to be more social than ever before," Gonzales adds. "Maybe to the point of a problem, right? "

Maybe. Remember "Binders Full of Women"? Or Olympic gymnast Mckayla Maroney scowling with her medal? With these things flying by at warp speed, it's hard to keep up with the cultural conversation.

People cry and moan a lot about the decreasing attention span of America's youth," says Shana Naomi Krochmal, a digital producer for Current TV. "I think everyone's attention span in American is, at the best, quartered from where it was even five years ago. Absolutely."

Call it the quartering of the half-life. Krochmal thinks it's happened, in part, because of the strain on old media in a 24-hour news cycle. Memes are cool. They're plucked up, chewed on, spat out and forgotten.

"I think the kind of media we have now does really reward that intense instant obsessive focus," Krochmal says. "But how long can you do that for, right?"

The Smartphone Factor

In a burgeoning online universe, not so long. This year, Facebook topped 1 billion users. With more of us from all over the world using the same social media — and using it better and faster — that means ever-more information to pass around. Of course, that also means some of it won't go away.

Things like "Gangnam Style," the catchy — and relatively long-running — pop song, tend to stick around if they're interactive or something people can copy or remix.

The proliferation of mobile phones has played a role, too. Social media used to be limited to computers, but 2012 was the year that more than 50 percent of American consumers owned smartphones, giving us Twitter and Facebook right in our pockets.

"Our access the Internet has just improved so dramatically over the last few years," says Andy Borowitz, a comedian who has worked successfully in both old and new media. "We didn't have so much high speed Wi-Fi five years ago. We didn't have high speed networks on our phones the way we have now."

Borowitz says, personally, he's exhausted by the rapid-fire firehose of information he gets on Twitter and Facebook. So in the year ahead, he's planning to read more books. It's balm, he says, for his over-stimulated brain.

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Short Stories To Savor On A Winter Weekend

Nishant Choksi

Hortense Calisher, a virtuoso of the form, once called the short story "an apocalypse in a teacup." It's a definition that suits the remarkable stories published this year by three literary superstars, and two dazzling newcomers with voices so distinctive we're likely to be hearing from them again. These stories are intense, evocative delights to be devoured singly when you have only a sliver of time, or savored in batches, at leisure, on a winter weekend.

As a lagniappe, begin with Object Lessons, a pairing of 20 contemporary authors with 20 potent classics from the pages of The Paris Review. Among them: Dave Eggers on "Bangkok"; James Salter's time bomb of a love-gone-bitter story; and Aleksandar Hemon on Jorge Luis Borges' cosmic "Funes, the Memorious," about a man cursed with the inability to forget anything.

Then move on to these five, my best collections of 2012:

A mix of new and older stories, spanning 20 years of work by Sherman Alexie, a master storyteller who has been honored with numerous awards. Alexie is constantly experimenting with form, but he never forgets to be funny. He laces his incisive observations about race, class, gender, sex, infidelity, and Indian and non-Indian bigotry with biting wit. Standouts among the older stories: "Indian Country," which opens with a noted Coeur d'Alene author arriving in Montana to learn he's been jilted by a Navajo woman, and "War Dances," the story of a 41-year-old undergoing MRIs and steroid treatments for sudden deafness, which probes a still-painful father-son connection. New stories include the raucous "Midnight Basketball," in which one teammate disses Obama's jump shot, and "Cry Cry Cry," which begins, "Forget crack, my cousin, Junior, said, meth is the new war dancer," and takes the cousins through to Junior's brutal end. These are stories that provoke and illuminate.

This second collection won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, one of the world's richest prizes for the short story form — and the title story is a stunner. Yes, it's a homage to short story wizard Raymond Carver's classic (substituting "Anne Frank" for "Love"), but the subtleties and wit are Nathan Englander's own. What seems at first to be an ordinary reunion between two high school girlfriends, now married, ends up exploring questions of Jewish identity, Israeli politics, intermarriage and the Holocaust.

Englander's lineage reaches back to Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, but he's less interior, more likely to give us pages of sparkling dialogue than reams of mulling over this or that. He has a natural sense of drama (a play he's written, based on an earlier story, "The Twenty-Seventh Man," opened at New York's Public Theater in November). And his relaxed storytelling voice makes this collection feel intimate, even when he's writing about Israeli history from the Yom Kippur War to today in "Two Hills," which focuses on two matriarchs of the settlement movement, or following the cross-country ramblings of a traveling writer whose crowds have dwindled down to every author's nightmare, a single demented fan who insists he read to him alone.

This collection is made up of 91 little chunks of flash fiction — a form that seems ideally suited to our fragmented times (think short, easily absorbed texts like NPR's Three Minute Fictions). Taken all together, they form a finely etched autobiographical portrait of a family that spans 50 years, and three generations.

At its heart: a woman whose life unfolds within a household role limited by her times. The character called simply "the Doctor's Wife" is a 1950s-era wife and mother living in a small town near Seattle. She cooks for her finicky family, does laundry daily, volunteers for community projects, and oversees her outdoorsy brood — Bob, Ann and Petrea, who calls herself Chrissie until she is college age. Watching helplessly as her fourth child, John, begins wasting away from a mysterious ailment, she "makes housekeeping into an art." Luis Jaramillo's combination of irony, tenderness, and restraint brings to mind Evan Connell's iconic portrait of Kansas City's Mrs. Bridge. As he explores how John's death as a toddler carries emotional echoes into the next generation, Jaramillo surprises us with miniature explosions like this, titled "In Contrast:"

"I was only depressed for, like, 40 years," Petrea says to me.

"Because of John?"

"Because of John."

For decades, the internationally lauded Alice Munro's stories have proven to be dependable pleasures, unparalleled for emotional nuance and depth. This collection, her 13th, includes 10 traditional short stories and four "almost stories" that are intentionally autobiographical, a first for Munro.

She often starts her stories abruptly — "At that time we were living beside a gravel pit," she writes in the haunting story "Gravel," in which that pit figures in a traumatizing childhood tragedy. "Amundsen" begins, "On the bench outside the station I sat and waited," and moves into an idiosyncratic story of thwarted early love set in a wartime TB sanitarium. The kick of Munro's work is, in part, its unpredictability. She interrupts herself, loops back to a chronological beginning, throws in strange images and oddities, and often ends with a sleight of hand that changes the meaning of a story altogether.

Reading "Dear Life" and the three other autobiographical stories, it's tempting to draw connections between Munro's life and her fiction. In these four she reveals the vivid memory for early-childhood moments and the sort of fraught mother-daughter relationship she often examines in her stories. When she describes her growing sense of separation from her mother's point of view, and how over time she began to understand her own inner self, we catch glimpses of the writer-in-the-making. It's a rare insight into a writer's life, and, along with these other recent stories, a treasure for Munro fans.

Claire Vaye Watkins' father, who died when she was 6, was a member of the Charles Manson family who escaped the cult to settle in the Mojave. In 10 stories set in her home state of Nevada (dubbed the "Battle Born" state because it was founded during the Civil War), she takes an unflinching look at the apocalyptic. She writes of a mother's suicide, a father's unnatural love for his daughter, a nuclear test blast that "sends the curse southeast, toward Las Vegas, to my mother's small chest, her lungs and her heart." She describes raw and arid landscapes around Reno, Virginia City, Black Rock and a brothel in Pahrump, where an Italian tourist holes up while waiting to learn if a friend lost in the desert has died. In her opening story, "Ghosts, Cowboys," she reckons with her own heritage, giving us artfully crafted sections on the founding of Reno during the Gold Rush era, the Spahn Ranch where 1950s Westerns were filmed, and her parents' "toxic and silver-gilded love." "And there is still so much I'll never know, no matter how much history I weigh upon myself," she writes.

Watkins has a survivor's gift for identifying the crucial detail, and she's a straight shooter. Each story from this talented writer is wired to detonate.

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Matt Damon On His Promising New Film

Steve (Matt Damon), a salesman for a large oil company, visits a small town in which he hopes to buy drilling rights.

Scott Green/Focus Features

Matt Damon has played Jason Bourne, the brainwashed assassin. He won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck. And now he's returned to the writer's chair for his latest film — Promised Land.

Damon plays Steve Butler, a salesman who comes to a small Pennsylvania town to sell the local farmers on allowing his company to drill on their land for natural gas using a controversial process known as fracking.

Matt Damon speaks with Linda Wertheimer about the experience of writing the film — as well as the possibility of another Bourne movie.

On why he made a movie about fracking

"The issue came later. We wanted to make a movie about American identity and where we are in the country right now and where we've come from and where we're headed. And in researching different things, this was the best issue to kind of explore those themes. 'Cause it's highly divisive and people feel incredibly strongly on both sides of the issue, and so it was a great way to explore kind of how we make decisions. Do we do it individually or as communities? And how are we thinking? Are we thinking in short term or are we thinking about the long term?"

On writing about a controversial topic

While in town, Steve meets Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt).

Scott Green/Focus Features While in town, Steve meets Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt).

Scott Green/Focus Features

"For us it was really about the characters and in writing it, we loved every single one of these characters. The screenplay and the movie is not supposed to judge any of these people. These are people who are in tough situations and are making tough choices. And — and that's a reflection of what's really going on. When we were in Western Pennsylvania and the first day we were shooting, a couple farmers came up and said, 'Hey, you guys making a movie about fracking. Don't say anything bad about it, we really need that.' And then a couple of other people came up and said, 'Hey are you making a movie about fracking? Don't say anything good about it, you know, it's poisoning the waters, it's, you know, poisoning the air. It's terrible.' And this is all in the same community in Western Pennsylvania. So people are quite savvy about it."

On his character in the film

"Essentially at the beginning of the movie, he's a guy who's pro-industry. He grew up in a farming community that basically went under when the industry left town."

"He sees himself as a realist and he feels like he's helping these people, he's saving them, he's bringing them back. And then, in the second act, he basically starts to get fracked, you know, emotionally, through these interactions with all these people. And by the end — he's not an environmentalist at the end, it's not that movie, you know — he basically takes a stand for democracy."

On the possibility of another Bourne movie

"I would absolutely love to do another one. I mean, we just, we just don't have a story. And if we had a story, we could do it. But what happens in those movies, and what happens a lot of times in Hollywood on big movies, is you get a release date before you have a script. [...] And the last movie was like that."

"We've always had this deal that we won't make another one unless we honestly feel it has a shot to be as good as the other three, as if it belongs in that family. I care about it too much."

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Peter Parker's Dead, But Spider-Man Will Live On (Sort Of)

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with Marvel Comics' web-slinging, wise-cracking superhero. Spider-Man is no more. Well, to be more precise, Peter Parker is no more.

In the 700th and final issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, writer Dan Slott's controversial story saw Spider-Man's mind switched with that of his dying arch-foe Dr. Otto Octavius, aka Doctor Octopus. The twist is that with his final effort, Spidey was able to give all of his memories and morals to his body-stealing enemy.

The Amazing Spider-Man #700 is the final issue of the series.

AP/Marvel Comics The Amazing Spider-Man #700 is the final issue of the series.

AP/Marvel Comics

For all intents and purposes, however, Spider-Man as we know him is dead. Slott explained to Weekend Edition Saturday guest host Linda Wertheimer why Doctor Octopus was the right person to "become" Spider-Man.

"Doc Ock is on some level the shadow Peter Parker," Slott says. "Peter Parker ... was very resentful of all of his peers. [But] it was the ethics and things that Aunt May and Uncle Ben taught Peter that in the end made him a hero."

"With great power comes great responsibility," Uncle Ben famously told Peter, setting him off on his path for justice and duty.

In his formative years, Doctor Octopus was a similarly bespectacled nerd and outcast, much like Peter. Not having those moral guideposts following his own radioactive accident that turned him into an analog of an eight-legged creature, he adopted the path of the villain instead.

Slott's storyline now gives him a second chance. Doctor Octopus, now in the body of Spider-Man but imbued with Parker's "great responsibility," renounces his evil ways and vows to become a better, nay, a "superior Spider-Man!"

"He kind of realizes that he wasted his life on villainy," Slott says.

When word of the story started to spread, Internet Spidey senses began tingling and even prompted death threats against Slott. To Wired Magazine, he joked he was going to have to pull a "Salman Rushdie" when the issue came out.

But Slott says there's also been mix of positive reaction as well.

"There's a lot of people that realize that over 50 years of Spider-Man, that some of the best stories involve loss," he says.

Slott says that when Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man in the 1960s, they created a hero who was like us and who "made mistakes all the time." The loss of Peter Parker, in a way, is just the furthering of the story of Spider-Man's vulnerabilities.

Real loss in comic books is pretty rare, however, and many major characters, including Captain America, Superman and Batman have all been "killed" before, only to return some time later. The comic book death has become a bit of a genre trope.

So if history is any indication, we might not have seen the last of Peter Parker — he just might return as an alien, a robot or perhaps even a version of himself from the future.

Peter might have come to an amazing ending, but Superior Spider-Man goes on sale in January, starring the villain-formerly-known-as-Doctor-Octopus as Spider-Man.

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Change Is The Only Constant In Today's Publishing Industry

Penguin and Random House, two of the biggest players in publishing, announced in October that they would merge.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images Penguin and Random House, two of the biggest players in publishing, announced in October that they would merge.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

The publishing industry has been in flux for years. First chain stores, then Amazon, then e-books — many forces have combined to create dramatic change in the traditional publishing model.

Mike Shatzkin is the founder and CEO of the publishing industry consulting firm Idea Logical. He says one of the biggest changes happening in publishing right now is the planned merger of two of the biggest players in the field, Penguin and Random House — with whispers of further mergers to come.

Already, there's a lot of debate about what that kind of consolidation will mean for the industry. Shatzkin tells NPR's Audie Cornish that the size of the merged company will give it the clout — and the backlist — to create book sales anywhere it wants to. Even the corner drugstore might have a real bookstore — filled, of course, exclusively with Penguin and Random House titles, not just a rack of pulp paperbacks.

"Another way they might create additional distribution is through a subscription, e-book subscription service," he says. "Before Random and Penguin merged, no single publisher would have had enough of the most commercial titles to make something like that work. They might. So they may be able to create distribution channels that are extra, compared to what we have now, and proprietary, in that other publishers won't be able to get at them."

Digital platforms are another big trend right now — websites where authors can publish their work and connect with their readers. Shatzkin says children's publishers have been making good use of platforms. "For example, Scholastic, which has fabulous reach into schools, through teachers, is creating an e-book reading platform called Storia," he says.

Storia will be a complete environment, providing services for the purchase and reading of e-books and tools for parents and teachers to oversee their kids' reading. "So if a parent or teacher get a kid reading on Storia, you're not going to be able to get a book to that kid except through Storia. And Storia's not the only platform of its kind ... and what that means is that power transfers to the platform owner from the individual title or author."

But what about the readers who don't want to sign up with a platform to get their favorite authors? "I think we've already had that experience," Shatzkin says. "Twenty years ago, much more than today, there were people that chose their books from what Book-of-the-Month Club offered them. And Book-of-the-Month Club did not offer them books that were Literary Guild main selections, because they didn't have rights to them. And in fact, in a more subtle way, people shop from what's inside a bookstore. What's inside a bookstore is a small percentage of the total number of books available."

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Let's Double Down On A Superstorm Of Malarkey: Picking 2012's Word Of The Year

Selfie, one of the candidates for 2012's Word of the Year, means a self-portrait photograph, usually posted to a social networking site.

textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/Original image by Diana Walker for Time Selfie, one of the candidates for 2012's Word of the Year, means a self-portrait photograph, usually posted to a social networking site.

textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/Original image by Diana Walker for Time

There is a major decision coming up that will truly define the year 2012. Yes, it's almost time for the American Dialect Society to once again vote on the Word of the Year. Will it be selfie? Hate-watching? Superstorm? Double down? Fiscal cliff? Or (shudder) YOLO?

Ben Zimmer is a language columnist for the Boston Globe, and the chair of the ADS's New Words Committee. He tells NPR's Renee Montagne that the Word of the Year can be either a word or a phrase, as long as it's achieved new prominence in 2012. "You might have heard about YOLO, the acronym for 'you only live once.' YOLO caught on this year as a bit of youth slang that young people are already a little sick of."

A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, usually posted to a social networking site — and used most memorably by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (or, let's be honest, one of her aides) in a humorous message to the Texts from Hillary Tumblr account. "Another word that I was introduced to this year which I quite like, hate-watching, which describes the masochistic act of continuing to watch a TV show even if you hate it."

And of course there were the old-fashioned words that resurfaced this year, like malarkey, popularized by Vice President Joe Biden in a debate with Paul Ryan. "That's a great Irish-American word that's been around for about a century ... it's such a great evocative word and it grabbed people's interest," Zimmer says. "It turns out it was Irish-American newspaper writers who popularized it in the early 20th century."

Some words captured public attention for sadder reasons, like superstorm, coined to describe Hurricane Sandy. "Someone from the National Weather Service actually suggested Frankenstorm, because it was a hybrid of different weather systems, like Frankenstein's monster, and it was also going to hit around Halloween," Zimmer says. But many news organizations considered Frankenstorm too light-hearted in the wake of the disaster, so the consensus settled on superstorm.

Last year, the concepts of the one percent and the 99 percent were on everyone's mind — giving rise, in a way, to this year's prominent percentage: 47. "If you think about the impact of last year's Occupy movement, the idea of breaking the population into percentages based on some sort of economic factor was powerful," Zimmer says. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape decrying 47 percent of the American electorate as "dependent on government," he adds, that became "a real touchstone of the election."

Gambling metaphors were also big this year, particularly doubling down, a high-risk, high-reward play in blackjack, which can be used in either positive or negative ways — such as when former President Bill Clinton described Romney as someone who will "double down on trickle-down" economics.

There's no clear front-runner among all these choices, Zimmer says. "Last year, I think it was pretty obvious going in that Occupy was the prohibitive favorite. Certainly, the term fiscal cliff has been used a lot in the last few months, and that could end up being the winner, in the same way that, for instance, bailout was the winner for the American Dialect Society four years ago. It could be coming from pop culture, or the tech world — there's a lot of possible choices this year."

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