Jul 11, 2018
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Photo by Emily Kask for NPR
For writer Jesmyn Ward, Mississippi is a place she loves and hates all at once.
She grew up and still lives in the tiny town of DeLisle, Miss., close by the Gulf Coast, where, she writes, African-American families like hers are "pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism."
Those struggles, hinging on race and class, run all through her writing, from her novel Salvage the Bones, which won Ward a National Book Award in 2011; to her searing memoir Men We Reaped, published in 2013; to her new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Ward, 40, has chosen to return to DeLisle and raise her children there, despite her profound ambivalence about what the town represents. NPR’s Melissa Block visited her there, to talk about place, belonging, and telling the stories of the silenced.
-- Petra
Just shy of 25, Swift's been in the music industry nearly half her life. In an extended interview with NPR's Melissa Block, she addresses what's changed in music, media, feminism and her own career.
You guys remember this interview? It sounds better written out than on the radio. I can remember the condescension in the interviewer’s voice when asking her some of the questions. But the worst question/best answer goes to:
MB: Like I said, I am the mother of a 12-year-old girl, and she loves your music. Her friends love your music. You have a huge platform among a very vulnerable, impressionable set of the population. And I wonder if you think about turning your lens outward, turning it away from the diary page, and sending a broader message to girls who would be really receptive to hearing about big ideas and the big world that's outside.
TS: Like what kind of messages?
MB: Well, other characters. I don't mean to minimize the effect of a love song or a pop song. But do you ever think about writing about other experiences, things that might turn girls away from themselves in a different way?
TS: There's nothing that's gonna turn girls away from themselves at age 12. I think that it's really important that I speak about things in interviews that I'm passionate about. I have brought feminism up in every single interview I've done because I think it's important that a girl who's 12 years old understands what that means and knows what it is to label yourself a feminist, knows what it is to be a woman in today's society, in the workplace or in the media or perception. What you should accept from men, what you shouldn't, and how to form your own opinion on that. I think the best thing I can do for them is continue to write songs that do make them think about themselves and analyze how they feel about something and then simplify how they feel. Because, at that age — really at any age, but mostly that age — what can be so overwhelming is that you're feeling so many things at the same time that it's hard to actually understand what those emotions are, so it can turn to anxiety very quickly.
We are dealing with a huge self-esteem crisis. These girls are able to scroll pictures of the highlight reels of other people's lives, and they're stuck with the behind-the-scenes of their own lives. They wake up and they look at their reflection in the mirror, and they compare it to some filtered, beautiful photo of some girl who's really popular and seems like she has it all together. This is not what you and I had to deal with when we were 12. It's so easy and readily available to compare yourself to others and to feel like you lose.
I'm 24. I still don't feel like it's a priority for me to be cool, edgy, or sexy. When girls feel like they don't fit into those three themes, which are so obnoxiously thrust upon them through the media, I think the best thing I can do for those girls is let them know that this is what my life looks like. I love my life. I've never ever felt edgy, cool, or sexy. Not one time. And that it's not important for them to be those things. It's important for them to be imaginative, intelligent, hardworking, strong, smart, quick-witted, charming. All these things that I think have gone to the bottom of the list of priorities. I think that there are bigger themes I can be explaining to them, and I think I'm trying as hard as I possibly can to do that.
You might think you know what frogs sound like — until, that is, you hear the symphony of amphibians that fills the muggy night air at Nokuse Plantation, a nature preserve in the Florida Panhandle.
There, about 100 miles east of Pensacola, a man named M.C. Davis has done something extraordinary: He has bought up tens of thousands of acres in the Florida sandhills and turned them into a unique, private preserve.
In the largest block of privately owned conservation land in the southeastern U.S., Davis is restoring ecosystems that agriculture and timbering have destroyed.
"I'm a self-proclaimed, devout conservationist," Davis says. "I've been dedicated now for about 20 years."
Davis is thinking 300 years into the future with his wildlife restoration project, even though he knows he doesn't have much time left. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in November.
Gambler-Turned-Conservationist Devotes Fortune To Florida Nature Preserve
Photo credit: Matthew Ozug/NPR
trying to find that post where someone drew a bunch of NPR hosts as literally as they can based on their names (i.e. Robert Siegel as a seagull, Melissa Block as an actual block, and Terry Gross as some sort of blob) if anyone knows what I'm talking about and knows where to find this post, please let me know!
"Everybody who's ever read a Little House book or everybody who's ever seen the TV show Little House on the Prairie really has been fascinated by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her life," Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, says. "And [the annotated autobiography] offers an opportunity to get behind the scenes and see what that life was really like."
'Little House,' Big Demand: Never Underestimate Laura Ingalls Wilder
Photo credit: Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum
Caption: Laura Ingalls (right), with her sisters Carrie (left) and Mary Ingalls.
The Keystone XL pipeline's proposed route is a diagonal line, starting in the Alberta tar sands in Canada and running down through Nebraska. The project has been tied up for years in a polarizing argument about energy, jobs and the environment — and has run into trouble in the Cornhusker State.
Pipeline opponents challenged the legality of the proposed route through Nebraska, and the state's Supreme Court could rule as early as this Friday. President Obama, who has final approval of the pipeline because it would cross the U.S.-Canada border, has been waiting on the Nebraska ruling before issuing his decision.
And as loud as the Keystone debate has been in Washington, D.C., and in the courts, Jenni Harrington says it's talked about in hushed tones in Nebraska's blustery York County, about an hour from the capital, Lincoln.
On Nebraska's Farmland, Keystone XL Pipeline Debate Is Personal
Photo credit: Melissa Block/NPR Map credits: TransCanada/Stephanie d'Otreppe and Alyson Hurt/NPR
NPR's All Things Considered host Melissa Block and senior editor Alison MacAdam spent a couple of days in Nebraska this week working on stories on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Check out their photos and personal observations on Nebraska on NPR's On The Road Tumblr site. http://bit.ly/1Gv45i6 And listen for their stories this week on All Things Considered on NET Radio.