You know how the names of NPR correspondents and hosts can be kind of amazing and beautiful. Well…

The Atlantic:

Of course, hearing a string of uniformly, gorgeously unusual names one after the other can have a different effect. Greg Studley, a stand-up comedian and screenwriter (“so you know, bartender,” he says) listens to a lot of NPR. One day last December, he just couldn’t listen to the news anymore; the journalists’ sign-offs at the end of each piece had begun to take over. At first, he was just distracted — “huh, that’s a unique name,” he thought — but then it became the “elephant in the room” of his NPR experience. Finally, he wrote a song about it. “We didn’t start the pledge drive,” he sings. “There’s a cash uptic when host names are ridic.”

UPDATE: We preemptively apologize for getting that tune stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Matthew McConaughey is on the show tomorrow. As The Atlantic pointed out last summer, with Bernie, Magic Mike and Killer Joe on his 2012 resume, the actor had a pretty good run there and in roles that flew in the face of the rom-com stuff he’s become most associated with in the past decade:

Since breaking through in 1993’s Dazed and Confused as hang-about high-school graduate David Wooderson, McConaughey has largely plied his easy charm in rom-coms of no particular distinction. But the new film, directed by William Friedkin from Tracy Letts’s adaptation of his own play (the two previously worked together on 2006’s Bug), caps a banner year for the actor, now indulging in a little character-actor free jazz at 42. He’s reviving comparisons to the late, great Paul Newman—not many of those have come his way since his big-screen breakout nearly two decades ago.

That run of good roles continues with his latest in Jeff Nichols’s Mud. In fact, this role might cement his new real-life role as Matthew McConaughey: Serious Actor with Serious Cred.

Over at The Atlantic is an interesting history piece about a never-made Stanley Kubrick film that, had it been made, would have been the part of the Venn diagram where the theme of today’s interview (World War II) and one of Fresh Air’s favorite things (No hints. Just click.) overlapped.

“Stanley Kubrick’s Unmade Film About Jazz In the Third Reich”:

[I]t’s Kubrick’s interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism.

In related news, John Powers has a review of the new documentary about The Shining — Room 237 — coming soon, AND The Shining is currently streaming on Netflix.

A profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates over at The New York Observer — “Fear of A Black Pundit” — makes clear the point that “the man has arrived.” Coates writes for The Atlantic about race, the Civil War, America, music and a host of other subjects:

For Mr. Coates, the job of the writer, even the pundit, is not to persuade. “The job of the writer should be one of humility, I think, one of being ignorant and learning—not to stand up and pretend to know everything,” he said. “I’m not a consultant or a race expert.”

Indeed, Mr. Coates is particularly anxious about being seen as some kind of black spokesman. And even Stephen Colbert poked fun at this idea when, in January, Mr. Coates appeared on The Colbert Report and the host asked him: “Are you guys still all excited about this first black president thing, or have you gotten over that?”

Mr. Coates says he is uninspired by the emails he receives telling him how his writing has helped someone win an argument. “That ain’t my burden. I don’t write to help others with their racism, and I’m not here to educate you,” he said. “I’m here to be insanely curious.”

Coates talked with Fresh Air in 2009 about his memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Listen here.

Image of Coates via the Brooklyn Book Festival/Flickr

Keeping with the theme of the day, over at The Atlantic, some thoughts on mothers and feminism in country music.:

Country’s willingness to consider women as mothers in addition to considering them as (sexually available) daughters isn’t always liberating, by any means. But it is, or at least can be, an alternative that isn’t generally explored or exploited in other parts of the pop landscape. At the least, this means that country is sometimes able to see mothers not just as stock characters, but as people whose experiences may in themselves be worth singing about—as in Loretta Lynn’s glorious 1971 ode for harassed parents, “One’s on the Way.”

That song explicitly distances its narrator from the “girls in New York City [who] all march for women’s lib.” But the ability to see mothers as human beings also makes it possible for country on occasion to have something that starts to look like an honest-to-God feminist vision. “To Daddy,” a hit for Emmylou Harris in 1970, for example, about the emotional aridity and monotony of a stay-at-home mother’s life, sure sounds like songwriter Dolly Parton was channeling Betty Friedan. In any case, it’s hard to imagine Friedan wouldn’t approve of the conclusion.

Fresh Air interviews with two of these great ladies of country, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton.

This is one durable bra. - Heidi

Archaeologists Find World’s Oldest Bra

If a bra feels like a medieval torture device* to you, you are correct about one thing: They are, in fact, medieval (whether they are also torture really depends upon the fit). 

[Image: Institute for Archaeologies, University of Innsbruck]

theatlantic:

2 Stunning Photos of Senator Daniel Inouye’s Casket Lying in State

[Image: Joshua Roberts/Reuters]

steroge:

2012: The Year in Volcanic Activity

The Atlantic has a great history of Leonard Cohen’s now-iconic song “Hallelujah” up, along with videos of the original and some of the best covers of it, including the one by Jeff Buckley that catapulted the song from obscurity to ubiquity. Fun fact about how Buckley came across the song:

Jeff Buckley, a hungry young singer-songwriter from California, first heard “Hallelujah” on a Leonard Cohen tribute album he discovered in a friend’s home while cat-sitting in Brooklyn in 1992. He began performing the song regularly in New York’s East Village clubs, and called it “a hallelujah to the orgasm … an ode to life and love.”

And here is Terry’s 2006 interview with the Bard Cohen himself.

(HT Fresh Air producer John Myers!)

I have a mountain of work to do this morning. (Two interviews, one review.)

It will be an uphill battle to finish before deadlines.

Related: Our show today is on work/life balance and whether women can “have it all.”

Climbing Muellers Peak, Summer (by Powerhouse Museum Collection)

What’s different about Radiolab (and what I think is changing about the web) is that it *is* a production, just one of a very new kind. Radiolab is actually post-blog and post-livestream. It’s not aping the oratory of old or the raggedness of the new. It’s a hybrid that takes lessons from the past, recent and deep. That’s where I think web journalism is headed, too. “No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online,” reads a telling line from Sullivan piece. “On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more.

— How ‘Radiolab’ Is Changing the Sound of the Radio - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic (via thisistheverge)

Atlantic’s Focus: Crisis in Yemen June 3, 2011

theatlantic:

Last Typewriter Factory in the World Shuts Its Doors

With only about 200 machines left — and most of those in Arabic languages — Godrej and Boyce shut down its plant in Mumbai, India, today. “Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India — until recently,” according to the Daily Mail, which ran a special story this morning about the typewriters demise. “Demand for the machines has sunk in the last ten years as consumers switch to computers.” 

Above, the Peter Mitterhofer 1864 typewriter. See more classic typewriters at The Atlantic

goodnight qwerty.

The Atlantic: The Mystique of Betty Friedan

The Atlantic, September 1999. See also: New York Times book review of The Feminine Mystique, September 1963. Chapter 1, The Feminine Mystique.

The Wrath of Khan

A 2005 Atlantic profile of AQ Khan, the subject of tomorrow’s Fresh Air.