Scott Simon

Lena Dunham talks about sex, oversharing and her new essay collection Not That Kind of Girl; Matt Bai discusses his book All The Truth Is Out about Gary Hart's 1987 affair and political journalism.

Here's an idea for weekend fun: Pick up a banned book.

Look for "the good parts" — the sections of Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath, The Color Purple, Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, the Harry Potter series, Animal Farm, A Farewell to Arms or ...

A man known around here as "The Host Whisperer" has died.

David Candow was 74. He was a slightly tubby man from Newfoundland with a sly smile and a soft voice. I wanted nothing to do with him.

David was a consultant, brought in to work with NPR hosts and ...

There might be a recliner rebellion going on.

At least three flights have been grounded in little more than a week after passengers had disputes over reclining their seats, or not being able to. On most airlines these days, passengers are packed so close that — insert your favorite ...

The Trojan Women, by Euripides, is a Greek tragedy written 2,500 years ago that war keeps timely.

It's about a group of women who struggle to survive in Troy after the town has been sacked. When one of the women cries out, "Our country, our conquered country, perishes ... O ...

I once told my Uncle Sheldon about what a day is like when you cover a war.

I'd just come back from Sarajevo or Kosovo, and described how the city had no trees, because they'd been chopped down for heat. How people had to eat grass because they had no ...

Just for a second, imagine a world without war, conflict or grief. Refreshing, right? But it's also a world without memory, at least in the premise of Lois Lowry's 1993 novel The Giver. The movie adaptation opened this week and stars Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges.

The Giver swept ...

Why can't some of the people who seem to bring the most joy into this world find it for themselves?

The death of Robin Williams, by his own hand, in his own home, possibly after he learned he was in the early stages of Parkinson's, caused a lot of people ...

M. Caldwell Butler died this week, at the age of 89, just a few days short of another anniversary of the event that etched his name into history.

Butler was a first-term representative from Virginia in 1974, serving on the House Judiciary Committee, which was spending a steamy summer under ...

Amazon is now 20 years old!

In 1994, Jeff Bezos walked out of the Wall Street hedge fund where he worked after they declined to invest in his idea, and began to sell books out of his garage.

Today, Amazon is a retail and entertainment empire, selling books and shoes, ...

"I am not a political person by nature," Nadine Gordimer once said. "I don't suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics."

Gordimer was born in South Africa in the early 1920s, into a society divided and identified by the crime of apartheid. Official racial segregation ...

City kids often feel like fish out of water when it comes to fishing. As a city kid myself, I understand that there are those who find it great fun to rise before the sun to bloody their fingers with sharp hooks and spiky lures, then spend long hours trying ...

What's behind the man who is below The Blue Room?

This week, conservators at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., revealed that underneath Pablo Picasso's noted 1901 painting The Blue Room is another painting of a mustachioed man in a jacket and bow tie, resting his face on his hand.

...

When fighters from ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, captured Tikrit this week, I thought of the time producer Peter Breslow and I visited that city as the war began in 2003.

Tikrit was Saddam Hussein's hometown, about two hours from Baghdad, and the place had prospered under ...

The men and women who brought down Adolph Hitler's war machine cannot defeat mortality. As the dwindling number of veterans who served during D-Day are saluted on the 70th anniversary, we might consider how different our lives might have been if those soldiers and sailors had been turned back from ...